Being a Good Host to Children

Our neighbor Oscar enjoys our fountain.

With schools closed during the pandemic, parents and children are spending a lot more time together, and so I thought this entry from my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy, might be helpful.

Children carry a promise with them, a hidden treasure that has to be led into the open through education (e=out; ducere=to lead) in a hospitable home. It takes much time and patience to make the little stranger feel at home, and it is realistic to say that parents have to learn to love their children. –Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen, 56-57.

Both experience and science suggest that there is a parental inclination to nurture and protect offspring. But love is also a matter of choice. Parental love and especially maternal love is likely to want to hold on to the child; but it is the parent’s will that recognizes and values the child as an independent soul, not an extension of the parental self.

I truly wonder at my parents’ extraordinary ability in the midst of life’s demands and stresses to make my sister, brother, and me feel “at home,” as well as “to lead us out” into our own unique self-expressions. True, stereotypically, my father was more distant and my mother held on more tightly. And, like all people who love each other deeply, we wounded one another in various ways. Yet I am grateful for the comparatively safe environment my parents provided even as they worried about paying bills, the state of the world, as well as what we were up to. I don’t mean just safe from abandonment, neglect, or abuse. I mean also safe for us to cultivate identities, embrace values, and pursue goals different from their own.

With similar awe, I have watched my sister raise three sons, largely on her own, and serve as proud matriarch of an extended family that now includes three daughters-in-law and seven grandchildren—all while pursuing two different professions.

In my view, parenting is the most important task an adult may do, yet it is the one for which most receive the least training. To understand parenting as a spiritual movement, as Henri does in Reaching Out, is a beginning. He places it in the context of the movement from hostility to hospitality, transforming enemy (hostis) to guest (hospes), in this case, stranger to friend. Parents act as hosts and children as guests.

A host has not only the right but the responsibility to set the boundaries of a guest in the host’s home. We are not to welcome another with an “ambiguous presence,” Henri says. We are to be clear about who we are and what are our limits. At the same time, to be good hosts, we are to welcome the guest and the promise or gift inherent in every guest, encouraging the fulfillment of the promise they hold deep within themselves, enabling the development of the gifts every guest brings into the home. As such a movement toward hospitality, then, parenting is as delicate and vital and as fraught with danger as welcoming any guest into one’s home.

Just as we learn through experience to become good hosts in relation to other guests, we learn through experience to become good parents, uncles, and aunts. By the time I came along, I believe my parents were more experienced, relaxed, and secure in their avocation than when rearing my older siblings. And grandparents may be the most experienced of all, especially when they grasp that now their own guests, their children, are hosts in their own homes.

+Help me to be a good host to all children, welcoming their promise, encouraging their gifts, reminding them they are beloved by God.

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Copyright © 2002 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

The Trouble with Oscar

A friend had a very old cat named Oscar. At age 22, Oscar died. My friend chose to bury his ashes in his front yard and plant a maple tree on his resting place. A cat that he’d never seen before came by and respectfully watched while he dug the hole, spread Oscar’s ashes, and planted the tree in his memory. The cat then walked away. Moments later, neighbors who had just moved into the neighborhood walked by and asked, “Have you seen our cat, Oscar?”

Not long after I was out running and heard a cat crying loudly, hidden on the sidewalk behind a recently-emptied trash bin. It looked unwell or injured.  I was headed home to shower and get dressed for work at a church I served as interim pastor. I don’t have time for this, I thought, thinking of the story of the Good Samaritan in which the lay minister and the priest ignored a beaten up traveler on their way from Jericho to the Temple at Jerusalem.

My vacationing neighbors’ cat had recently bitten me when we played while checking his food, water, and litter box.  So I was hesitant to pick up an injured cat that might be defensive, especially since I was dressed only in running shorts and shoes.

Home was not far, so I ran there, cleaned up, and returned in my car with water, tuna fish (my closest approximation of cat food), and my dog’s pain medication, leftover from a previous need. At first I didn’t see the cat, his having moved from the sidewalk.  At that moment, a neighbor happened to come out of her house on her way to work, and I told her about the distressed cat just as we found it again on a driveway.  The cat did not seem responsive either to the water or the tuna.

Lisa, the neighbor, thought the owners were out of town, but it had always been a neighborhood cat, left behind by the previous owners of the house, and many of the neighbors provided him food and water. I went up to the front door and found a note that the residents were out of town, a note which included a cell phone number, so I phoned and left a message.

It so happened that Lisa was a cat lover, owned a cat-carrier, and we shared the same veterinarian group, Ansley Animal Clinic. She offered to drop him off on her way to work and let the owners know.  Relieved, I went off to work myself.

A few days later, running in the neighborhood again, I wanted to find Lisa and discover how things turned out. I couldn’t remember which house was hers. Serendipitously, she emerged from her house once more, and I was able to learn the cat’s fate. He had been extremely dehydrated, and the speculation was that he had fallen into the trash bin a few days before and liberated by the refuse collectors the day I found him.  The vet gave him an IV to rehydrate him, and later that day, the owners retrieved their recovered cat. A small neighborhood miracle! And to think, I had not wanted to get involved!

Intending to thank the vet during my dog’s next appointment, I asked Lisa what the cat’s name was. “Well,” she said, “His owners call him ---, but all the neighbors call him Oscar.” I was so astonished by the name “Oscar” I totally forgot the other name.

Goosebumps all around. Yet another Oscar!

I believe we all have such stories to tell. They may or may not fit neatly into our theologies, but they surprise us with grace in a seemingly ungracious world. Toward the end of his career as a 20^th century Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner famously wrote, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.”

According to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, “A mystic is someone who has the gnawing suspicion that just beneath the apparent contradictions, brokenness, and discord of this everyday world lies a hidden unity.”

I couldn’t obtain a photo of any of the Oscars in this post, so for fun I’ve included one of the Abercrombie cats generated by college students that made the rounds on the internet and Facebook. 

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.