Celtic Prayer of Hospitality

I have been thinking a lot about hospitality this past month. Our Buenos Aires community finished a book discussion on Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine Pohl. This was my second time reading the book and I was challenged in new ways. Last week I finished reading Friendship at the Margins: Discovering Mutuality in Service and Mission by Chris Heuertz and Christine Pohl. This book does an excellent job explaining the WMF posture of ministry that we seek to live out among our friends who are poor. I highly recommend both books! They deserve blog reflections all of their own.

Reflecting on hospitality, I recently found this "Celtic Prayer of Hospitality" that I just posted on the Prayers and Creeds blog this weekend.

Celtic Prayer of Hospitality

We saw a stranger yesterday.

We put food in the eating place,

Drink in the drinking place,

Music in the listening place,

And with the sacred name of the triune God

He blessed us and our house,

Our cattle and our dear ones.

As the lark says in her song:

Often, often, often, goes the Christ

In the stranger’s guise.

True evangelical faith

cannot lie dormant

it clothes the naked

it feeds the hungry

it comforts the sorrowful

it shelters the destitute

it serves those that harm it

it binds up that which is wounded

it has become all things to all creatures.

~ Menno Simmons, 16th century

(Taken from: With All God’s People: The New Ecumenical Prayer Cycle (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1989), 131.)