It’s 5 in the morning and my house is quiet, but the world is noisy. Here in the US we are preparing for Thanksgiving, and against the bright backdrop of what we think the holiday is all about. ought Being (happy families gathered around abundant tables) is the sometimes miserable quality of our ordinary lives: burnt sauce, arguing siblings, and empty chairs. Fox News or MSNBC plays over and over in the background at Grandma’s house, and anxiety simmers on the second burner on the stove.
We prepare our tables and imagine where everyone will sit. Can Uncle Bill, who loves to talk about Trump 2024, sit next to Sara from Seattle? Can they reach the pumpkin pie? We check how much last-minute tickets to Honolulu cost and stop to reflect on the bears, a little jealous of how hibernation helps them survive long, harsh winters.
We want to gather, to welcome, to bless, but we are afraid. “We Christians often have no idea how to open our hearts and our homes to include the people who need to be there,” Rosaria Butterfield says in her book. The gospel comes with a house key. “We love the miraculous stories of Jesus, his feeding of the five thousand, his divine healing, his contagious grace. And we overlook the most obvious things about these stories: that we must replicate them in ordinary, non-miraculous ways.”
Ten years ago, an Egyptian Muslim woman named Heba helped me (a white American Christian) rediscover how to practice the spiritual discipline of hospitality, especially when our differences make it difficult.
I met Heba in a park. She was with her two daughters and was looking for a friend. I was also there with my two daughters, but I was simply looking to pass the hours between nap and bedtime with as little disturbance as possible.
She thought I seemed kind, a perception that strikes me as the first miracle of our friendship, given the beleaguered state of my heart and mind at that stage of my life. It took her three attempts at striking up a conversation before I finally reciprocated, and within minutes, she invited me over to her house for tea. That I said yes to a stranger’s invitation is the second miracle of our friendship.
Heba and I live in Midland, Texas, in the heart of the United States oil and gas industry, which attracts many multinational companies to a relatively isolated region of our country. These companies move global employees in and out of our community. Five hours from cities like Dallas, San Antonio or Austin, the Permian Basin can be a tough and lonely job for expats, foreigners who work temporarily outside their home countries.
It’s especially difficult for spouses, usually women, who are often stuck in a small apartment in a strange city, with little to do and no friends. For example, when Heba and I met, she had to drive at least five hours to get to a good Arabic grocery store with halal meat, and the local international food scene was dominated by taco trucks and Chinese takeout. .
Like Heba, I moved to Midland from abroad—from Beijing, China, where my husband and I had lived for almost four years. I remembered from my stay abroad how lonely it could be to wake up on December 25 in a country where Christmas was just another day, and I knew the “left behind spouses“In Midland we were more isolated than ever. So Heba and I began hosting dinner parties in our homes, inviting Native American women interested in making friends from other places and expat women whom Heba had brought into her fold.
Our dinner parties quickly expanded from two people to three or ten, and when we outgrew our houses, we formed an international women’s group called Basin Bridges and began meeting in a church fellowship hall. Open to all, our group has grown over the years to include more than 500 women representing at least five different religious traditions, nearly 20 countries, and even more languages.
Our monthly meetings have always centered around a shared table and conversation. Most months, it’s just coffee and snacks from the grocery store, but once a year, we host a global Friendsgiving potluck, where we each bring our families and a traditional meal from our home culture. to share, bringing as many chairs closer to the table as necessary. . Last year, our group was almost 70.
Ask anyone who regularly attends our meetings and they will tell you that being part of a group with the sole purpose of fostering friendship between people of different cultural and religious backgrounds has profoundly changed the lens through which they see the world. There are no longer faceless conflicts. This group has altered my natural propensity (prompted by so many headlines and pundits) to categorize everyone and everything into neat categories of “us” and “them.” Everything is both more complicated and much simpler.
When Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli civilians last month, our group discussed what each of us knew about regional history. We learned from each other how incomplete our perspectives were, shaped by children’s history classes in Cairo and Carrollton. Together, we grieved the violence inflicted by Hamas on ordinary Israeli families, and when the war in Gaza began, I held my breath alongside Heba as she waited more than three weeks for news of some of her friends trapped in the region.
When Russia bombed a Ukrainian nuclear power plant Last year, our group heard from a Ukrainian woman who longed for a place she would never be able to visit again. She told us what Zaporizhzhia had been like before the war, about summer walks through leafy, tree-lined streets to cafes hidden in old European buildings.
Friends from Myanmar share news of aunts and uncles who fled to the jungle to escape government-led bombings. Friends from Venezuela tell us how their families in their country of origin manage to stretch their salary to cover a month’s worth of food. Last month, an Iranian Christian told our group that she had fled Iran due to religious persecution, and a Malay Muslim woman wearing a hijab was one of the first to express her furious grief for those who use religion (in in this case, their own religion). to coerce, control and consolidate power.
These conversations They are not always easy, but after sharing many tables together, our conversations are based more on curiosity than contempt. Every time we come together, we are reminded again that what we have in common is far greater than what separates us. After all, you can’t see someone as completely “other” when he teaches you how to make his grandmother’s dumplings.
And in a global context of algorithms, clickbait, and outrage porn that pushes each of us into our respective echo chambers, relationships that cross cultural and religious lines provide a useful path back to temperance. My friendship with Heba and Basin Bridges in general has become an organic program of deradicalization, a life jacket in turbulent seas.
Gather, part, bless, go out: this is sacramental life. As Christians, it is what we do when we take communion. We met; we break bread, remembering the sacrifice of Christ; we take it, receiving the blessing of its promise to be our ever-present help in times of trouble; and we go out to love and serve the world.
It is the same pattern that is repeated in Jesus’ miracle of feeding the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21). He gathered what the people had to offer, broke the bread, blessed the flour of five loaves and two fish to be abundantly more than anyone could ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20), then sent the people out with transformed lives. .
Although our international women’s group meetings are not centered on a shared faith tradition, they follow this same sacramental pattern. We meet, break bread, ask questions and listen to each other (which is, of course, a way of blessing each other), then we go out to our ordinary, non-miraculous lives, better equipped to live as ordinary peacemakers and not miraculous. .
The truth is that sometimes it is easier to love a culturally distant stranger than it is to love those we have been with our entire lives. Sometimes our families include dangerous people for whom the rules of engagement must necessarily differ. But most people are simply difficult, and our very familiarity, as the saying goes, makes it even more tempting to fall into contempt.
This week, as we gather at our Thanksgiving tables, let us accept the holy invitation to practice more purposeful hospitality. May we ask questions instead of making assumptions and try to listen more than we seek to be heard. May we see each person around our table as a bearer of the holy image they long for, to borrow the message of writer David Brooks words, “let another person look them in the face with love and acceptance.” Let us remember, as Butterfield says, that “we belong to each other, and although we have just realized it, we always have been.”
Even when it is difficult to gather and break bread together, practicing hospitality is a habit that the Bible elevates as a spiritual discipline (Romans 12:13). It is a two-way transformation, reconnecting the hearts and minds of both the giver and the receiver. They are the ingredients of an ordinary miracle.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas-based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlanticand Texas Monthly Magazine.
