In most years one of the loveliest feasts, the Feast of Corpus Christi, falls in June. This year it missed doing so by three days. Nevertheless for me it is the feast of early summer. When we celebrate the Lord’s gift of Himself to us in bread and wine on Holy Thursday our joy is overshadowed by the sadness of the Last Supper, the watching in Gethsemane, the knowledge that tomorrow is Good Friday. Now, however, we can relax and rejoice in the light of the Risen Christ, who still gives Himself to me, to each one of us, in the Eucharist. How amazing is that!
How am I going to respond to such love?
I am going to go to Chapter 53 of St Benedict’s Rule and reflect on what hospitality might mean in my life. Hospitality is a key element of the Benedictine life, as indeed it should be of every Christian life. To receive others, all others, without distinction, with loving care and courtesy, with words of peace, with prayer and humility, is to be a core aspect of our lives. The gift I have to offer to the other on my path is a hospitality of the heart that goes far beyond the obvious kind of practical hospitality. It lies not so much in my ability to make cake and offer cups of tea, as in an attitude of openness and availability and welcome to all.
It is easy to extend hospitality of the heart to friends, it is considerably less easy to offer it to the irritating driver behind me, the girl on the supermarket checkout, the colleague who is not pulling her weight, the person who has taken a dislike to me, the person who is different from me.
It can also be easy to practise a generalised hospitality of the heart towards those I do not know at all – those whose traumatised lives I see on the evening news or read about in the papers, for instance.
What I am asked to practise, however, is self-sacrificing love, self-emptying service. I do not need to wait for the Big Chance to come along. There are a million unremarkable opportunities along each day’s path, chances to exercise patience, kindness, generosity, love in tiny, unremarkable ways. I am never going to go out to Africa and heal the sick, solve poverty and hunger, educate the millions who still don’t have the opportunity to go to school. I have not been called to that kind of service, those are not my gifts. There may be nothing I can offer in my small-scale life but my attention, my concern, my time, my willingness to listen. Most of the people who need my hospitable heart are not in the Third World, not even in Syria or washed up on the Mediterranean shore, but in my workplace, in my social life, in the daily Mass community, the Parish, my choir. For most of us this kind of small-scale hospitality will actually make demands on us every hour of the day. Where I am is where I am called to be, to love, to serve.
The gift I have to offer is the gift I have received. I can only offer hospitality, hospitality of the heart, if I am at home. Where is my heart at home? The Lord says: Make your home in me, as I make mine in you (John 15:4). I have only to do that and what I receive will be beyond imagining. Alone, I do not have the strength to love others, but I can receive that strength daily in the Eucharist. As the Lord gives Himself to me, so I am asked to give myself to the other. I am called, by my Baptism and my Oblation, daily to live out in the humdrum circumstances of my little life the love that I have received in the Eucharist; I am called as a Benedictine to live that love in humility, in service, in obedience to the needs of each moment and each person on my path. I am called to be the person God needs me to be, every minute of every day, knowing how much He loves me, and, awesomely, how much He trusts me to get on with the task of loving. If I reflect on all that I have received, how can I not be overflowing with a hospitality of the heart which impels me to share my joy, my certainty that God loves me and values me, with every single person on my path today?
Mary Cockroft
Oblate of Stanbrook
