Monday, May 10, 2010

Yogurt

I have a sore throat, and this morning the only thing I could find to eat that "felt good" on my throat was some plain yogurt. And it was good. In fact, it tasted so good to my otherwise unwell-feeling body, that I thought: This is the best yogurt I've had in a long time. Since... and then I remembered when, a little over a year ago, I sat in a tent home in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank and ate a bowl of yogurt served by the Palestinian family that hosted us there on their native land. Since I can't eat gluten (and the best way our translator could explain that was by telling them I had a "weak stomach"), they brought me a special item with breakfast. While my friend Stephanie and our translator Jessica ate bread, I ate the most powerful, delicious, goat-milk yogurt. And I was blessed, I was nourished, by this family who let me sleep under the same roof (er, tent-flaps) as their own children and then went out of their way to feed me something I could eat. Even though we don't speak the same language. Even though they live in a remote village without electricity or plumbing (in very much the same way their ancestors have lived there for centuries) and I come from a rich, Western nation and wear pants and loose hair in the midst of their culture of more modest female dress. Even though they are Muslim and I and my fellow visitors are Christian. Even though they are struggling to keep their home and farm on their land in the midst of a terrible military occupation that my government continues to support and help finance. This family was indeed gracious in their hospitality to me. I will never forget that visit, and will always remember it as a perfect example of the kind of hospitality I want to be able to give and receive.
Walter Brueggemann puts it well, in writing about the importance of hospitality (in Sojourners magazine, May 2010, p. 48):
Perhaps the practice of hospitality is the ultimate outcome of the Easter season, when there is no fear of others, but readiness to host (see Romans 12:13)... God's readiness to take up residence in our habitat contradicts all the fearful aggressiveness of the world. The risen Christ came and said "peace" (John 14:27). Where he comes, there is peace. The news of Easter is that the enlivened Christ invites us away from the deathliness of the world, not to withdraw, but to listen and host and welcome, and so to reverse the vicious cycles that keep wounding nations, communities, and persons.

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