Love Bade Me Welcome

Cultivating Place is a column considering our relationships to the varied places we have been planted. As followers of The One who became flesh and made his dwelling among us, who wept over the earthly Jerusalem, we will explore the unique opportunities each of us has to seek the good of our place, wherever that may be.

In a sleepy market town by the River Teme, where the rural, English counties of Worcestershire, Hereforshire, and Shropshire fold into one another, sits Cornwall House. This handsome, time-worn Tudor dwelling was never my home, but for three years in my late teens, it was the centre of my world. 

Many were the weekends that my friend Chris would invite a gang of us back to stay. We would pile onto the bus after school on Friday, making the ponderous hour-long pilgrimage through narrow lanes into the deep countryside. The door of Cornwall House was never locked, the range in the snug kitchen perpetually radiated warmth, and something good always seemed to be cooking. In we would bustle, a crowd of teenagers on the heady brink of adulthood, giddy with the promise of the weekend to come. We were noisy, our humour was coarse, we had ravenous appetites, and yet we were made welcome. 

To stay at Cornwall House was to be seamlessly ushered into the centre of family life. If a bottle of wine was being drunk, a glass would immediately be poured for you. If a meal was being prepared, a chopping board would be placed in front of you so you could play your part. If an ingredient was lacking, you would be sent down the shops with a five-pound note to remedy its absence. If we felt as though we were family, it was because to step through that unlocked door was—without ceremony—to be treated as though you were. We would eat, we would laugh, and we would ramble down the road to the pub. Hours later, we would carouse back again to sit and talk until the early hours by the glow of the kitchen range, no doubt keeping Chris’ parents awake long into the night. At the last, mattresses and blankets would be laid down in the barn out back, and we would fall into satisfied sleep to the sound of the dawn chorus. As we did, we never once doubted we belonged.

So self-absorbed was I in those heady days of young adulthood that I never realised the radical hospitality I received at Cornwall House. It is only with the passage of time, as I have walked through many more doors, received many different forms of welcome—or lack thereof, and become responsible for my own hearth and table, that the unusual kindness I received has shone clearer.

At the time, I was dimly aware none of my other friends’ families embraced our boisterous late-boyhood with quite the same readiness. Yet, the posture in which the door at Cornwall House was opened, the hearth shared, the table offered, and lodgings prepared, was so fluent it seemed it must have been an easy, everyday thing. 

It is only now I realise how little of this posture can have been accidental: how much intentional kindness was at play in leaving the door unlocked and the table open, to a carousel of noisy, ravenous teenagers. For years, we gravitated to Cornwall House like moths to a flame because of the unquestioning kindness which lay behind that unlocked door. Yes, we were fed, and yes, we were given somewhere to sleep, but far more than that, we boys were looked in the eye and embraced and bestowed the privileges of family, despite sharing no ties of blood. Twenty years on, that generosity of heart remains a fragrant thing in my memory.

For I realise now how rare it is to walk through any door and receive more than you expect or deserve; how unusual it is to be treated as belonging, before doing anything to merit a place at the table. This is the precious pearl of kindness: the heart that moves towards the other, initiating blessing prior to any indication that blessing is deserved. It is kindness that lies behind the eyes of the stranger whose face crinkles in gladness to see us before we have done anything to make them glad. It is kindness in the embrace of the one who welcomes us as family, despite no tie of blood. It is kindness in the steps of the wronged father running in joy towards his prodigal son. It is kindness in the mercy of our wronged Heavenly Father, forgiving us in Christ while we still despised Him (Eph. 4:32). Not for nothing is kindness listed among the Spirit-given virtues in Galatians 5:22, for to experience human kindness is to hear the harmony of the love of God. 

There can be no true kindness offered to humanity “in general,” because kindness is by nature deeply particular in orientation. Our model is the God who—when we were shrinking back from him in fear—called each of us by name (Is. 43:1). He called us, not as interchangeable, generic sub-units of the human race, but as unique image-bearers. As so as we conceive of our own call to show kindness, the same focus on particularity seems inherent. We know innately the truth of this: to be invited to dinner to “make up the numbers,” and to be greeted coolly but civilly, is utterly different to being invited by name and greeted with evident joy and words of personal affection.

As a guest, my stomach and my eyes hope for good food and a beautiful table setting, but my heart yearns for signs my host wants me there, not as a representative of some wider class, but for who I am in myself. Though we might sit at the finest table, the richest fare will turn to ashes in our mouth if once we recognise ourselves to be tolerated rather than wanted.

Because kindness is a posture of heart towards others, our places are unavoidably extensions and magnifiers of that same posture. Lanier Ivester has helpfully clarified that the only difference between entertaining and hospitality is an attitude of heart [1]. The physical place I tend—my home—is, for better or worse, the stage where the attitudes of my heart play out. A home is an instrument under the fingers of the one who wields it, and whether what results is a symphony, a dirge, or blank silence, depends on the heart plucking the strings. Entertainment is mere performance, whereas hospitality is a song of love resonating to the other through the instrument of the home. 

While there is nothing in the external details of a given dinner—the menu, table setting, or guest list—to tell you whether the host is seeking to bless their guests or exploit them as tools to buttress their own ego, we know the difference the moment we are greeted at the door. For we have all experienced counterfeit kindnesses: apparent acts of generosity wielded not as instruments of love but as weapons by those seeking homage to their own self-worth. Likewise, we have known largesse that has wounded rather than blessed because it was targeted not to bless but to invoke a debt, induce shame, or win a contest. No matter the material sacrifice of the host, there can be no genuine kindness where there is no heart reaching out to the other, to initiate or reconcile relationship. Had the good Samaritan sprinkled his gold on the wounded man and passed on his way, we would not consider him good. His presence was the true gift.  

As I reflect on being the recipient of both true and counterfeit kindnesses, I wonder to my shame how often my own home has been a fortress rather than an unlocked door; a theatre of my pride rather than an altar of other-centred love; a vacuum through which I devour the approval of others, rather than a vessel into which I pour an offering to their blessing. I recall the sobering words of 1 Corinthians 13, that though my acts might move mountains, I gain nothing if these endeavours are not animated by love. And so I pray the Lord would, by daily recollection of His own self-giving love, kindle my oft-cold heart to burn more brightly in its turn, that when I bring my guests before the physical hearth of my home, they might know the glow of a second, unseen fire—that of Christ-like kindness—radiating out to embrace them in its deeper warmth.

[1] https://omny.fm/shows/the-habit-podcast/lanier-ivester-wants-you-to-rest-this-holiday-seas

The featured image, “Iron Bench Arm in Snow,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Sam Keyes

Sam is a poet, essayist, photographer, and songwriter, who explores the interspace between imagination and reason, faith and doubt, the physical and the transcendent. He’s inspired by the examples of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, G.K. Chesterton, and George Steiner: rare thinkers who chose to dwell in the often painful yet fruitful tensions of these ‘in-between’ spaces.

Sam lives with his wife Colette and his two young daughters in the cathedral city of Winchester; UK. A recovering academic in the natural sciences, Sam now mixes science and semantics as a Patent Attorney; but by night, he returns to his first love of crafting stanzas and songs.

In addition to Cultivating, Sam’s work has been published by The Gospel Coalition and Ekstasis.

samuelkeyes.com