The CoSpire Circle

I spent part of July in Spain, and somewhere between the late dinners and the long conversations, I noticed something.

Food was taken seriously.

I mean. Seriously.

My Spanish skills aren’t great, but I can confess to eager waiters that Después de cuatro meses en Costa Rica, yo hablo español como una niña de tres años.(After four months in Costa Rica, I speak Spanish like a three-year-old.)

This usually got a chuckle while also lowering expectations of how much we’d be able to communicate.

But the deficiency in language didn’t stop the communication that came from the food.

I know it is cliché to say that even a hole-in-the-wall restaurant had great cuisine, but it was true. It was the season of the tomato, and there was lots of pan de tomàquet, and tomato salads, and gazpacho to go around. Offered without exception or apology.

And I, a grateful recipient of the hospitality spread before me, became very cognizant of the truth:

Receiving is the other half of giving.

I was being received, at the same time that I was receiving what was being offered.

No one seemed to be waiting for the right moment to be hospitable or particularly torn up over the rules of it, even though the laws that guide these moments are older than some religions.

I came home inspired to make cheese (yes, ask me about how that went), but I also came home turning over a bigger question than table manners.

What does it mean to receive someone well?

Because hospitality extends far beyond the table.

It’s our posture to ideas we aren’t sure about. The person who interrupts a day that was already full. The issue that shows up uninvited and asks for our attention anyway. The new technology we’re suddenly supposed to adopt. It’s the board member’s “have you ever thought about…” and the feedback that you didn’t ask for, probably didn’t want, and delivered with all the grace of a prickly pear cactus ripping off a thousand Band-Aids.

How do we receive what we didn’t choose?

Two Sides of the Same Word

Part of the tension lives in the word hospitality itself.

Its ancient linguistic roots gave us two words that now seem like opposites: hospitality and hostility. Two etymological siblings, trying to decide what to do with a stranger: absorb it into relationship, or treat it as a threat.

Which twin wins isn’t decided by the word. It’s decided by us, every time.

The ancient Greeks had a word for the obligations between host and stranger: xenia, sometimes called Zeus's Law. In a world without inns on every road, a traveler's safety could depend entirely on whoever answered the door.

Hospitality became a sacred duty rather than a matter of manners. A host who mistreated a guest offended heaven directly.

You see it all through Homer's Odyssey, a story having something of a moment again this year with Christopher Nolan's new adaptation released this summer. When the shipwrecked Odysseus washes ashore among the Phaeacians, unnamed and unrecognizable, he is fed clothed, and welcomed before he tells them who he is.

But the suitors offer the darker lesson. Occupying Odysseus's own home while he's away, consuming a household’s hospitality without any intention of reciprocating. By the time Odysseus returns, hospitality has curdled into hostility.

The same table capable of creating relationship has become the site of resentment and violence.

The laws of hospitality required something of everyone at the table.

Receiving the Person

That is what strikes me most about this ancient understanding of hospitality.

The host receives the person in front of them before knowing what that person can offer in return.

Somewhere along the way, hospitality became something closer to entertaining people we already like. But its roots are much more demanding.

Hospitality asks us to make room for what seems strange.

To receive it.

To let it take up a little space at the table—and in our minds—before deciding what to do with it.

Leadership gives us endless opportunities to practice this.

It is easy to welcome the donor with resources, the board member with connections, the colleague who already knows how to help. It is harder to receive the person whose contribution isn’t yet obvious.

Harder still when what they bring is something we don’t want at all.

An unwelcome idea. A difficult truth. A need we don’t have time for. A perspective that complicates our own.

Receiving someone does not require agreement. Hospitality has always included boundaries and obligations.

But it does require making room.

People Are Reaching for Us

People are reaching for us right now, more than a newsletter usually has room to admit.

A board member with an idea that lands wrong.

A colleague who needs to be seen and picks the worst possible moment to ask.

A neighbor who looks or speaks differently than we do.

And then there are people we truly do not know: at a border, in a detention center, or in communities where ICE raids have left families afraid to leave their homes.

All of it is arriving.

How we respond is ours to choose.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are having a loud national fight about what we owe strangers at the same moment so many of us are being asked, in much smaller rooms, to practice receiving people well.

I don’t think what we do with our hearts stays contained to our kitchens and staff meetings.

I think it travels.

The habits we build in the small encounters—the interrupting idea, the person who hasn’t earned our patience yet, the unfamiliar neighbor—are the habits available to us when the stakes become large enough to make the news.

None of this is easy.

Receiving an idea, a need, or a person we didn’t choose almost always costs us something: a plan, an assumption, our patience, sometimes even our certainty that we were right.

Real hospitality has always asked something of us.

People are reaching for us.

In our boardrooms and staff meetings.
In our neighborhoods and communities.
Sometimes at our borders.

How we receive one another in the small rooms is how we learn what to do when the stakes become much larger.

Warmly,

Janetta Cravens

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