Chapter 53: The reception of guests (paragraphs 1-4)
The greatest care should be taken to give a warm reception to the poor and to pilgrims, because it is in them above all others that Christ is welcomed. (From para. 4 of Ch. 53 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
My experience of being an assistant to mentally handicapped adults in a L'Arche household made very real for me a radical gospel message: Put the poor (the weak, the disenfranchised, the vulnerable) at the center of community.
There are two points that Joan Chittister makes commenting on this reading in her book, The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century, that drive this reading home to my heart. The first is that hospitality is a form of worship and second is that by letting down the barriers of my heart, I allow "the God of the unexpected" to come in. I love her description of some of those possible barriers for me: that others look like my kind; that they are "clean and scrubbed and minty -breathed and worthy of my(our) attention". Her phrases strike at the root of my securities and values. Moving away from these securities takes place in my heart and then my head as I "seek" in my meditation practice "to be for God"(J. Main, April 6 reading in Silence and Stillness in Every Season)and in the way that He leads me and to whom.
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