the rix mix

"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." Hebrews 13:2

We don't know who wrote this down;  it must have been a common saying long before the author appropriated it. There was a "code" of hospitality in much of the  pagan world.  But angels are another matter. The Jews had been entertaining them for centuries. Jacob wrestled one to a standoff, & the angel had to "cheat" to get loose.

Our opportunities for hospitality occur most often outside our homes. I'm not by habit a person who looks for those opportunities, not out of deliberate indifference but because I'm usually wrapped up in my own thoughts. But I believe in what Carl Jung called synchronicity: "...the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance." I'm inclined to allow "chance" a greater role. One may see the synchronicity only by letting the chance encounter unfold.

 My patron saint, Martin of Tours, has such an encounter, with a coatless beggar. 

I have been served by angels. All of them were human. Only one had an other-worldly quality. Met him toward the end of a cross-country bus trip, in upstate New York, when my girlfriend & I were financially tapped out & concerned we wouldn't eat anything until we reached a friend expecting us in Bar Harbor, Maine.  We asked him for nothing. He sized us up & just happened to be carrying a large shopping bag of goodies from a Trader Joe's kind of store. He got on the bus in Rochester & was dressed  in black, wore a straw boater kind of hat, & departed the bus the middle of the night somewhere around Syracuse.

The problem with serving as an "angel" is that one might have to approach what one finds repulsive, whatever qualifies as the "leper" to us. Repulsive is not the same as vulgar. I find vulgarity everywhere. Sometimes it amuses.  I enjoy it on a boardwalk or at a traveling summer carnival, dislike it in downtown Elizabeth, & when used too often & too casually in speech. Repulsive is something else.