Archive: The Healing Graces Of Hospitality

How can ministers’ wounds become sources of healing?

On the one hand no minister can keep his own experience of life hidden from those he wants to help. Nor should he want to keep it hidden. But a minister who talks in the pulpit about his own problems is of no help to his congregation, for no suffering human being is helped by someone who tells him that he has the same problems.

So how does healing take place? Many words, such as care and compassion, understanding and forgiveness, fellowship and community, have been used for the healing task of the Christian minister. I like to use the word hospitality.

Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our homes to strangers. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers and makes close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.

But it has become difficult for us today to understand hospitality. Like the Semitic nomads, we live in a desert with many lonely travelers who are looking for a moment of peace, for a fresh drink and for a sign of encouragement so that they can continue their mysterious search for freedom.

What does hospitality as a healing power require? It requires that the host feel at home in his own house and that he creates a free and fearless place for the unexpected visitor. Therefore, hospitality embraces two concepts: concentration and community. Hospitality is the ability to pay attention to the guest. This is difficult, since we are preoccupied with our own worries. We find it hard to pay attention because of our intentions. As soon as our intentions take over, the question is no longer “Who is he?” but “What can I get from him?”—and then we no longer listen to what he is saying but to what we can do with what he is saying.

Anyone who wants to pay attention without intention has to be at home in his own house—that is, he has to discover the center of his life in his own heart. When our souls are restless, when we are driven by thousands of different and often conflicting stimuli, when we are always “over there” between people, ideas and the worries of this world, how can we possibly create the room and space where someone else can enter freely without feeling himself an unlawful intruder?

Paradoxically, by withdrawing into ourselves we create the space for another to be himself and to come to us on his own terms. But human withdrawal is a painful and lonely process because it forces us to face directly our own condition.

When we are not afraid to enter into our own centers, we come to know that being alive means being loved. This experience tells us that we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our lives are gifts and that we can only make others free because we are set free by Him whose heart is greater than ours. When we have found the anchor-places for our lives in our own centers, we can be free to let others sing their own songs and speak their own languages without fear.

The minister who has come to terms with his own loneliness and is at home in his own house is a host who offers hospitality to his guests. He gives them a friendly space where they may feel free to come and go, to be close and distant, to rest and to play, to talk and to be silent, to eat and to fast. The paradox indeed is that hospitality asks for the creation of an empty space where the guest can find his own soul.

Why is this a healing ministry? It is healing because it takes away the false illusion that wholeness can be given by one to another. It is healing because it does not take away the loneliness and the pain of another but invites him to recognize his loneliness can be shared. Many people in this life suffer because they are anxiously searching for the man or woman, the event or encounter, which will take their loneliness away.

A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, when someone comes with his loneliness to the minister, he can only expect that his loneliness will be understood so that that person no longer has to run away from loneliness but can accept it as an expression of his basic human condition. When a woman suffers the loss of her child, the minister is not called upon to comfort her by telling her that she still has two beautiful, healthy children at home; he is challenged to help her realize that the death of her child reveals her own mortal condition, which he and others share with her.

Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because they have the idea that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings are wounds integral to our human condition. Ministry does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken.

No minister can save anyone. He can only offer himself as a guide to fearful people. Paradoxically, in this guidance the first signs of hope become visible. This is so because a shared pain is no longer paralyzing but mobilizing.

Hospitality becomes community as it creates a unity based on the shared confession of our brokenness and on a shared hope. This hope in turn leads us far beyond the boundaries of human togetherness to Him who calls His people away from the land of slavery to the land of freedom. It belongs to the central insight of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that it is the call of God which forms the people of God.

A Christian community is therefore a healing community, not because wounds are cured and pains are alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision. Mutual confession then becomes a mutual deepening of hope, and sharing weakness becomes a reminder to one and all of the coming strength.

This article is excerpted from The Wounded Healer by Henri J.M. Nouwen. Reprinted by permission of Image Books, New York, New York.