By Carla Arnell

“We’re never the ones to say whether we arewelcoming” — so a fellow parishioner re-cently remarked. That humble acknowl-

edgement of uncertainty about our congregation’s hos-pitality caught our rector’s attention and prompted herto reflect on what it means for a congregation to be wel-coming, a matter of theological importance but alsopractical concern in these days of dwindling numbersfor mainline congregations.

In a subsequent weekly letter, our rector concluded:“Being radically welcoming means embracing the Otherand allowing ourselves to be changed, mutually trans-formed, in the process.” Her answer reminded us thataccepting the Other is central to a church’s practice ofhospitality, but her response also opened as many ques-tions as it answered. What does it mean to embrace theOther? Embrace, after all, is a term of intimacy. By whatmeans will that embracing happen and transform us?

As I think back to a Protestant church I attended for20-plus years during the first half of my life and its ex-ample of hospitality, I remember a parish that was hometo men and women, children and elderly, professorsand factory workers, divorced, married, and single peo-ple, and people of different races and classes. It was aplace where people were welcome to assemble along-side each other, regardless of the superficial differencesthat might otherwise divide them. Yet, true hospitality— radical welcoming — goes beyond the kindly toler-ance of otherness that I fear we sometimes mistake forhospitality. In its fullest sense, true hospitality pressesus not only to worship alongside, but also to embrace,the Other. And it’s the mysterious mechanism behind“embracing” the stranger that I find more clearly illus-trated in the hospitality stories of an ancient Greek epicthan in the welcoming practices of many contemporaryChristian congregations.

Since those 20 years rooted in one particular churchhome, I’ve moved geographically and been either

blessed or cursed to be something of a religious wan-derer, visiting church after church in my quest for anew ecclesial home. As a result of that wandering, I’ve

had a chance to see what it means to be a stranger indifferent places. In almost every church, I’ve encoun-tered congregations sincerely committed to hospitality— to making the stranger welcome. Parishioners wearnametags or ask newcomers to do so. Parishioners in-vite newcomers to sign a guest book. Parishioners flockto newcomers with hearty handshakes and words ofwelcome at the Peace. And, above all, parishioners di-rect newcomers to reception areas replete with donutand pastry treats, fruits, crackers, cheeses, coffee,lemonade, and other painstakingly prepared refresh-ments. Yet, amid all that hospitality, there’s one key in-gredient of welcoming that has so often seemed to bemissing, an element that was central to hospitality asthe ancient Greek poet Homer envisioned it in TheOdyssey, which I teach every year in my literatureclasses.

As a student, I remember dismissing Homer’s epicpoem as just a story of extraordinary heroes, struggleswith mythical creatures like the Cyclopes, and roman-tic encounters with glamorous seductresses such asCalypso or Circe — in other words, as a story very dis-tant from my everyday life and moral concerns. Butduring the many years I’ve taught that text I’ve been in-creasingly impressed by it as a work of wisdom litera-ture, with much to teach me as a Christian.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story or foggyabout its details, the basic plot concerns the Greek heroOdysseus, who has been away fighting in the TrojanWar for ten years and, for another ten years, trying des-perately to return to his home in Ithaca. The story is oneof wandering and estrangement in a number of ways:Odysseus must travel through many foreign lands dur-ing his journey, and his son, Telemachus, travels a par-allel path through strange places in order to obtainnews of his father. Through those quests of father andson, we learn what it means to be a good guest and hos-pitable host, for time and again Odysseus andTelemachus find themselves as guests at the mercy of astranger’s hospitality.

Of course, the ancient Greeks supremely valued goodhospitality, expressed particularly through the host-guest relationship. Because this early Greek world was

Tell Me Your Story: Homer and Hospitality

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Bust of Homer, thinkstockphotos.com

gregations tend to think of welcoming in terms of wear-ing name badges, shaking a visitor’s hand, and offeringa generous reception feast. Indeed, I was recently partof a congregation that was seemingly expert at suchcongregational welcoming. At the start of every service,the rector would ask those who considered themselvesmembers of the congregation to rise in order to identifythose who were strangers — those worshipers stillseated. That ingenious process of identification led tohand-shaking and exchanges of names or good morn-ings. And yet, even after a year of being warmly greetedin that way, I still felt like an outsider in a sea ofstrangers, for beyond those morning pleasantries, fewpeople asked for my story, nor was I courageousenough to seek out the stories of others.

What was missing there and in other congregationalinitiatives to be welcoming is a will-ingness to cross boundaries of pri-vacy and invite the stranger’s story.My guess is that this reluctance toinvite stories stems from a few dif-ferent causes: our natural solipsism,our work culture, and our modernsense of politeness. Too often we areso caught up in our own thoughtsand concerns that we don’t push our-selves to be genuinely curious aboutother people, for real curiosity de-mands that we transcend our self-en-closed worlds and try to enter intosomeone else’s world with empathyand interest.

Moreover, in the work world, for obvious legal rea-sons, we are typically trained not to ask strangers — jobcandidates, for instance — certain questions: Are youmarried? Do you have any children? What is your cur-rent salary? Perhaps we carry that workplace tabooabout questioning the stranger to other contexts, in-cluding congregational ones. And last, I think we toofrequently fear inviting the stranger’s story because wedon’t want to intrude upon the person’s privacy and askthings it’s not polite to ask, given how politeness in con-temporary culture has come to mean (when it meansmore than please and thank you) self-restraint and re-spect for other people’s boundaries — a weak modernsubstitute for the richer sense of courtesy found inHomer’s stories.

In that context, then, I suggest that Homer offers awelcome challenge to our Christian views about what itmeans to be hospitable. At the heart of Homer’s visionis the assumption that it is hospitable to invite astranger’s story. Although this commitment to learningthe stranger’s story can happen informally in the op-

a perilous one for travelers, the ancient Greeks placedgreat importance on the ability to establish a bond be-tween host and guest, which would ensure the host’ssafety if he were ever a stranger in the guest’s land. Sosacred was the host-guest relationship that it eventrumped political allegiances, as illustrated by the fa-mous encounter between Glaucos and Diomedes inHomer’s Iliad, when the two men, respectively a Trojanand Greek warrior, share the stories of their lineagesand agree to lay aside arms because of the host-guestties that, they discover, united their grandfathers in aspecial bond.

The host’s special obligations to a stranger are mem-orably illustrated in a number of episodes in TheOdyssey. When Odysseus is washed ashore in the beau-tiful, refined kingdom of Phaeaciaafter having been finally releasedfrom imprisonment by the nymphCalypso, he appears like a moun-tain lion — grizzled, scruffy, andterrifying. With that animalistic im-age, Homer emphasizes how warhas transformed Odysseus intosomething Other, barely recogniza-ble as human to the princess andher ladies-in-waiting who discoverhim on the shore.

Even in the face of that bedrag-gled appearance, Princess Nausi-caa invites him back to the palaceas her guest. There, the king of therealm, Alcinous, orders him to be bathed, reclothed,and treated to an elaborate banquet, where he is fedwith the finest foods and regaled with stories told by ablind bard, Demodocus. Most importantly, though, KingAlcinous pauses at a key moment during the eveningbanqueting and turns to Odysseus with a special re-quest. “Tell me your story, stranger,” he asks.

It is this deceptively simple moment that is the heartof the epic poem both structurally and morally. Struc-turally, it prompts the shift from third-person to first-person narration and precipitates the seminal story ofhow Odysseus came to be stranded on Calypso’s island,the essential information readers have been yearning tolearn. Morally, it places the desire to know another per-son’s story at the heart of true hospitality. In Homer’sculture, it is the height of courtesy to ask for a stranger’slife story.

Herein lies the central lesson for Christian congre-gations. During my many years of being both a vis-

itor and a congregational host, I’ve noticed that con-

At the heart of Homer’s vision is the assumption that it is hospitable to invite a stranger’s story.

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portunities for conversation beforeand after a worship service, it canhappen in more formal ways as well.For instance, the church I attend hastaken seriously this challenge tobuild a welcoming community byinviting the stories of its parish-ioners.

To that end, the traditional Biblestudy or topic-centered adult forumshave, for a season, been replaced bya storytelling hour. Yes, every weekduring the season of Easter, a differ-ent parishioner holds court much asOdysseus did, as we gather in a cir-cle and listen to that person’s story— stories about the person’s spiri-tual journey but also about the pro-saic details. I have never found anadult forum to be time so well spentbecause those forums have taughtme much that I didn’t know aboutpeople I see every Sunday and knowby name but otherwise don’t reallyknow. And in a sense I have foundthese adult forums to be “hospitalitytraining,” preparing us for thosemore informal congregational mo-ments when we might invite thestranger’s story or share ours.

As I think back to the innumerableparish coffee hours during whichI’ve found myself looking across atstrangers as if across an abyss, I re-alize that those empty moments offeeling not welcome transpired be-cause no one (including me) posedthe basic question: What is yourstory? If radical welcoming reallymeans “embracing the Other and al-lowing ourselves to be changed, mu-tually transformed, in the process,”the mechanism for that transforma-tion is story. Through story, we arebrought into deeper relationshipwith each other. Only through thisexchange of stories will we knowand be known — and fulfill what itmeans to be a community of wel-come.

Carla Arnell is associate professorof English at Lake Forest College.

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