The Grace of Hospitality
Anne Snyder
If someone had told me in the early years of my career that “hospitality” would one day be the last best hope of effective leadership, I think I would have probably smiled gently at the naivete and moved on. Not because I didn’t value this precondition for public joy – I had been graced by an international childhood shaped by a cross-cultural family wise to the trifecta of welcome, beauty and preparedness - but because as an adult cutting my professional teeth in a city like Washington, I didn’t see those in positions of authority around me demonstrating anything more than a care for their own excellence, their own product.
Fast-forward fifteen years, and the shriveled fruits of individual striving are all around us. We see exposure after exposure of religious celebrities high on power and low on character. Well-educated elites who could once assume shared touchpoints with the broader public are finding their white papers ignored, the top-down dictates from a coastal cloister unable to win over shortened attention spans and the more compelling texture of realities on the ground. Black Americans don’t feel understood by white Americans, Red voters by Blue, teenagers by their peers, the poor by the rich. Something vital has broken down. Or perhaps was always broken, in need of more attentiveness to the ingredients that soften one’s defenses and allow one to see.
And for this you need space. Our truest selves are typically beckoned by a careful mix of structure and freedom. We grow in the context of relationships encased in some blend of the familiar and the new; if it was all one or the other, we’d stagnate or take up arms. But who out there is sensitive to this fragile blend, and are they willing to give themselves to the subtle labors required to protect it?
Like anything pure and life-generating, hospitality wears different cloaks depending on the need. Most of us default to intimate images: an invitation, a fireplace, a meal, generous pours of wine. But the metaphors natural to the table are bound up in an interplay that we should experience in perpetual rotation throughout our lives, namely, that of being a guest, and that of serving as a host. It’s an interplay that should be occurring cyclically in healthy workplaces, in lifelong friendships, in covenantal sacraments and in polities that last. It’s a way of life more than a discrete domain, and it requires the forming of certain virtues and the practice of particular skills: humility and openness, welcome and honor, gratitude and patience, excellence submitted to love.
Where are you finding these graces today? Who do you know that is creating from their nutrients? It’s so tempting to embrace logics of competition and dominance today, of might making right. The vulnerable unknowing of hospitality’s trust seems foolish in this era of division and defensiveness. But what if this soft weapon is the last moat available to free us to attend to the vital over the massive? What if hospitality is all we have left for encounters between friends and strangers to be gifts and not threats?
Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine.From 2016 to 2019 she directed The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a program seeking to help foundations and business leaders strengthen “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. Her path-breaking guidebook, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Renewing our Social and Moral Landscape, was published in 2019.
