Just Hospitality

God's Welcome in a World of Difference

Letty M. Russell

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780664233150
• eBook ISBN: 9781611640120
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this book, theologian Letty Russell redefines the commonly held notion of hospitality as she challenges her readers to consider what it means to welcome the stranger. In doing so, she implores persons of faith to join the struggles for justice.

Rather than an act of limited, charitable welcome, Russell maintains that true hospitality is a process that requires partnership with the "other" in our divided world. The goal is "just hospitality, " that is, hospitality with justice.

Russell draws on feminist and postcolonial thinking to show how we are colonized and colonizing, each of us bearing the marks of the history that formed us. With an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that stem from our differences and a constructive theological theory of difference itself, Russell proposes concrete strategies to create a more just practice of hospitality.

1

Why Hospitality?

In this chapter I think through my own understanding of hospitality and its ability to address social structures of injustice and division in the world and in religious communities. I seek to connect action and reflection by asking about all the ingredients in our theology: experience, social reality, tradition, and action. In order to do this, I want to share with you some of my own experiences and insights. I will include how I came to the topic, an important clue from the biblical tradition, descriptions of hospitality, and last, possible clues about the integration of difference and community in ministries of hospitality. Then I will turn to the problems of using the practice of hospitality as a way to work for justice in a divided world.

Why hospitality? Of course, one answer to this question is as simple as what Christine Pohl, professor of church in society, says in Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition:

Hospitality is not optional for Christians, nor is it limited to those who are specially gifted for it. It is, instead, a necessary practice in the community of faith.¹

I understand hospitality as the practice of God’s welcome, embodied in our actions as we reach across difference to participate with God in bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis. For me, my interest in hospitality began with and comes out of many years of work in the ecumenical movement and in ecumenical church structures. From 1977 to 1989, for instance, I was a member of the Faith and Order Commission, known as the theological think tank, of the World Council of Churches and of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, and worked on issues that divide the churches, such as doctrine and church order, or polity. I also spent a number of years working on the study Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry.² But despite the fact that those of us who were women, or who were from countries in the Global South—Asia, Africa, and Latin America—were present and asked to speak and write, our points of view were always considered a problem because we increased the diversity of opinion concerning faith and order. This was particularly the case for women in ministry, those who had been ordained. Again and again their comments appeared only in the footnotes, if at all! They were truly in the margin.

As bell hooks has made so clear in such writings as Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, margins are socially constructed sites that dominant groups consider to be the location of those who are of “no account.”³ These margins are not always easy to locate, because they (and the social, political, economic, and ecclesial power they represent) keep shifting as people gain and lose power in movement from center to margin. But margins can be places of connection for those who are willing to move from the center out. They are sites of struggle for those who choose the margin but move to the center in order to gain the ability to talk back.⁴ And when the distinctions of margin and center begin to blur, as all share in God’s hospitality, we are being given the sign that God’s New Creation is breaking in.

My discipline of liberation and feminist theologies involves knowing where the margin and center are located in order to respond appropriately. My own intellectual, social, personal, and political biography is full of those margins and centers, and I am constantly on the move to find the margin and to claim it as the site of my theology of resistance. Theologians like myself make choices about moving from margin toward center, or from center toward margin, according to where we find ourselves in relation to the center of power and resources, and of cultural and linguistic dominance in any particular social structure. Our connection to the margin is always related to where we are standing in regard to social privilege, and from that particular position we have at least three choices. The first is to live where we are and refuse to challenge the social construction of our identity in terms of class, gender, sexuality, or race. The second is to choose the margin and work for the empowerment of people who have been themselves marginalized by the dominant cultural, political, economic, religious, or educational systems. The third choice is to identify with those in power in the center and to emulate the dominant group.⁵

In this chapter, I want to look at the various social locations of my own life and work, asking in what way they pushed me to keep moving to the margin as part of my commitment to share in Christ’s welcome of all persons into God’s household or reign. First, I will describe how growing up in the center helped to shape my theology and provide me with the roots of my Christian faith and commitment. Then I will revisit my experience of living in the margins that shaped the themes of my theological reflection, teaching, and writing. Finally I will look at the ways in which my work has become more and more identified with struggling in the center of the elitism at Yale University.

ON BEING A MISFIT: EMBRACING HOSPITALITY

I don’t know if I am an “outsider within” or an “insider without,” but I do know that I have always been a misfit! I have been a misfit for my entire life and ministry as an educator, pastor, ecumenist, and theologian. This is a very common experience for groups of persons who “miss the mark” because they are not white, Euro-American, affluent, heterosexual, able-bodied, or male.

I have served within the structures of the Presbyterian Church and various ecumenical and academic institutions, yet even as I did, I have always known that there is something that makes me a “square peg in a round hole.” My woman’s body and woman’s way of work somehow do not measure up to the father stereotype of a Protestant pastor. Even today, with ever increasing numbers of talented and gracious women in church leadership, the question of where they fit into the male-dominated hierarchy of the church is ever with us.

In the midst of social structures designed to push out, or down, anyone who does not fit into the right model because of race, class, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation, I have discovered many networks of wonderful people devoted to the work of justice and partnership in the mission of the church in the world. Moreover, over the years many changes have taken place in the church in the United States and abroad, one of them being the increasing contribution of outsiders to what has until now been a white, Eurocentric, male church. This I celebrate as I reflect on my own journey as a woman who is in but still out of the church, and how that has led me to search for clues to the meaning of our call to ministry in a church inside out. My experience as an outsider within has also led me to embrace a ministry of hospitality.

IN BUT STILL OUT

In 1973 Elizabeth Howell Verdesi published a book on the history of women’s work in the Presbyterian Church entitled In But Still Out: Women in the Church!⁶ She identified and documented two events in which women in the denomination lost their access to power and decision making. First, in the 1920s, the Women’s Board of Missions found itself restructured into the boards and agencies of the church and no longer in control of either its finances or the work of women in mission. Then, in the 1940s and 1950s the women had a potential power base in Christian education but allowed it to be co-opted by the larger structures of the church.

We know that there are many reasons for such events/ reorganizations—they continue to happen today—but we also know that the experience of women in the church has on occasion been an experience of diminishment and restructuring, if not downright hostility. The General Assemblies are regularly the scene of strategies to contain efforts to empower young women and reach out in new ways to the coming generations. This sort of political action by those who are in competition to control church structures affects the role of lay women as well as those who are ordained deacons, elders, and ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

Making sense of what ministry means for women and men within structures of oppression or marginality that are the result of racism, sexism, and classism has been one of my lifelong concerns. In fact, it has been my concern for so long that the list of isms keeps growing—with imperialism, ableism, heterosexism, globalization, environmental destruction, now added to the list! Nor have I been able to ignore the fact that as an educated, white, Euro-American woman I benefit from many of the privileges that come from such social sins. Yet I am always status inconsistent: a woman who has authority in the church as a pastor and theologian, but also a bisexual⁷ feminist who advocates for the full humanity of all women, together with all men in harmony with the creation.

MAKING SENSE OF MYSELF

I must confess that my critical perspective on theology developed at a very early age. I grew up attending a Presbyterian church in Westfield, New Jersey, a largely white, middle-class town in northern New Jersey. My parents expected me to attend church school and/or church each Sunday, but while still in kindergarten I ran away from church school and made my way home across a number of forbidden streets. On my arrival home I greeted my startled mother with the comment, “There just is nothing there to interest a girl like me!” Interesting or not, that church remained my theological home all the way through high school, although I drew the line at attending the youth group; the Jack Benny radio program was more fun.

My church and my family were, I know, important to the development of my faith in Jesus Christ and my trust in God’s love. But it was only much later, when I began to study religion in college, that I began to notice the long tradition of church involvement on both sides of my family that was my heritage. Although my father seldom attended church, his grandmother in Boston, Mary Luny Russell Charpiot, with whom he grew up, founded the Massachusetts Home for Intemperate Women in Boston in 1881. The home housed 100 women and was the first of its kind in the United States. My mother often stayed home on Sunday with my father, but her parents were pillars of the local church, and she herself became an active lay leader after my father died.

I trace my feminist tendencies to the fact that I always felt like a misfit. As a child, I wanted to play active games and was what they used to call a tomboy. I refused to learn to read until I was in the fourth grade, because the books about “Dick and Jane” were so boring. One day I discovered a great book on the Vikings and read it cover to cover. The next day I told the teacher I could read and wanted to be put up in the highest reading group! By seventh grade I was already 5′ 8″, the tallest girl in the class; a tomboy who did not fit!

What was it that gave me a sense of entitlement, even though I often did not fit the stereotypes of white, middle-class America? One very important factor was undoubtedly that I grew up as the “boy” in a family with three girls and never felt any pressure from my parents to forsake my interest in woodworking, sports, or anything else that wasn’t the typical domain of girls. I discovered the pain of this type of behavior only when I got to adolescence. In junior high school, I towered over all the other seventh graders. When the students asked me to play “Pistol Packing Mama” in the school musical I knew what it meant to be different! Yet, in spite of clearly being different, I continued to think of myself as having a great deal of entitlement.

As the speaker at my high-school graduation I took the opportunity to talk about the idea of noblesse oblige. What led me to this strong sense of our responsibility to others? Most certainly it was at the heart of what I learned in my family and in my religious education. My role model was my grandmother, Letty Mandeville Towl, who labored all her life in tireless service to her family, community, and church. Her love for others blanketed me as well, so that, although I had a strong sense of autonomy and independence, I knew that the love and care I received and experienced from her was what life should be about. I am particularly grateful for her, because my father was a very rigid person whose anger at any infringement of his authority could easily have shaped me in a different way.

I grew up with an orthodox Presbyterian theology, which I never took seriously enough to reject. I knew very early that there were different opinions about things because my father was a Unitarian and spent Sundays at the tennis club and not in church. Clearly, the part of my faith that was most nurtured within my family was service to others and responsibility for one’s own actions before God.

When I followed my Mother’s footsteps and went to Wellesley College, I thought I would fit right in. And it seemed only right, therefore, that I would arrive at Wellesley to find its motto, non ministrari, sed ministrare (not to be ministered unto, but to minister), emblazoned on its crest and across the chapel chancel. My sense of entitlement had always incorporated the assumption I would go to college. At Wellesley I also had a strong and continuing role model in President Mildred McAfee Horton. Having served as commander-in-chief of the WAVES in World War II, she was already a role model for the heroic behavior that I’d admired as a child during the war, when I wanted so much to be old enough to serve in the WAVES! Again, she was a strong, caring, faithful woman who lived out Wellesley’s motto day by day. I had chosen a school where as a white woman I would not be a misfit, but I found that my father’s lower economic status and my interest in religion made me somewhat “different.” This difference, I’ve always felt, was the foundation of my life of Christian service.

But the most important role models I had were my peers who lived with me in the co-op dorm as scholarship students. I found myself living with the daughters of ministers, missionaries, and teachers who could not afford Wellesley’s tuition. This businessman’s daughter who thought she had escaped compulsory church attendance on high school graduation found herself singing in the chapel choir, daily and Sunday! The one who had thought church was boring was soon involved in a biblical history major, with extracurricular activities centered in the ecumenical religious life on campus, and in the Student Christian Movement (SCM) of New England. One day on the train to New York I told my father that I was going to work in the church as a Christian educator. His reply? “You’ll be sorry because you will always be a misfit!”

If my Father thought religion was marginal to what counts in society, there were many people at Wellesley who did not share this opinion, including women who were teaching theology, church history, ethics, Bible, and philosophy with no thought of gender inequality. My church history professor was Louise Pettibone Smith, a social activist and exacting scholar who in 1913 became the first woman to publish in the Journal of Biblical Literature of the Society of Biblical Literature. She was also the only woman to appear in its pages in its first forty years!⁸ One of my Bible professors was Lucetta Mowry, later to be the first woman on both the RSV and the NRSV New Testament translation committees. Neo-orthodoxy reigned in the theology department, but this sounded like the scholarly footnotes for my Presbyterian heritage. The most important theological shift in college was ecumenical theology. As an officer in the Student Christian Movement of New England, I planned and attended conferences and became deeply involved in trying to connect the work of the church to a worldwide movement for peace and for social justice.

LIVING ON THE MARGINS

When I graduated from Wellesley, I reached for the center but soon found myself living in the margins. Through my ecumenical connections and work at SCM, I’d met and then married one of SCM’s coleaders, a student at Harvard. Following the middle-class prescription for a white woman in 1951, I graduated, got married, and moved to Higganum, Connecticut, to teach school and serve as a pastor’s wife while my husband began his studies at Yale Divinity School. But this prescription didn’t seem to fit me very well. I knew something was wrong when my Methodist husband was not sure he wanted to be married to me if I believed in “predestination.” By the end of our first year of marriage, he had left Yale and abandoned me, leaving me to care for his church as student pastor and continue teaching my third-grade class.

In the pain of these events, I recognized that if I could not fulfill my Christian vocation by being a pastor’s wife, I could do it by entering ministry on my own. And so I ended up in the most challenging place I could find: an ecumenical parish in East Harlem where some of my friends in the Student Christian Movement were already at work. At least there I could learn more about who I was by living in a different culture and by finding ways to carry out Jesus’ words, “not to be served, but to serve” (Matt. 20:28). I found a home at this church in the margins of an interracial, low-income ghetto. By raising my salary from my home church in New Jersey I was able to fund my position as a Christian education director and become a home missionary of the United Presbyterian Church.

Coming to East Harlem was like coming home—not just because my college roommate came to work with me in the East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP) as her field placement from Union Theological Seminary, or just because I was coming out of a soul-searching crisis and life change. It was home because I discovered among this marginalized community that in God’s sight no one is a misfit and that it is our call to join God in practicing hospitality for all persons. The community of the Church of the Ascension where I was working and of the Group Ministry of EHPP welcomed my gifts as a teacher and minister and became my extended family.

Nevertheless, I soon found that I needed a seminary education. It was clear that my calling was to work in the church, and for that I needed an advanced degree. I also needed more extensive theological tools in order to be able to connect our daily struggles for life with the teachings of Scripture and tradition. My critical perspective was also beginning to make me incr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Why Hospitality?
• 2. The New Hospitality
• 3. Riotous Difference as God’s Gift to the Church
• 4. Reframing a Theology of Hospitality
• 5. Just Hospitality
• Notes
• Index of Scripture References
• Index of Subjects