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“If today you hear his voice,” says
the Psalmist, “harden not your hearts.”
I invite you to be comfortable and relaxed: to
let go of all anxieties and to rest in the presence
of the numinous. Use your imagination. Day-dream
if you want. Enter into the story.
This is a meditation on hospitality and interior
decorating. First, hospitality. When we are hospitable,
we make room for the other, we give of what we have
to the other.
This is the story. It comes to us from the Hebrew
Scriptures.
A great lady presses the prophet Elisha to accept
her hospitality. She and her husband have no extra
room for him, but since hospitality consists of
taking time and of expending one’s own resources
for the other, they build an upper room, a little
roof-chamber for the holy man. But they do not stop
at that. They also furnish the room to make him
welcomed and comfortable. They furnish his room,
the story goes on to say, with a bed, a table a
seat and a lamp. They literally give him the keys
to their home. “Let him stay there whenever
he comes to us,” says the lady to her husband.
Elisha is then welcomed any time, all the time,
no matter what.
Let your imagination guide you for a minute or
two. Is there not within us a receptive voice that
calls us to make room for, to have time for, to
ready the roof-chamber of our deepest self for Wisdom’s
visitation?
It strikes me that the four objects mentioned in
the story, the bed, the table, the seat and the
lamp give us a hint about the humble art of interior
decorating, of soul furnishing in preparation for
the visit.
Accept for the moment that the manner in which
the Shunamite woman and her husband prepared to
receive the prophet who speaks and acts in the name
of his God teaches us how to receive that which
is beyond our own resources.
First, the bed. If we want someone to stay with
us and to make of our home their home, in comfort
and in privacy, we provide them with a place to
sleep. We make them feel safe and secure. We do
not hurry their stay. In our own roof-chamber, symbol
of our soul, which looks up to the heavens, we need
to provide a pillow for the sacred visitor.
Then there is the table and seat. Wisdom does not
want to be idle within. She wants to share with
us. She invites us to the table we set for her.
She does not come uninvited. Indeed, it belongs
to us to press her to accept our hospitality as
did the lady in the story. Wisdom wants us to desire
her. She would embrace us, break bread with us,
be our companion, dwell with us, sit with us in
our in the furnished and decorated space.
And finally, the lamp. We provide the lamp but
not the light. We place the lamp in the upper room.
She is the light, the light that shines in our darkness
for the good of others and the world. A wise man
is reported to have said that “when a lamp
is lit, it is not put under the meal tub, but on
the lamp stand where it gives light to all in the
house.”
“You have taken all of this trouble for us,”
says Elisha to the woman, “what can I do for
you?” Imagine what it might be that Wisdom
would do for us were we to engage in hospitality
and interior decorating.
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