This week’s post in my Kitchen Inspiration series shares three things I’ve been learning about hospitality. I had no intention of calling it ‘Hospitality in Wartime’. But once again, early in the year we have woken up to images of war. It’s hard to keep writing in the face of such upheaval. The things I’ve been thinking about seem so small in comparison and it’s easy to reach a conclusion that, for now at least, they don’t matter.
Back in 2022 I’d been reading C.S. Lewis’s ‘Learning in War-Time’, a remarkable address given in the University Church in Oxford at the outbreak of the Second World War. I wrote a post reflecting on the relevance of Lewis’s words to our own generation. The basic thrust of his argument was that in days of global turmoil, the small ‘ordinary things’ that form part of our human search for knowledge and beauty lose none of their importance:
the war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under that shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with'normal life'. Life has never been normal.
My own conclusion back in 2022 was this: ‘In the face of war, and in the face of our broken human condition, there is a choice. We can give up and give in to fear. Or, as Lewis explained, we can remember that life is precious, that our days are numbered, and that each moment counts. We can refuse to believe that evil will have the last word, and we can pursue all that is Good’.
It’s with similar thoughts in mind this morning that I write this post. So, for what it’s worth, here are three things I’ve been learning about hospitality:
- Hospitality restores
- Each day is a gift
- Kindness makes a difference
1. Hospitality restores
There is something beautiful and life giving about being given a cup of tea or coffee, being welcomed into someone’s home, or gathering around a spread table and eating and talking together. That was our experience these last few days when my husband and I spent time in the home of our daughter and son-in-law. I am so grateful to be on the receiving such kindness and restorative hospitality shown to us by all of our family and by friends. I hope the givers are reading this and get the message! Often the work of hospitality is practiced off-camera. It can be quiet and unsung. I call it work because I know how costly it can be in terms of time and effort and resources. But kindness and life-giving hospitality are the very opposite of the hostility experienced in so many places and situations across the globe. Kindness and hospitality reveal the heart of God, as pictured in Psalm 23: ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies’. Remember this at times when, in the middle of the busy tasks of hosting, you feel tired or even unthanked.
2. Each day is a gift
During the past week a fascinating piece in The Guardian got me thinking about how each day is a gift with potential for great good or for ill. The article featured the story of a woman called Vickie Harden Woods. Vickie had pursued a busy career as a town planner. When she retired, to make sure she had a routine, she decided to bake a different kind of pie every day, for an entire year. I imagined what this must have entailed: planning what kind of pie to make, buying the ingredients, setting aside time each day to bake. But Vickie wasn’t making the pies for herself; the point was to give them away. So she also had to decide who would be the recipient of her pie, and make arrangements for delivering it. The first pie she baked was a lemon meringue, specially curated for an elderly aunt. But she gave pies to all sorts of people: a homeless man, former colleagues, even strangers. I’m not advocating we all embark on pie-making extravaganzas on such a scale. But the story shines a light on the way kindness can be achieved through food and hospitality, and on the potential in each of our lives to nourish and connect on a daily basis: Kitchen Inspiration, certainly!
3. Kindness makes a difference
So far this Kitchen Inspiration series has illustrated that kindness and hospitality look different in different contexts. My Mum’s traditional Northern Irish pancake bundles given as gifts; an olive woodcraft enterprise developing refugee aid in Greece as featured in a Creative Conversation with Randall Graber; my daughter and son-in law hosting us in their home; and Vickie Harden Woods’s pie project look very different indeed. But they share one thing in common: they are life-giving. And each day they make a difference. Even in days like this amidst wars and rumours of war. Or perhaps especially in days like this.
Introducing Kitchen Inspiration
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