Reaching Out in Lent, Part III: Hostility, Hospitality, and a Spirituality for the Academic Job Market

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.”

-Pope Francis

In posts I and II of this Lenten series, we have followed Henri Nouwen’s discussion of the transformation of interior loneliness into inner solitude. In this and the next post, I turn my attention to the second and more social component of Nouwen’s conception of reaching out: the transformation of hostility into hospitality.

Given our current sociopolitical context – complete with trolling, combox wars, and constant attempts to trump one another as we play at the game of life – hostility presumably needs little introduction. What does need introduction – or perhaps a re-introduction – is the practice of hospitality.

Significant for Nouwen is the fact that hospitality is a way of being before it is a concrete action. It does not preclude foundational hospitable practices such as the opening of one’s home, but neither is it inherent in these practices – one might very easily open one’s home without opening one’s heart, and the opening of one’s heart in hospitality need not be confined to our means or ability to offer physical space.

Rather, what Nouwen means by hospitality is a capacity for humility, a gift of opening a space of freedom where guest and host alike can interact – or be silent together – removed from the coercions and violences that we find both within and without our hearts. As one might expect, the practice of establishing such a space is difficult, for even when we separate ourselves and the spaces under our control from the maelstrom outside, it’s still inside us. As Nouwen points out, we fear silence, to the point that we will project onto it whatever chatter or illusion we can manage as a distraction – thereby filling that space with our unsettled selves rather than with a capaciousness that invites others. Indeed, as a recent study suggests, many will actually choose physical pain rather than face silence – a fact we know all too well from the addictions we practice as “self-medication.” But the battle is, I believe, worth fighting, and Nouwen is onto something – as I can attest from my own experiences and desires.

I’m an academic, and I’m on the job market – and it’s prime training ground for precisely what Nouwen is talking about. For those who don’t know the current status of the academic job market, it’s bad. The market is supersaturated, and there can be competition even for sessional and adjunct positions, which generally don’t pay enough and are not stable enough to depend on as a long-term means of making a living. Further, in the job hunt, we are all competing against each other such that the top third if not the top half of any given job search pool are likely more than qualified for the positions offered. There is no grace, and no room for mistakes – those just a little less polished or less quick or less clever or less extroverted are left behind, even if their work and self-presentation are generally good or promising.

And this is precisely the nightmare climate of the modern world that Nouwen is talking about. Rejection makes one guarded, even in relationships that may have nothing to do with our vocations. And there are always temptations. There is the temptation to envy rather than rejoice with even some of our closest friends when they succeed. There is the temptation to get caught up in our own matters and forget the heartbreak of others around us – often far worse than our own. And when we are sick and tired of these options, there is always the temptation to throw up our hands in passive dissociation, to become ghosts haunting an abandoned ruin of ourselves.

Yet precisely in the midst of this is the very space I have been called to make hospitable. I’m not good at it, but I’m willing to learn because it’s something I want. I want a clear space in my heart, free of the envy and bitterness and guardedness that drives others away, even as it is clear of my own preoccupation with myself on one hand and my temptation toward self-evacuation on the other. The world around me has colluded with my wayward heart to offer me a space where clash the powers and principalities, the thrones and dominions. What I pray for rather is a space in my heart open and free to rejoice with those who rejoice, and to mourn with those who mourn.