In Flannery O’Connor’s collection of essays and lectures, entitled Mystery and Manners, the author discusses her aesthetical and literary theories, and the art of writing fiction in the deep south. She argues that it is impossible for the southern writer to divorce her sensibilities from the intensity of interpersonal relationships so common among southerners. For example, the presence of racism notwithstanding, we in the south do have rich relationships with our black brothers and sisters, and much of the art in the south emerges from that relationship, from Jazz and gospel music to sculpture and painting to literature and poetry. O’Connor’s premise is that it is manners, the social graces, that open us to the intimate mystery of who we are as humans….gracious words, words from the soul, that enable us to defer to the human nature of the other, a mirror, as it were, onto the Self. My mother would agree. There was no sin greater in our household than bad manners. There is a carved sign in the refectory at General Theological Seminary that reads, “manners maketh man.”
In our reading this Lent Three Cups of Tea, we discover that the cosmic force that transforms the protagonist from mountain climber to humanitarian is that of hospitality, the greatest of all the manners. It is the art of sacred welcome that makes holy our connection to each other. It is the art of welcoming the stranger that will lead us into the life God envisions for us and our world. It is the means by which we experience the mystery of being human, and our rightful place in the created order. This idea exists in every religion in the world, so there must be something to it. We hear Jesus say in Matthew that “whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” In the Koine Greek, the words for ‘welcome’ and ‘stranger’ share the same root. So there is a decided linguistic tension in this passage. Perhaps that tension is best described as mystery….the mystery engendered and apprehended upon the gracious welcome of the stranger.
What would the world be like if we as post modern world citizens stop the deeply institutionalized practice of violence, and begin the practice of recognizing our common humanity through the art of hospitality and welcome. We now know, as we always should have known, that our means are our ends in the making; that violence will, as it forever has, beget new violence…violence, just plain unadulterated bad manners. Why not welcome first in sacred deference to our brother, our sister…and there we will see the mystery of who we are, which is to see the very image of God that manners maketh.
