The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World by Rosaria Butterfield

Author:Rosaria Butterfield [Butterfield, Rosaria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012000/REL023000/REL030000
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2018-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

7

Giving up the Ghosts

The Lamentation of Hospitality

February 3, 2017, Durham, North Carolina

This morning, when my alarm chirped at four o’clock, I intuitively reached for a sweater of my mom’s that still smells of her. The sweater smells like jasmine and Suave hair spray and tea tree oil.

My mother and I were too close and not close at all. I was her only child, and for most of my life, I suffocated under her dashed expectations.

My mother was an early feminist who raised a feminist daughter. When I was about five years old, I recall being in the elevator of Marshall Fields in Chicago. A (somewhat creepy, as I remember him) man bent down, got too close to my face, smelling sickeningly of Old Spice (too sweet!) and Brandywine pipe tobacco (too stale!), and breathed, “What a pretty little girl. Are you going to marry a doctor?” My mother, who stood 4 feet 11 inches high, wedged herself between me and this man and declared, “My daughter is not going to marry a doctor. She is going to become one.” From that day forward, my fate was set, and the churning of women’s empowerment and independence from men became my driving idols.

My mother was also manic, and until she admitted this to a doctor in 2008—at the age of seventy-seven—and started taking medication to control it, she was unbearable to be around. No majestic mountain range knew the heights of her excitement, and no cavernous depth knew the pit of her anger and despair. My job was to keep jollying her out of mental illness to stay somewhere in the middle. I spent my life trying to orchestrate my mother’s mental health, and I failed miserably.

For most of our years together, it was just she and I. My half-brother disappeared from my life when I turned ten; my father was absent through alcohol abuse and a secret life of white-collar petty crime long before he passed away, seven days after my twenty-second birthday.

My mother was fundamentally unable to keep friends over the long haul, when her unpredictable anger canceled out her effusive giving, but my mom was able to make friends in the snap of a smile. Mom was personable, funny, gregarious, and the life of the party.

When I was a new professor at Syracuse University, my lover at the time, Kate, would bring me home to her father and stepmother’s house. They lived a few miles from our home. Together with Bill and Janet (Kate’s dad and stepmom), we would play bridge and drink merlot, go bowling and then out for Mexican food, take in the festival at Sylvan Beach and play dopey carnival games. We would stay up in our pj’s and watch movies together. When we stayed at their house, Kate and I could spend hours working on our books or go for a long run. We could come to their home when it was convenient and leave when we needed to. We were not shamed for our absence or criticized for our presence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.