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Hospitality: “the act and practice of being hospitable; the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors or strangers; liberality and goodwill” (Oxford English Dictionary). The etymological root of the word hospitality is the Latin hospes, meaning guest, host and stranger.

“Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” Hebrews 13,2

 

The Giftbearers
YOU
extraordinary ones
stretching deep off script
along subterranean routes
of duress and hope
traded across continents
as things of slab flesh
then tossed away
by someothers’ soiled hands
onto somewhere’s stony shores
arrive still breathful
bearing beautiful dreams
bearing bones
bearing gifts
beyond price.
WE
can only guess

 

Day time. Maria Skobtsova House, Calais*. The front door bell rings, an unsettling sound, always, like the clock that chimes thirteen.

“In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” quickening towards the door with those thirteen quietening syllables, tracing the sign of the cross.

“Welcome back, Robbel, I am so happy you are safe.” An embrace. Such cold small ears. Winter's chill is still in the air.

Or a request: “I'm so tired can I sleep the night?”

Of course, welcome.

Or one hand clutching a head wound, the other a discharge paper from the hospital.

Yes come in.

Or four people asking for a shower: “I’m sorry, we cannot offer showers today, the house is too full.”

The pain of saying “No” feels like an act of violence.

Adonay, Josef and Haile are at the door. They’ve come to spend the night after their friend Samuel, just a month in Calais, has been killed, hit by a car as he jumped from a lorry. Tomorrow, to the mortuary in Lille to pay respects to Samuel’s body.
Massawa presses the doorbell. He’s come to shower and have his clothes washed before visiting Teodros, his friend in hospital who is now paralysed from the neck down after being shot by a people smuggler.

“Welcome Massawa.”

Tomorrow he will see the words above his friend’s bed: “Teodros, everything happens for your own good”.

 

Boundaries: “A boundary is a line drawn that defines and establishes identity. All within the circumscription of that line makes up a whole, an entity. Neither good nor bad in its own right, a boundary determines something that can be pointed to and named: a person, a family, a geographical region, a city, a town, a nation, a parish church, a denomination, a faith. A boundary provides essential limits, for what is not limited, bounded, merges with its context and ceases to exist in its own particular way” (Canon Caroline A. Westerhoff).

But who do we allow to cross these boundaries, to enter our countries, enter our homes, enter our personal space?

 

Night time, probing the darkness under the pine trees. The moon has yet to rise. Emerging from the trees, the path towards the bridge under which ninety or so Eritrean refugees spend the night becomes clearer, foot-flattened earth through black grasses. The thunder-drum of lorries powering along the artery road from the port creates a pervasive sound wall.

“Salam, welcome.”

Issac beckons. “It’s draar, dinner time, eat with us.” We gather, ten of us, cross-legged in a circle in the low space just beneath the undersurface of the road bridge. A container with rice and beans is placed in the middle, spoons are passed around. First we pray and then eat. Isaac smiles.

“Yes life is hard, but it can be good, like now, and everyone smiles. We can smile because we know everything passes.”

“Bruq leyti, goodnight.”

There are many hands to shake. The way back is clear. Yarrow, the last of summer’s flowers, is caught in the moonlight.

 

*Maria Skobtsova Catholic Worker House, Calais: ‘Our mission is to be prayerfully present with and amongst the refugees, migrants and poor; and to build with them a community of hospitality’.

 

Well, this wasn’t something my arithmetic teachers would have seen coming. Marian spending a full-on day at an ethical finance conference making head AND tail of what ‘money’ people do. But of course, what I understood at this top-level conference in Edinburgh was not the numbers but the morality that was discussed.

 

I’ve spent a lifetime believing that anyone in a sharp suit selling investment products must be in league with dark forces. I got it wrong. Of course there are individuals and companies willing to sell a pig in a poke to an old age pensioner or deal in the kind of debt juggling that led to the 2008 financial apocalypse. We are still permanently perched on the brink of the financial abyss.

 

But the number of earnest and honest who attended this ethical finance conference was high enough to convince even the most sceptical that there is a sea change in the finance industry.

 

Justice and Peace Scotland believes in the stewardship of the planet, and that includes dealing with climate change, the arms trade, and human rights. There was a lot of talk about SDGs – the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, which are Justice and Peace territory.  Throwing those initials around is all well and good, but I wondered how many of the delegates were really aware of those goals in relation to financial investment. I decided to put people to the test if I was given the opportunity.

 

I almost regretted that decision during the coffee/networking break when a scientist-come-AI specialist-come-investment expert responded with an avalanche of convincing evidence that his job entailed grilling every company seeking investment on every SDG. Any company failing stringent tests would not be included in investment portfolios. No sneaky box-ticking could get them through.

 

During our lunch/networking break, I spoke with a young man about his organisation’s methods. He’d set up his own company. He was smooth, smart and charming - but my goodness, forget stereotyping. He knew his SDGs inside out. I threw numbers at him (SDGs 4 and 5) and he came back at me - quality education and gender equality - before my question was formulated.

 

There were panellists who understood that those living in poverty in developing countries need access to affordable financial products that will pay for a wedding or a funeral; experts who explained the complications of moving from a fossil fuel economy to sustainable energy.

 

It’s all complicated - but the message was that it’s do-able, and that ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’, ‘sustainability’ are not just blah-blah words but ones that a large enough swathe of this industry abides by.

 

This was an interfaith conference, initiated by the Muslim and Church of Scotland communities and supported by the Jewish and Christian faiths. It was multi-national. It suggested strongly that finance can be truly ethical. But as investors (and that includes us all, not just those with millions), we have to ask for the ethical option, or we are still in danger of falling off the cliff.

This year we have had several new arrivals in our parish in Lochgilphead, Argyll and the Isles. It’s always lovely to see (and hear!) new babies at St Margaret’s.

New life: such promise for the future.

 

And yet by the time this current crop of babies reaches the age of eleven, this planet may be at a dangerous tipping point that curtails their adult lives. If we don’t act on climate change, there may be no future that can sustain humanity.

 

Catholic Social Teaching says we’re stewards of this earth. For much of this century, we’ve been warned we have to care for it more effectively. One stumbling block (leaving aside flat-earthers who deny all evidence of climate change) that has prevented us from steaming ahead with all possible mechanisms to alter this frightening trajectory is the naming of years as goals.

 

We were told we had to reverse the rise in temperature by 2050. We had just moved into a new millennium - 2050 was light years away. So we continued with our fossil fuels and our exhaust fumes and our increasing herds of cattle to feed people whose traditional diets had never ever included burgers and steaks. The clouds of methane wreathing the altars of the god of fast food have drastically increased the risks to the very existence of the earth.

 

Now, almost 20 years on and with so little progress made (think of all those toddlers suffering from asthma in UK cities; whole populations wearing face masks to go about their daily grind in Tokyo and Beijing), we are told that we really, really have to do something by 2030.

 

And still that seems a way off. We can talk about it a bit longer; procrastinate some more.

 

Well, no we can’t. Unless, of course, we think the lives of those babies born this year count for nothing. That it’s OK when they are eleven years old for this world to have reached the tipping point denying them the fun of their teenage years, the joy of marriage, the wonder of becoming parents themselves, of growing old and having the pleasure of walking in forests, by lakes, cruising on seas, visiting historic cities.

 

The day the scientific reports came out naming 2030 as Doomsday, I saw a Facebook post questioning whether there should be a wind farm on nearby hills. Bring it on, I replied. If our parish’s babies – the babies in your family, your parish - are to have a future, the time for nimbyism is over. Pope Francis laid it out in Laudato Si: ‘Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.’ And he warned ‘Those who will have to suffer the consequences…will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility.’

 

Do we want this on our consciences? Pope Francis said – in June 2015 – that we have to hear the cry of the poor. Three years on, we have to hear the cries of our own babies, too. Speak out. Act. Pray. We made this mess. Let’s make sure our leaders (and we as individuals) sort it.