4. Fractal One: Hospitality Within

I have experienced polarization within myself, identifying as an outlier in multiple contexts: Financially, affectionally, with regards to gender, health, and ability/disability, and neurologically. In every case, I felt as if I were perpetually caught between worlds – not fully female, but with enough passing-privilege to be not fully non-binary, not fully queer but not straight either, not disabled, but also not abled enough to keep up with the standards set by capitalism.

Though my Whiteness afforded me a certain level of safety that rendered these erasures merely psychologically, spiritually, and developmentally interesting,[1] the leitmotif of invisibility grew as I felt unable to claim any formative identities other than the broadest categories of “parent” or “child” or “student.” It is notable that these identities were all relative or responsive to other contexts or relationships, and not original or inwardly-motivated. The idea of gray areas and loss of self within nebulosity persisted.[2]

To develop from childhood with such a poorly conceived sense of self rendered it challenging to find my place in the world. For me, this was attended by a fundamental self-doubt that, until it was addressed and contained, would cause me to invalidate my own ideas, experiences, learning, and opinions, perpetuating the pattern of erasure on my own.

To be chronically self-deprecating is to be inhospitable to oneself, however it also creates the possibility for great harm to be done to others because, until one is aware of oneself and one’s social location, there can be no significant growth or development of self-knowledge about one’s impact on others.

The inward realm is tricky to address because it presupposes a certain minimum threshold of self-awareness and a receptivity to discomfort associated with growth and change. There may be any number of barriers to this self-awareness, suggesting that triage of personhood may require trauma-informed care and pluralistic acceptance of a wide range of what that self-awareness might present as. The highly localized nature of this work could be framed in process theological terms as a “quantum insurrection.”[3]

Our experience of ourselves is subjective and relative and the paths toward self-knowledge will be different for everyone: A wealthy, Black, liberal, cis-het businesswoman will have a completely different hospitality engagement process than a disabled conservative homosexual male veteran. I can offer several overarching themes that could be useful as generalized guidelines, however, including:

• self-reflection (what you value) and -reflexivity (what makes you who you are),
• humility (be of real service to others’ needs as they exist, not as you imagine them),
• spiritual expansiveness (what makes you feel whole), and
• a forgiveness practice (we are not alone; we need a way to navigate hurt).

Essentially, the telos of hospitality applies to the inward realm by helping each practicer define a space in which they claim the right to thrive in life-affirming ways within their inner environment. This becomes a theological practice when we can begin to experience ourselves as simultaneously whole and integrally connected to All That Is, or at least to the larger system of the cosmos. This is the paradox of complexity.

The expansiveness gained from practicing inward hospitality informs, and is also potentially informed by, the next fractal level, our proximal communities. Within the context of process theology, this might be described as follows: “If the occasion enacts a quantum insurrection [of hospitality in the inward realm], societies can coalesce and cascade into resonant revolutions [of change at the interpersonal level].”[4]

Read Part 3. Next, Part 5 in the series, "Fractal Two: The Proximal Community – Hospitality At Home."

[1] This privilege also gave me ready access to the gumption, freedom of thought and movement, inventiveness, and higher education that is allowing me to capitalize on my experiences in beneficial ways with few social barriers.

[2] As a minister in formation, I attune myself to those gaps where spiritual need resides and am working to educate and then position myself to use the gray areas I occupy to draw the edges of spiritual wounds together. This also positions my constructive theology as being intrinsically valuable to working in the gray areas between the aisles of political, religious, or social divides.

[3] Michael Hogue in American Immanence, page 153.

[4] Ibid, page 154. In Process Theology, an "occasion" is much more accurately described as a quantum, or a particle - a group of occasions organized into a more complicated structure like a body/person/individual would be classified as a society of occasions. For the sake of the analogy, I'm taking liberties with the theological definitions for the sake of conversation, equating an occasion to a person and a society to a group of people to illustrate the path of amplification of both complexity and hospitality.