Dr. Christine Pohl: Making Room–Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

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Overview

Welcome to this episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast! Today on the podcast, I got to talk to Dr. Christine Pohl, Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at Asbury Seminary where she taught for 29 years. This is the first of a two-part series on hospitality and community. Today on the podcast we talked about the origins of hospitality, the important difference between hospitality and entertaining, why it’s important to both give and receive hospitality, and how we can continue to do that even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let’s listen!

*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.

Dr. Christine Pohl, Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at Asbury Seminary

Dr. Christine Pohl retired in the summer of 2018 after having taught Christian Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., for twenty-nine years. Prior to graduate studies (PhD, Emory University) and teaching at Asbury Seminary, she was involved in congregational, parachurch, and refugee ministries. Major publications include: Living into Community: Cultivating Practices that Sustain Us (Eerdmans, 2012) and Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 1999); along with several other co-authored books and numerous scholarly and popular articles. She speaks regularly on recovering the practices of hospitality and community.

Heidi Wilcox, host of the Thrive Podcast

Writer, podcaster, and social media manager, Heidi Wilcox shares stories of truth, justice, healing and hope. She is best known as the host of Spotlight, (especially her blooper reel) highlighting news, events, culturally relevant topics and stories of the ways alumni, current students and faculty are attempting something big for God. If you can’t find her, she’s probably cheering on her Kentucky Wildcats, enjoying a cup of coffee, reading or spending time with her husband, Wes.

Transcript

Heidi Wilcox:
Hey everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary. I’m your host, Heidi Wilcox, bringing new conversations with authors, thought leaders, and people just like you, who are looking to connect where your passion intersects with the world’s deep needs. Today on the podcast, I had the privilege of talking to Dr. Christine Pohl. Dr. Pohl taught at Asbury Seminary for 29 years, and she is the professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Asbury Seminary.

Heidi Wilcox:
This is the first of a two part series on hospitality in community. Today on the podcast we talked about the origins of hospitality, the important difference between hospitality and entertaining. Why it’s important to both give and receive hospitality and how we can continue to do that even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s listen.

Heidi Wilcox:
Well, I’m so happy to get to talk to you today. I really enjoyed getting to read your book, “Making Room.” We have a lot to talk about today, so I’m really looking forward to it.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Thanks. I’m very happy to be here.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. How did you first become interested in the topic of hospitality?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think that goes back to pretty early in my life. I wouldn’t say that I had the language or the vocabulary for hospitality when I started being interested, but I certainly experienced its challenges and blessings. I think from pretty early, I was drawn to people who are usually overlooked or not valued as much and I found that I was the one who was blessed in the relationship. I ended up doing some work with people with disabilities, quite a lot with people who were refugees or experiencing homelessness, and then just a fairly significant number of folks who maybe you would call lost souls, kind of people who weren’t attached anywhere who were drifting and I found it really life changing for me.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, it was always challenging but it was also quite wonderful. That was really from fairly early… from sort of teenage years on and then I think also I’ve for a long time really since young adulthood been interested in intentional Christian communities. I paid attention to them and hospitality is often a key practice in those communities and so I saw it lived out in community and I found it very compelling, very appealing.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think those were some of the ways that I was formed initially to be interested but the other thing I think was sort of the intellectual and moral challenge that I was really struck by how often people can be cruel to one another and exclude one another. Like through things like the Holocaust or genocide or things that aren’t quite as dramatic as that, but still are terrible exclusions.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I kept wondering how we could do that to one another and eventually started thinking about, maybe I could come at it from the more constructive side, which is what it would mean to make a place for people who were different from ourselves, how we might offer a welcome instead of exclusion and destruction. I think those all came together in terms of my interest in hospitality.

Heidi Wilcox:
This wasn’t one of the questions I pre-sent you, so you can totally say I don’t want to answer this, but did your interest in hospitality… because you mentioned exclusions, did it come at all because there were times in your life that you were excluded and so you wanted to try to do something to correct that and help others not to feel that way?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think growing up most of us managed to feel excluded by something or someone or some jury.

Heidi Wilcox:
True.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean that’s part of teenage years. So, yes. I think there were times where I felt different or not fully part of the group and I think it wasn’t so much that I wanted to figure out how to make that better than as much as I remembered acutely the feelings of being left out and excluded and… yeah, understood that if that were written out in a larger way, or if it actually involved basic wellbeing or something, that could be pretty significant for people. I think, yes, that was part of it from early on.

Heidi Wilcox:
For sure. One of the things that I found really interesting… I found many things interesting in your book, “Making Room,” but you mentioned that often we learn hospitality from other’s example. I was curious from whom you learned to embody the spirit of welcome.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. I think probably it was more my grandparents than anybody else, especially my grandmother, but really both of them. She was incredibly welcoming. She just never really met someone who stayed a stranger for very long and she would welcome them into our home and she was always making meals for people. She herself had been an orphan and I think there was this deep, I didn’t know it at the time, but I think there was probably this deep commitment to making sure that nobody was alone.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I saw that modeled in my life, really my whole growing up period where she and my grandfather just made room for people and she made it look pretty easy and definitely she enjoyed it. That was really formative, sort of always having people at dinner, extra people.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. In your work, how do you define hospitality? Because I think there’s many… I think people think of it different ways. I think it’s really important to kind of set the foundation for what we’re talking about when you say hospitality.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. The Greek word in the New Testament, it’s not the only one for hospitality, but one of the main ones is “philoxenia” which actually means love of strangers. That’s a pretty basic definition. I think historically it has meant welcoming strangers into some home environment and meeting their needs, which would often be for food and shelter and protection, but it always meant more than that. It always included more than the household. I mean, for me, one of the working definitions has been to welcome people into a place they wouldn’t necessarily feel free to enter without some kind of invitation.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
In a space that you had some access to, welcoming others into that. I think that means it has multiple dimensions like physical dimensions in terms of feeding people or providing space for them but it also has social ones in terms of providing recognition and conversation and valuing the other person, and then it has lots of spiritual dimensions because we worship a God who’s welcomed us.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. For real. You’ve been working on this topic for 30 years. Is that right? Like how-

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I’ve been working on it academically for 30 years. I guess before that I was working on it sort of practically. Yeah.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, because you have a lot of experience in the field of hospitality and you mentioned a little bit about your work with the homeless and people who need welcome. You have both practical and academic experience. How have you seen the issues changed change or have they remained the same as you worked in this field?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think it’s a great question. In many ways it just seems fairly continuous. Hospitality was always important, is always important, continues to be important. In some ways I think it’s more important now than it was 30 years ago. Just for a variety of sort of cultural and social reasons but I think with the coronavirus outbreak we have maybe come to realize just how important face-to-face experiences are, how interactions that are in flesh are so important because we miss them so much.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think we’ve also come to realize how terrible it is when people who end up in the hospital or who are living in nursing homes or even isolated at home, how terrible it is that they can’t have visitors or people with them. I think in some ways this experience reminds us of how important face-to-face hospitality is.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, definitely.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think in terms of sort of the overall last 30 years, in some ways people’s fears about hospitality or about strangers… I mean, that’s always been part of the story, but in some ways they seem even more acute now. People worry about terrorism or being overwhelmed by the needs of asylum seekers or immigrants or whatever, or they’re fearful of all sorts of unsettledness. I think those fears help us realize just how much the issue of strangers who are unknown to us, which is what strangers are-

Heidi Wilcox:
All right.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
… but how much that drives our responses, but then also how much those strangers need hospitality so many times. I think that’s been part of the challenge so that the fear and anxiety about strangers seems even more acute today but so do their needs. That would be a piece of the sort of 30 year trajectory I guess.

Heidi Wilcox:
How do we get over our fear in order to just have a spirit of welcome?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think one of the ways we get over it is by simply offering welcome. I think many times in the context of hospitality, we realize that our fears are overblown. That there are-

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes. That’s true in many areas. I’m discovering, but yes.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right. I think our anxiety is just sometimes so out of proportion to what the real risks are and as we practice hospitality, we also experience the joy and the blessing. We have to deal with some of the risks. There are some risks. Part of the way we get past those fears is by making certain arrangements that make it a little bit safer both for guests and hosts, but I think there are ways to get over the fears.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about what those arrangements would look like for somebody who wants to make room for hospitality in their life? Because I guess I’m thinking like what you said about making it safe for the guest and the host. Like what does that kind of space look like?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. Well, I think one of the things that has made hospitality more difficult in recent history is that our households have gotten much smaller. Basically, there are only like oftentimes one or two adults in a household.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
It’s harder to welcome total strangers into settings in which there’s only one or two adults, which is why I think intentional communities find it easier to do hospitality. It helps if there are more people around. It’s safer for the guest, it’s safer for the host.

Heidi Wilcox:
Okay. What do you mean by intentional community? Because I’m [crosstalk 00:12:46].

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Communities that aren’t just a nuclear family. I mean, it could be a network of households. It could be a group of people living together in one extended household or something like that. Lots of Christian communities would have a house with single and married people living in it or whatever where, yeah, people can practice hospitality much more readily.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
When I was staying in a Benedictine community at one point years ago when I was writing “Making Room,” I realized how much easier it was for a community of people to offer hospitality than one person. I mean, they were already cooking for a lot of people.

Heidi Wilcox:
Okay. What’s one more?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
… [crosstalk 00:13:31] big deal to include somebody else, which is also what we used to find with farm families, right? Where there would be lots more people around. I think one of the maybe principles or whatever is to find ways to make hospitality personal but not as private.

Heidi Wilcox:
Okay. That’s interesting. Personal but not private. How do we do that?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think again you can still have face-to-face close-knit relations but you have more people involved.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
You can be intentional about creating what I’ve called threshold places, which are places that are a little bit more open where people can safely encounter each other as strangers and begin to build relationships. Thinking about what might be threshold places, people often talk about… in the past we had front porches and front porches are sort of a threshold place. They’re not exactly in the house, but they’re definitely not fully outside the house, and that’s a place where you can encounter a stranger while other people are kind of looking on or whatever.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think churches can actually function as threshold places. Things like potluck dinners are a place where people can get to know one another a little bit. I think sometimes schools can be threshold places. Just being more intentional about looking for strangers that we might want to encounter in those spaces and then it’s a slightly more public setting to begin to get to know each other.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, because at least for me I think it’s easy to overlook strangers because I don’t know them so I focus on the people I do know, at least for me, and I don’t see people who may need to be welcomed in. For me, part of it is just learning to see people that I haven’t seen before.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Absolutely. I think one of the crucial ways that we become better at hospitality is simply to become more attentive to the people around us, and even prayerfully ask the Lord to bring us to people who might really benefit from welcome.

Heidi Wilcox:
I’m thinking now, especially because we’re recording remotely because of the coronavirus, how do we engage in hospitality in meaningful ways during this season? Because I mean, it’s hard.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I must say that is a question I keep getting and it is really hard because hospitality is an enfleshed embodied kind of experience most of the time and I’ve been very hesitant to sort of embrace virtual notions of hospitality. Although I’ve sort of understood them in the past as something that’s supplemented face-to-face hospitality, but now it’s become the main way that we’re connecting with people.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, I’ve been struck by how effective Zoom can be in connecting with people. Of course, that’s… In some ways some Zoom is with people that you know, but I’ve been struck also by how many strangers I’ve encountered that way now. I’ve been very grateful for that as an experience of hospitality. I mean, I would say I’m usually the guest in those settings, not the host but that’s been good. I think it’s required more creativity to practice hospitality. A lot more of it goes on outside in smaller groups but I think one of the things to remember in this period is that the people who were vulnerable before the COVID outbreak are the people who are even more vulnerable now.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Thinking about those folks, people who really don’t have easy access to food or who are overwhelmed in one way or another, or who are just very isolated, are the people we need to be particularly attentive to and that means we have to be more creative about reaching out. I think churches can do a lot. Some of them are, can do a lot about connecting with their more isolated members and then the people in the community that they know are isolated or in need.

Heidi Wilcox:
I want to talk about church a little bit. What would it look like for churches that viewed hospitality as their central practice? Because like you said, some of them are, so this is not a critique, but how can we grow in our practice of hospitality within churches?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think churches that practice hospitality look a little bit messy.

Heidi Wilcox:
Okay.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
They’re willing, I think quite often to deal with some unpredictability because when you welcome people, especially people who don’t usually fully fit in, it’s not going to happen that are a little bit less tidy. I think that would be one thing that I would say about churches, that I think they would be active. People would be active and engaged. I think there would be a lot of unlikely friendships.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think one of the wonderful things about hospitality is that it allows us to cross or transcend pretty significant social differences, and so you might find people being friends with people who are really quite different from themselves. People you wouldn’t expect to enjoy each other’s company and be together, do things together.

Heidi Wilcox:
Can you give us an example of some of like a church experience that you’ve had or in your previous work of things that you’ve seen unlikely friendships form or some of the blessings that you’ve experienced because of hospitality and like… because you’ve been giving blessings, but also you mentioned it was a receiving a blessing.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. Well, I think where I first learned sort of the practice of hospitality, especially with refugees was the incredible blessing that came with not just sort of doing the regular formal resettlement of refugees, but the friendships that formed in the church. Beginning to know each other’s stories, share each other’s cooking interests. In that church it was really interesting. Lots of times you couldn’t tell whose children belong to which adults because all the kids were sitting on everybody’s lap and it was just this wonderful mix of sort of white folks. It was about a third African American, a third white, and a third sort of mixture of all sorts of other backgrounds and it was just a wonderful mix. It wasn’t easy necessarily because we were quite different from each other, but it was wonderful and you did have a sense of somehow experiencing a little bit of the kingdom.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think the blessing that came when I was part of a biracial church in Lexington actually was the experience of becoming friends with people whose life experience really was quite different from mine and beginning to be able to see the world through their eyes, which was a huge blessing. I mean, again, it wasn’t easy, but it was such a gift in a sense. I think those friendships that wouldn’t just form based on necessarily where we lived or who we worked with can be a real gift and a real expression of a hospitable church.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Because in your book this is a good lead in. In your book, you talked about even unintentional boundaries with our jobs, our neighborhoods that unintentionally most of the time, or sometimes anyway are created to keep out needy strangers, so I think it’s interesting that you’re talking, that you mentioned that.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the boundaries are unintentional. People will say, “Well, I just don’t know any of those people.” Well, yeah, if you don’t ever put yourself in a setting where you would encounter them, you’re not going to know them. Sometimes if we leave our houses and drive to work and then drive home and… I mean, it’s quite possible that we don’t encounter very many strangers. It does require a certain intentionality and a certain willingness to see the places where we’ve erected or just become comfortable with certain boundaries.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Again, that’s where threshold places can be helpful, where we deliberately locate ourselves in places where we might encounter strangers and begin to become acquainted and then friends.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. What would you tell somebody is kind of who wants to start engaging in hospitality even right now in a fuller aspect of hospitality? I mean, I guess we just go into these threshold places, like are you saying like find a place to volunteer, or like how do we get started?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. Well, certainly finding a place to volunteer is a good place to start. I think oftentimes we can begin by simply praying that God will open our eyes to the people around us who might need welcome, or even as you encounter strangers across a day that you might ask the Lord to… you might pray for them and be more attentive. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to welcome every stranger into our life. Lots of people are fairly self-contained in going about their day, but there are people that God brings into our lives that we can be more responsive to I think.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think we really have to pray. I mean, the tradition has said if… Oh gosh, what’s the quote, but basically the house is never going to be open until the heart is and in a sense we have to really pray for our transformation of hearts where we can be more attentive to the people around us. I think there are lots of ways we can express hospitality, but that first… those encounters, I think initial encounters are really important. I think another thing that helps is sometimes to connect ourselves with someone who makes hospitality look easy, who kind of is natural at it and to sort of be their apprentice for a little while and just watch how they do it, because some people are just more naturally comfortable with it.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, for sure. I’m thinking of some people right now that I’m like, “Oh, if I really want to do this well, I could spend more time with them and learn how to do this.” Yeah. I want to talk for a little bit about the origins of hospitality. Where did the tradition come from? That’s a big question.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
You’re right. Just a small question you could write a book on.

Heidi Wilcox:
Right. [inaudible 00:24:07] which you did.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Actually it’s a really ancient practice. Almost every society engaged in some version of hospitality and I would say that was because the development of things like restaurants and hotels and refrigeration are all really recent compared to the whole time span of civilization. When people traveled in ancient times, they were dependent on the kindness of strangers. I mean, if you were gone away from home for more than a few days, you needed new supplies and you needed a place to stay. It wasn’t really associated with being poor or needy. Every stranger needed some version of welcome and was dependent on the community they were traveling through to keep them safe and provided for.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think that’s the origin in most… I mean, as much as I can tell that’s the origin of the practice, it was an issue of what’s called mutual aid, that everybody would need that kind of hospitality, so everybody knew they needed to also offer it. It was a highly valued practice in most cultures. The Christian tradition came to understand it a little bit more with certain distinctives, but I would say that historically, that was the origins that people simply needed help when they were traveling.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. At least in American culture, now we are more self-sufficient for better or for worse, because sometimes it’s better, sometimes worse. Yeah, and so it’s easier I guess, to stay inside or we just get a hotel somewhere or something?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. I think people are actually quite uncomfortable… would be uncomfortable unless it’s an emergency to depend on the kindness of strangers. I mean, at least most middle class people would not think that was a great idea. You don’t go traveling just hoping that somebody will take you in. I mean, that would be an exception, whereas in the past, that really was necessary.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I really like the quote from your book that says hospitality is a way of embodying the sacrament of God’s love to the world. Just thinking of hospitality as one of the sacraments in a way of showing love to other people, I thought that was just a beautiful way of looking at it.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, thanks. I mean, it seems to me that that’s really important for followers of Jesus to understand. I mean, we welcome a God who has welcomed us and welcomed us at an extraordinary price. To be the followers of that God, to be followers of Jesus means that we will also embody that kind of welcome. That’s simply part of who we are. The Christian tradition really I think understands hospitality in a fuller way in the sense of it’s embodying or response, a faithful response to who God is and what God has done in such an extraordinary welcome to us.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Paul can say welcome in Romans 15. Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you. That’s an amazing statement really.

Heidi Wilcox:
Really it is.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Hospitality becomes sort of core to, or it should be, and I don’t think it always is but it should be core to our identity, again, as followers of Jesus.

Heidi Wilcox:
I guess I’m curious, is hospitality… is it a gift, a command or is it both?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
People always ask that. I think it’s both. It’s both. It’s clearly a command. I mean, Paul says pursue or practice hospitality in Romans. We read in Hebrews 13 not to neglect hospitality. In 1 Peter, not to do it grudgingly. I mean, those were all sort of generalized commands in scripture, but in our own experience we recognize that some people are just more natural at it. They’re more comfortable. There is a way in which it’s a gift.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think it’s both. I think I’m always wary of saying it’s a gift because then people exempt themselves. It’s like, well, I don’t have that gift [crosstalk 00:28:40] option.

Heidi Wilcox:
Right.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, you can not have that gift but you still have to practice hospitality. It may just be a little bit more challenging. People do it differently and that’s fine, but I think actually neither of those descriptions is the best one. I think hospitality is better understood as a way of life.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, interesting.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
It’s a practice within a way of life that again… I think to see it as a way of life gets us away from the command orientation that often diminishes the way in which hospitality is good for everybody. It’s not just that it’s a command to do something for someone else. As a way of life, the way that God has created us, I think means that hospitality is good for both hosts and guests. When we do that, we experience some of what God intended in God’s economy, that this would be a practice that was good for everybody.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, it’s still challenging. I don’t mean to suggest it’s not difficult sometimes, but I think seeing it as a way of life allows a richer understanding and practice.

Heidi Wilcox:
It becomes more like a rhythm. Would you say that’s [inaudible 00:29:53]?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. I mean, it’s not so much one more task that we add on as good Christians that this is yet again, one more good thing we should be doing. It’s actually a reorientation of how we’re living I think, and then you’re doing essentially the same tasks, but you’re doing them slightly differently with a view toward who might benefit from welcome, who might be blessed in the encounter.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. You said something I found interesting just now about how it’s important to be both hosts and guests at different points in our lives. Why is it important to both give and receive hospitality?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah, I mean, there are a fair number of critiques of hospitality because the hosting role can be a way of holding on to power-

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, interesting.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
… and being the one who determines the distribution of resources. If you always have to be the host, you might need to ask questions about why that’s the case. I think oftentimes hosting is the role where you do have more control and where you can often see yourself as not really being the needy person and yet all of us have needs as well as gifts and resources. Part of the importance of a willingness to be a guest is a willingness to recognize our own vulnerabilities and needs, and that those also need to be met.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
There are people who are very uncomfortable being outside of a host role because they want the predictability and the authority and so on of just hosting, but I think being willing to be both and… especially being willing to, even if you’re hosting to see that the guest also brings gifts and has things to share and that the host doesn’t have everything all together, but that there can be a mutual blessing, is really important in keeping the relationship whole and on life giving.

Heidi Wilcox:
With what you were saying, somebody told me once, like one of the nicest things you can do for your guests if you’re having them over for dinner or something, is when they offer to help to find something for them to do so that they can be a part of the meal, of the cleaning up and participate in it. Would you agree with that or disagree?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Oh, absolutely. I would agree. I think that sometimes sort of the very stiff kind of guest, hosts… division of roles and to guests and hosts are uncomfortable and incorporating again, kind of just inviting someone into your life as you live it, which is what you’re doing when you say, oh yeah, you can help me prepare the vegetables or set the table or, you know. It’s just a much more comfortable setting.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I suppose there are times where you want to honor the guests by doing something special for them, but oftentimes it really helps just to make it more natural where people don’t feel as uncomfortable being sort of limited to sort of a formal guest role. Yes, I think it’s really helpful to just welcome people into kind of a normal life rather than something that’s very, very structured and formal.

Heidi Wilcox:
Just kind of become part of the family, I guess. Yeah and I guess it’s more… because we define hospitality in the beginning, but I think I’m still as we’re talking, thinking it more of having people over for dinner. I want to like kind of move beyond that. What are some other ways of being hospitable to people on a personal level?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think being very conscious of viewing the other person with respect and valuing is something that we can take with us into any setting which is part of hospitality. It’s part of how we understand the other person as being a person of value, a person who’s interesting to us, a person with needs but also with gifts. I have come to think that hospitality can inform how we do our jobs, how we structure work environments in ways that respect persons that show that we value them, that can be true if we’re in the healthcare environment or in a school environment in terms of how professors treat students or how students treat one another, or how people interact with staff and so on. As we do it being interested in people, in being eager to share times of fellowship with them. Oftentimes in more personal settings sharing meals is a really crucial part of hospitality.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Historically. That’s always been really important, that we share food or drink together and that we share conversation. Creating environments in which conversation is easier. That can be true even for a church and how it structures its gathering, not during the coronavirus but other times how it structures its gathering spaces so that you can encourage people to talk to one another and get to know one another and so on. I think it can inform a lot of how we live.

Heidi Wilcox:
How does hospitality relate to our money? Because you talked about like giving of our time. How does it relate to what we think of as our possession? Our money, our stuff basically.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. That’s an important question. It’s kind of a funny thing with hospitality. I mean, it does help to have some possessions to make hospitality more comfortable. It helps to have a roof over your head and enough money for food and so on, but it’s not the case that having more stuff or having lots of stuff makes you a better host because it simply doesn’t. Lots of times it’s actually poor people who are more willing to share what they have even if it’s not very much. What I do think happens is if we have a lot of things that we’re very attached to, that makes it harder to offer hospitality because we’re worried about our stuff. It can actually get in the way of welcome.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Cultivating a lighter hold on things can be really important thinking about what… and that’s a bigger question than hospitality. That’s a question of Christian discipleship I think, of how we relate to. I think how we relate to our things, our stuff, as well as how we relate to our time, is it ours or is it something God has given to us to share? Lots of times hospitality means sharing your time, and I think in some ways, time is our most precious resource and we hold onto it quite tightly. Being willing to share that is a crucial kind of gift we give to other people.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Similarly, a willingness to hold onto possessions lightly, a willingness to share them is really crucial in hospitality.

Heidi Wilcox:
How we learn to cultivate, because for me time is the big deal. I can be very focused on, I need to get this done here, and if I get off my little predetermined schedule in my head, I get very frustrated… I can get frustrated if there’s an unexpected interruption. I guess just… and I hope I’m not the only one in the world who’s like that, because that would make me feel very bad, but how can I learn… I guess just talking to me specifically, how can I learn to be more sharing with my time and not be so tied to, “Oh, well I only have an hour for this and then I have to move on to the next thing, whether we’re done or not?”

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. Well, I don’t think you’re alone in this. This is a huge issue. I think it’s partly because we are very task oriented as a culture and we want to be able to measure the results of how we’ve spent our time, which means we want to be able to check off the boxes of what we’ve accomplished in this day and how much we’ve gotten done and how busy we are and so on. That does kind of crash into kind of an open handed hospitality.

Heidi Wilcox:
I’ve got 15 minutes to be hospitable, so come-

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right.

Heidi Wilcox:
Come and get it right now because that’s… then it’s over.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right.

Heidi Wilcox:
I’m just kidding.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, there’s something to be said. I don’t want to make an argument for just sort of floating through life because there’s a real value in accomplishing things but I was struck by the number of people… I asked people how they knew they were welcome.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, interesting.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I was struck by the number who said to me, I didn’t feel like an interruption.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
And I thought, “Oh dear.” Because how often that’s how we experience. I mean, I think opportunities for hospitality often come as interruptions, our very task organized kind of day. It happens at the edges and if we never have time, if we’re just running from one task to another, it’s very unlikely we’re going to see the opportunities for hospitality, and so that does require… again, that’s why it helps to think of it as a way of life.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
It doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a lot of the same stuff that you’re doing. You’re just doing it a little bit differently. Maybe allowing a little bit bigger time boundary around the things you’re trying to accomplish so that a teacher who’s willing to come a little bit early to class or to stay a little bit longer after class is actually a way in which you can be much more hospitable to your students because you’re simply there instead of rushing in and out.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
We’re not necessarily talking about huge blocks of time, but at least being present long enough to encounter someone and then to… you might have to say, well, I can’t do it now, but could we arrange a time to talk longer or to have coffee together or something like that.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes. I like that. That’s really helpful. Thank you. How can we use hospitality as a lens for examining our homes, churches, jobs, schools, kind of healthcare, politics. How does the… Looking at the world through a lens of hospitality, how can we see the world?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think using the lens of hospitality would help us to remember that our lives are enriched oftentimes by strangers and so just living with a little bit more openness to difference and to unexpected things, to surprises would be significant in almost every sphere. I think the Christian tradition which emphasizes, clearly emphasizes offering welcome to the least of these because of the Matthew 25 passage where Jesus says I was a stranger and you welcomed me, in as much as you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me. Based on that and the Luke 14 passage where Jesus says, when you give a party, don’t invite your friends and your family and your rich neighbors. I mean, he’s not saying don’t ever have them over, but invite the poor and the people who are disabled and so on.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Don’t invite your friends and family because you’ll be rewarded, but invite the ones that seem like maybe they don’t have as much to offer and God will reward you. Based on those two passages, the Christian tradition has really emphasized attentiveness to the most vulnerable ones. I think that would become a really crucial part of any lens of hospitality for us asking how are the people who are vulnerable being affected, maybe it’s by public policy or by our social behavior, or who is the church noticing in our community who’s missing from our church, who’s kind of invisible. A lot of times we can ask who are the invisible people in my community because oftentimes those are the ones that are being overlooked.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think that those can be some of the ways in which hospitality helps us and then it’s remembering that just because someone has needs, doesn’t change the fact that they deserve respect and dignity and so that should really shape how we respond to people’s needs, that they have value. They matter to God, they need to matter to us and that needs to be shown in the way we respond to needs, which is partly by helping but also partly by really respecting who they are.

Heidi Wilcox:
We talked about… like you mentioned it just a little bit earlier about every stranger. We can’t welcome every stranger personally and I don’t know, like when we get into the social sphere kind of the more systems and policies sphere how that all works, but like what do we do when we can’t welcome every stranger, because I know sometimes we’ve all heard the thing. I can’t do it for everybody, so I will do it for no one. What should we do?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. I think that’s true. I mean, one of the difficulties with hospitality is that you do come up against limits. Many of the people who practice hospitality say that the hardest thing actually is closing the door, of saying we don’t have room. I think most of the time we don’t even encounter the… we don’t get to the edge of those limits, but occasionally people do. I think that everyone benefits from welcome and hospitality, both as guest and host, but there are some people, the more vulnerable folks, the people who are more isolated or overlooked that particularly need hospitality.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Does every stranger need our welcome? Yeah but every stranger is not really looking for it. I mean, if they’re just passing through and they’re renting their hotel room and all that kind of thing, they’re mostly okay. There’s lots of other people, whether it’s the family that’s just moved cross country that needs welcome into the neighborhood or into the church, or whether it’s kind of the lonely teenager or the person with disabilities whose mobility is limited or whatever. I mean, those people need welcoming a different kind of way. Similarly with people who have recently immigrated into the community or whatever. There are people who particularly need welcome.

Heidi Wilcox:
Well, Dr. Pohl, we have covered a lot of topics today. Is there anything else that you would like to mention that I haven’t asked?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I’m not sure that there’s anything I would want to add, except that I highly recommend the practice. It’s really… it’s a blessing. Again, you wouldn’t want to say that it was necessarily easy all the time because it’s not, and you can run into quite complicated situations and so on, but it’s so much part of who we are or who we’re meant to be as followers of Christ that I think it’s a practice really worth recovering and working at until it becomes a way of life.

Heidi Wilcox:
What is one of your most memorable experiences of either offering hospitality or receiving hospitality?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think probably the most memorable one of mostly offering, but again, it became kind of a mixture was what really launched me into thinking about this, which was when I was working with refugees in New York City, because we were doing it on a large scale, my church and… my church was. The experience was sort of simultaneously utterly overwhelming and incredibly powerful, and sort of learning our way into best practices and I must say we didn’t have a lot of best practices in the beginning. We kind of learned and we learned it together.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
We learned the goodness of it… We were persuaded of the importance of it. We just didn’t always know what we were doing, and you kind of live to tell the tale. I learned so much from doing it. I think the experience of that incredible mix of people from different backgrounds and people who desperately needed welcome at that point along with our oftentimes inadequate expressions of welcome in the context of the church was incredibly powerful. You really did feel like you were sort of experiencing a little bit of the kingdom. That’s probably the most memorable one. There are a million other ones that are important.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, I’m sure. What did you learn from that experience specifically?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That it was messy. That our best intentions could go awry, that we were pretty naive at times, and that there was way more blessing than we ever thought there would be, so that it was really, really good and really, really hard at the same time so that even when I wrote, “Making Room,” I was determined that I would never sort of paint hospitality with a brush that sort of suggested that it was only nice and always easy or something because that’s simply wasn’t true to anybody who’d actually tried to do it. The experience of God’s presence in it was so amazing. That was the overriding thing that I took away from it.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, for sure. Because both sides have to be vulnerable and when you’re vulnerable in the most authentic version of yourself, it’s going to be messy on both sides.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right.

Heidi Wilcox:
Well, Dr. Pohl, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed our conversation and very much appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. We have one last question that we ask everyone on the show, because the show is called the Thrive with Asbury Seminary podcast, what is one practice spiritual or otherwise that is helping you thrive in your life right now?

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Zoom.

Heidi Wilcox:
Zoom. Yes. Amen to that.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think, yeah, it would be hard at this point without Zoom. I’m not sure that that would be the primary practice. One thing that I’ve discovered is, my life has been pretty busy and so I’ve not always had time to even be attentive to my extended family which lives right next door and then the next house over. There’s three houses in a row that’s family.

Heidi Wilcox:
Okay. Cool.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
It’s really a blessing. I haven’t been all that present to my brother and sister-in-law or my niece and her family over these past years because I’ve been so busy doing other things. The shutdown has meant spending quite a lot more time outside with people that you interact with regularly because it’s a bit safer. My brother and sister-in-law and I, and most of the time my niece and her boys and her husband, toward the end of the day come together and just chat for a while in the backyard.

Heidi Wilcox:
That’s lovely.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
It has been lovely. First of all, we’re definitely more connected to being outside. Well, I am anyway, than I’ve been in years and experiencing the beauty of creation and so on, and then just the gift of being able to share more relaxed time with family because nobody’s going anywhere-

Heidi Wilcox:
All right.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
… and sort of making the best of that has been really a blessing for me.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. I love that because I love hearing you find loveliness in the midst of this time that isn’t always so lovely.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. It’s also really funny because in all my talk about hospitality to strangers, this is hospitality with my most immediate family members, but that has been a real help for me, otherwise it would be quite lonely.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah.

Heidi Wilcox:
Well, Dr. Pohl, again, thank you so very much. As our listeners know at the beginning of the show when I do your intro, this is the first of a two part series. The next time we’re together, we’ll be talking about your book, “Living Into Community” and some different aspects of that and I’m really looking forward to that as well.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, thank you so much, Heidi. It’s been really good to be together.

Heidi Wilcox:
It has been. It has been, even virtually. It’s been great.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right.

Heidi Wilcox:
Well, thank you.

Dr. Christine Pohl:
All right. Take care.

Heidi Wilcox:
Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation on hospitality with Dr. Christine Pohl. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did and that you’ll tune in again next time to hear us talk about community and healthy community and practices that are essential to maintain that health within community.

Heidi Wilcox:
As always, you can follow us in all the places, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @AsburySeminary. Until next time, have a great day y’all and go do something that helps you thrive.