hospitality
How much pain do you feel right now?”
On the intake forms at the doctor’s office, Riley assesses her pain level at a ten, on a scale from one to ten, and watching her click hard on the notebook-sized computer provided by the office staff, I lean over and repeat my explanation.
“So, one means no pain at all, ten means the worst pain, and five would be somewhere in the middle, a medium amount of pain.”
A medium amount of pain? Is that even a thing? Even I want to reject the rating system, thinking pain just kind of goes with living. Certainly, having risen up into undeniable pollution, most of us eventually figure out that pain just is, and that the better question really is how much attention it presently requires of us. Right now, is it more like a phantom bruise or a tantruming toddler? The tug of a comb against a tangle or unending bee stings?
But I didn’t mean to lead the witness, not exactly. It’s just that because of Autism, Riley lives with double difficulty when it comes to pain. She has muted sensitivity, and she expresses her suffering in unusual ways, or at least that’s my best guess, after years of experiencing her. Riley has trouble assessing and naming her pain, even more with describing it verbally. But wait, does that sound familiar? Because here’s the thing: all of us fall on the spectrum somewhere. We are at least spiritually autistic, fumbling both our interpretation of suffering and care, especially in seasons when our own pain feels particularly captivating.
And here I’ve been sitting in the waiting room, balancing somewhat tensely on the razor edge of hospitality season, considering, as I collect ideas about how to practice hospitality over the holidays, about developing my with list, as a dear friend of mine always says, why it is that God cares so much about us making space in our hearts for Him, space in our hearts for each other.
I drop my phone and its picturesque collection of possibilities into my purse to give Riley my full attention.
“They’re asking how much it hurts right now,” I say, literally turning towards her, because I’m not sure I trust her assessment of the situation.
She had encountered the pain scale on her forms and had turned to me, feeling lost without a concrete way to measure such a thing correctly, which brought to my mind the number of times in the last few days that I had asked her if her ankle hurt and she’d said, “umm, let me see,” and lifted her foot to look pointedly at the skin around her ankle bone, to jab at it tentatively with her finger. Meanwhile, nothing I’d observed of her body language suggested to me that she felt any crushing pain, and she had walked in on that twisted ankle, wearing a pair of unsupportive slip-on sandals, without really showing any signs of discomfort, despite the obvious swelling in her foot.
Admittedly, at the moment I feel interrupted from my reverie on hospitality, drawn to keep looking at pretty pictures of tailored tables, to unplug a little while we wait, wandering my way toward inspiration rather than teasing out a knot I’m not sure anyone in the doctor’s office will really even care to note.
And then a flood of something else washes over me, a flood of words not my own.
Come away with me, you who are weary, worn out, burned out. Come away with me; learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
I don’t know about you, but I could really use some unforced rhythms.
Suddenly thinking of the hospitality of Jesus, of Him sitting wearily down, body aching and hungry from the miles, beside a well, engaging a miserably lonely woman, I feel shocked, jarred by the spiritually divergent Way.
Riley looks up at me, catches my gaze, this time wearing an expression I can easily interpret—sweet, but practiced, patience.
“Yeah, I put ten for that one,” she says simply, her eyes firmly pressing the point.
Is pain real only if I can understand it?
“Okay,” I concede, sitting back against the politely professional blue tweed waiting room chair, resolved not to argue over pain that is not my own.
Did you know that in New Testament scripture, the word most often translated hospitality, philoneksia, the word used in the apostle Paul’s imperative that we should practice hospitality, combines a word for friend with a word for stranger? Digging into this, I had done a double take, not expecting the emphasis on strangers, this clarity about the hospitality of the Way, that it is not merely a matter of opening up my frantically cleaned home to feed my family and friends, but of showing love to strangers. But as I think on it now, my feet pressed flat on the durable carpet, there is the story Jesus tells of a wedding feast, of a servant told to go out on the street corners and invite everyone you see; there is the way He invited me in before I knew Him. That woman at the well had been so weary, really, so alone and thirsty for love, and even though He seemed to be asking her at first for a drink, what He really wanted, even body-sore and bone-tired and carved-out hungry, had been to offer her some hospitality. He had come, thirsty, to offer a strange woman an open invitation to eternal quenching. Come now, let us reason together.
Finally, a medical assistant in sky blue scrubs appears at the waiting room door to welcome us in to see the doctor, just as I am wondering if hospitality—the hospitality at the heart of the season ahead, at the heart of the Jesus-apprenticed life–really has anything at all to do with pretty tables, much less my own feelings of incapacity.
I draw near to the brokenhearted; I save those who are crushed in spirit.
Consulting her clipboard, the medical assistant calls Riley’s name neutrally, so neutrally, in fact—her voice gone dry as a bone—that I try to imagine the number of names she’s called today, the number of patients who’ve limped towards her, who’ve pushed themselves up from these chairs on their way to treatment. She must be tired of entertaining people in pain.
Meanwhile Riley, with her pain level ten, hearing her name, gets up and waves enthusiastically, her face suddenly radiant with welcome—welcome for a stranger, even here, where we are the ones entering in. So, is it her seeking healing here or her here offering the eternal kind? I wonder, thinking again of Jesus, watching the medical assistant’s face go bright.
“That’s me, uh, Ms. Juanita, hello,” Riley says, bending down a little awkwardly to attend fully to the nametag perched on Ms. Juanita’s ample chest, as she ambles past.
You’d think we were on our way to coffee and dessert instead of a medical exam.
“Well, hello, Miss Riley,” Ms. Juanita says, with audible relief. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I can’t miss the emphasis, the sudden tender honorific, nor the way Ms. Juanita blinks with some surprise, glancing down, noticing that Riley’s swollen foot puffs around the edges of her sandal straps.
My food is to do the will of my Father, Jesus had said, after the conversation with the woman at the well, when the disciples returned from buying bread, and she ran off to tell everyone she’d found the Christ. It’s as if practicing the hospitality of the Way ushers in a kind of fullness, an eternal comfort, that overwhelms the pangs—the pains—of mortality.
There’s treatment I guess, and then there’s being healed.
