Catching Me Off-guard

As the self-proclaimed "capital of the French Alps", Grenoble is a city which provides visitors and residents alike unparallelled access to hiking trails, rock-climbing, skiing, and paragliding, just to name a few of its outdoor sport offerings.  For those who explore the mountains and find themselves in need of shelter, there are quite a lot of alpine refuges available in these parts. These are some variation of small cabins nestled in the wilderness able to withstand the elements and provide a safe, dry place for adventurers. This can actually be a scary sight for those who may have been traumatized as children by images of forest houses found in the stories of Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks and Snow White.  For example, once when Emma and I were hiking, we came upon a stone and tin refuge high in the mountains and I swear that I heard someone cackling. Just remember, where one man sees a shelter, another man sees The Shack. 

There are two types of refuges, guarded and unguarded. Though that might sound like a war zone, it just means that one is manned and the other is not.  To stay at the guarded refuge, one has to book it in advance.  The on-site caretaker makes sure the important things are taken care of, like keeping the spider population in check and providing something softer than leaves and smooth sticks next to the seat of porcelain.  And guests, who sleep dormitory style here, can usually pay to have a hot meal prepared for them. But hiker beware, earplugs and deodorant are optional.   As you might imagine, this type of refuge is not free. In other words, it's a refuge for those who know in advance they are in need of one.

But to me, that makes the first kind of refuge more like a hotel. If I plan and book ahead, is it really a refuge?  It seems to me that a refuge is something one stumbles upon or runs to when really in need or difficulty. I think the second type of refuge fits this description better.  There is no charge to stay in the unguarded refuge.  Yes, things are more basic and the upkeep depends on volunteers or those who stay there tidying up after themselves.  But there you'll find the necessary table, chairs,  fireplace, and mattress on the floor.  The door is always open and it operates on a 'first come first served basis'. 

I would like to think of my family and our home as a refuge for students, travelers, and the needy. I remember growing up in a pastor's home, there were times when our meals or television time were interrupted by an unexpected knock on the door. I saw as my parents modeled the unguarded shelter to my watching eyes. Unfinished food or favorite TV programs were quickly left behind to attend to the need at the door. They never let on that their agenda had been interrupted, but rather communicated that there was no one more important at that moment than the unexpected guest.  Our simple house with basic needs was, if nothing else, accessible, on a first come, always served basis.

Sad to say, too often today my heart and my house are like the first refuge, with the emphasis on being well stocked, clean and comfortable, but with a preference for advance bookings.  The reality is, those I am called to serve in this city need to find a shelter they can stumble upon or run to and always find the warmth and welcome they may need.  There are plenty of hotel chains that will cater to the pre-registered but rarely to those at the last minute or on their last dollar. So I am aiming to be more of a forest chalet than a fancy chain. And to be a destination of the unguarded variety.

You're So Sweat

     France is famous for its cheese. One famous variety is Roquefort, which the uninitiated might say is just bleu cheese.  Au contraire, mon ami, its much more than that. One doesn't call a Ferrari just a car and Roquefort is not just a bleu cheese. Rather, it is known as the cheese of kings and popes, said to be loved by none other than the emperor Charlemagne.  To be officially donned Roquefort, a cheese must be aged in caves four miles deep into Mount Canbalou in the south of France, where the cool humid atmosphere gives it a characteristic blue-green marbling.  Which is the color the face of a Velveeta-loving American tourist turns when tasting it for the first time. Who first decided to leave sheep cheese rotting in a cave for three months? Legend has it that it was a smitten shepherd who left his lunch at the mouth of a cave to woo a shepherdess, only returning to find it moldy. Let's just hope he got the girl. But, like it or not, Roquefort has been given Protected Designation of Origin status by the EU, rivaled only by something called the Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb, undoubtedly taking its name from draconian methods British mothers use to get their little Liam to eat the famous English veggie. 

       France has some of the strictest copyright laws there are, due to its famous brand names and the creativity of its artistic firms.  When you are a world capital of fashion, food and the arts you have to be  on your toes to both stay at the pinnacle of refined taste and culture, as well as hide the fact you enjoy an occasional Big Mac at the drive-thru.  At France's borders, customs agents seized 7 million counterfeit objects in 2010, yet that still did not prevent losses of 40,000 jobs and six billion dollars to counterfeiting.  It's a big business world-wide, making up seven percent of total world trade, a testimony to the fact that it's hard to turn down paying $20 for a Louis Vuitton purse while on vacation in Thailand. Just be careful if you happen to have that little status symbol on your arm when passing through Charles de Gaulle airport. It could cost you as much as five years in a French jail or a maximum fine of €500,000. It seems there is a high price to pay for being fake.

     The French can teach us a lot about the authenticity of things.  Here, everything from sculptures to speeches to screen plays can be strictly copyrighted. And the biggest criteria to qualify for a copyright protected by French law?  It has to be original. And the definition of an original work is that it is "endowed with the personality of its author".  I can't help but draw a comparison to us as people who Genesis says were created in the image of God.  You, my friend, are an original who bears the stamp of authenticity from the universe's number one unrivaled Designer. So why would we settle for being a cheap counterfeit of something else? When we are not authentic, our true selves are imprisoned in cells of shame and fear and our lives pay a price, becoming bankrupt of real value. We were made to be more than cheap knock-offs of something else.  We were fashioned out of the creative genius of a perfect Creator.  In the kingdom of God, we as Christ-followers should police ourselves as diligently as the douane - the French customs agents - who search the bodies and baggage of people entering the Republic for anything suspected as fake. Counterfeits and lack of authenticity rob the originators of design the recognition and recompense they deserve. Equally, the inability to be our true selves ultimately deprives God of the glory due Him. So in our believing communities, we should uphold a strict ban on counterfeits in our personal  relationships with one another and our spiritual relationship with God.

     I really do want to be more authentic, both relationally and spiritually - in the way I talk to and about God, in the way I relate to people, and in  the way I daily walk with Christ. It is not easy, especially when there are people with whom we compare ourselves that we consider to be the Yves Saint Laurents of the church - high quality and out of our price range. But that's part of the problem.  When no one, especially leaders, lets down their guard long enough to be real - to cry, to confess, to show weakness, to voice doubt - then we all think the only way to preserve our value is  to be an imitation.  But that is not real Christian living. Believers in Christ are not inhuman, and to be human is to hurt, to feel deeply, to struggle, and yes, to fail.  When we do not manifest this humanness, we inadvertently encourage those around us to join in trying to be some other kind of species, which is what super-spiritual, unreal believers come off looking like to the world.

     The Gillette Company launched an ad campaign in 1980 for its antiperspirant, Dry Idea called "Never let them see you sweat". In one television commercial, actress Lauren Hutton says to the camera, "Three things I have learned in being an actress: never audition first thing in the morning; never try to play a character half your age; and even if your leading man is prettier than you are, never ever let 'em see you sweat". This is the mantra of a society whose heroes are people who excel at pretending to be someone else on camera.  There is a huge difference between being an actor on a stage and an athlete in  a stadium.  When you have a teammate out on the playing field, not only can you see them sweat, but after a hug or a high five, you can surely smell and even feel the sweat. Communities of Christ-followers are called to keep it real with one another. No make-up. No posturing. No rehearsed lines. I'm tired of acting and trying to hide my sweat. We were not called to be carefully staged and preplanned  but rather fully spontaneous and authentic. We're called to be on a team that, win or lose, sweats and smells together.  There is a high price to pay for counterfeits, so why be anything other than an original?
    

Xeno-friendly or Xenophobic?

    

  Hospitality is a tricky concept. We all understand the basic gist of the word, but its varied application from culture to culture is often a source of misunderstanding.  An Asian visitor to a northern European home might find it scandalous to have his host offer a refreshment only once, misunderstanding his guest's first polite "no" as literal. Equally as disturbing to a British tourist to India would be their host's very enthusiastic bordering-on-pushy attempts to refill his plate, in spite of clearly declining multiple times, and quite emphatically.  Hospitality's rules are charged with history, tradition, and nuance. But it is an art, and art is something we develop and become good at by exposure to masterpieces as well as the discipline of trying our hand at interpreting  and creating something that has inspiration and soul.  If we are followers of Jesus and students of His word, we can't escape the fact that hospitality for us is not an option, but indeed a command. But we would do better to understand just what is this genre of art called hospitality.

    When Paul told the Romans to "practice hospitality" (Rom. 12:13) or exhorted Timothy to  "show hospitality" (1 Tim 5:10), it was more than suggesting giving it a good try. The commands literally mean to pursue and press after hospitality and to actively take hold of strangers and receive them into one's home. I get this image of someone seeing a stranger in town, running after them, taking hold of their hand and imploring them to come to their house to share a meal. This is more along the lines of what hospitality really means. It's both what you do to convince the person to trust you enough to come and then what you do to honor them because they did.   It's too easy to read into the concept what is a given for us culturally. As with any scripture, we need to determine what the original author and audience understood when certain terms and images were used.  Hospitality in the New Testament is translated from philoxenos. When I see the word philo, the first thing I think of is the Greek dough my wife sometimes  uses to make delicious savory pastries. Others more theologically minded, however, might be thinking of "loving" or "preferring", which is is technically correct, but not nearly as appetizing.  The other half of that word, xeno, is not the brother of the notorious Warrior Princess, but rather the word for "foreigner" or "stranger".  Where am I going with this fascinating etymological exercise? Just to say that when the New Testament believer read the words "practice hospitality", he or she did not necessarily understand that to mean using your best china or to offer your dinner guests five choices of something to drink.  Those are not bad ideas, but they are only surface attempts to get at what hospitality really is. Because hospitality is a value and a motivation of the heart from which flow different kinds of action. As Paul, Peter and John intended it in their writings, practicing hospitality literally means "pursue and press after a deep fondness towards foreigners and strangers".

    Ah, I can see defections from the hospitality committee and welcome-wagon already, because that definition calls for a whole deeper involvement than the size of my bowl of chips or welcome brochure.  It touches on our entire orientation of how we think about and relate to strangers. And what is a xenos or stranger, really?  Originally it was synonymous with "enemy", because those who were not of your tribe, language or culture were strange, and therefore their motives and background were suspect out of fear and superstition.  The appearance of an outsider suddenly in the neighborhood was alarming, surprising and unsettling. Although I am attempting to describe the setting in possibly early Mesopotamia, I don't think I am far of from describing exactly the same reaction when a foreign family moves into a "nice" neighborhood in modern suburbia. But this is actually a sociological regression, because members of society on the whole as they traveled and experienced first-hand what it was like to be an outsider, subsequently established social mores where aliens and strangers were no longer considered enemies to be killed or feared, but began to be accorded special treatment and protection. Sometimes strangers , even enemies, were expected to be invited into homes and treated with greater kindness than relatives and neighbors.  In Hellenistic Greek culture, one could ask the name and origin of a stranger only after having fed them a meal.

    Hospitality is a frame of mind and purity of motive where one is actually fond of strangers and foreigners.  Is that you?  Can I say that I have this special warmth in my heart toward people who immigrate to where I live, but don't learn my language and still insist on dressing like their home culture, always shopping in their ethnic grocery stores instead of Wal-Mart?  The opposite of philoxenos is xenophobia. I think we're all familiar with that word, which conjures up images of Nazi skin-heads and armed border-patrolling vigilantes. Most of us are a far cry from that extreme, but how close are we to the other side of pendulum, which is actually not another extreme, but rather the water-mark set by God-lovers and Jesus-followers of the Bible? Jesus' standard of hospitality was illustrated in his story of the Good Samaritan, who offered help, lodging and healing to a Jew whose people hated and despised his own. It could be we have come as far as some older Jewish cultures, where the passing foreigner was received warmly, knowing that their presence was a temporary curiosity and diversion. But the shortcoming was that It was the resident-alien who was actually despised. The stranger who didn't just want to come and go, but actually had shaken up the demographic status-quo and decided to stay and invite his whole extended family to join him, he was the one who got the cold shoulder, silent treatment and worse. This is why Ruth was so surprised by the kindness of Boaz. It just wasn't normal for the foreign immigrant to be treated with anything but discrimination and disdain.

    If we could really take on this attitude of going after a New Testament kind of hospitality, what could the results be?  Jesus, who had no place to lay his head, was dependent on the hospitality of strangers. Often, the homes and communities where he was received became the recipients of healing and grace.  He sent His disciples out the same way, with little money and provisions, intending that those families who understood and practiced hospitality would be the ones to receive blessings and to become part of His nascent Kingdom on earth.  Paul followed suit, and his hosts often became leaders of house churches that witnessed transformed lives, miracles, and which grew organically from having simply first lived and practiced this value called loving and receiving the stranger.  History tells us that temples, synagogues and later, places that received Christian pilgrims with hospitality, became known as hospices. These hospices increasingly became destinations for those aliens fleeing persecution,  and offered medical care in addition to lodging, food and a warm fire.  It was here that hospices developed into what were called  hospitals.

     As we go deeper into these last days, the frequency and the level of the persecution of Jesus' followers will only increase. Wars and famine and racial hatred will continue to leave many asylum seekers and immigrants in their wake. Government and social programs will not be able to heal the ugly wound of xenophobia and prejudice that lies at the base of every sinful heart. Only those whose hearts are cleansed and healed by the One who forgave his tormentors and reconciled a sinful world to His Father can solve what plagues our communities. And it is an epidemic to which no nation, city or culture is immune.   There will be a great need for centers of hospitality and unconditional love to the weary souls of strangers, aliens and foreigners. If we are not there yet as a family or a believing community, we can start. Start valuing, pursuing and practicing hospitality in ways big and small. We can begin by being  friends to the outsider and finding our hearts increasingly fonder of guests, instead of flustered by unexpected interruptions to our tidy lives and tight schedules.  Our motive is to obey the words and example of our Savior, but the end result just might be unexpected blessings and honor poured out on simple hearts and hearths of hospitality that evolve into powerfully attractive hospitals of healing and hope.

The Pont of the Story

    

      I just love May. Good weather, college graduations, tons of vacation, Mother's Day, hay fever. Hey, it's nothing to sneeze at. Maybe something on this list escapes you, though - like the vacation part. However in France, the month of May is always equated with a particularly generous vacation schedule. The happy month kicks off with a workers holiday on the first. This is followed by Victory Day (8th), Ascension Day (9th), and rounded out by the Monday after Pentecost Sunday. And yes, two weeks off school for the kiddos thrown in there for good measure. That's a serious block of family time, which might explain the abnormally high number of divorces in the spring. That was a joke. But the French do take their vacations quite seriously.
   
     I was told by a French friend that his grandfather, just three generations ago, was not given any vacation time. Evidently, they had to fight for what they have. Someone should have told them they could stop fighting, because now the French holiday system is near legendary. Your average worker in this country receives six weeks of personal vacation a year. That doesn't include a dozen other public holidays, like Jesus' Ascension day, Epiphany Day, and of course this year what I call the Grand Assumption day, not to be confused with the real Assumption Day on August 15th . This is what I call the double holiday of May 8th and 9th when it falls on a Tuesday-Wednesday or Wednesday-Thursday (like this year) and most workers just decide to take the normal working Monday or Friday in between as a holiday, conveniently creating five straight days off work. It's not given to them officially, but they decide to take it anyway. It's called le pont  here in France, which means "the bridge", where everyone assumes they can just receive a  free pass and take that one extra day off. Hey, it's a natural bridge and you just learn to take it.  And it's conceded, though they've already received their fair share of sleep-in days.

      What do we do when someone takes advantage of our generosity? Do we let it go and give them a pass? Or do we count favors and tally benefits, all in the spirit of keeping everything fair? Sometimes people take more than they should. Often they are ignorant of the grace they receive and just want more. It's hard to just let it go. But that's what grace does. It gives a pass. And that's ultimately the purpose we serve on this earth - to freely give away to others the grace handed to us when we were just takers and consumers of kindness. The next time someone takes from you, do what Jesus said in His great sermon on how to be a disciple -let them have their extra demand. You just might build a bridge between the selfish and the Selfless One. And that would make any day a real extended holy-day.

A Barry Good Story

     Barry Zito’s story fascinates me. A big reason is because I am a die-hard San Francisco Giants fan. Another is because his story is one of reconciliation and finding redemption while standing on a very public stage. Barry is a Christian today, but that wasn’t always the case. When he pitched for the cross-bay rival Oakland A’s, he was known by such names as “Planet Zito” and “Captain Quirk” as he avidly followed Zen Buddhism and practiced yoga in the outfield before games. He once credited something he called a universal life force that helped him excel in his career. He was raised in a metaphysical, new-age church where his mother was the pastor.  But all of that began to change in 2010. And to understand the full story we have to go back to 2007 where Barry Zito was a Cy Young award winner and All-Star who had just signed, at that time, the most lucrative long-term contract for a pitcher in Major League Baseball history.

     From the start in San Francisco there were high expectations, and by all accounts Barry was a failure. He was booed and criticized by fans frustrated with his string of yearly sub-par performances. He struggled for years as the highest paid pitcher on the team, yet with the worst record. He hit bottom in 2010 when he was left off of the team’s World Series roster. He watched from home while his teammates went on to win the championship without him.  Fueled by millions of dollars in salary, the expectations of thousands of fans and the merciless media were on his shoulders. It looked like the pressure would crush him.  He was injured in a car accident and had a recurring foot injury that wouldn’t heal. He was replaced as a starter on the Giants.  And Barry began looking for answers and God was there. Even though Barry had previously rejected Christ as a valid option in his life, Jesus graciously began to set him on a course of restoration. Barry began the 2012 season with renewed hope and determination, and also a new life surrendered to Christ.

     And what a turnaround. His first game of the season was a 7-0 shutout. He won 14 games straight to finish the season and lead the Giants to the playoffs. In game 5 of the National League Championship, he pitched what he would call “the best game of my career” bringing the Giants back from the edge of elimination. In two years he went from watching the World Series from the sidelines to being handed the ball to start Game One of the most important game of his life. And he won that game, opposite the best pitcher in the league for the Tigers.  He left the game to a standing ovation. He inspired a Twitter hashtag #rallyzito which trended worldwide. The guy who had become the biggest punch-line, was now the team’s biggest punch-out. Restored to his proper place of a valued and respected player, he walked off the world series mound to a standing ovation of cheering, adoring fans. That was an incredible moment of redemption. A career rescued from the ashes. A life given a second chance. And the once vilified was now reconciled to a city and team that had all but given up and turned their backs on him. 

     It’s not just a feel-good story. It’s the real-life triumph of a man newly surrendered to Christ, who finds that God has the power to make all things new and to bring reconciliation among even the most hopeless situations. That’s our God. And I couldn’t be happier that I get to see restoration and reconciliation lived out in high-definition clarity on a baseball team that I love.

Much Too Pie-ous

     

     I was having a discussion with my friend Guy today.  Yes, he is also a guy friend, but he happens to be named Guy, in case there is any confusion. Anyway, we were talking about  models of evangelism and discipleship among ethnic/religious groups and how to help shape and equip an established church representing the dominant culture to adapt in being more hospitable and attractive to the minority cultures around her. Maybe you thought all guys talked about was sports, but we also talk about other subjects, like food.

     Guy used the analogy of a pie to illustrate how a primarily mono-cultural  church can create a slice from among its whole to serve as a concentrated focus on  a specific people group, such as Arabs.  That started me thinking about pies, which really had nothing to do with my appetite because at that moment we were enjoying a breakfast of cappuccinos with freshly baked baguettes and jam at McDonald's (Only  in France, people- only in France). As I thought about it, the analogy doesn't seem to hold up too well only because the room we carve out in the pie for them becomes what turns out to be a slice of something of an entirely different flavor and texture from the rest. And in the end, it's still exclusively our pie and we really don't understand what it feels like to be a little blackberry surrounded by a whole lot of rhubarb.   Cultural, religious, or historical barriers prevent us from helping invitees or new believers from minority or cultural sub-groups to feel welcome and to fully integrate into the life of the church. One problem is that we tend to think about the participation, power sharing and personality of our pie in terms of doling out rationed slices. It is as if  we're a pie divided, before we've even started.

      Keeping with the pie imagery, one could also envision just creating two entirely different pies. We see this all the time in more of  a "let them have their own pie" approach.  Often, it means ethnic churches that have their own culture and language, and exist quite independent from other mono-ethnic churches or who are loosely associated with a "mother" church, meeting for language-specific worship and fellowship at an alternative time and/or location. I get my pie and you get yours; everybody's happy, right? When the two pies do try to get together for a unified event, it can resemble more of a side-by-side dessert display rather than a true fusion of tastes and textures. 

     But what if there was a third model, and it wasn't a pie but a pizza. OK, I can hear the Italians objecting that pizza is pie.  I won't argue that, but I would like to argue the superiority of  thick crust over thin.  That's an argument worth fighting for. But on the subject of pizza and dessert pie.  They may possess the same shape, and maybe the same amount of slices, but I propose to you, they are constructed very differently. A pie's main ingredients are mixed together into a filling before baking. A pizza's ingredients are spread over the whole pizza a layer at a time.  Cheese, salami, olives, and more rarely, anchovies, are spread over the entire pizza, each with it's distinctive appearance and flavor, yet covering its entire surface to give it a unique array of colors, aroma, and taste. But should you want to concentrate a number of extra pepperonis over onto one quarter of the pie to give it a more dominant  taste of spicy goodness, you have not changed the nature of the pizza, which was always designed to be a "combination" from the beginning. Now you have a dominant flavor in a certain section, but one that still mixes with the other ingredients more organically.  Further, add a brand-new, untried ingredient to the pizza, and it should blend right in with the other varied, yet complimentary components.

     Isn't it typically the least mature in a given family who prefer not to branch out to order anything but the tried and true mozzarella pizza they have always eaten?  A combination pizza is more costly than a plain cheese. Of the two pizzas, one requires more work, more preparation of ingredients, and more investment than the other, not to mention a more diversified palate. But the result of richness in diversity of flavor is well worth the cost and the risk of ordering a large pizza with "the works".  In the church, we barely do OK at reproducing churches after our own kind. But we are pretty inept at reaching and integrating people different from us into our Christian communities.  In most cities, pizza restaurants outnumber pie shops. May it be so in the Kingdom of God as His Church and her rapid multiplication begin to reflect more accurately what God Himself destined to be an wonderfully diverse yet connected and globalized world.

Make Light Work

     I have been intrigued lately by Jesus’ description of us, His disciples, as a city on a hill.  We have a lot of those here in Grenoble. No, I’m not necessarily talking about disciples. We could use a lot more around here. But we do have a lot of hills. And mountains. Big ones, in fact.

     One of the prettiest sights in this valley which is full of them, is to look up at night and see the dancing lights of the small communities that dot the surrounding mountainsides. It inspires valley dwellers to say from afar “I want to visit that place one day.”  True community emanating Jesus’ warm light is pretty attractive.  Hopefully, it’s what makes the courageous few non-initiated seekers decide to give our Christian groups and meetings a shot. But what do they feel and experience as they pay a visit?  I imagine if I hiked up to explore one of our hilltop communities, the same lights that attracted me would be coming from pretty houses with welcome mats in front of the door. But I would still be on the outside looking in. All the warmth and light and laughter on the inside of the house, would now only frustrate me, as I stand shut out in the cold. Appreciating the light can degenerate quickly into resenting those in the light who remain blissfully ignorant of my presence just outside the window, enjoying their meals, their bedtime stories or their Monday Night Football.

     I think this is why Jesus followed up his city metaphor by saying, “No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house.” It’s that last phrase that really stuck with me. A city on a hill, Jesus-style, doesn't just radiate light. It’s not enough to catch someone's eye; we have to capture their hearts by inviting them all the way in to the house. Here the original word is better translated household, or family. Simply put, we have to try extremely hard to help people feel like they belong to what we have and who we are.  By giving them complete access to our hearths and our hearts, regardless of race, religion, or rebellious lifestyle.

    We are trying to build an authentic, non-religious community of Christ-followers here in this alpine city. What Grenoble is physically – a city on a hill – is what we purpose to be spiritually.  Grenoble historically was a place of refuge for persecuted Protestants in the 1500’s and for Jews hunted down by Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.  It continued to be a destination for displaced peoples during and after the Algerian conflict a half-century ago.  Today, immigrants still flock to this city, escaping their past in search of a real future. 

      God is also calling us to be like one of the six cities of refuge in the Old Testament which were set apart to receive those caught in crisis of their own making. These cities were the inheritance of the Levites, who were already well-versed in mediating between the harsh law and a sinful people.  Who better than they to serve as a compassionate buffer between the hapless pursued and the hell-bent pursuers? This is one of the key roles we feel called to fulfill. Grenoble, our city-of-refuge-on-a-hill, will continue to be a cross-roads for the asylum seeker and international sojourner. There are many, political, religious and economic refugees, students, laborers, and stateless immigrants who find themselves in France.  They possibly were attracted here by the lights of hope and promise they observed from a distance. But sadly, upon arriving here, they are often shut out from structures of culture, community and even church that surround them. If hospitality is an art, we can’t just offer to a world in crisis and conflict sterile replicas or shameful forgeries. We have to paint from our hearts daily, epic works of beauty and warmth that draw people into the scene, captured and inspired.