Courageous Hospitality: No Hindrance, No Fear
Week 2: On risking our light, embracing the stranger, and remembering we are beloved.
The most courageous moment in my life was my first day of middle school. I started at a new school across town and didn’t know a single person. Early classes were one thing to get through, just listening to teachers. But then came lunchtime. Absolute terror. I walked to my locker to grab lunch when I saw Beth, who had been in two of my classes that morning.
“OK,” I thought, “I have to do this.”
I did exactly what my mom taught me: to visualize myself in God’s light when I felt fear, feeling it shine within and around me. I visualized Beth in God’s light too. Mustering all the courage possible in my twelve-year old self I said, “Hi Beth, can I eat lunch with you? I’m new and I don’t know anyone.”
Can you imagine?! I actually had the courage to say that! In middle school, the scariest place on earth!
Beth responded, “Sure, I’m meeting my friends, you can join us.” This was absolutely a planted seed of hospitality in my life. Beth saw me, and she welcomed me. She extended phenomenal generosity to the vulnerable new kid, and offered me a space of belonging in the belly of terror: the middle school lunchroom.
The Gift of Fearlessness
This small act pointed me toward something I’d later learn in Buddhism. In Buddhist terms, Beth epitomized generosity through her gift of fearlessness. Dana paramita is the paramita (or “perfection”) of generosity, and there are four kinds of gifts that can be given: material (food, clothing), spiritual teachings, protection, and, as Roshi Joan Halifax says, “most importantly and most subtly, we can give the gift of non-fear.”1 Non-fear is cultivated through wisdom (Prajna paramita). Once we become aware of hindrances getting in our way, we see them for what they are and let them drop away, “no hindrances, therefore no fear, far beyond deluded thoughts.”
Roshi Norman Fischer writes that when we give fearlessness “You give [fearlessness] away by giving love, because when you feel loved, you feel confident. To give the gift of fearlessness is to give others the sense that they matter, that they are respected, cared for, secure within a loving reality; and therefore ultimately, protected.”2
As the light in me shone, asking Beth to see it, she opened her heart and generously offered no-fear, a place I was seen, and cared for. This expresses the mutuality in hospitality. I had to be vulnerable and open to her, to receive her response; and she in turn accepted and responded with the generosity of fearlessness.
“Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy,” Henri Nouwen writes in his book, Reaching Out. He says, “The real host is the one who offers that space where we do not have to be afraid and where we can listen to our own inner voices and find our own personal way of being human. But to be such a host we have to first be at home in our own house.”3
Creating a Free Space
If we are caught up by the hindrances of the mind we live in a world of delusion in which we believe criticism, listen to others judgements, doubt ourselves, doubt our belovedness. We rely on external validation for our sense of belovedness. This is the harmful nature of our human condition and we need hospitality to reorient us. We need hospitality towards ourselves, and we need communities of hospitality to re-member with true belovedness.
Parker Palmer writes that we become “afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our identities from each other. In the process, we become separate from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within.”4 When we feel unsafe, like our worth is in question, we resort to mental foxholes - the scripts that feel familiar, yet ultimately fail to actually express courage in these moments of fear. We revert to scripts rather than relationships, rather than reaching out for connection.
The Courage to Risk Your Light
This is why my exchange with Beth is still so amazing to me, even today. My mental foxhole would have been (and still is) to be quiet, find a spot on my own, and not talk to anyone. But in that moment of incredible courage, I chose relationship and connection instead. I did not hide, but very consciously, I let my light shine. And I have found time and again, the goodness that flows from risking your light. Palmer says it so well, “We must become conscientious objectors to the forces that put us at war with ourselves, assaulting our identity and integrity, violating the sanctity of our souls.”5
Hospitality is generous, it is courageous and offers fearlessness. We show up grounded in our belovedness, and humble ourselves to receive the other as a friend. Hindrances of opinions, and judgements, and attempts to control are removed, so the other too may claim their own belovedness - enough, just as they are.
This same wisdom appears in other teachers, too. The wisdom Roshi Joan alluded to is echoed by Henri Nouwen and is familiar from St. Francis: they call for a poverty of mind, a poverty of opinions — a not-knowing, a “Beginner’s Mind”. Nouwen says, “once we have become poor, we can be a good host… Poverty is the inner disposition that allows us to take away our defenses and convert our enemies into friends.” He continues, “We have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give.”6
Poverty of Mind, Abundance of Heart
Fischer calls it a “stinginess of mind” that prevents us from opening to the abundance of hospitality. Nouwen labels it as hostility. Hostility of course shares a root with hospitality: Hospitality derives from the Latin hospes, meaning "host", "guest", or "stranger". Hospes is formed from hostis, which means "stranger" or "enemy" (the latter being where terms like "hostile" derive).”
Fischer and Nouwen bring us into everyday situations when we are miserly with our thoughts, or even hostile. Nouwen writes, “fear and hostility are not limited to our encounters with burglars… In a world so pervaded with competition, even those who are very close to each other, such as classmates, teammates, colleagues in work, can become infected by fear and hostility when they experience the other as a threat to their intellectual or professional safety.”7
If we are stingy with our generosity then we easily revert to scripts of judgement, opinions, and threat. We worry that this “other” could somehow damage our worth. Poverty of mind allows us to set aside these fears, poverty of opinions lets go of our judgements, and through not-knowing we are free (liberated) to be at the center of our being, unhindered by the conditions of external validation. This generosity with ourselves flows forward, and those “others” can be fearless, they too no longer need to “prove” themselves in our presence.
To offer courageous hospitality we humble ourselves, not needing to be defensive, or possessive (about anything, including our ego). Christine Pohl writes, “concerns about possessions can make us hesitate to offer hospitality to strangers… Rather than deal with our discomfort by making changes, we sometimes choose to keep our distance or find new friends whose resources more closely match our own.”8
Possessiveness of opinions gives us something to defend, to protect, but poverty of mind allows us to offer hospitality that is not dependent on the other or the guest agreeing with us. We can extend hospitality to the new kid, without knowing anything about them.
If we cling tightly to our mental possessions we will absolutely lose the courageous creativity that only comes from vulnerable powerlessness - the willingness to innovate and be transformed.
Greg Boyle writes, “Our fragile ego gets nicked and yet we are called again to the joy of self-forgetting. ‘Unless you become like these children,’ Jesus says, it’s hard to enter into the kinship to which we are all invited.”9 We are all beloved, we all belong, but we have difficulty stepping into that loving if we are afraid and don’t actually believe our worth is infinite and unconditional.
Hospitality is generous, it offers fearlessness. From groundedness in our belovedness we can generously extend no-fear, and cultivate belonging with the person in front of us such that they too can simply exist in their belovedness. Like Beth and I: No hindrance, no fear.
This is hard. All the rest of the world, every moment, we are bombarded by messages that seek to undermine our grounding in belovedness. Hospitality is a vital embodiment of dissolving such delusions and enlivening the truth of the belovedness of all beings.
Let me leave you with a few words from Episcopal Bishop and Indigenous Elder, Steven Charleston: “Do not doubt yourself, especially if you were programmed to do so by the critique of others who told you over time you were not smart enough, not good enough to measure up to their expectations… Do not doubt yourself for the holy hand that shaped your soul is a maker of art. You are a masterpiece of mind and spirit, of endless possibility.”10
So may you remember you are beloved.
May you too cultivate spaces of fearlessness.
Roshi Joan Halifax, “The First Paramita: Dana, Generosity: Joan Halifax,” Upaya Zen Center, Dec. 9, 2014.
Norman Fischer, The World Could be Otherwise,” p. 32.
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out, p. 71, 102.
Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life, p. 4.
Palmer, 72.
Nouwen, 103.
Nouwen, 69.
Christine Pohl, Making Room, p. 117.
Greg Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 99.
Steven Charleston, Ladder to the Light, p. 41.