Is the stranger at your table (a) god?

What about the ones at your gate?

I have found myself trying to write fiction lately, for the first time in more than a decade. I have no idea whether it will ever come to anything, because good fiction is incredibly difficult. Amongst the generalised difficulties, I have been interested to find one specific barrier within myself that I did not expect: part of me does not take stories seriously. I am an English Literature graduated, poetry-loving, mainly novel-reading theatre goer, so this was a shock. Every time I sit down to try and write a story, a bitchy voice in my brain goes: “Why are you wasting your time on this selfindulgent bullshit? The world is BURNING! Write a think piece or a manifesto or a twelve point plan to save it, or better yet, take to the streets, you useless effete artiste!”.

Well. Aside from a disturbing insight into another bit of formation I need to undo (don’t worry, I have a lot of encouraging voices too), this voice has driven me to understand again why I do, in fact, think stories matter. Even now. Dr Sharon Blackie put it beautifully in a recent post:

[O]ur ancestors – the hard-working, long-suffering peasant women who told these stories to each other and passed them down the generations through the oral tradition – knew everything there was to know about adversity. Living in the world today is hard, and the stakes are high – but it’s always been hard, and the stakes have always been high. And the universal ancestral wisdom that’s locked up in fairy tales shows us that although our individual ways of responding to life’s joys and vicissitudes might be unique – and although times change and the texture of our challenges might change too – the fundamental challenges that we face today are nevertheless the same challenges that we’ve always faced.

Stories and sayings are how we have always passed on wisdom. And although I do not believe in some universal, generic wisdom, many stories from wildly different cultures share similar themes. The one which has been standing out to me this week is hospitality. Global leaders and policy wonks all over the world are wrestling with what we do with people who are “strangers” - not “one of us” in some (usually poorly defined) way. What I rarely see, outside some specific congregational contexts, is discussion of what we do, as people and households and communities. What postures and practices might help us stay fully human, become more fully alive.

My friend Caroline Ross (another substack you should subscribe to) alerted me to three different stories which play on the idea that we should welcome a stranger because they may not be what they seem. One is from Greek mythology, one is from the Brother’s Grimm, and one is from the Bible.

Let’s start with the oldest. Baucis and Philemon is a rare example of a happy marriage in Greek myth. You can find a full retelling of it by mistress of myth Madeline Miller here, and it’s worth going back to later.

Baucis and Philemon have been married for years, living happily together in the same humble, straw-roofed dwelling.

Their rustic routine is interrupted by two weary strangers, knocking at the door looking for food and shelter—they have been turned away, they say, by all the finer houses in the neighborhood. Baucis, the wife, and Philemon, the husband, welcome the two men warmly. Even though their resources are scant, they set about cheerfully making the best of what they have. One of my favorite parts of this story is the elaborate preparations: Baucis scrubbing the dinner table with mint to make it smell fresh (good idea!), and Philemon carving the meat.

This elderly couple welcome the strangers, who turn out, of course to be Zeus and Hermes. They are rewarded for their reflexive hospitality by having their house turned into a palace, and having thier last, deeply romantic request honoured:

“Let the same hour bear us both off; let me never see the tomb of my wife, nor be buried by her.”

Zeus agrees, and the couple spend many joyful years together in their new home. Then, one day, as they stand outside their temple talking of their lives, they notice something strange—branches are beginning to grow from their heads, their hair is transforming into leaves. With their last breaths, they call out their farewells to each other. A moment later, two trees, an oak and a linden tree, stand where the old couple was. And, just as in life, the two are bound together, sprung from the same trunk, their branches entwining into eternity.

Because it is Greek myth the story also includes darkness, including the mass destruction of the couple’s entire neighbourhood as punishment for a lack of hospitality. We do not learn what they think about living in a palace alongside the ruined houses and rotting bodies of their neighbours.

Baucis and Philemon is just one hospitality parable in the Greek canon, because it was a sacred virtue in that culture, a practice that was shirked by only those worthy of derision, or worse, destruction.

Fast forward to medieval Germany. The Brother’s Grimm captured The Bear at the Door in the mid 1800s but it is assumed to be much older. A mother is living alone in a cottage in a wood with her two daughters, Snow White and Rose Red. Dr Sharon Blackie picks up the tale:

One night, when an enormous, exhausted bear shows up at the door of their tiny cottage, instead of taking fright and slamming the door on him, she takes pity on him, and lets him warm himself by the fire:

‘Poor bear,’ said the mother, ‘lie down by the fire, only take care that you do not burn your coat.’ Then she cried: ‘Snow-white, Rose-red, come out, the bear will do you no harm, he means well.’ So they both came out, and by-and-by the lamb and dove came nearer, and were not afraid of him. The bear said: ‘Here, children, knock the snow out of my coat a little’; so they brought the broom and swept the bear’s hide clean; and he stretched himself by the fire and growled contentedly and comfortably.

In this way, the girls are taught both that hospitality is a sacred duty, and that the wild other is not always to be feared. (The bear turns out, of course, to be a prince who’s under a spell, and at the end of the story, he marries Snow-white. Handily, he happens to have a brother waiting in the wings for Rose-red.)

Let’s go back in time again. Hospitality was also, funnily enough, central to the culture of ancient Israel. This verse from Leviticus 19:34 is just one version of a command repeated like a leitmotif throughout the Hebrew Bible:

The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt;

It comes up again and again in the stories too. At one point the prophet Elijah begs for bread and water from a poor destitute widow. She brings him water, but apologises that she and her sons have no bread because of a drought-induced famine. They are starving and are about to lie down and die (this is a pretty good excuse not to share your bread, and it makes clear how costly that glass of water was to her). Elijah blesses her for her hospitality and performs a miracle so that the oil and flour in her house do not run out until the famine has passed.

The repeated theme indicates that hospitality is important, but also sufficiently difficult that people would need to keep being reminded to do it. This doesn’t change as we move from the Hebrew bible to the New Testament. Take this from Hebrews 13:2.

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.

There is that stranger in disguise again.

Reading about the miraculous bear, the incognito Greek gods, and the beggar who turns out to be a miracle worker, I could not help but think of the Parable of Sheep and the Goats. It is pretty confronting, but worth reproducing in full.

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fireprepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

⁴⁴ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

⁴⁵ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

The logic of all those old stories is mysterious: the stranger at our table might be a god, or an angel, or a miracle worker, or a prince. The stranger at our table might be Jesus. Is Jesus, in at least one sense, for those of us who are trying to follow him.

These themes do not feature in our stories so much now. We have told ourselves different tales, of independence and self-creation, of our homes as controlled and primped private space. Our underlying interdependence is masked, usually, by the market, where we can get what we need without the entanglements of encounter and mutual obligation. None of this is as great as it sounds. It is also already not possible for the most precarious and may become less possible for all of us. Maybe we need these old stories, or some new versions, again, as we look to an unstable future.

When did you last have a stranger at your table? I am feeling very challenged by this, because although we value hospitality highly in our micro-monastery, and often have people over for meals, it can end up being mainly People Like Us. We may not know them well, but there is a gravitational pull towards those with whom we share reference points, a common language. Opening your space to strangers is uncomfortable enough. Doing it with people who look more like a bear than a prince even more so. However, if we want to take this deep “ancestral wisdom” seriously, the call of so many stories over so many centuries, it is something we (and I include myself in this) need to relearn. As Dr Sharon Blackie says:

Hospitality, in a fairy tale, is a duty to the wider community of the world: it’s the act of welcoming and providing for strangers. It’s the act of welcoming in what’s Other. And in fairy tales, whether or not an individual offers hospitality is a test of their character, and this kind of hospitality is always rewarded.

As I read these strories, wondering what modern versions of them might be, I find myself shrinking from the way they centre punishment and reward. I argued (amicably!) with Shadi Hamid on a podcast about this recently, and it helped clarify how deeply I believe this thing: we can be scared, at least temporarily, into good actions, but we cannot be scared in any lasting way into goodness. It came up again on my recent The Sacred podcast with Jameela Jamil. I asked her how she changed the way she communicated with people she disagreed with, and she said “some people showed me grace”.

There is not a lot of grace in these stories. Not just the fairy tales. The Sheep and the Goats unavoidably has a punishment/reward frame, and I just have to live with the tension of that, acknowledge that my sacred text does not always say what I want it to. Taking the wider sweep of my tradition, and my experience of people more broadly, I have come to believe that we grow up our souls and move towards life when two thing happen: We know ourselves welcomed, and have something beautiful that draws us forwards. We can only really give when we have received. When we are welcomed as a stranger (which is one way of thinking about what my tradition calls “the gospel”), we can welcome others. Jesus is the beautiful thing that draws me forward, partly because he explicitly identifies himself with the alien and the stranger, the hungry, naked and imprisoned.

I need this reason to practice hospitality that goes beyond looking for a payday or avoiding a punishment. Because one way of reading all these stories is as a sort of wager - we should welcome people and it will mainly be just a duty but every so often we will welcome an angel or a god and ding ding ding ding - there is our reward. This is welcoming the stranger in case they are not, in fact, just a stranger. I wonder if the deeper meaning is closer to that we find in the Sheep and the Goats. Every time we welcome a stranger we are welcoming Jesus, because Jesus and the humans that bear God’s image are so deeply intwined. Especially the meek and merciful, the ones who hunger and thirst. Perhaps the other stories are quietly whispering towards a similar meaning: the stranger is the reward. The bear and the prince are not so very far apart. The beggar is also a prophet. Our encounter with them will help us stay human, stop the shrinking of our souls. My very wise husband says “we need strangers to stop us becoming strange”. (Unless they turn out to be Zeus and Hermes who have come to destroy the neighborhood. Maybe the Greek ones are less useful for learning.)

I do not know how to write a manifesto for these times, but I might be able to teach myself to write a story that helps us stay human. I also know how to cook a large, non-expensive meal including three types of brassica and ask people over for dinner. Even ones who look a bit like a bear. When that is too much, just a cup of tea will do, or as Elijah’s story shows, a glass of water. Maybe, in tribute to Baucis, with a sprig of mint.

I’d love to hear what you make of all this, in the comments. If you’re inspired to experiment, let me know how you get on. Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Some links!

• My friends at The Nearness have launched a new project. Amulet is described as “a literary magazine of spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike.” I especially liked this essay by Sheila Heti about the difficulty of speaking and writing about the deep stuff without seeming like “a ninny”.

• I have an article in this edition of The Mockingbird magazine, ahead of speaking at their New York conference on 2nd May.

• I will also be speaking in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Princeton around that time, details to follow.