In my last newsletter, we named several elephants in the room of hospitality, namely, the many anxieties and obstacles we face trying to orient our lives toward welcoming a stranger. Those elephants, once summoned, won’t depart quietly. Rather than tackle them directly, we’re going to take them on one bite at a time over the coming weeks (and if you can think of any other elephant cliches I can add to this jumble, let me know!).
Seriously, though, when we actually name the reasons we don’t manage to make room in our homes for strangers in need, we can feel overwhelmed. A lot of this overwhelm comes from recognizing that our homes are embedded in systems beyond our control— systems of roads and workplace expectations and schooling and socio-cultural patterns and so much more. These patterns and systems shape our lives in ways we often don’t realize until we try to do something beyond the norm — like inviting a refugee to live with us, or bringing strangers into to our weeknight meals.
I felt this overwhelm when I sat down to write this morning. The temptation is always to jump toward solutions (simplify your schedule! plan your meals more strategically! ), and while I do want to talk about practical strategies, I want to be careful about my language. As inhabitants of the twenty-first century, with other people in our lives and with bills to pay, not even the wisest habits can really “solve” the pace of our lives or the complexities of our relationships.
And yet, we press on. We take heart. We look at our cookbooks.
Yes, I said cookbooks. I’m very picky about which cookbooks I purchase, because to me, any collection of recipes starts to look like a big “to do’ list. I generally only welcome cookbooks to my shelves when they offer a philosophy or set of fundamental practices that can shape my entire cooking practice. The first cookbook I ever bought, at 22 or 23, is More with Less: Recipes and suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources (Herald Press, 1979, Repub. 2000). As the title makes clear, this cookbook was confronting a problem. The author, Doris Longacre, wanted to discern how Christians might step outside of the American food culture, with all its waste and disease, and respond to the real challenges of global hunger.
Her book is full of what we might call habits and practices: recipes that use meat for flavor and accent, rather than as the central protein; formulas for making your own pancake mixes or granola; ideas for meals that easily stretch to feed unexpected guests. But Longacre was wise enough not to call her compendium a “solution” to the problems of the global food system. Instead, in her preface she writes,
We are looking for ways to live more simply and joyfully, ways that grow out of our tradition but take their shape from living faith and the demands of our hungry world. There is not just one way to respond, nor is there a single answer to the world’s food problem. It may not be within our capacity to effect an answer. But it is within our capacity to search for a faithful response.
In our study of hospitality, we too, are looking to the needs of a hungry world, but we need to remember that we are not the world’s savior, and it is well beyond our power to welcome every stranger the world creates. “But it is within our capacity to search for a faithful response.”
A faithful response — that’s what I’m hoping to discover along with you. It’s a spiritual discipline, to let go of solutions, to humbly admit that whatever we do is going to be small. But it is possible, thanks to the homeless guest (the glorious host!) who once said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:29-30).
"More with Less" was my go-to cookbook for the first decades of married and adult life. My copy was so battered and splattered by my 40's that I had to stick it in a small 3-ring binder. Pages fell out (important pages!) and when I inherited my mother's less-abused copy I finally had the complete volume again. Though many of the recipes are outside our medically-restricted diet, still I treasure it for the way it helped me think about food, cooking and sharing.
yes! I have a couple of these! my neighbor turned me on to these and they are brilliant.