When I was a child, we lived in a crowded house. I had three sisters, and my grandmother lived with us for much of my childhood, as well. And there was about a year when we had someone else living with us too. My mother brought a young woman into our home who was struggling with grief. I was too young to understand the circumstances; I just knew that Marie was broken, fragile. Still, she was a beloved big sister to me and my sisters.
I remember, too, gaggles of young Filipina women in our house. Back in the 1960s the U.S. opened immigration and many nurses came into the country from the Philippines, to meet the need at the time. The hospital where my mother worked hired a lot of them. When my mother looked at these nurses she saw girls who were lonely for their families and living in a strange land; she drew them into our family.
My mother didn’t seem to mind a crowded house. Actually, she seemed to love it. It gave her joy to open her house and her heart to others, even when she didn’t have much – and most of the time she didn’t have much. My parents always struggled. But this never closed my mother’s heart.
She gave of herself completely. She worked long days, then would sometimes go back into the hospital on her day off to visit a patient she knew was lonely.
She always seemed remarkable to the rest of us, even more so because of how little she had. Compared to others, my mother had little to give, yet she gave so much. I always wondered why that seemed paradoxical.
But I read something recently that made me think about this. There is a kind of hospitality that goes beyond the conventional type. There is the usual kind of hospitality, such as having the family over for Sunday dinner. But this unusual sort involves reaching out to the people way out at the margins and drawing them in.
Those who practice such radical hospitality are usually ones who, themselves, feel like outsiders in some way. They are the ones who know what it is to be at the margins, who know what it feels like to be the last, the lost, or the least. And I know that certain experiences in my mother’s life put her in that category.
It seems like it takes an experience of loss to learn real compassion for others. That, somehow, we have to get really near to the edge of the cliff to understand what truly matters. When we have plenty, when everything seems manageable, our priorities can become all kinds of messed up. We think: If I can’t have that purse, that car, that boat, that whatever it is, I will just die. It is almost as though we have tightly gripped that shiny object even before it is in our hand, and to not acquire it feels like loss. The loss of something that is not even ours.
I know this personally: the more I have, the more comfortable I become with comfort, the more I feel it is actually my right. The more entitled I feel. And so it strikes me then as bewildering to read Paul’s letter to the Philippians and hear him speak about joy. Because Paul was writing this letter from a prison cell.
For people who have never been behind prison walls, it is mystifying. How could he possibly be overflowing with joy, as his letter shows him to be?
During his many years of traveling around the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, of discipling new believers and guiding new churches, Paul had the task, again and again, of teaching these new believers how to live into their faith; teaching these new churches how to be the church. It was a monumental task. But Paul was a patient and gifted teacher.
In the case of the Philippians, what we know from this letter is that they learned that Paul was imprisoned and they were deeply concerned for his welfare. They loved Paul and it hurt them to imagine his suffering. So they sent one of their own to him with provisions. Paul was, of course, grateful for what they did. But the focus of his concern was somewhere else.
Paul, in his letter, instructed the church at Philippi to keep their eye on what truly matters. He told them his current situation was not something that really mattered. Not that he liked being in prison, but he knew that God was accomplishing wonderful works through the church in spite of his circumstances – or maybe even because of his current circumstances. We recall that Paul is the one who wrote in another letter that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose. That might even include, Paul thought, his imprisonment.
I imagine it is possible that spending time in a prison cell could be an opportunity for a person to re-evaluate what really and truly matters. But there are also plenty of other experiences we might have that could do the same.
Have you ever had an experience that taught you about what really and truly matters?
What are the things that really matter to you?
For my mother it was not being alone. Knowing that you were someone of value. She fed people. She sheltered people – and probably not so much because they were hungry or homeless, but more because they were alone. She needed them to know that there was someone who loved them. and there was always a place at the table for them.
Paul believed God was able to do extraordinary things through the church. Paul knew that the gospel of Jesus has the power to transform people, to shift our vision so that we can see what really matters.
As Paul says to the Philippians, we are not there yet; we are a work in progress. But I hope we are always on our way to seeing that all of God’s children really matter. I hope we see that the stuff we spend a lot of time and money and worry on are insignificant when measured against the well-being of one another. I hope we see that in God’s realm there is a place at the table for everyone.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
