HOSPITALITY AFTER COVID: A MONASTIC WAY FORWARD
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Having lived under various states of lockdown for the last months, I am aware that we have been here before and, unfortunately, we will be here again. COVID is just the latest pandemic, but in our lifetime alone we have already seen SARS, AIDS, Polio, Ebola, Swine Flu, and more. While we are all eager to begin embracing the return to “normalcy” that this phase of the COVID pandemic allows, it is also important to remember that we have been here before, and we will be here again.
I believe that the most significant thing we will be facing in the years to come—yes, the years to come—is a crisis of grief. You may have seen Allison Gilbert’s opinion piece recently in The New York Times, “The Grief Crisis is Coming.” (1) In it, Gilbert estimates that for every death from COVID, nine people are bereaved. We have just passed the 600,000 mark here in the US and are nearing the 26,000 mark in Canada. It is estimated that over 175 million individuals worldwide have contracted the virus and more than 3.8 million have died. (2)
Based on Gilbert’s estimate—that for every death, there are 9 people grieving—that amounts to an enormous amount of grief. Yet her estimate considers only immediate family members. If extended family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers are included in the calculation, the number becomes astronomical. The toll is made even starker when you realize that at least 37,000 children in the United States alone have lost at least one parent to COVID. The grief these children carry will impact not only their mental and emotional health, but also their education, and that will have a ripple effect on their jobs, housing, and income for the rest of their lives.
Even this dismal summary considers only the grief caused by death. Beyond bereavement, the emotional toll of the past fifteen months is incalculable. Think of the grandparents who have missed out on over a year of their grandchildren’s lives; of the children whose educations will be marked, and indeed marred, for the rest of their lives; of the countless people who live alone and who have not been hugged in over a year; of those who have recovered from the virus, but who now live with Post-COVID Syndrome; of the people who have lost their employment, health insurance, secure housing. Think also of the emotional strain we have all been under, even under the best of circumstances – as individuals, households, and communities. As we inch back toward “normal,” we must acknowledge that the intense emotional and mental health impact of COVID will last for decades.
I’ve been thinking and praying about all of this with my brothers in The Society of John the Evangelist as we ponder the next steps for our community. While we are not yet at the point where we can safely open our Chapel or Guesthouse doors to guests, we are preparing for what we will face when we do. We recognize that literally everyone who comes through our doors—indeed everyone with whom we come into contact in the next years—will be grieving, and we will need to make space for that. Moving ahead, the ministry of hospitality will be about making a safe and welcoming space for grief.
I want to share a few insights from my own monastic heritage, which I hope might inform this new calling of hospitality as we cope together with what has passed, and what will come again. I hope this monastic way forward will be helpful to others in the Church as we find our way into what is next.
Let me begin with the monastic vision of hospitality offered in the SSJE Rule of Life, the shared document that expresses our vision of our calling and how we live together. On hospitality, our Rule teaches: [just] as we enrich our guests’ lives, so they enrich ours. We welcome men and women of every race and culture, rejoicing in the breadth and diversity of human experience that they bring to us. Their lives enlarge our vision of God’s world. The stories of their sufferings and achievements and their experience of God stir and challenge us. If we are attentive, each guest will be a word and gift of God to us. (3)
This last phrase is perhaps the most significant for a consideration of post-pandemic hospitality. In order to open a space for grief, and to welcome each guest as a word and gift of God to us, whose stories of their sufferings…[will] stir and challenge us, we will need first to make a space for our own grief. When we can do that, others will see in us an authenticity which allows them to be vulnerable in return. A willingness to be honest about our own grief will make it possible for others to share their grief with us. So, it may be that right now, wherever we are in the process of reopening, we are being invited to take time to pray, and even befriend, our own grief.
Part of praying our grief is being friends with death. Saint Benedict instructs us to live in fear of judgement day and have a great horror of hell. Yearn for everlasting life with holy desire. Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die … And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy. (4) As Christians, it is our relationship with death that allows us to sit with grief. Modeling this relationship with death is, perhaps, one of the great gifts that monastics have to offer the Church. Our Rule reminds us brothers:
We are called to remember our mortality day by day with unflinching realism, shaking off the sleep of denial. Paradoxically, only those who remember that they are but dust, and to dust they shall return, are capable of accepting the presence of eternal life in each passing moment and receiving ever fresh the good news of hope. The anticipation of death is essential if we are to live each day to the full as a precious gift, and rise to the urgency of our vocation as stewards who will be called to give account at Christ’s coming. Remembering that death can come to us at any time will spur us to be prepared, by continual renewal of our repentance and acceptance of the forgiveness of God, to meet Christ without warning. We shall remember to express to one another those things that would make us ready to part without regrets, especially thankfulness and reconciliation.
Week by week we are to accept every experience that requires us to let go as an opportunity for Christ to bring us through death into life. Hardships, renunciations, losses, bereavements, frustrations, and risks are all ways in which death is at work in advance preparing us for the self-surrender of bodily death. Through them we practice the final letting go of dying, so that it will be less strange and terrifying to us. (5)
The gift of being friends with death is only made possible because our lives are rooted in baptismal hope. In Baptism, we all have died with Christ and been raised with him. This is true for all Christian, not just for monastics, though monastics are perhaps called to embrace this aspect of our Christian vocation in a unique way. We can sit with death because our lives are rooted in hope.
A life of hope accepts the paradoxical reality of the promise of resurrection life without denying the cruelty of death, for we believe that the One who is resurrection and life is the same as the one who wept at the tomb of his friend. (6) Grief and hope are not in opposition. They are companions. This paradox will be a mark of sacred hospitality in the years to come. Our churches, parishes, retreat centers, and monasteries need to be places of hope and grief: firmly grounded by the reality of death, faithfully pointing to the hope of resurrection.
It is the power of hope—rooted not in wishful thinking, but in the reality of Christ crucified, dead, buried, and risen—that is the core of our faith. This hope will calm our fears, comfort our grief, and reveal to us the risen, yet still wounded Christ, who speaks to us the resurrection greeting: Peace. (7)
The work of grieving hospitality will change us, even radicalize us. We will not be able simply to return to doing things the way they have always been done. If we did, we would lose an opportunity to meet the Risen Christ who always travels ahead of us, and not behind us.
So, what might hospitality look like after COVID? It will be shaped by—and need to respond to—grief, loss, trauma, and dislocation. It will have the power to change, convert, and challenge us in ways we cannot now even begin to imagine. It will be rooted in hope and prayer. It will befriend death. And through it, we will continue to meet the Risen Christ, present in all who come to us, bringing us his promised “Peace.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/opinion/covid-death-grief.html?searchResultPosition=1 downloaded 19 April 2021.
All data taken from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu as of 15 June 2021.
SSJE, Rule of Life, Hospitality, chapter 34, page 69
Rule of St. Benedict, The Tools for Good Works, chapter 4: 44 – 47, 74
SSJE, Rule, Holy Death, chapter 48, page 96 - 97
See the story of the Raising of Lazarus, John 11
Luke 24:36, John 20:19, John 20:21, John 20:26
