We’ve all been new somewhere. The first day at school or university. A new job. A new neighborhood. Some of us stay in the town we grew up in but many of us relocate to a new area, even a new country.
Recently, I watched a Frontline documentary, “Children of Syria,” that followed the journey of one family for three years from Syria to a refugee camp in Turkey to a small town in Germany where they re-settled. The children were understandably nervous about the reception they would receive as outsiders and their mother worried too. Fortunately, most of the children’s classmates welcomed them; though as the mood in Germany toward refugees has shifted in the last year, there have been less hospitable encounters.
Even in our country, where far fewer refugees from Syria and other war-torn nations relocate, the rhetoric of hostility too often replaces hospitality. If only we could remember our own experience being the new person, the outsider, we might extend a warmer welcome.
The biblical exhortations in both the Old and New Testament to serve, even to love, the stranger remind us most of our ancestors migrated and thus, the stranger among us is but another incarnation of ourselves.
I learned this on a trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where I stayed with Benedictine nuns at a retreat center designed to welcome North American guests. From the bottled water in our commodious rooms to Oreos in the dining hall, the nuns exhibited such thoughtfulness.
The purpose of the trip was to acquaint folks like me with the stark reality of very poor Mexican people. Each day we would visit someone’s home, a shack at best, roofed with corrugated tin, the dirt floor meticulously swept, flowers growing in coffee cans. In one home, our host presented us each with a red rose from the bundle she would sell that day to feed her family. Each flower given represented income lost. In another home, the 5-year-old who sold Chiclets to augment her mother’s income, offered us pieces of gum.
The last day of the trip, I noticed five of the nuns in a small room at the retreat center gathering for noontime prayer. One of them caught my eye and beckoned me to join them. The nuns spoke only Spanish and I only English.
Throughout the week, one of the other North American guests had translated. Alone with the nuns, I let the sound of their Spanish prayers fill me as I reflected on the hospitality they had so graciously extended throughout the week.
At the close of their prayers, the nuns rose from their chairs and stood in a circle. Sister Rosa gestured for me to stand with them. Laboriously, all five nuns recited the Lord’s Prayer – in English – for me, their lone guest. Every person I met there dug deep into the scantest of resources to offer the most bountiful welcome. Each embodied the exhortation to serve and yes, love, the stranger. Why would we do less?
Leaf Seligman, a Jaffrey resident, serves on the board of Monadnock Restorative Community, a nonprofit created to restore communities to wholeness through genuine re-integration that includes radical hospitality, nurture and healing.