A carers conference has heard there is a hunger for hospitality in a disconnected world, writes Sylvia Thompson
Hospitality is a word we usually associate with tourism - at home or abroad - yet earlier this week, one of Ireland's best known providers of care for people with disabilities and those suffering from mental illness chose hospitality as the theme for a conference.
"A new call for an authentic spirituality" and "a way of life which offers new hope for contemporary Ireland" were among the aims of the one-day conference held as part of the first St John of God week, according to Brother Gregory McCrory, director of the Cluain Mhuire Mental Health Service in Dublin.
Grand aspirations indeed, yet, as speakers including Fr Bobby Gilmore, chairman of the Migrants Rights Centre in Dublin, and Fr Sean McDonagh, anthropologist and author, spoke, it became clear these aspirations were born out of fears that the essence of sincere human contact would be lost in our frenetic and urban, relationship-challenged and media-saturated society where specialisation, economic targets and fear of the stranger (a euphemism for racism, perhaps?) are to the fore.
"There is a deep hunger for hospitality and welcome. People are tired of the frenetic disconnected [lifestyles] with its overvaluing of efficiency," said Prof Christine Pohl, professor of Christian Social Ethics at the Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky, US, who spoke at the conference about recovering hospitality as a Christian tradition.
Drawing a historical timeline from biblical times to contemporary healthcare settings, she said people had always struggled with the moral issues around caring for others. "Physical needs can be met but spirits can be broken. Care-givers can intrude too much into the lives of those they care for simply because they are able to do so or people can be treated carelessly and condescension slips in as we distance ourselves from the problem," she said.
Prof Pohl also spoke of the dangers of "those who think they are superior and often despise those they help" or "those who disrespect those who receive their care simply because of their need" and the dangers of "those who choose to humiliate even as they help". Such strong moral issues gave much food for thought for over 150 staff members of St John of God clinics and hospitals who attended the conference.
"One of the differences between working for St John of God service and a health board service is that we are given the tools we need to work and we are encouraged to identify unmet needs and bring them to the attention of the service-provider," Dr Siobhan Barry, psychiatrist at the Cluain Mhuire Centre in Blackrock, Co Dublin, said. The aesthetics of the working environment and the need for time out to reflect on ways the service can be enhanced are also core values of the St John of God order.
Prof Pohl explained how historically professionalisation and specialisation in care-giving were in themselves attempts to provide respect and separate the donors [the financial care-providers] from those who did the caring. However, she did acknowledge that nowadays the pressure healthcare professionals are under to provide evidence for how budgets are spent can undermine the human-to-human contact essential to their work.
"Specialisation can miss the person. There is a need for accountability and support to be re-connected," she said. She suggested hospitals and day centres could do "hospitality inventories" asking themselves "how they communicate genuine respect and support and challenge those they care for toward growth and transformation".
Prof Pohl is the author of Making Room - Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans Publishing Company) and is researching a book on practices that build and break communities. "I'm looking at issues around fidelity, promise-keeping and truth-telling. Communities can't be sustained by deception and betrayal," she said.
Meanwhile, Fr Bobby Gilmore suggested it was significant that nowadays all we hear about is the economy and the market. "We seldom hear the word society. We need to look at how we as a society and as faith communities are relating to diversity. Immigration is a psychological journey of hope and there has to be a humanitarian gap left between the [powers] of the state and the marketplace," he said.
Speaking more specifically about Ireland's immigrant populations, he said: "The vast majority of immigrants are aged between 18 and 30. A country that loses that age band loses its energy and a country that gets people in that age-band gains that energy... yet a recent survey found that 66 per cent of Irish people have no contact with non-nationals. We have to switch from a culture of obligation to a culture of celebration."
Taking up the environmental theme and that we, as humans, are guests of the planet, Fr Sean McDonagh said, "it will take a radical commitment to justice to challenge the idolatry of the economy".
"The modern industrial economy sucks enormous energy out of people and most people are engrossed in mortgages, education for their children and holidays but this frenetic world has dislocated us from the texture of the earth and the community life which makes life enjoyable and pleasant." Fr McDonagh said, "We need to be enchanted by the world and realise that if we don't care for the earth, we can't care for our neighbours."
Moving on to more philosophical debate about hospitality, poet and philosopher John O'Donohue suggested that "we are made uneasy by what is foreign and different because we haven't made peace with it [the strangeness] in ourselves".
"The presentation of Ireland to Ireland, and Ireland to the outside, has been done in the language of the market yet hospitality is a different thing attuned to the logic of the invisible - it gives, not wanting a return."
He suggested the idea of "holding on to the image of the human face" as a means of keeping human contact central to the practice of care-giving and welcoming the stranger in contemporary Ireland.