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Charlotte's Theory

July 6, 2010

By the Rev. Matthew Heyd

New York magazine recently ran a story about the opening of a new high-end restaurant in Manhattan, the kind where it will be impossible to get a reservation and most of us couldn’t afford the bill even if we could get in. The article depicted a fascinating scene where the well-known restaurateur’s office was covered with a thousand choices of songs to play as background music for different times of day and each season of the year.

I find this story really compelling because it offers a clear example of how important details can be for hospitality. In a great restaurant, we feel welcome before our food arrives or before we even sit down. The restaurateur in the article knew that music was a critical part of his guests’ experience — and that his careful attention might spark spontaneous conversations and connections.

Shouldn’t Christian community express that same level of thoughtfulness about welcome? Why should first-class hospitality be reserved only for those who can afford expensive bottles of wine and the catch of the day?

Trinity folks have been talking about hospitality lately. Last fall we started a Brown
Bag Lunch ministry. We pack crackers, tins of tuna, and water in brown school lunch bags in the middle of our coffee hour every Sunday morning and serve about 100 people,
twice a week, from the front doors of Trinity Church. (We got the idea from Christ & St. Stephen’s Church here in New York, which has sponsored a similar ministry for a quarter century.) Our guests are homeless people from the neighborhood but also maintenance workers, students from a local high school, street vendors who set up along Broadway. They eat alongside Wall Street businesspeople and tourists and pilgrims from all over the world.

They are all people in need — but what they need is fellowship as well as food. Our conversations together have become as important as our tuna salad. Over the last several years, Trinity has re-imagined our “faith in action” ministries — including our grantmaking — as spiritual practice. We seek to live our faith as a way of life in diverse community. No practice is described more centrally in scripture and tradition than the practice of hospitality. From Abraham’s welcome of weary travelers in Genesis through Jesus’ radical invitation to sinners and tax collectors to share a table with him in the Gospels, hospitality reflects recognition of God’s presence in our neighbors’ faces and stories. The New Testament uses the Greek word philoxenia for hospitality, which means love of stranger. My late seminary professor Letty Russell defined hospitality as the “practice of God’s welcome, embodied in our actions as we reach across difference to participate with God in bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.”

Practicing God’s welcome requires at least the same level of attention to detail as opening a new restaurant. Building on the Brown Bag Lunch, we are in the middle of creating a community center in long-unused storefront space that will welcome the whole Lower Manhattan community.

It will be named for a long-standing parishioner whose financial bequest helps make the center possible. Like our lunch, “Charlotte’s Place” will welcome homeless people — and also businesspeople on their way home, students from the high school next door, workers rebuilding the World Trade Center, and anyone who loves art. Guests will be able to participate in a résumé writing class, listen to a performance by a jazz quartet, take part in a support group for domestic violence victims, or simply eat their lunch. Every part of the space and activity will be carefully chosen for the energy it can create with our guests — I have a friend who describes it as “sound, movement, and beauty.”

Charlotte’s Place will be defined by its ability to “reach across difference” and break down barriers. In a society that increasingly demands that we show our IDs before we can get in the door, this possibility for openness feels both difficult and exhilarating. The congregation and staff planning group have conducted dozens of interviews and site visits over the last year. We see intriguing programs that serve one particular group but find few that break down barriers to welcome all. The separation comes to seem natural. People outside Trinity sometimes say about the plans for Charlotte’s Place, “we love the idea of a place that supports workers in transition (or students/ homeless people/artists), but won’t it be tricky to also include students (or workers in transition/ homeless people/artists)?”

Our answer is, “yes!” Tricky doesn’t begin to describe it, actually. Bridging difference with hospitality will absolutely be challenging — in the same way living out the Gospel has always been difficult. But “love of stranger” embodies our calling as Christians. It makes us Church. Ensuring that Charlotte’s Place truly reflects God’s boundless love for us within our own hospitality has proven an enormously absorbing task. Care about all the details will offer the possibility of unexpected reconciliation and transformation. Spiritually, we might understand this balance as the ancient dance between discipline and grace. Both are required to practice Gospel hospitality.

And, while it will be challenging, offering hospitality as diverse community won’t be new for us. Several weeks ago, a Brown Bag Lunch volunteer described a situation that occurred in the last moments of a Tuesday lunch. We had just one bag left, and a regular guest walked up to claim it. As soon as he did an older woman whom we’d never met also arrived to ask for a lunch. Our “regular” turned around and handed his bag — the last one — to the woman, who was a stranger. She then saw that he had no lunch, and opened the bag and shared it with him. It was an unexpected moment made possible by the details of Sunday morning packing, setting up tables and tents, and organizing hundreds of brown lunch bags. We haven’t picked out our music for Charlotte’s Place yet, but this kind of hospitality is the kind of music we want to play, every day and all year.

The Rev. Matthew Heyd is director of Faith in Action for Trinity Wall Street.