One of the first times I felt a call to Religious life was during a Thanksgiving break in college in which I spent at a friend’s house in Chicago with her family. I’ll never forget being overwhelmed with a mystical feeling during the beginning of the actual Thanksgiving meal. Grace was prayed, and while others began to dip into the food, I was stunned with a feeling of immense gratitude and love. It was the simple fact of breaking ordinary bread, in the context of a loving family outside of my own, that brought me nearly to tears. 

A similar moment struck me while in Harrisburg on a Saturday morning. I had spent the previous evening dining with some of the wealthiest and most connected individuals in the area. However, in the morning I found myself having breakfast with a family that recently immigrated from Peru, knowing no English, living as a family of five in a tiny, two bedroom apartment. The dichotomy of the two situations were present in my mind, but it was the similarity in hospitality, the similarity in breaking ordinary bread, and the similarity in laughter and love, that made me overwhelmed with joy. 

A Christian should never underestimate the power of hospitality. The bulk of the Gospels are stories about feasts, some ordinary and some seemingly extraordinary. The miraculous stories like the Wedding at Cana, the Loaves and Fishes, and the Last Supper garner much of our attention, and for good reason. However, my prayer is that Christians begin to harness the loving power of what seems like unremarkable hospitality stories in the Gospels. Jesus found himself at so many dinner tables during His earthly ministry that he gained a reputation of being a “glutton and a drunkard”. 

The Pharisees could not understand why Jesus would break bread with sinners, the sick, or the poor. I have found that through hospitality, the labels of sinner, sick, and poor, begin to fade away. During those meals in Chicago and Harrisburg, a moment came when I could no longer decide who was the broken one, or the poor one at the table, the guest or the host? True Christian hospitality should remind all present that we are all one human family, each with our own joys and sorrows to share.