It’s been a busy social swirl in these winding-down days of summer. We have hosted, and we have been hosted.
Recently we visited Ponte de Lima, a small town about an hour south of the Spanish border, where a tight-knit group of North American transplants have made their homes and where we’re lucky enough to have friends. We stayed with a couple who moved there from Oakland, and now live in a stone farmhouse with a big garden, a thirty-minute walk along the river from the center of town. They welcomed us in — walls warm with artwork, rugs, pottery, and textiles collected over years of travel. We ate, drank wine, told stories, played bocce under the olive trees, and slipped into the pool whenever the heat got to be too much.
Back in Lisbon this past weekend, we were the ones opening our door — to friends visiting from North Carolina. It sometimes takes a visitor to make you see your own city again. We took them to Monserrate Castle in Sintra, deliberately skipping the more Instagrammed monuments and their crowds of photo hounds, and found something closer to what the place actually is.
Both visits, as guest and as host, left me thinking about the particular grace of inviting someone into your personal space — and about how rarely that happens here. In Lisbon, most socializing happens in restaurants and bars. There are exceptions, and we treasure them, but we’ve fallen into the same pattern as everyone else: we don’t have people over the way we used to. Somewhere along the way, hospitality outsourced itself to the nearest table with a menu.
That’s a loss, I think, and not a small one. Across cultures and centuries, welcoming someone into your home has never been treated as mere logistics. It’s treated as sacred.
Among Bedouin communities of the North African desert, a guest is described as prince, poet, and prisoner all at once — received like royalty, expected to sing the host’s praises, and bound by an unspoken debt of honor. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye captures this same weight in “Arabic Coffee,” describing her father’s ritual of preparing coffee for guests:
And the place where men and women / break off from one another / was not present in that room. / The hundred disappointments, / fire swallowing olive-wood beads / at the warehouse, and the dreams / tucked like pocket handkerchiefs / into each day, took their places / on the table, near the half-empty / dish of corn. And none was / more important than the others, / and all were guests.
Everyone at the table — grief, disappointment, hope, whoever walked through the door — is treated as an honored guest. That’s the whole practice in a few lines.
The pattern repeats everywhere you look. A 1990 UNESCO Courier essay notes that “from time immemorial people have felt a sacred obligation to share their bread and salt with the passing stranger,” inviting them to the fireside and offering lodging for the night. In Ancient Greece, welcoming a stranger was a way of honoring Zeus himself, patron of travelers; Odysseus’s whole journey home is, in part, a search for xenia — guest-friendship, a ritualized bond between host and stranger. It’s worth sitting with the fact that the Greek root for “love of strangers,” philoxenos, is also the root of a word we still use constantly today, just inverted: xenophobia. Somewhere between “love of strangers” and “fear of strangers,” something in us started closing the door instead of opening it. In Theravāda Buddhist tradition, hospitality — sakkāra-sammāna — isn’t a private courtesy either; it’s a moral and spiritual act understood to bring happiness to guest and host alike, and it extends outward from the family home to the whole community.
That last point matters, because hospitality was never meant to stay indoors. What some call “radical hospitality” — the deliberate creation of safe, welcoming space for people on the margins — is the public expression of the same instinct that puts a coffee tray in a guest’s hands. And it’s worth noticing that this is precisely the muscle so much of public life seems to be losing right now. The news is full of stories about hospitality contracting rather than expanding, often loudest among those who claim some faith tradition as their own justification for shutting the door.
Meanwhile, we’re told we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic — a term a former U.S. Surgeon General used to describe what he called a public health crisis. Researchers are pushing back on parts of that narrative, and it’s fair to be skeptical of any tidy story about decline; every new technology, from the telephone to the television to the long commute, has been blamed for isolating us at some point. But something in the underlying feeling still rings true: more people living alone, more of us describing ourselves as disconnected, conversations about current events turning into minefields we’d rather avoid. The always-on news cycle and the flattening of public discourse leave a lot of people feeling helpless, overwhelmed, and unmoored from any shared sense of meaning or purpose.
I don’t think the answer to something that large is another large thing. I think it’s the opposite. I believe big, structural problems are best met with small, deliberate gestures — what I’ve come to think of as generative resistance. Not a grand gesture, just a door opened, a table set, a coffee tray carried in with both hands. Anthropologists have called hospitality central to the entire development of human societies, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. It’s one of the oldest technologies we have for building trust between strangers, and it still works.
So here’s what I’m sitting with, and what I’d invite you to sit with too: when did you last invite someone into your actual home, not a restaurant table, not a screen? What would it take to do that once this month? You don’t need a stone farmhouse and an olive grove — a full pot of coffee and an empty chair will do. The invitation itself is the practice.