Does hospitality solve anything?

“We’re here to learn about a solution to homelessness.”

During my years living and working at The Village I heard this line hundreds of times. Whether they had come for a tour or were attending a Symposium, many of the sincere, passionate people who came to the Village were on the hunt for a solution to the many challenges of homelessness within their own communities.

One of my jobs was to convince them that their quest was futile.

I understood, of course, the heart behind the quest for a solution. Our visitors were sincere, gifted people, many of whom had traveled from other states and even other countries to see if the Village—a 27-acre, permanent supportive housing community—could inspire a better response to the challenges of their own communities. Like us, seeing people enslaved to drug addictions or crippled by mental illness broke their hearts. Like us, they understood the fears or business owners and other citizens who worried about the safety of homeless camps in the woods or downtown. And like us, they had hope that there were better options than the typical responses to homeless men and women, which generally involved law enforcement.

The problem with seeking a solution to something like homelessness is that it is a human problem: simultaneously spiritual and material, shifting by the minute, and tangled with human choice.

Certainly, solutions work well for simple, material problems. If my washing machine stops spinning, the solution is to replace the belt that drives the drum. Solutions have as their goal to stop a problem, and the fewer the variables, the more likely the solution is to work. Americans, in particular, are known for solutions-based thinking, which comes fundamentally from a spirit of optimism, confidence that we can fix things.

But the minute you try to apply solutions to people, everything becomes more complicated. If my children’s room is messy, I might think that providing each child with his or her own toy box will solve the problem. But I’ve done nothing to address the fact that the children themselves—little people with a rightful desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose—have to choose to use the boxes. Perhaps I offer candy or money as an incentive to clean up the first time, only to find the next day that they will not clean without the same incentive.

These challenges were infinitely greater as we attempted to welcome homeless men and women into a new season of life at the Village. When asked about solutions, I would wonder which problem, exactly, we were hoping to solve? Could we solve the extreme childhood trauma most of our residents had experienced decades earlier? Could we solve the physical and mental damage caused by years of alcohol and drug use? Could we solve the shame of being regarded as a pariah for thirty years? The real problem, as our founder and CEO often reminded us, was homelessness: a lack of home, a lack of belonging, safety, agency, authority.

Confronting the complexity of human problems can be overwhelming, and it’s why, in the last few years, there’s been a subtle (but I believe intentional) effort to begin calling our homeless neighbors “the unhoused.” And why? Because if the problem is being “unhoused” then a solution appears obvious: just give them housing! And providing free or low-cost housing might be a good thing. But let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that an apartment can resolve the deepest burdens those men and women carry.

Years among the homeless brought into relief problems that are just as profound and (in some cases) intractable in ordinary suburban neighborhoods. Perhaps we are lonely, or notice the loneliness of others. And so we reach out, set the table, pour the lemonade and offer it in the garden. We share a pleasant hour with a neighbor: well and good. But have we solved anything? The retired widower still faces lonely hours when he returns to his house. And if the visits continue, your new friends will bring their burdens with them. You may find yourself grieving over the wounds of one family’s marriage, or worrying about the elderly woman whose medical needs have become so great she really shouldn’t be living alone anymore. Her only family member lives in another state. What do you do?

Sometimes it can feel like hospitality doesn’t solve anything, and perhaps even weighs us down more than we were before. Certainly, if I think that I practice hospitality in order to offer solutions to my neighbors, then welcoming others is going to overwhelm me sooner rather than later, and I will end up shutting the door altogether.

Instead, I must remind myself daily that my job is to seek a “faithful response,” rather than to presume to offer definitive solutions. I first encountered the language of faithful response in the More with Less Cookbook, a resource I encountered in my early 20s, when I was living on my own for the first time and trying to discern how to source and prepare my food in a way that honored Jesus. The cookbook’s author, Dorish Janzen Longacre, was a Mennonite, and her collection offers simple, mostly plant-based recipes and principles for food preparation that remain the foundation of my cooking. In her introduction, Longacre explains that her people were seeking to live faithfully in light of the world’s “food problem.” (The book was first published in 1980, a year that saw famine, war, and natural disasters exacerbate tremendous suffering around the world). And yet, Longacre refuses to claim that her book is a solution to world hunger. She admits that “it may not be within our capacity to effect an answer [to the problem of hunger]. But it is within our capacity to search for a faithful response.” (5)

The only place to look for a faithful response is to the example of Jesus. Recently I was discussing with a spiritual director the story of Jesus in the boat with his disciples in Mark 4. A storm begins to rage, yet Jesus remains asleep “on the cushion” in the back of the boat. His disciples wake him, terrified, and he rebukes the wind and waves. My director asked me where I imagined myself in that scene. And while I fully sympathize with the disciples’ cry for help, my immediate thought was that I just wanted to curl up next to Jesus and go to sleep while the storm raged. “Do you think,” I asked, “there might be another cushion on that boat?”

Did my question come from escapism? Burn-out? Anxiety? Certainly, I know all those feelings well, and hospitality has often provoked all them. But I think my instinct was was a longing for faith - faith powerful enough to trust that right next to Jesus was the safest place to be, and that

“it is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Pslam 127:2)

Like so many aspects of the Christian life, the call to hospitality is irrefutable, but we must look for the fruit of our efforts with the eyes of faith, which is to say, with confidence that that the Spirit working through us is the One responsible for the results. We can faithfully prepare our hearts and our tables for a stranger. We can run like Wisdom’s servants out into the streets to gather the hungry in. But the healing we long to see is not within our power. Our faithful response to a broken world is to work, yes, to welcome, absolutely, but then—but then!—to rest.

How do you think about the outcomes of hospitality in your home or church? What do you see as the difference between a “solution” and a “faithful response”? How do you rest in the context of hospitality, releasing the outcomes of your work to God? What practices or reflections help make this rest possible?