Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
The Heart of Hospitality
Essay on the Nature of this Christian Virtue
October 7, 2006
We have recently returned from a trip to Pennsylvania. We went on pilgrimage to Antiochian Village, north of Ligonier, in honor of Sts. Thekla and Raphael. Some new found friends (one from Baltimore and the other from Murphreesburough) invited us to visit the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, PA. It was the highlight of the pilgrimage.
It is a women’s monastery in the Romanian tradition and under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church in America. There are currently nine sisters at the monastery. According to our guide the Monastery of the Transfiguration was the first Orthodox women’s monastery in North America. Because there is no history of Orthodox women’s monasticism here our primary conception of nuns is from the Roman Catholic tradition where they almost exclusively work in the world. When we Americans think of nuns, we think of teachers, nurses, professors, and administrators. Orthodox monasticism has a very different focus. Monastics are cloistered and their primary focus is prayer in the context of a balanced life. (The task of the monastic is to balance private prayer, public worship, work, and recreation.)
Since Orthodox monasticism was unknown in North America, the founder of the Monastery of the Transfiguration, Mother Alexandra, realized the monastery’s primary task would need to be hospitality, because the curious and the seekers would soon be knocking on their door in order to find out what this whole Orthodox women’s monastic thing was all about. Thus, the ministry die was cast for the monastery.
But just what is hospitality?
The monastery has several guest houses. The nuns provide beds for those who desire to stay a night or a week. Is being a motel maid for Jesus all there is to Christian hospitality?
The monastery also provides meals for those who are passing through. Toward that end they bake bread and create simple but hearty menu choices for those who eat in the refectory. If they have guests, the nuns also eat their noon meal with their guests. Is being a gracious host and providing board all there is to Christian hospitality?
The monastery has a wonderful bookstore with an eclectic range of books, icons, incense and sundry other items. They have a particularly notable selection of children’s books. Other volumes that they sell include scholarly works, books written for those curious about Orthodoxy and Western Christian writers of note such as Lewis, Menken, and Muggeridge (picking three out of the middle of the alphabet). Again, is providing information to the curious and scholar alike the extent of hospitality?
Of course these are three facets of the Christian jewel that is hospitality, but hospitality is far more broad and life-encompassing than any one of these things. Hospitality is certainly born out in our actions, but at its root, hospitality is an attitude that shapes everything the hospitable person does. It is welcome. It is looking out for the needs of others. It is creating unexpected means of help that makes the guest feel comfortable and at home.
We arrived at the monastery in mid-afternoon. After a informative and interesting tour we were invited to relax, to browse the bookstore and library at our leisure, to have a snack if we were hungry. But especially we were invited to stay until 5:00 o’clock and join the nuns in evening prayer. Since our schedule was not pressing, we did just that. Later in the afternoon a priest and his family (wife and three very young daughters) also stopped by. They had been at the same conference we attended—the priest was the conference speaker—and stopped by for some spiritual refreshment before returning home to Tennessee. It was the nun’s relationship to this young family where I witnessed a profound sense of hospitality that embodied Christian virtue in a simple but utterly profound way.
The three daughters were probably ages eight, six, and under a year old. When the family arrived for vespers, the nuns gathered the three children (with the parents’ permission) and bustled them toward the front of the chapel. Where appropriate, and according to the two older children’s ability, the children helped lead the service by reading prayers and responses, and following along in the music as the nuns pointed out the words with their fingers. The baby was passed from nun to nun. Each nun in turn, held the baby, usually so she could gaze at the icon of Christ the Teacher to the right of the Royal Doors, or the candles, whose flickering light danced before the icons of the Transfiguration, the Icon of the Mother of God of Ellwood City (a rather famous icon painted in France and given to the Monastery many years ago), or the icons of the particular saints being remembered that day.
Sometimes the children’s attention was lost and they would go sit or lay on the floor near their parents. On occasion they would wander into the back of the chapel; always a nun was gently watching over them. When the oldest child went over to the reliquary, a young nun joined her and helped her honor the relics, touch the containers, work through her curiosity, and then brought her attention back to the prayers being offered.
Through the gentle and loving attention of the nuns, the children were made a part of the service to their abilities and made to feel welcome and important. Meanwhile (and clearly, this was the intention of the nuns) the parents were freed from the responsibility of attending to the children for an hour or two, and, as a result, freed to relax, concentrate, and pray in a manner they had probably not been able to do in quite some time.
It was a remarkable gift that the nuns gave to those two young parents. The primary job of monastics is prayer. It would have been perfectly understandable if the nuns tuned all else out prayed vespers with careful attention to God alone. But there is a very real sense that worship, like the Sabbath, is made for humans and not vice versa (Mark 2:27). I was reminded of Jesus’ parable about the Priest and Levite who saw the man beaten and dying on the Jericho road, but ignored him, because they were on their way to the temple (Luke 10:29ff). Worship is the pre-eminent human activity, but worship cannot take the place of being attentive to our neighbor.
What is hospitality? For the nuns at the Monastery of the Transfiguration, it is certainly changing bed linens, scrubbing showers, baking bread, doing dishes, and keeping the bookstore shelves stocked. But it is also (and more so) gently rocking a child still in diapers before the icon of Christ the Teacher so the child can gaze at the visage of his Savior while listening to the prayers of the Church that she will not understand for several years to come. Hospitality is leaving one’s station during to worship to join a curious child at the very back of the chapel. Hospitality is looking upon these children, and for the sake of the spiritual comfort of their parents, seeing Jesus himself in those young and sometimes restless eyes. Hospitality is not doing what we are required to do, but finding ways to be present and helpful in far more mundane actions.
The vision of hospitality first formulated by Mother Alexandra, the founder of the monastery, has been truly and profoundly embodied in these women seeking to serve God in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Thanks be to God.
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
You are free to distribute as long as attribution and web address is included.
Site support by C T E K