Item 1569 - Hospitality frees guests

This item is a half-page article by Henri Nouwen entitled, ‘Hospitality Frees Guests’ published in the National Catholic Reporter, September 27, 1974, p. 11. Nouwen begins the article by stating, ‘If the first characteristic of the spiritual life is the continuing movement from loneliness to solitude, its second characteristic is the movement by which hostility can be converted in hospitality’. Nouwen suggests that if we meet others out of needy loneliness that will not create an open space of hospitality to help the other be who they should be. Nouwen states that he believes the biblical concept of hospitality ‘might offer a new dimension to our understanding of a healing relationship and the formation of a recreating community’. Hospitality creates ‘not a fearful emptiness , but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free…’.