I came to know about Stephen Carter, Professor of law at Yale University, through a book, ‘To heal a fractured world’, written by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth. Stephen was an eleven-year-old boy when his Afro-American parents, two brothers, and two sisters moved to an exclusively white neighbourhood of Washington in 1966. Instinctively this family knew that they were not welcome there because of the race conflicts of that period. Years later Stephen Carter wrote a book, ‘Civility’, about his first day experience of this neighbourhood in Washington. On that first day, he sat with his brothers and sisters on the front step of their new home and waited to see what kind of response they would get from their new white neighbours. Passers-by looked at them with curiosity, but did not welcome them or greeted them with any enthusiasm, except a white woman coming home in the evening from work. She was on the other side of the road; she smiled at them warmly and said, ‘Welcome!’ She disappeared to her house and after few minutes came out with a tray filled with ‘drinks, cream-cheese and Jelly sandwiches’ for the children. She made them feel at home. Stephen Carter later wrote, “That moment changed his life.” The name of this ordinary Jewish woman with extraordinary charity and kindness was Sara Kestenbaum. This may seem a simple act of kindness to many, but not so for Carters because it happened at a time when a black family could not feel safe in a white enclave. This kindness could only be derived from a God-given understanding that human beings are made in the image of God and we are the children of one Father, our God, our provider and protector.

The above story reminded me of an old Irish proverb, which states that ‘it is in the shelter of each other that people live.’ Shelter for Carters was different from that of a hungry or homeless family. The shelter that Kestenbaum provided was respect, acceptance, trust and empowerment. She felt their worth as human beings and members of a community and she was totally colour blind as far as this family was concerned. She felt their needs and provided it without any prejudice. It is the same sentiment which led Maxim Gorky to write about Leo Tolstoy in the following way: “I am not an orphan on the earth as long as this man lives on it.” This again is the driving force at the heart of the story of the Good Samaritan that Jesus told. Accepting a stranger as a neighbour means opening our hearts to a person we encounter. This is great leap of faith which removes fear, suspicions and prejudices. This creates opportunity for a healthy relationship with God, others and us. One way of looking at this is to think of this hospitality as grace-driven and to place God at the centre of this extravagant compassion, others and ourselves at separate concentric circles around this centre point of powerful drawing magnetic force of God’s love, as we get closer to God we get closer to each other. It is God’s love, which brings neighbourliness in us.

Hospitality is a major theme in the Old Testament; we see hospitality from the very beginning with Abraham. In nomadic existence hospitality was a matter of survival. When Lord appeared to Abraham by the terebinth trees of Mamre in the company of two others, Abraham welcomes them according to the custom of the desert, he brings water for their feet and their thirst and Sarah prepares them a great feast without ever expecting anything in return. This hospitality has become one of the great blessings for Abraham and the inauguration of a great nation. The blessing comes by the way of a prediction that Sarah will give Abraham a son. At the other end of the spectrum, we also read the story of the kind of hospitality given to the two angels who appeared at Lot’s door step and how Lot’s hospitality ended up in hostility and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the New Testament Jesus has become the reason for hospitality and creates a season for hospitality through out Galilee. From the beginning of His ministry He became the medium for hospitality. At the wedding at Cana, at the feeding of five thousand, and numerous other occasions and finally at the Last Supper we see this theme in His ministry. His mere presence and personality created hospitality for the tax collectors and other socially unaccepted people; after His death and resurrection, Peter, Paul and other Apostles extended this hospitality to the gentiles and the whole humanity. Therefore, one of the major emphases in Christianity is moving away from hostility and creating hospitality. The invitation to God’s great banquet is still open to all, but we should be aware that gate-keepers of our faith always try to deny people entrance to enjoy this hospitality.

In this opening decade of twenty–first century we continue to experience demands on us to provide basic human needs, friendship, warmth, empathy, healing, and an integrated collective spiritual experience through adequate pastoral care within and without our communities. Main line churches, generally, do not meet emotional and social needs of the majority in the society; other, ‘instant- do- it- yourself’ religious groupings move in to exercise their influence. There are differences among us; but, more importantly, there is a world out there crying out for hospitality; a world broken by wars, oppression, prejudice and injustice; a world destroyed by floods, tsunami, hurricane and earthquakes as we just experienced in southern China and Burma. In the fields of Mission and evangelism there is an urgent need for greater understanding of other faiths to move away from hostility to hospitality to create wider ecumenism. We should search for a new vocabulary in creating this hospitality. People search out and find safety in spiritual desert-islands. Spirituality and a spiritual life are the ways of seeing the whole life in a new and fuller perspective. Sadly, we often speak of spiritual life as though it were a different life lived in a different world.

The healthy environment of all religious conviction must be a living theology and in the best sense an everyday theology. It should be an attempt to speak to a need and respond to an opportunity. There is a quest for faith and belief; we need to help ordinary people to have the tools, road maps, and guide books for their spiritual journey. We live in an expanding market of faith and we really do need some basic understanding and to be able to articulate our own faith. Cardinal Newman realised these years ago and said, “I want an articulated and well educated laity.” The need for an articulate, theologically sound Church is far greater than ever. Today’s world is a world of buzz words, sound bites, instant opinions, and packaged discussions, manufactured for a global market. Mass manipulation is increasingly the agenda of our times, which is a sure prescription for hostility as we so painfully, observe in television evangelism.

For this reason, for no other, there is an urgent need for a greater and deeper theological understanding of hospitality and solidarity in all the churches today. Most of the theological basis for the formation of new branches of churches has arisen from a knee-jerk response to events, an insight of a particular period. Such circumstantially-oriented theology is an ‘occasional theology.’ Such ‘occasional theology’ is of some importance because it is formulated for a need of the day and satisfying that need in the context of best possible theological insights of the time. Hence there is an urgent need to understand gay ordinations and the priesthood of women and such issues in the Anglican community and other mainline churches. Together with this we should develop hospitality, hospitality in the wider sense, of including everyone in our spiritual journey to experience God. Our liberal understanding is that creation is a continuing process within which there are the further revelations and purposes which we come to call redemption. This continuing redemptive process is set within a continuing creative process in which man at some point comes to play his apart under the grace of God. It is important to see that we should not allow ourselves to be guided by a tyranny of the institutions or emotional blackmail in appreciating this reality. This understanding is essential for moving away from hostility to hospitality in our spiritual journey.

Many people are experiencing a vacuum in their religious experiences and expectations. It is a god-shaped hole created by the theological vacuum or rejuvenating fellowship of the mainstream churches which so many religious cults are filling in through university ministries and church planting. This is a real crisis and it will be met only by a fresh understanding of the importance and place of theology in the life and faith of whole people of God. A tripartite theology should be appreciated and valued involving the word of God in scriptures; the word of God in tradition and the teaching of the Church; and also the word of God in human experience. It is this third part which is hidden in the very fibre and fabric of his creation. The genius of a living theology is to see how these three witnesses, scripture, tradition and reason, can agree for creating God’s Kingdom here and now. This is a sure way providing hospitality for seekers of spirituality. This should remove the hostility and resentment associated with denominational divisions. We should be moving towards creating a much-needed Eucharistic hospitality at the Lord’s Table with other churches. The early Church practised the fellowship of the community, hospitality and solidarity as we read in the 2nd chapter of Acts; they had a sense of the community that anyone in need was catered for. Sadly, many of our churches have lost the sense of the community and solidarity. Only last week I attended a wedding in which the couple had to be married twice with built in restrictions and provisions to satisfy the statutes of two different denominations at the discomfort of two devout Christian families and their hundreds of friends. We need to pray for the Holy Spirit to empower many ‘Sara Kestenbaums’ to breakdown barriers between faith communities.

I am very fond of an African word, ‘obuntu’, which in a positive way means I am what I am because of you are what you are or simply I am what I am because of you. Most of the time, we do not realise that our actions affect others in many ways. We make them worthy of themselves or destroy them; we discourage them or empower them. Our responsibility to others is very significant; we have the God-given potential power for making or breaking people. An innocent smile can lift a person, avoiding eye contact or a hard ward can leave a scar for a life time. Even prayers could be used to destroy innocent people. I gave the title butterfly effect to this article for the simple reason that Edward Lorenz, meteorologist, once described the phenomenon that a fluttering of butterfly’s wings in Australia can cause a tornado in Kansas or a monsoon in Indonesia; this was his way of explaining the chaos theory. Throwing a stone on the calm waters of a lake can have an unending ripple effect on the surface.

Small acts of kindness can have large outcomes. Mother Teresa and such people, all through history, have generated this butterfly effect for the benefit of mankind, but there are many more people who created death and destruction as well. It is true that we cannot change our church or our community in one act, but we can have an effect through, one word at a time, one sentence at a time, one article at a time, one critical or encouraging glance at a time. It is nice to think in utter humility that our lives lived out under the grace of God can make a difference to someone else. We may just be pebbles thrown to the ocean of humanity, but we will be making never ending ripples on the surface for ever and ever into eternity. We need to pray for keeping our arms open to strangers, to those who are different. There is also the distinct possibility that these strangers may be carrying unexpected gifts and blessings with them, which might change our lives as realised by our Patriarch Abraham and also by Stephen Carter in the story I related in the beginning.