Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

November 20, 2005

“Come to the Welcome Table”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

I recently came upon a story about a Thanksgiving dinner from some years ago. This happened in Philadelphia during World War II, when a wealthy woman there, a woman who lived the high society life of the 1940’s, decided to be charitable, and open her home to some GIs who were stationed nearby. She called the local army base and was connected with the sergeant. She said, “I’d like to invite three soldiers to my home for Thanksgiving dinner.”

The sergeant replied that he would be glad to arrange for that, especially for men who were far from home. Remembering that many of the soldiers stationed there were from New York City, she added, “Sergeant, I don’t want any of them to be Jews.”

He answered, “I understand.”

On Thanksgiving Day, the woman opened the door to her gracious home and there on the front step were three handsome, uniformed soldiers, all of them African American. One said politely, with a Southern drawl, “Madame, thank you for inviting us to your Thanksgiving dinner.”

She clutched at her pearls and sputtered in astonishment. “But, but, … the sergeant must have made a mistake.”

“Oh, no, Madame,” said the soldier, “Sergeant Cohen never makes a mistake.”

Thanksgiving is that quintessential American holiday when we share the universal prayer of gratitude, and then stuff ourselves silly with food. But before the thanking and the waddling, this holiday calls us to two other universal activities, which could be thought of as everyday prayers – welcome and hospitality.

We welcome people into our homes and we are welcomed. Granted, we may exhibit the opposite of welcoming behavior as we clog the airports and highways trying to come together in groups that are large enough to consume that hefty runner-up to our national bird, the turkey, but we are also trying to bring a sense of welcome to each other. Whether we are the host, the hostess, or the guest, or the folks who are heading out to a restaurant together, it is the welcome that all extend to each other that resounds the strongest this day. We are with family, with friends, with strangers – actually, there are no strangers, only new friends – and we greet each other in the sacred expectation that we belong together, at least for this large, long meal, and maybe for the extended weekend.

We sit with our memories and traditions, our holy history as well as our hell-bent past, our anxieties and our expectations, our hopes, discomfort, and love. In faithfulness, we come together each year for a day that is not tied to religion, but rather to a universal longing to welcome each other, to belong to each other, to give thanks for our blessings.

After we share this initial prayer of welcome, but before the thanksgivings begin, we engage in another spiritual practice: hospitality. And again, it is not just the host and hostess who share their home and their abundant table – all who enter the feast, who come to the table, bring the hospitality.

For one thing, they bring pies and breads and wine, salad and cookies and cheeses. Sometimes, tradition rules, and you can count on your Grandma’s jello salad mold, and your niece’s pecan pie. Sharing food and drink is a powerful communion.

Hospitality is not just about what we put into our mouths, though. Usually there is such a spread on the table that it keeps us in face to face contact with folks for longer than we are used to being. Thanksgiving is a meal when the TV and radio are blissfully silent, an increasingly rare event. So there we are, sitting with each other for a long time without distractions, and we are able to engage in the best hospitality of all – sharing ourselves with each other. As Gunilla Norris says, “we go to the kitchen” (or dining room) – we go to the table – “ to be nourished and revealed. It is a holy place.”

The thanks we then give, for the meal and our blessings, come easily because we first have been welcomed and welcomed others into belonging, and then we have given and received, been “nourished and revealed” with the hospitality of abundance and presence.

I thought about welcome and hospitality often when I was on sabbatical in Nova Scotia. It’s hard to avoid the subject – everywhere there are signs with the Celtic greeting, “Cead Mille Faelte”, which means “one hundred thousand welcomes”. And they were not empty words – I felt welcomed and given gracious hospitality quite often.

One Sunday, I went to a church service early, just to sit and take in the beautiful building – I was the first one in the pews. I noticed in their church bulletin that there would be a Celtic Singing Concert that evening. A friendly older woman came and sat next to me and chatted. She offered to pick me up for the concert that night, before we had even exchanged names. What a ministry of hospitality! Her name was Jessie and I immediately felt like I belonged. I thanked her and said that I would come, but I didn’t need a ride. Welcome and hospitality contribute much to the well-being we experience in that deep sense of belonging.

Brother David Steindl-Rast writes that in some societies they do not actually have verbal expressions of thanksgiving, and it’s not because they aren’t grateful, but because they have “a deeper awareness of mutual belonging than our society has.” He goes on, “an expression like ‘thank you’ would seem as inappropriate as tipping family members would seem to us. The more we lose the sense of all belonging to one big family, the more we must explicitly express that belonging when it is actualized…” In our imperfect world, then, we don’t feel that beloved belonging, that universal family sense all the time, so we need the words to express the thanksgiving to those we sometimes feel belonging with, at least now and then during the year, especially at times like Thanksgiving, when we are encouraged to experience those gathered around the table as one big family.

In her latest book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott writes about a friend named David Roche, pastor of the Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity. David has a severe facial deformity – some parts are missing; some badly burned – and you can well imagine that his face throws people right off in their welcoming behavior. But David is graceful and kind and gives talks about his experiences, about what not being welcoming is all about. He says, of himself and other deformed folks, “we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God.”

The Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity isn’t a physical church, but a congregation of the heart which is realistic. David says, “Eighty percent sincerity is about as good as it’s going to get. So is eighty percent compassion.” Of unconditional love, he says it is a reality, but it has “a shelf life of about eight to ten seconds.” Or maybe till the end of dinner. And you savor that, and be open to the grace when it comes. If we follow David’s reasoning, at Thanksgiving we can only realistically expect about eighty percent of the time to feel belonging, welcoming and hospitality, but we should celebrate that, not worry that all the other families out there have got it and we don’t.

I told you about Jessie welcoming me in a Nova Scotia church, but I had many different experiences visiting congregations, and they weren’t all welcoming. One person asked me where I was from and when I said I was just visiting from Great Barrington, she literally quit talking to me. I’d never become a friend, or a member, so what was the point?

That’s not why we welcome folks with hospitality – not to get something from them, but to give them, and ourselves, something sacred. Each Sunday we greet the Holy in our midst because we are the gathered congregation of beloved belonging, here and now, visitor and long time member – we are the ones who are welcome; everyone belongs; everyone may come to the welcome table; everyone is part of the soul of the world. Though we barely realize it less than eighty percent of the time, we are all one.

I realize that hospitality and welcome have come relatively easy for me, with the blessings of a large family, a house in which to welcome folks, and a remarkably kind congregation. But, to tell the truth, not everyone at my table has always been someone I could easily welcome – I admit I’ve had to work for that eighty percent welcome sometimes – and I would be deceiving myself if I thought that I have always been even fifty percent welcome elsewhere. At least some have undoubtedly groaned inwardly, “oh, no, a minister’s at the table – we have to clean up our act,” belonging is not to be assumed, but is a process we all enter into.

Do you know what the best hospitality I’ve ever received was? It came years ago, when I was 22 and volunteering at Rosie’s Place, a women’s shelter in Boston. In the basement was a free clothing room. One of the women who was staying at the shelter while I was on the overnight shift, took me down to that give-away room. We were strangers really, in the sense that we had just met, and also, there was nothing “stranger” than the way I dressed as a young adult, without any thought to how I looked and often hopelessly clashing.

The homeless woman decided to give to me from her abundance, and those piles of free clothing did truly belong to the shelter’s women. She sized me up, considered my coloring, and what style I might actually be able to wear, and picked out a lovely pair of teal green slacks and a matching print blouse. The outfit looked good on me and was comfortable. Just as in a fancy boutique where a personal shopping assistant comes to your rescue, at a shelter in Boston, the poorest of that city’s poor gave me the kind of service that only the richest of the rich ever receive. What a ministry of hospitality!

Welcome and hospitality are some of the first and most basic acts we are called to do, for the good of the world, and for our own well-being. They establish that sense of belonging, of oneness that is as simple as feeling that we are all neighbors, or maybe even one big family. The old Leviticus teaching of the Hebrew scriptures tells us that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. That sounds impossible, even to do it eighty percent of the time. Jesus asked the challenging question of ‘who is the neighbor?’ Do we really have to love everybody? He was answered by the lawyer who had just heard his story of the “Good Samaritan”: the one who showed kindness and mercy was the neighbor. The neighbor is not the object of our deeds – the person over there that we decide to be welcoming to or not – the neighbor is any of us when we choose to bring welcome and hospitality to the world.

May Sarton writes that the only real deprivation is in not being able to give one’s gift. Come to the welcome table, ours of communion here today, and the Thanksgiving table of beloved belonging this week. Come and share your gift of neighborliness, your prayer of welcome and hospitality. Come to the welcome table. Come.