by Cindy Cushman, Cohort I member
The Occupy ICE movement descended on Louisville, Kentucky on July 2, 2018. Mijente Louisville and Black Lives Matter Louisville began the movement by setting up Camp Compasión in front of the ICE offices in downtown Louisville. The camp remained there for 17 days until the Louisville Metro Police Department forcibly removed it on July 19.
I was sad to see it go, not just because I support their cause of fighting “to abolish ICE, reunite all state sanctioned separated families outside of prison, open borders, and dismantle the police state and its genocide of black/brown people.”[1] There was something really beautiful about how this community protested our administration’s inhospitable policies towards immigrants, while simultaneously modeling for all of us what true hospitality is.
When I visited Camp Compasión, it called to mind the late Letty Russell’s teachings on Christian hospitality. In her book Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference, Russell defined hospitality as “the practice of God’s welcome, embodied in our actions as we reach across difference to participate with God in bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.”[2] For Russell, our call as Christians to extend hospitality to strangers is rooted in the Bible and the people of Israel’s own experience of once being strangers in the land of Egypt. Russell notes that not only does the Bible tell us to love our neighbor, but in no less than thirty places it commands us to love the stranger. She makes the point, “It isn’t hard to love our neighbors because by and large our neighbors are people like us. What’s tough is to love the stranger, the person who isn’t like us, who has a different skin color, or a different faith, or a different background. That’s the real challenge.” [3]
For Russell, true hospitality as shown to us in the Bible, isn’t just about welcoming people. It is about welcoming people different from ourselves. And it is not just welcoming them, but inviting them to participate with us in God’s work as partners, not simply as guests. True hospitality is a give-and-take relationship, not one in which the host does all the giving and the guest does all the taking. At times, she says, the guest and the host will change roles. When the practice of hospitality includes reciprocity in the relationship, then true community is formed.
As a pastor serving congregations, I sometimes find it difficult to convey this understanding of partnership, or mutuality, in the practice of hospitality. As Russell says, “hospitality is often associated with such things as ‘terminal niceness’ like tea parties…and subject to deformation when it is practiced as a way of caring for so called ‘inferior people’ by those who are more advantaged and able to prove their superiority by being generous rather than using a model of partnership.”[4] When a church welcomes a new person, the goal is not to integrate that person into the church by teaching them to conform to that church’s ways, but to learn what gifts that person brings to the community and welcome them to share those gifts so that the whole community is transformed through the relationship as they participate together in God’s work in the world.
When I visited Camp Compasión, this is the type of hospitality I experienced. In just the couple of hours I spent at Camp Compasión, I wasn’t simply given a warm welcome. I was offered a role in the work to be done that day. I witnessed passersby being offered food if they were hungry. It was a “camp” in the truest sense of the word, so there were no fancy tables or rich delicacies, but anyone who stopped in was invited to make themselves a sandwich or help themselves to a drink whether they were there to actually protest or were on their way to somewhere else and were simply hungry.
Those like me, who came to see how they could participate in the work, were oriented to the day’s schedule and the needs of the moment. If there was a lull in the work, there was an art tent and participants were invited to make signs or other artwork. Throughout the seventeen days, the camp offered activities that were open to all people that benefitted the wider community – everything from first aid training to yoga to de-escalation training. The camp was a space where people were constantly “reaching across difference to participate with God in bringing justice and healing to a world in crisis.”
Not everyone there would name it as such because not everyone there was Christian, or even people of faith (while I was there a woman was holding a sign that said “Atheists against family separation”). But that too, was ok. There was an “altar” of sorts where people could choose to place sacred objects, so there was space for religious expression, without forcing it. People of different races, religions, classes and ages were gathered in that space every day, a unique expression of unity without uniformity. This group, that was gathering to protest the government’s inhospitable policies, displayed for us what hospitality means in its truest sense.
But, alas, as Russell warns in her book, “just hospitality will not make us safe.”[5] That truth was born out on July 19 when the city put an end to the camp. The city quickly found out that destroying the camp did not destroy the movement, as nine members of the Occupy ICE Louisville movement blocked the elevators to the Heyburn Building, where immigration court is held, on July 25. Occupy ICE Louisville will continue to find ways to protest our government’s treatment of immigrants, and hopefully continue to be creative about finding ways to exhibit for us what true hospitality really means.
“Just hospitality will not make us safe,” Russell says, “but it will lead us to risk joining in the work of mending creation without requiring those who are different to become like us.”[6] I am thankful for the witness of Camp Compasión in providing us with a living image of just hospitality. May each of us go and do likewise.
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[1] https://www.facebook.com/pg/occupyicelou/about/?ref=page_internal
[2] Russell, Letty. 2009. Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, pg. 1.
[3] Russell, Letty. 2009. Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, pg. 101.
[4] Russell, Letty. 2009. Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, pg. 80.
[5] Russell, Letty. 2009. Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, pg. 123.
[6] Russell, Letty. 2009. Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, pg. 123.