13 
THE HOSPITALITY OF EXILES
We
Who do not own ourselves, being free,
Own by theft what belongs to God,
To the living world, and equally
To us all
EVERY TIME I DRIVE PAST AN APARTMENT COMPLEX, I feel an ache in my chest because I do not and cannot live there. Do other people experience this? The desire to know what life is like in all the little corners of the world, to make a home in the hidden-away spaces where people are crammed into proximity to each other? I’ve lived in several different apartment buildings as an adult, and my recollections are all dreamy: sunlight filtering through windows, inviting neighbors into my space and being invited into theirs, crossing cultural and racial and socioeconomic boundaries, receiving the gift of a diverse community.
My husband remembers it differently. He reminds me that in certain seasons we were so busy we were like ghosts, slight impressions in the microcosm of life in a complex. Other times we were frightened by the sounds of our neighbors screaming in rage, wailing in sorrow, taking their fights out into the corridors, people in a mental health crisis, and people trying to wash away their sadness with gallons of vodka or pipes full of hard drugs. The sickly sweet smell of passing out, of numbing out, of trauma breaking through. Or the nights when neighbors would sail into our apartment without knocking when our small living room was another extension of the outdoors—so little privacy, all exposed, no respite for the introverts, constant invitations into spaces and feasts and stories.
When my husband reminds me of these experiences, I can start to remember the nuances. But it all goes out the window as I drive slowly past a complex, full of peeling paint and mothers bouncing babies on their knees, a big sign saying “Now Accepting Applications.” I want to live there; I want to sit around and see how people go about their lives; I want to become a known entity, benign as a mailbox, a staple of the community, a watchful grandmother. I want to do this in every apartment complex in America. I want to know and be known by every person who lives in these spaces that cater to those working very hard to make it. That’s not too much to ask, is it? Sometimes I tell this to my husband, and he just shakes his head at me. “Danielle,” he says, full of kindness, full of wisdom. “You can’t be neighbors with everybody. You can only be a good neighbor to a few. So pick those neighbors on purpose.”
I once read that philoxenia, the Greek word for hospitality, means “love of the stranger.” Much of the hospitality shared on my social media feeds is geared toward family, friends, and church groups. Oftentimes it revolves around conversations about immaculately decorated houses or complicated recipes pulled off with aplomb. It is about a hostess with killer hair and a cozy house. For some it’s just a way of expressing themselves; for others, those already drowning in bills, in children, in an inability to get out of bed to tidy up, this kind of hospitality is a millstone around their neck.
There’s a story about a woman who put a picnic table in her front yard, painted it turquoise blue, and sat at it until she started meeting some of her neighbors. She wrote a book about this table, colored the same shade that a multitude of Christian inspiration books also mysteriously flaunt. The turquoise table is not a bad idea, not at all. It was a bold move to break free from the isolation that the American suburban experience is built on. It was one woman making a claim that the dream was too narrow for her. She needed a flag, a bright turquoise one, that she could plant as a sign that there was more to life than the kingdom she was building inside. She sat at the table and invited others to join her, and relationships were forged.
This woman reached out to the strangers around her, and it resonated with her audience of other people who I assume also felt that same pull toward neighborliness. But is it true hospitality, I wonder? Does it really get to what the love of the stranger really means? In order to love the stranger we have to love the people who are the most estranged from us. And that would involve upending the entire system, how neighborhoods and shopping centers and schools and churches are all built by people wanting to be with those who are just like them. A turquoise table simply won’t reach far enough if the people in your neighborhood are the result of targeted systems of segregation. A turquoise table will not do if your suburb—your neighborhood—is built on the backs of the people being excluded.
Xenophobia is the opposite of hospitality. In Greek, it means “the fear of the stranger.” It’s in the very air we breathe: it’s built into our mortgage contracts, our constitution, our foreign policy, our immigration system, and the speeches that elect our politicians. It’s the large backyards and the white picket fences, the parents googling a school’s rating and buying houses based on the result, Facebook groups casting judgment on “suspicious” males wearing hoodies, police brutality that disproportionately affects Black and Brown people, locking our car doors as we drive through a neighborhood we have no curiosity about. The fear of the other is so strong and so systemic that it might take something more than a good dinner party to upend it.
In a famous passage the Catholic mystic and monk Thomas Merton writes about seeing a vision of God’s love. He was struck with an invisible lightning bolt from the divine. There’s even a plaque, I am told, in the town square in Kentucky where he had his vision:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of the separate holy experience is a dream. . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around like the sun.1
He goes on to write that monks live in the same broken world, the world of the atomic bomb, of race hatred, mass media, technology, and so on. The difference is that monks are conscious that they belong to God, but the truth is—everybody belongs to God. Why should they consider themselves different or better? “Thank God, thank God,” he wrote, “that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”
Born and raised in suburbs or semirural areas, I did not grow up viewing my neighbors walking around as bright as if they were the sun. The stereotypical wave and smile was the norm, especially as my family moved every two to three years. But the exceptions stand out vividly. When I was a senior in high school my mother made me check on our elderly neighbor nearly every day. “Make sure she’s still alive,” my mom would cheerfully tell me as she pushed me out of the house. I would knock on Marguerite’s door, and I can still remember the prayers I prayed, “Oh Lord, help me not to be the one to discover her body. Please let today not be that day.”
It never was that day, thankfully. Instead, I got an education in neighborliness, both the awkwardness and the blessing of it. Marguerite, who was in her late eighties, was like no one I had ever met. She was what my parents would have described as a liberal—the radio constantly tuned to NPR, the New York Times always perched next to her chair. Her house was mostly books and houseplants. I don’t remember what we chatted about, but it mostly revolved around books. My parents would invite her over for Christmas and she would come, sitting somewhat stiffly through all of our prayers. When I left home for new adventures, Marguerite gave me an ornate brocade chair and a broken uke-banjo (half ukulele and half banjo). Delightful, completely impractical gifts from a woman who gave me a glimpse into an alternate way of living. Surrounded by knowledge, surrounded by the world, and yet still capable and desiring of community.
But sometimes we need help to swim against the current of isolation that moves beneath our way of living. My friend Breanna lives half the world away in Southeast Asia. She upended her life to be a learner. She writes beautifully about how living in cramped, close quarters, with all of her neighbors knowing everything about her business, has enabled her to see the loneliness of the American landscape when she returns home for a visit. Everyone with their houses in the suburbs, their garages, their swing sets in the backyards. They are alone, Breanna realizes now, and they don’t even know it. She tries to explain this to her neighbors in Southeast Asia, and they are shocked that most people in the United States don’t know their neighbors. They feel sorry for us.
My neighbors born in other countries have communicated the same to me many times over. When we moved into our current neighborhood we were warned about the crime rates by outsiders. And while some things were hard to get used to—including celebrations that went into the wee hours and a neighbor who confused the gas pedal with the brakes and drove his car into my daughter’s bedroom—overall we felt incredibly safe. It was a space filled with people who had not grown up with the dominant culture values of autonomy and privacy. We found there is immense safety in community, in knowing people. And the opposite is also true: fear laces all of our privacy and autonomy, a fear that comes from being estranged from the people in our neighborhoods.
When I drive around neighborhoods with large homes and spacious yards, I feel a rush of questions: How do people pay for those huge spaces? How do they reconcile having that much room, that much stuff with the realities of other people in our city struggling to pay the water bill, while the shelters are stuffed to overflowing with homeless families? But there’s also a sense that this loneliness is on purpose, though we never say this aloud. That we believe people are supposed to be affluent, and they are supposed to be autonomous—even if it turns out to be very bad for their souls.
There’s a reason my heart leaps within me whenever I see another large, battered apartment complex with a sign proclaiming a room for rent. There’s a reason I want to move in there, immediately. It’s because these are some of the very few spaces in our country and our culture where interdependence is a necessity, where it is a discipline that can be cultivated. These apartment complexes mirror the world of the biblical writers, who would be baffled by how individualism, consumerism, and affluence have shaped our communities—including how we live, eat, shop, educate our children, and worship.
Just like affluence, autonomy can be hard to see unless we are given a different perspective through relationship and education and the Holy Spirit working in our hearts. As we learn how to live in community and how to retain our dependence on one another, we were also inadvertently learning how to navigate a world that will never be completely safe but is full of people shining like the sun—if only we have eyes to see.