Hospitality – a conundrum

A first world problem?

I’ve been worrying about the offering of hospitality lately. I’ve always liked to have friends and family round for meals, parties, discussions, music, coffee, you name it. So I think of myself as hospitable. But when the question of hosting a family of asylum seekers arose I couldn’t do it. Happy to help in other ways, but actually living here? I have a hundred reasons why not. A crisis of conscience for an affluent first worlder? Maybe, but similarly, I have a colleague who frequently beds down its friends’ houses as part of his working life, but when he wants to stay her I’m resistant. Why? It’s not that I don’t like the guy, we get on fine. I think there’s a common thread and some of it is to do with feeling obligated and some of it is to do with setting your own rules and boundaries.

Obligation

None of us likes to be told what to do and being made to feel obligated is a variation on that theme. This doesn’t mean we have no obligations, just that it is up to each of us to work out what ours are. I feel I have an obligation to be tolerant, supportive and aware of the needs of others but that that supportiveness and awareness can be expressed in a whole range of ways. The acid test is not whether I’m prepared to do one specific thing – open my house – but whether I’m prepared to do anything. Refugee and asylum seeker organisations have needs for support other than accommodation – financial, practical, sharing of skills. Friends and colleagues also need different sorts of support from time to time. We all do. Maybe we just need to be clear what we are offering. Which takes me to the hospitality question.

To host or not to host

I’ve agonised over this, not least because I’m not good its saying no and tend to feel bad when I do manage it. I think it comes down to setting some house rules, based on my needs. I have a need to help, and to be a ‘good friend’, to be supportive of others and conscious that I, like most Brits, am very privileged, compared to the rest of the world. But I also have a need for my solid home base, and my home, or parts of it,  doubles as office, writers study, and music room for me and more for my wife. We need, in my view, to be open but also to know when not to be – and this means only having people stay over when we invite them to do so, and only inviting them when it makes sense and works. Most of the time this means when we’re inviting people socially. The rest of the time we need that peaceful place to charge our batteries, to do what we do, to enable us to contribute to the world in whatever ways seem appropriate – and to be hospitable when that’s the right thing to do. I started writing this as a way of working out why I felt ungracious when faced with a request earlier this week (even though it wouldn’t have worked anyway) and I wanted to work out why. I’m publishing it, rather than scrapping the draft, because I think it has wider implications which include the need to be honest, to communicate, and to know what we are prepared to do – and to make sure we do it. As for what we are not prepared to do, the honesty and communication remains important if more difficult but if we know where we want to draw the line and why we can act with integrity.