To Love What is Mortal

“To live in this world 

 

you must be able 

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it 

 

against your bones knowing

your own life’s journey depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.” –Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

 

Oh girl, that feeling of safety you prize 

Well, it comes at a hard hard price 

You can't shut off the risk and the pain 

Without losin' the love that remains 

We're all riders on this train—Bruce Springsteen, “Human Touch”

 

“Daily washed the feet of poor people” from the Profile of Saint Oswald of Worcester, Feast Day, February 29 (the day of his death in 992).

 

“Ain’t nobody got no business mistreating nobody.” –Diane B., guest at Manna House

 

Hospitality draws us close to serve other people in their vulnerability, their woundedness, even their death. Guests come with needs, some of them physical, which are relatively easy to address. A shower and some clothes, a haircut, “socks and hygiene,” a cup of hot coffee; none of those are all that hard to share. It is the emotional and spiritual needs that require more. To listen or have a conversation with a person who has lost their place to live and have lost work, or sobriety, or family, or friends, or their minds, that takes empathy, compassion, patience, and in all of that, love. 

 

To practice hospitality with love requires being close, in the same space with those who come. Hospitality means smelling sour breathe, body odor, rotting flesh, shit. Death hangs over hospitality. People on the streets and people in poverty die younger than the general population. One study found the mortality rate for unhoused Americans more than tripled in the past ten 10 years. Another study notes that the average life span of a homeless person is about 17.5 years shorter than the general population. 

 

I doubt Mary Oliver was thinking about hospitality with people on the streets when she wrote that our own life’s journey depends upon our capacity “To love what is mortal” and “hold it against your bones.” And I’m sure Bruce Springsteen was not thinking about hospitality when he wrote, “You can't shut off the risk and the pain, Without losin' the love that remains.” But they both get at something fundamental about love and the practice of love in hospitality. In both we join with others in the shared human condition in which fragility, vulnerability, woundedness, and death are unavoidable. And to recoil from this human condition is to also recoil from love. That is the pathos and the promise inherent to human love. There is no love without risk, and finally without loss. But there is also no human life worth living without love.

 

This love is at the heart of being a disciple of Jesus. To keep practicing love knowing vulnerability and death is how we practice resurrection. We love, we practice hospitality, by getting close to people and allowing them to get close to us, physically, emotionally, spiritually. St. Oswald, whose Feast Day of February 29^th was celebrated Thursday morning at Manna House, understood that a Christian faith that does not touch and is not touched by those who are hurting, abandons Christ who both touched the hurting and was crucified. Thus, St. Oswald, “Daily washed the feet of poor people.”

 

To practice resurrection is to live the loving conviction that every person is created in the image of God and deserves respect and recognition. As a guest put it this morning at Manna House, “Ain’t nobody got no business mistreating nobody.” Our business in offering hospitality is overturning mistreatment, overturning death with affirmation of life and love, holding people close, holding the love that remains, knowing we’re all on the same train.