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Satiated with consumerism, technological gizmos, and frenetic activity, people of all stripes are exploring the mystical realm. We
all resonate with moments of elevated wonder triggered by a beautiful sunset, rapturous music, or the birth of a baby. In a depersonalized age, image bearers are searching for relationship with something or Someone larger than themselves that will ease
the dullness of daily life and energize the soul. Christians, in particular, hunger for more intimate experience of Jesus Christ and
greater awareness of the Spirit’s ministry within.

From where inside are you reading these words right now? If you are reading from your thinking mind alone, then what you
see will be run through the sieve of your mind’s refl ective categories and conditioning. What you see will also be affected by the
mind’s “ego coating,” its often unconscious way of skewing the words’ meanings to fi t its protective desire for the familiar and
the securing.

Thomas Aquinas is a man of mystery. Born into a wealthy, powerful family he chose the simple life of a poor friar. He was a large lumbering man whose classmates labeled “the dumb ox.” Yet he proved himself quick of wit and the possessor of a brilliance so rare that his voice has been heard “bellowing across the ages.”

Knowledge—not faith, mere true belief, or one’s tradition—is what gives people the right to act and teach responsibly and with authority. We give dentists, not accountants, the right to fix our teeth because we take them to have the relevant knowledge. We receive the ideas of Willard, Foster, and Nouwen because we take them to know what they are talking about. When contributors to this journal share their spiritual experiences, we readers take them to know at least what their experiences actually were. Without such an assumption, we would have no confidence in their descriptions of their own
experiences. Imagine a writer saying that he did not know what his own experience of forgiveness
was like, but he was going to describe it to us anyway!

Hospitality has fallen into hard times these days. Worse yet, the commercial world has picked up the word and used it for its own ends—such as the phrase “hospitality industry,” which refers primarily to hotels and convention centers. There’s nothing wrong with commerce—that is, we need thriving businesses for our economic growth. But Christian hospitality goes a bit deeper than making money off of people you don’t know and never will see again. To me, this is an abomination of the word’s meaning, far too shallow to capture the ancient biblical vision. I would like Christians to reclaim the word for what we do in our homes and churches.

Friday. The small square on the calendar is empty. No appointments. No job site meeting with my client and the architect. No phone calls to make. No need to leave the house. Empty square days are the days when I can sit in the black leather armchair in the living room for as long as it seems good. These are not ordinary days when my time is cut short by the note in the appointment calendar.

My place of prayer is in this room. My prayers meander and wander prompted by the view out the window, the reading of Scripture, and the reproduction of Rublev’s icon of the Old Testament Trinity painted by my friend, Dan Cassis.

One cannot think of Andrei Rublev, the Orthodox monk who at the turn of the fifteenth century produced this icon near Muscovy, the precursor to modern-day Moscow, without also thinking of his spiritual abba and mentor Sergius of Radonezh. Their stories are as entwined as that of a boy and his father.

With this in mind, a particular event from Sergius’s childhood is worth recounting. Sergius was a good and earnest student, yet he struggled to read, says his hagiography. But one momentous day a starets, a spiritual elder, visited him and gave him holy bread. From this day on Sergius could read. Christians soon adopted the belief that this visitor was, in fact, an angel. It is not difficult to see possible linkages between this event in Sergius’s life and the icon Rublev created decades later. Notice the Trinity is presented as three angels (the text that informs this image, Genesis 18:2, refers only to “three men”), offering us holy bread.

Ok, I admit it. I am not very good at welcoming strangers. I am sure this is due, in part, to my introverted nature and the fact that my relational world is already very full. Truth be told, on most days I just don’t feel the need for more relationships and would rather stick with the intimate few. The other part of the truth is that some strangers are, well, stranger than others, which make things just plain uncomfortable. And since I am being completely honest—I seem to have the ability to walk into a room and sense immediately who is the strangest of them all so I can then expend vast amounts of energy avoiding the whole situation. I am not proud of this; I’m just sayin’…

During each Christmas season, God assigns me a role in the nativity scene so I can focus on something besides painful memories that can derail me at the holidays. A couple of years ago, God assigned me the role of the innkeeper. In that innkeeper role, I became the midwife for Jesus’s birth—and also a midwife for people who are experiencing their own rebirth at the manger. I felt this role as a profound calling and I was grateful for this compassionate gift from God. But God, in infinite wisdom, had more in store for me that Christmas.

When I was in a time of crisis, Andy and Phyllis opened their home to my infant son and me. Andy is my long-time supervisor at work, and he and Phyllis have taken in so many people in various transitions that we joke that it is a rite of passage to live in their home for a while.

Andy and Phyllis taught me a lot about hospitality in the easy way they hosted me. They have a room always at the ready. The house itself is comfortable and uncluttered. You never feel in the way in the shared living spaces, and at the same time privacy was readily available. Their teenage son, David, babysat for my son and was nonchalant when the baby threw up all over him. David, too, was offering hospitality.