Radical Hospitality...Critique

I think I'm learning that God's holy, radical hospitality includes openness to correction. We humans can be mighty wrong while insisting we are mighty right. We see it in ourselves again and again as we look through history.

I wonder if perhaps radical hospitality is openness to correction in the today.

We've been taught that hospitality is inviting others to enter our world...and it is. When people don't like our world, we congratulate ourselves on having invited them...we stay comfortable because really, we can't do anything about the refusal of our hospitality.

I'm thinking the call to radical hospitality is the genuine openness to critique of my world. Perhaps embracing the critique would enable us to live in covenant relationship with each other, building a way of life that brings health and wholeness for all.

Practicing hospitality as an invitation to critique is frightening. We are all able to critique. It's a skill mastered well and early. In fact, we've made it part of the weave of our society. If the warp are the long threads of the fabric of life the threads of family and friends, of faith and fun, all that make up the pattern of our days, then the weft of our lives is criticism. The thread that binds us together seems, far too often, to be incessant criticism.

So what would make criticism constructive, instead of the constant, destructive force it seems to be today? I wonder if it might be a return to the idea of "common good." God's term is shalom. When all people are able to live in peace and wholeness, that is God's idea of common good. Our criticism seems to be more about our personal preferences or a way to get what is best for us or our group...even at significant cost for others.

What if the weft of our lives was the weaving of critique that brought about what was good for the other? what was good for the all?

What a beautiful fabric we might weave...