Radical Belonging

Online abbess of the “Abbey of the Arts” Christine Valters Paintner invites us to rediscover hospitality as a radical act of belonging that begins within. Inspired by the Rule of St. Benedict, she explores how true welcome extends not only to those who appear at our door, but also to the parts of ourselves we’d rather turn away. 

Radical belonging is rooted in an experience of feeling welcomed by a group of people or even a particular landscape or place. The spirituality of welcome is shaped by the practice of hospitality.  

There is a line from the Rule of St. Benedict which I love perhaps more than any other spiritual teaching:  

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt. 25:35). —Rule of St Benedict 53:1–2 

Expressing wisdom from Matthew’s gospel in the Christian scriptures, Benedict is saying that any stranger who arrives to the door — of the monastery, of our homes, of our hearts — is to be “received like Christ.” The stranger is anyone who comes knocking who is unknown, who makes us feel uncomfortable, who disorients us. That person is the very face of the divine presence. There are no qualifiers here, Benedict is clear to mean “all guests.”  

It is in those encounters with what feels most strange, foreign, or uncomfortable, that the Holy One especially shimmers forth. These words are a foundational expression of the principle of hospitality at work: I am called to welcome in every stranger who comes to the door as the presence of the Beloved.     

This principle does not just apply to our outer door, in terms of people and experiences I find difficult or challenging. Equally important, Benedict also points us to an inner kind of hospitality. His writing is grounded in the stories of the desert monks who offered all kinds of wisdom for being with our thoughts and inner experience.  

I find this principle of hospitality even more vital when applied to the inner life, because that is where hospitality begins. It is only when we learn to welcome in all the parts of our inner life that feel strange and disorienting that we grow in our capacity to welcome in the strangeness of others.   

Coleman Barks’s contemporary rendering of 13^th-century Sufi mystic Rumi honors this inner “guest house” with its new arrival each day, including joy or sadness, anger or depression. “Welcome them in,” he writes, because “each has been sent / as a guide from beyond.” All of the feelings I encounter, which make me want to slam the door on my inner life — these are precisely the places where I am called to meet God. As we grow in compassion for the places within that challenge us, we can learn to extend that compassion toward others. The more we grow intimate with our own places of weakness or unlived longings, the more we can accept these in others. 

Instead of being able to say that God appears only in what is familiar, only in the people who make me feel comfortable and safe and look like me, hospitality calls on us to extend ourselves, to risk… 

Most of us don’t want God on these terms, but on our own. We try to domesticate the sacred into prayers and doctrines that follow our own rules and expectations. We want to understand why things happen as they do, so we create trite responses to people who are in suffering. 

Hospitality asks that we court holy disruption. To welcome in everything that challenges my perspective on how the world works, that upsets all the plans I have for myself, and that turns them on their heads.  

What if when life started falling apart, I opened my heart to welcome in the grief and fear, which arrived as well, and considered them as holy guides and windows into the immensity of God? What if I invited all the painful feelings of loss and disorientation in for tea and tenderness? What if everything that turns our preconceived ideas inside out is precisely where we find God? 

I do not mean to imply that everything “bad” or painful that happens is somehow part of an inscrutable plan. This again puts God back in the box. Welcoming the inner experience does not mean validating harm caused by others. But it might help us reach a place of deeper understanding and compassion.    

We are called to make space for the full range of our experiences of discomfort, strangeness, and loss, and to cultivate trust that these experiences draw us into an encounter of radical openness, where our walls have been torn down. The power comes in what can emerge through God when we treat our experience and emotional response to all that disorients us as honored guests. 

It means trusting that somehow the brokenness we experience, when truly welcomed in, can become a doorway into a more expansive way of living and imagining the world.  

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE, OblSB, is the online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery and global community of dancing monks and mystics seeking to integrate contemplative practice and creative expression. She is the author of more than 20 books on spirituality and has lived on the west coast of Ireland since 2012 with her husband, John. 

Reflect with Us  
Christine Valters Paintner reminds us that hospitality begins within. When we welcome every part of ourselves — even the hidden, the hurting, the strange — we open the door to the Divine dwelling within and around us. Radical belonging grows from this inner practice of tenderness and trust. 

What parts of yourself are asking to be welcomed home with compassion? Share your reflection with us.  

We Conspire is a series from the Center for Action and Contemplation featuring wisdom and stories from the growing Christian contemplative movement. Sign up for the monthly email series and receive a free invitation to practice each month.