"Radical Hospitality"

"When we speak of hospitality we are always addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Each of us make choices about who will and who will not be included in our lives. To make such choices is inevitable; we do not have time to be everyone's best friend. The reasons to include and exclude are very personal. You and I probably can't even say why we become close to some people and have no interest in getting to know, or include others. We only know that we prefer some, and others are harder to like."

"Somewhere, sometime, you were excluded. Remember what that was like. Some people live with the experience constantly. There was a common saying in Germany just before the Nazi reign: 'The human body contains a sufficient amount of fat to make seven cakes of soap, enough iron to make a medium sized nail, a sufficient amount of phosphorous for two thousand match heads, enough sulfur to rid one person of fleas.' The Nazi view of humanity reduced us to nothing more than the usefulness of our physical components, and when that was used up it was fine to cast aside the human being.

But you and I are much more than what we appear to be. We are more than what we do. We are more than a social or economic class. In the movie Elephant Man, actor John Merrick is chased through a train station and cornered in a bathroom by a mob who see only his deformity, his difference from them. He cries out, 'I am not an animal... I am a human being...'

That is the sound of every single human heart. It is the cry we make against all that would make us less human, the cry of the darkest night of our lives, the cry of the abandoned and the misunderstood and the excluded. 'I am not an animal. I am like you. I am human.'

I am not a street person.
I am not a token of my race or creed.
I am not a statistic.
I am not a divorcee.
I am not an AIDS patient.
I am not a sex object.
I am not a laborer.
I am not an "at-risk" kid.
I have a mind. I have a heart. I have a soul. I dream. I feel. I care. I am a human being."

Radical Hospitality: Benedicts Way of Love, pp. 2-4.