I recently read Sigrid Undset’s beautiful novel “Kristan Lavransdatter,” a tale of desire and regret set in medieval Norway. Undset has been rightly praised for the meticulous historical scholarship that informed the novel, offering us an authentic glimpse into the life of 14th-century Scandinavian culture.

One feature of that culture that stood out to me was the emphasis on hospitality and gift-giving. The novel’s protagonist, Kristan, lives in a manor, but she’s always careful to show a generous hand to visitors, whether high- or low- born, who come to the estate. Beggars and knights alike can always expect a feast and a comfortable bed in her house, and the goodwill is often sealed at parting through gift-giving.

In this way, she lives out an ancient injunction, so well-known and venerated that it’s written not on paper but in memories and traditions, the cultural blood of the people: to be hospitable to guests. The duty of hospitality has roots in the classical world (the Greek term for it was “xenia”), and it continued to branch and blossom in the Christian era. The relationship between guests and hosts forms a kind of anointed bond, a sacred compact that lies at the heart of our culture. This relationship is one of the basic relationships that makes civilization possible.

An absence of hospitality is both a sign and cause of barbarism. In those parts of the world where one cannot safely knock on a stranger’s door for fear of being robbed, mugged, or kidnapped, men are living more like animals than human beings. In times past, the peddler wandering through a rough country where he dared not stop for fear of brigands was in the wild, not in a civilized place.

Civilization requires graciousness, generosity, and manners. It requires the opening of hearts and homes, the exchange of goods and goodwill, between members of the community. It is this kind of interchange that links household to household, so that we grow beyond isolated families living in private refuges in a wild country. The opening of a home to one another signifies mutual trust and respect, the emergence of communal bonds that make a group of people into a true society instead of a collection of atomized and self-oriented individuals. Where a man can hope to find some refuge with others, where he can hope that a plate and a little food has been set aside for the unexpected visitor, there the light of culture has begun to burn in the darkness. There, something has begun curbing the chaos and barbarism into which humanity so naturally sinks.

Homer dramatizes this truth extensively in “The Odyssey,” which is largely a poem about hospitality. At the beginning, Homer provides an example of the hospitable Phaeacians, who welcome the stranger Odysseus, washed up on their shores. In accordance with the laws of hospitality, they provide clothes, shelter, banquets, music, and athletic games for him, despite knowing little about him. This is a civilized people.

By contrast, when, earlier in his journey, Odysseus stumbles upon the island of the Cyclops, he meets quite a different reception, as his “host” turns out to be a bloodthirsty monster who seeks to imprison and devour Odysseus and his men. The various cyclopes on the island all live separately, individualistically. There is no community, no generosity, no hospitality, and no manners. The cyclopes’ one-dimensional, egotistical, and individualistic perspective is symbolized by their single, staring eye. This is barbarism.

Fewer strangers wander our roads today or wash up on our beaches looking for shelter. When they do, we have hotels and Airbnbs in which they can rest. What was once a face-to-face relationship between families, a welcoming into someone’s hearth and home, has become a commercial enterprise executed by faceless corporations for travelers who are on set schedules. But that doesn’t mean hospitality doesn’t matter anymore; it just takes a different form.

We can still open our homes to others, particularly our neighbors, and in that way rebuild human connections in this increasingly atomized and anonymous age. Because hospitality requires sacrifice, it shows genuine friendship and love, particularly when we make it on behalf of someone that, maybe, we aren’t naturally drawn to. As Carmel Richardson writes in Volume 2 of “Hearth & Field” magazine, “This is true hospitality: not bread broken for the one who is already loved, but a free gift, even for the one who seems least worthy.” Our reward is the joy of giving and the deepening of relationships, sometimes most unexpected ones.

The duty of hospitality is even more urgent for Christians. Who among us can forget that when God Himself came calling and was turned out into the cold, forced to spend His first night on earth in a cave among animals? By our little efforts at hospitality, perhaps we can atone a little for that gigantic injustice, the inhospitality of the cosmos when its Creator wished to be its guest.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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