Reading people we do not know
The Blind Side the movie based on the better book based on the life of Michael Oher, the American football player. These conversations usually go as follows…
Person A, “I love The Blind Side it’s such an amazing story!”
Person B, “I hate that movie it’s so racist!”
Strangely at that point the conversation ends without any discussion as to why Person A loves the movie or why Person B considers it racist. The story of the movie strikes home with me and at some point I’d really like to know what makes it racist, but alas no one has told me and I am not interested enough to look it up on the Internet. I suspect it has something to do with the “white savior” trope that is all too common within American cinema. Nonetheless, I like the movie because I think it is a great example of the practice of hospitality.
Hospitality is the act of making room for the the other within the confines of your life. In the movie the Tuohys made room for Michael in their lives that had been fairly sealed off from the rest of the world around them. It is this very act of hospitality that brings them to a place where they are entering and welcoming more of the world than they have previously been associated with.
When hospitality is a way of life, the strangers and guests we welcome seem to become increasingly diverse. A life that is open to surprise and contingency has room for the refugee family and the elderly woman down the street recovering from surgery. The door is open to the teenager with developmental disabilities and to the student with questions about life’s meaning and purpose. The hospitable church finds room for the homeless man and for the family that has just arrived from a distant state. Obviously, as finite persons, there are limits to how much we can do, but welcoming different kinds of strangers usually equips us to open the door wider and more often, with less fear and more confidence. 1
Hospitality welcomes people into the place that was once held as a fortress against the rest of the world. The philosopher Derrida argued that absolute hospitality “requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner…but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names” 2 In other words, for Derrida, hospitality requires that I welcome in everyone without judging whether they might murder my family in the middle of the night or not. He sets a pretty high bar, one that most are not likely to clear. For most people there will need to be some sort of judging what people we provide hospitality to or not.
Much like reading and discussing a book that we have not read, evaluating who to provide hospitality to is reliant upon a library of knowledge of behavior. There is going to be a level of judging that happens no matter what, unless you are able to conform to Derrida’s standard. The only way to do that well is to have a library of knowledge on how people act and the behaviors that follow those actions. The majority of the time you are not going to have the time to get a full history of the person or group needing hospitality. The practice of reading people will serve to help expedite the practice of hospitality. Initially our library is small resulting in us being cautious as we seek to provide hospitality. But as we continue to provide hospitality our library of knowledge grows and our level of caution becomes less protective.
Much like the Tuohys in The Blind Side evaluated Michael based upon his behavior and saw that he was a good fit, we must learn to evaluate humanity and welcome them into our places of refuge. Over time we will be willing to welcome more and more types of people. It is okay to start out small because, much like Pohl describes above, as you enter into the practice of hospitality your doors will eventually be opened wide.
1Pohl,Christine D., Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 103.
2Derrida, Jacques., and Dufourmantelle, Anne. Of Hospitality. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
About the Author
Sean Dean
An expat of the great state of Maine where the lobster is cheap and the winters are brutal I've settled in as a web developer in Tacoma, Washington. As a foster-adoptive parent of 3 beautiful boys, I have deep questions about the American church's response to the public health crisis that is our foster system.11 responses to “Reading people we do not know”
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Sean, I sure thought I posted a comment to this last night, but maybe I never hit post. Oh well. I do like the idea of reading people, but I worry about my personal bias getting in the way. I do believe we should practice hospitality, learning to try to understand our differences. It truly takes a step of faith to rely on the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth in all we do.
Mary that is a good point – one that I should have written about. Our biases – both conscious and unconscious – will play a lot into how we read people. Perhaps we need to start by first reading ourselves and being aware of what those biases are before we start. That being done, the practice of hospitality is also a way of getting past our biases. The more people we welcome that contradict our biases the more our biases fall by the wayside. But thankfully at the end of the day we do have the Holy Spirit there to guide us past our biases.
First of all, I loved the movie and can only guess that it is the “White savior” issues people are having. As someone who spent five years in a home-for-children, this was something a lot of young black kids didn’t want following them around but at the same time wanted out of the system.
Secondly, I love the insight you bring on the aspect of hospitality. In the age of criticism we live in, people think you have to be rude and critical all the time to be taken seriously but what if the opposite were true. If you want to be heard then open the ears of the other through the door of hospitality.
Great post!
Thanks Mario. We all judge everyone, to say or act otherwise is a lie. The question is whether we are judging from a place of harshness or a place of love. Are we trying to tear down or lift up? Hospitality asks us to lift up.
Sean,
Thanks for opening our eyes and hearts to wonder about giving hospitality to the other based on very limited reading. I appreciate your heart and passion and look forward to see where it will lead you. P.S. I liked your mountain of meat in your Facebook post. See you on Monday, H
Great post about hospitality. I look forward to seeing how we all demonstrate this trait as leaders in our own unique contexts.
I am curious, have there been examples in the church when you have seen hospitality embraced/performed/enacted well? The Deacon Board at the church I serve is actually spending the year focusing on the idea of hospitality. Would love to learn your experience.
There are certainly places throughout the history of the church where hospitaility has been a driving force. Currently, I’d look at the L’Arche communities as a great example.
Your decon board should definitely read Making Room, which I quoted in this post. It’s pretty much the standard source for ideas around Christian Hospitality. I would argue that if you haven’t read it then you haven’t considered hospitality. I think that would be a good jumping off point for the board.
Excellent post, Sean. I appreciate your correlation of Bayard’s work to reading people and how that relates to hospitality. I was thinking about the posts between you and Mary regarding biases and I wonder if the key to that is something I wrote about, humility. I am learning how humility quiets my biases and I a suspect that would be as true about people as it is books.
Tammy, I think you’re correct that humility is a key. Hospitality is a humbling practice. First we humble ourselves in order to practice hospitality. Then hospitality generates greater humility that lessens our biases, which then allows us to provide greater hospitality. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle.
Hi Sean. Love that you mention Derrida. The quote was a moment of déjà vu. I still remember reading of his horror that a fellow European could utter the words ‘crime of hospitality’ in relation to the alien immigrant. That simple phrase propelled him to write a philosophy of hospitality. Your use of his radical hospitality model is a superb angle for viewing Bayard’s understanding of knowing literature. However, are you saying that our inner librbaries can prejudice us against books we haven’t read if our library is too narrow? Consequently, we need to learn the hospitality of viewing unknown books more positively? If that’s the case, how would we know the content or genre of the unknown material if our libraries excluded any understanding of them in the first place? Or, are you suggesting that we might well understand the category and kind of unread book, but we too easily discard it out of hand, when perhaps we should welcome it’s altrernative contribution?
Both Derrida and Levinas set up sort of Platonic ideals – or perfect forms – for what hospitality should be. I think that’s a good jumping off place for understanding how we do and should practice hospitality.
I think that if our library of personal engagement is small and we don’t know it then we can believe that it is perfect and thus not see the need to be hospitable to others, to discard them out of hand. This is the crux of protectionist or nationalist movements – “that which we know is perfect and everything (or everybody) else is evil.” But I think that once a person is brought to the understanding that their library of personal engagement is too small that entering into the practice of hospitality will help to enlarge their library and allow those they are hospitable with to add an alternative contribution to their lives.