Editorial: The Gift of the Stranger
Revisited
David
I. Smith
Most readers of this
journal are probably familiar with the volume The Gift of the Stranger:
Faith, Hospitality and Foreign Language Learning that I coauthored with
Barbara Carvill. This is no great boast; the literature on faith and language
learning is small enough that anyone interested in the topic is likely to have
picked it up it regardless of its merits or weaknesses. Even so, the response to
the book, recently published in Russian translation, has been gratifying. It has
also at certain moments been troubling. In what follows I would like to voice a
caution and a corrective concerning the way in which some of the book’s
central themes appear to have been received.1
At the heart of the
book is the argument that the Christian learner of other languages and cultures
stands under a twofold calling: to be a blessing as a stranger and to exercise
hospitality to strangers. As we put it then:
Students who become
strangers in a foreign land are called to be a blessing to the locals by
speaking in their tongue, by listening to their stories and sharing their own,
by asking good questions, by comparing and contrasting, by learning from
them—in short, by using the special freedom and responsibility an educated
stranger has in the host country for being a loving presence. Similarly,
students also are called to become good hosts to the foreigner or alien in their
own land, to receive the stranger graciously, and to practice a kind of
hospitality which is a blessing to both the guest and the host. Both callings,
we propose, make up the very heart of foreign language education.2
Over the past few years
I have seen these themes cited on various occasions either in papers presented
at conferences or submitted for publication or in campus discussion, and have
become uncomfortable with what appears to be a discernible tendency in such
mentions, namely the tendency to focus only on the idea of hospitality. The call
to learn hospitality to the stranger is
emphasized to the neglect of—sometimes without mention of—the call to become
a particular kind of stranger. There are many possible reasons for this,
including the simple fact that the idea of hospitality fits easily into a wider
discussion of the virtues that makes it easier to latch onto than the perhaps
vaguer notion of being a good stranger. The imbalance may be to some degree our
fault; with hindsight, it seems to me that the passage just quoted, and other
similar passages, associate being a stranger too firmly with visits to the host
country. Our focus was on travel to the target culture as an element in and
desired outcome of language learning, and what we had to say about that still
seems worth saying; however I suspect that it needs to be supplemented with some
further discussion about how we learn to see ourselves as strangers to others
even when we are in familiar, comfortable surroundings, and particularly when we
are in our classrooms.
The reason why this
matters is basically an ethical one. A focus on hospitality without a
willingness to realize one’s own position as a stranger to others too easily
cohabits (especially for Caucasian, Western speakers of English) with existing
feelings of cultural superiority and moral worth. A true story told to me by a
NACFLA colleague makes the point vividly. A professor was teaching a statistics
class in the Spring semester, and one of his students, who was from India, was
struggling. He arranged to meet with this student weekly for individual
tutoring. The weather was quite warm, the office was very small and the student
sat very close to the professor, who began to find his personal odor strong and
offensive. The student used no deodorant, no mouthwash, no aftershave. But the
professor was determined to be tolerant—to exercise hospitality—and said
nothing. At the end of the semester, the student came by to thank the professor
for his help, and then added in a somewhat ashamed manner that there was
something he had to confess. He admitted that he had found it very difficult
working with the professor in such close quarters because the smell of the
professor’s cologne, aftershave, deodorant and mouthwash had been overpowering
and offensive.
This brief anecdote
highlights well the dangers of one-sided hospitality—playing host without
realizing that one is also a stranger to the other can lead to the unfortunate
situation of harboring a condescending attitude towards the other while at the
same time feeling more virtuous for one’s noble attempts at accommodation.
Dwelling only on how “we” (a category commonly constructed to exclude the
stranger) must be more hospitable to “them” (Hispanics, foreigners, etc) too
easily confuses hospitality with what a colleague referred to the other day as
“Christian pity,” a form of pride that appears to itself as virtue.
Of course one proper
response to this is to point out that such pity is not genuine hospitality. In
our book we talked about what we meant by hospitality as being when, for
instance, “native English speakers, whose mother tongue is the lingua
franca of our world, indicate with their open arms that they are ready to abandon
their attitude of linguistic superiority and walk humbly the long and
arduous road of learning the tongue of another people,”3 or when there is “authentic give-and-take” in which we “make
space within ourselves” for the other.4 Genuine hospitality, argues Amy
Oden, “shifts the frame of reference from self to other to relationship. This
shift invariably leads to repentance, for one sees the degree to which one’s
own view has become the only view. . . . When we realize how we have inflated
our own frame of reference and imposed it on all of reality, we know we have
committed the sin of idolatry, of taking our own particular part and making it
the whole.”5
Interestingly, Oden also notes that “it is common for readers to identify
almost automatically with the host, but seldom with the stranger. This may be
partly due to the belief that the position of the host carries greater power.”6
She goes on to echo the concerns raised here:
Hospitality does not
entail feeling sorry for someone and trying to help. . . . The feeling of pity
and the desire to better the lives of others is a good thing, often inspired by
God in one’s heart. But it is seductive, even dangerous, for the host to view
herself as the helper. The would-be act of hospitality becomes an act of
condescension and failure to see, either one’s own need or the true identity
of the stranger as Christ. . . . Ego, self-satisfaction, a need to feel off the
hook, demonstrating competence and righteousness, all too easily enter the
equation, with the host as hero and the guest as victim.7
Part of the answer,
then, is to insist on a fully Christian understanding of hospitality as a
welcoming of angels unawares, that is, of one who may well be greater than I and
from whom I must learn, rather than as a virtuous retooling of the centered self
to make some space for pity. Even such an interrogation of the idea of
hospitality, however, carries with it the need for a further step, an admission
that the self, and not merely the other, is a vulnerable stranger.
I was struck recently
in this connection by a passing comment made by theologian Lamin Sanneh. In the
midst of a discussion of the vast growth in Africa of forms of Christian faith
and practice that are authentically rooted in African tradition, and not to be
understood as by-products of either Western colonialism or Western mission,
Sanneh comments:
If you remember, I said
earlier that conversion was to God; I did not say that it was to European or
other people’s theories of God. I accept that conversion puts the gospel
through the crucible of its host culture, but Europe is not host to Africa in
the things of God, do you think?8
His point is clear and
congruent with the dangers already discussed—as long as Europe (and
Eurocentric America) sees itself as the host graciously welcoming Africans to
the spiritual table, it is implied that the relationship of African Christianity
to God must somehow be mediated through the West. To position ourselves
primarily as host, even if we try to be open-hearted hosts, is still to lay an
implicit claim to ownership of the space in which the interaction occurs.
Sometimes (as when we welcome a stranger into our home) this seems justified;
sometimes (as when native speakers of English see themselves as welcoming
Spanish speakers to the USA, a country that does not actually have an official
language) the assumption seems questionable.
This is why the
stranger is important. Our book was titled The Gift of the Stranger (not The
Gift of the Host), and both in the description of our dual calling quoted
above and in the sequencing of the chapters the stranger came first, the host
second. This follows a biblical pattern. We rooted our argument in the biblical
call to love the stranger, In Leviticus 19:34, where the call to “love your
neighbor as yourself” from a few verses earlier (19:18) is reformulated as
“love the alien as yourself”, the full command reads: “The alien living
with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for
you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God” (19:34–35).
The command to love is preceded by a leveling of status (do not consider
the foreigner as less than one born in your own community) and perhaps most
significantly is rooted (as elsewhere in the Pentateuch) in an appeal to
Israel’s prior experience as aliens themselves. Being a stranger comes before
loving the stranger—Israel’s knowledge of what it is like to be at the
margins is appealed to as the basis for developing a kind of hospitality that
might not be mere condescension.
This, then, is another
part of the answer to the seductions of hospitality: Realize first that you are
a stranger to others; that your own ways are contingent, challengeable, and
often just plain odd. Having grasped this it may be possible to extend
hospitality (to do to others as we would have them do to us, for we also are
strangers) without placing oneself on a moral pedestal or seeing the other as
the poor supplicant on whom we can bestow our bounty. Returning to the quotation
with which I began, while it remains true that it is often during foreign travel
that we will find out what kind of stranger our students have become, the
process of realizing that they are strangers to others, that they are not the
center of everyone’s world, needs to be taking place before then, and should
be addressed in classroom pedagogy. I think this was intended to be implicit in
what we wrote in our book, and we certainly discussed the dangers of the
one-sided host perspective as we shaped the material, but I think now that this
aspect of learning to be a stranger even before one actually ventures out into
another culture could have been stated more clearly.
I do not make the
assumption when I see the book quoted and only hospitality mentioned that the
author is intending to adopt a stance of condescending cultural superiority.
Perhaps there was simply an effort to be brief; perhaps the summary was partial;
perhaps it was only a passing reference with little weight attached to it. I do
think, however, that our abbreviations are often telling, and I remain wary when
I see the theme of hospitality cited and celebrated without its grounding in the
awareness that I, too, am a stranger.
Introduction to Volume 7
The papers in this
volume make a series of intriguing connections between the highly specific,
perhaps even the esoteric, and basic broader issues that should be of concern to
every reader of the journal. Andrew Wisely’s paper focuses on a particular
episode from German literary history, the critical response to an early 19th
century novel, but does so in such a way as to draw out important wider
implications for the practice of Christian interpretation. His paper thus speaks
beyond the bounds of German literary studies. Joanne McKeown’s essay takes its
starting point a century earlier and draws from both French and German sources
to explore the connections between nervous illness and spiritual visions as
represented in literary settings. Galen Yorba-Gray reaches further back still,
finding in the autobiographical writings of Saint Augustine a stimulus for
reflection on how journalling practices in language classrooms can contribute to
students’ spiritual formation. Finally, Laura Dennis-Bay brings us back to
modern times and once again connects a particular starting point with matters of
wider concern with her examination of how the film Au revoir les enfants
can enable discussion of religious and ethical issues in the French classroom.
While each of these papers is grounded in a particular language and period, each
also raises concerns that are relevant to colleagues in related disciplines.
The forum in this issue
contains two diverse contributions. Sara Nova continues the focus on the
Holocaust begun in Laura Dennis-Bay’s article with her discussion of Tzvetan
Todorow’s account of the experiences of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II.
David Smith turns to recent discussions of language pedagogy, in particular to
recent talk of the language classroom as an ecology, and suggests some ways in
which ecological metaphors can connect with a concern for student spirituality.
The journal concludes with Jim Wilkins’ review of a new book by Terry Osborn,
the keynote speaker at this year’s NACFLA conference.
Once again, the
material contained in these pages covers a rich range of issues emerging from a
wide variety of areas of specialism, yet converges around the concerns that form
the heart of NACFLA. We commend these papers to you and hope that they will
provoke fresh reflection and renewed practice.
David I. Smith and
Dianne Zandstra
NOTES
1 I am very
grateful to Barbara Carvill, Terry Osborn and Hadley Wood for their input into
what follows.
2 David I.
Smith & Barbara Carvill, The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality and
Foreign Language Learning, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, p.58.
3 Smith &
Carvill, p.100, emphasis added.
4 Smith &
Carvill, p.92.
5 Amy G. Oden,
ed., And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity,
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001, p.15.
6 Oden,
pp.26–27.
7 Oden, p.109.