As a country we are expecting 25,000 surprising Syrian guests, strangers, who will become Canadian citizens. There are all kinds of ways to respond to these guests but the tradition that I am part of first reminds me that I too was once a stranger. So before we do anything we need to recall a time when we were strangers, remember the feeling and how much it meant to be hospitably taken in and cared for well. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “In biblical tradition, the practice of encounter shows up most often as the practice of hospitality, or philoxema. Take the word apart and you get philo, from one of the four Greek words for love, and xenia, for stranger. Love of stranger, in other words, which is about as counterintuitive as you can get. For most of us, xenophobia—fear of stranger—comes much more naturally, but in that case scripture is unnatural.”
We are going to have a quieter Christmas this year and yet I am excited for Christmas and especially that it provides an opportunity to host surprising guests, maybe even new Syrian guests. I would like to imagine it to be like that great classic film, Babette’s Feast, where a remote Danish village is transformed around a table by the culinary hand of Babette who, in this case is the stranger come to visit.
If we "host suppers with surprising guest lists," says Taylor, perhaps we will "see past our own reflections in the mirror to the God we did not make up."