hospitality is resistance.

in what is turning out to be one of my new favorite books, making room: recovering hospitality as a christian tradition, christine pohl quotes from john calvin on hospitality:

we should not regard what a man is and what he deserves: but we should go higher - that it is God who has placed us in the world for such a purpose that we be united and joined together. he has impressed his image in us and has given us a common nature, which should incite us to providing one for the other. the man who wishes to exempt himself from providing for his neighbors should deface himself and declare that he no longer wishes to be a man, for as long as we are human creatures we must contemplate as in a mirror our face in those who are poor, despised, exhausted, who groan under their burdens ... if there come some Moor or barbarian, since he is a man, he brings a mirror in which we are able to contemplate that he is our brother and our neighbor: for we cannot abolish the order of nature which God has established as inviolable.