Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions (edited by Richard Kearney and James Taylor) features ten meditations on the theme of interreligious hospitality by eminent scholars and practitioners from five different wisdom traditions: Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic. First published in 2011, it’s a wonderful resource for anyone interested in religious and ethical imperatives.
By gathering thinkers from different religious traditions around the same timely topic of what it means to “host the stranger”, the book enacts the hospitality it investigates, facilitating a hopeful and constructive dialogue between the world’s major religions.
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s analogy between religions and different languages informs a sensitive, flexible methodology. Just as a translator mediates between a host and guest language, so must the participants in interreligious dialogue translate and transit between their own religion and those of others.
Hospitality is a central and inaugural event in wisdom traditions. It marks that moment when the self opens to the stranger and welcomes what is foreign and unfamiliar into its home. Judaism tells of Abraham and Sarah welcoming the three wanderers in the desert. Christianity speaks of Mary’s encounter with the angel/visitor as a moment of receptivity to a Word becoming flesh. Islam teaches hospitality to the stranger as a core principle of the Koran. Hinduism recognises the guest as a manifestation of the divine. Buddhism cherishes a radical hospitality of “interbeing” as a way of overcoming illusory antagonisms between friend and enemy.
The common root of hospitality and hostility – hostis – carries a sense of primary wager between welcome and exclusion. Hosting the stranger is always a risk. It is an act of daring and trust, of bold compassion and justice, never a matter of cheap grace or easy virtue.
While it is sometimes tempting to retreat behind familiar doctrines and rituals, the discernment of wisdom within one’s own tradition (never straightforward or final) is aided by encounter with others. I often perceive more keenly the gifts and contradictions, promises and limitations of my own Christian faith in dialogue with those of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist convictions. Indigenous spirituality is an enduring source of critique and encouragement. Secular and atheist voices, too, offer many insights and correctives.
Moreover, the refusal to enter into dialogue with other religions speaks a violence of exclusion. And many of the worst wars have been fuelled by perverted religious customs. Interreligious empathy, imagination and compassion are essential antidotes to the most egregious excesses of blind faith and fundamentalism. Exchanging sacred stories can foster tolerance and healing.
A story from the Bhaghavata Purana about poor Sudama who journeys to visit his wealthy friend Krishna (in an essay by Kalpana Seshadri) offers the assurance that emptiness and nothingness (symbolised by Sudama’s gift of puffed rice as well as his own existential nakedness) may be bearers of hope and prosperity.
From a Buddhist perspective, John Makransky notes that through a conceptualising process we often label others as strangers in the sense that they are mistaken for our own limiting thoughts of them. Emptiness of self and other offers a groundless intimacy in which no one can be sensed as a stranger.
Marianne Moyaert’s reading of Genesis 18:1-33 (divine revelation in and through an encounter with three wanderers) asks: “Why does the story shift from God as Abraham’s visitor and conversation partner to the three wayfarers, without a word of explanation?” The story, Moyaert suggests, presents Abraham as preeminent example of an other-oriented hospitality – Abraham allows God to wait until the strangers are provided for.
Joseph Lumbard speaks of hospitality as two-directional, involving selfless giving and receiving. Drawing on Islamic scriptures, he suggests that other-oriented hospitality teaches both one’s “nothingness before God” and one’s “potential sanctity”.
