for shneevon, thank you for calling me this morning, brother. here's those quotes I was talking about, hope they help :) bolded some extra good parts
If homes are to have open doors and open windows, then homes must be sites of hospitality. Just as rest is founded in a sense of home as gift, so is hospitality—arising in grateful response to the gift—its own giving. Indeed, Levinas says that such welcome—such extraterritoriality that is necessarily constitutive of the interiority of the home, such intimacy with the other—is nothing less than “an event in the oecumenia of being,” the coming together of self and other between boundaries. Such hospitality was, of course, at the heart of Dorothy Day’s vision for the Catholic Worker communities. Day was dependent in her views on the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who argued that property was an extension of the body of a human being. In capitalist societies, however, “the tendency for property (or place) to be used simply as the physical extension of one’s sphere of control. It becomes a protective barrier, making oneself less vulnerable to the intrusion of the world. … By using property (or space) in a protective, defensive manner, one becomes unavailable to the outside world. His property insulates and isolates him.” Houghton notes that “hospitality means a letting go of certainty and control—and paradoxically it’s only this letting go that allows the change that makes real and not pretended community possible.
--Brian Walsh, The Hermeneutics of Charity, pg 239-240, fn 56
For Johnson, hospitality creates a place where differences meet and where power relationships are transformed. The host, who has cultural power in the home, opens that home to the stranger who is without power. In the act of being hospitable, the host, to a certain degree, becomes the servant and, at least for the duration of the visit, the other takes center stage. “Hospitality in its deepest sense,” Johnson writes, “is a willingness not only to receive the stranger, but also to be changed and affected by the presence of the other, not only personally, but also institutionally, curricularly, and politically.” Whether we function as host or as guest, we do not come as blank slates. We have already been shaped and given a cultural identity by where we came from. Postmodern readers will object that this picture of “home” is too comfortable; the very claim to a home that provides security and centeredness has, throughout history, driven others away. Such a view, writes Walsh, sees the idea of home as merely a social construction—a violent one—in which home for one group of people is homelessness for others. Does this mean that we must assert a “radical homelessness” wherein we can never be at home? We think not. The fact remains that to want a home is normal, human, and good. Here lies the basic difference between practicing hospitality and simply abandoning any hope of ever really being at home. For hospitality to be possible, our home can neither be some vacant space which we simply throw open nor a private castle in which we take refuge from foreigners and strangers. As Bauman writes, “the image of the secure home transforms the 'outside of home' into a terrain fraught with danger; the inhabitants of that outside turn into the carriers of threat—they need to be contained and kept away.” In contrast, the biblical message tells us that to be at home is a gift, a gift to be used for blessing others. Like all true gifts, a home does not belong entirely to the one who received it. Home is not a possession to be owned, but a gift to be shared, which only in that sharing becomes a gift.
--David Smith and Barbara Carvill, The Gift of the Stranger, pg 88-91, par.
