The 18th chapter of the book of Genesis holds an ancient story of hospitality. The patriarch Abraham is sitting outside his tent in the heat of the day when three men appear before him. To Abraham, they are simply strangers passing through. His first instinct is to feed them: “Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant” (Gen. 18:5). He invites them to wash their feet and stay for a meal. Sarah bakes bread, Abraham asks a servant to prepare a calf, and then he serves the strangers food as they rest under a tree. Unbeknownst to him, these men are angels, emissaries of God, sent to reveal to Abraham and Sarah that they will have a son in their old age.

Abraham’s instinctive hospitality was typical of people living in the ancient Near East. Dr. Mona Siddiqui, who studies the role of hospitality in Islam, notes that hospitality was “absolutely basic” for the desert dwellers of Abraham’s time. Offering food and shelter was part of the social code of responsibility toward others. “If you did not give somebody traveling or passing through food and water, that person would die,” Siddiqui says. Ever since Bedouin people offered welcome to strangers in the desert, hospitality has been a foundational virtue of the Islamic ethical system.

But maybe the story of Abraham and the angels is also about something larger. Yes, hospitality was a fact of survival for nomadic people living in harsh climates—but Abraham’s response also points to the central role hospitality plays in the spiritual life. After all, the strangers he feeds are angels. As Siddiqui writes, “By this act, Abraham inspired a theology of hospitality often echoed in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature, and used as a framework for interreligious dialogue.” All three Abrahamic religions emphasize the role of hospitality in a life of faith, viewing it less as a matter of “entertaining” at home and more as a sacred virtue and continual posture.

A public and private virtue

Hospitality can be thought of as having two branches: private and public. The first involves welcoming people into one’s home. This is the context the word “hospitality” calls to mind for most—having people over for a meal. The public side of hospitality examines how a society welcomes and cares for marginalized groups. In both cases, hospitality is about crossing boundaries, whether that boundary is the threshold of one’s front door or a border between countries. 

Both privately and publicly, American society is a long way removed from Abraham’s day, where caring for strangers was an essential virtue. Our private lives are independent, insular, and highly self-sufficient. A global pandemic made many of us feel rusty when it comes to hosting others in our homes. On a public level, strangers or “the other” may be regarded with suspicion—if not downright hostility. This is where spiritual traditions have much to teach us.

Brother Aaron Raverty is a monk in the Benedictine order, a branch of Catholicism that emphasizes the virtues of stability and hospitality. Benedictines commit themselves to one place and one group of people. Out of this rootedness in a single community, they create a temporary home for others. “Hospitality in its broadest sense,” Bro. Raverty says, “is offering someone a home away from home.” Nearly all Benedictine monasteries, including his home of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, provide this in the form of guest rooms where visitors can stay. 

The monks at St. John’s consider their monastery a respite from the world, where guests are invited to leave behind the frenetic pace of modern life. Spiritual pilgrims, travelers, and local visitors alike can book a stay at St. John’s and participate in prayer, spiritual direction, solitude, and silence. Raverty’s community is particularly committed to offering a respite to people who are suffering, “trying to recover from various kinds of illnesses or from trauma, or just from overwork [and] exhaustion.”

Beyond providing physical accommodations for pilgrims, Raverty also believes the purpose of hospitality is to nurture spiritual development, both in those who provide it as well as those who receive it. Hospitality in monastic communities entails a deep respect for people, regardless of language, culture, faith tradition, or worldview. We are all “creatures that need to be nurtured,” he says. Part of this nurturing means offering a comfortable bed and a warm meal. But an equally important element is providing “a creative environment where they can thrive”—a spiritual as well as physical hospitality.

As priest and writer Henri Nouwen put it, “Hospitality is not to change people but to offer them space where change can take place. … The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free.”

Transformation for host and guest

When we see hospitality as the practice of creating space for people to become more fully themselves, the virtue expands exponentially. It’s no longer about having people over for dinner, but about creating spaces for strangers to be welcomed as they are, so that both the host and the guest might leave changed. 

Over the years of studying hospitality and Islam, Siddiqui has grown to see hospitality as having the potential to transform both parties. She remembers feeling self-conscious about inviting people over for dinner because of her family’s dietary observances and because they didn’t drink. It was much easier, she thought, to meet people at a restaurant.  “I think that was wrong on my part,” she says.

Both the guest and the host benefit from experiencing cultural and religious differences, which are often highlighted around the dinner table. Eating together across these boundaries can dissolve some of the fear we might feel around other ways of being. In this way, hospitality constitutes “a way of living in which we are constantly reminded of human diversity.”

This kind of hospitality makes space for dialogue across faith traditions and cultures. Raverty sees generous conversations as their own form of hospitality, grounded in reciprocity. One person offers something—an idea, a cultural practice, a theological conviction—and invites the other person to respond with an offering of their own. “When you extend yourself in hospitality to others, especially those who are not of our tradition or language or culture, you’re actually extending an invitation for them to dialogue with you,” Raverty says. 

Prompting an interfaith or cross-cultural dialogue with this kind of reciprocal spirit can lead to spiritually-enriching conversations. And one doesn’t need to be a monk, or own a home, or be a gifted cook to practice this form of hospitality. It’s available to anyone.

Hospitality that blurs boundary lines—both in public and at home—is less about throwing dinner parties and more about opening a doorway to growth through participating in diverse community. It is a spiritually-enlivening, if often uncomfortable practice. As Siddiqui writes, “When honoured and exercised as a divine imperative, it is about knowing that reaching out to others is an act of worship, thus challenging, humbling and spiritually transformative.”