For years I have struggled to come up with a cohesive way to explore and express my interest in seemingly disparate topics — personal growth and development, coaching, spirituality, wellness, interior and landscape design, hosting gatherings, food, wine and cooking.
The word is hospitality, in its broadest sense.
Hospitality is a central tenet of each of the three Abrahamic religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. As writer Annelise Jolley wrote for the John Templeton Foundation, it’s more than throwing a dinner party for your friends. Benedictine monk Brother Aaron Raverty reminds us that hospitality is nurturing. Part of this nurturing means offering a comfortable bed and a warm meal. But an equally important element is providing “a creative environment where they can thrive”—a spiritual as well as physical hospitality.
Priest and writer Henri Nouwen writes of three poles that offer context in which to speak of a spiritual life. These are our relationship to ourselves, hospitality as the basis for our relationship with others, and the structures of a spiritual connection with whatever Force we identify with. (As a priest, he specifically says God. I’m more open to interpretation of the spiritual experience.) He writes of the spiritual life being one of constant movement between the poles of loneliness and solitude, hostility and hospitality, illusion and contemplative practice.
“Hospitality is not to change people but to offer them a space where change can take place … The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create … a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves …” writes Nouwen.
Coaching, at its best, offers that creative, empty environment. It offers the threshold for people to find their own internal home. Coaching is cloaked in a generous conversation as an invitation for exploration and understanding.
One of my biggest challenges in learning to be a coach is to leave plenty of open space. Sitting in silence is difficult. Most of us can’t bear stillness, for external silence often stirs up inner turbulence. We may say we long for rest and quietude, yet our holidays and vacations are compelled to be on busy beaches, campgrounds, foreign cities, and noisy entertainment venues.
It’s in the empty spaces, the in-between pauses, where magic often happens. You must be open to its own cadence.
Some of my most resonant moments in the many gatherings and dinner parties I have hosted are not when I am in the middle of the conversation at the table. Rather, it’s when I have been off to the side, preparing the next dish. This gives me a moment to look back at the people who have gathered, to observe the dynamic energy in the room. A warmth washes over me as I see guests’ eyes sparkle in recognition — and no, it’s not always the wine-induced haze that is often part of my events.
Few things make me happier than watching a gathering that I have created, whether it’s been a weeklong festival for 600 guests, or a client’s grand opening event for 10,000 people, or a long-lingering New Year’s dinner party to greet a new year with friends, or sitting on a veranda with a small group in the Açores with a full moon over the sea and laughing until tears come.
It’s in these moments when I feel most myself, when my previously disparate interests and signature strengths come to full fruition. “If we expect any salvation, redemption, healing and new life, the first thing we need is an open receptive place where something can happen to us,” says Nouwen.
In a spiritual sense, hospitality refers to becoming familiar with a stranger. As part of their Civic Conversations project, the team at OnBeing developed several Grounding Virtues. One of them is hospitality:
Hospitality is a bridge to all the great virtues, but it is immediately accessible. You don’t have to love or forgive or feel compassion to extend hospitality. But it’s more than an invitation. It is the creation of an inviting, trustworthy space — an atmosphere as much as a place. It shapes the experience to follow. It creates the intention, the spirit, and the boundaries for what is possible. As creatures, it seems, we imagine a homogeneity in other groups that we know not to be there in our own. But new social realities are brought into being over time by a quality of relationship between unlikely combinations of people. When in doubt, practice hospitality.
When we first moved to Portugal, I immediately felt an epigenetic familiarity. Locals here were kind and open, and I feel deeply grateful for the people who welcomed us into their lives and their homes. This generous hospitality has been foundational to our feeling grounded here.
I admit that I am not feeling particularly hospitable lately to many of my fellow American voters. My generosity has recoiled, and I tilt toward the pole of hostility. As Viktor Frankl says, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
For now my best recourse is to practice hospitality toward myself, to sit in stillness in a safe, welcoming space that invites a personal opening toward creativity. I will use this time to make myself aware of the hospitality I have enjoyed from others, so that I can become, as Nouwen writes, “more sensitive to my own inner movements and be more able to affirm an open attitude toward my fellow human beings.”