A Week at Stillpoint
Today: The Spiritual Practice of Hospitality
Tuesday’s Compass | Gone Hiking | August 11
For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and "Gone Hiking" is one of its recurring series. Every Tuesday it ventures into the practices and ways that lead to a deeper life with God. Sadly, many of those ideas and ways have been largely forgotten within contemporary Christianity.This series is a guide to finding it again.
The time had come for Dr. Trueblood, our mentor, guide, teacher, and friend, to move east to Philadelphia to be near his children in the last years of his life. Lorri and I had been his students for a decade by then. We understood the need for his move east, but we were grieving the loss of that fabulous relationship that had changed us deeply. Our time spent with him being guided into deeper understanding of the ideas and ways of Christianity were golden moments and years.
The moving day had come. Elton had invited us to spend the last night with him in his home in order to share a final breakfast and have a proper time for farewell. Everything in the house was crated, waiting for the movers. Early in the morning, we heard him downstairs rustling through the crates in the dining room. We had plans of making him breakfast so we hurried downstairs, but we were too late. He had found his finest linen and spread it over a large crate that would serve as the dining table. He had found his china and crystal and they were set on the crate. He had gone outside and cut some of his finest roses and they adorned the table with beauty.
As we took in what he had done, Lorri said to Dr. Trueblood that she had been wanting to make him breakfast. But with a twinkle in his eyes and a smile at the corner of his mouth, he said, “Lorri. I’m sorry. You’ve flunked the entire course.”
When she asked what he meant, he said something we’ve never forgotten: “I wanted you to see one more time how important it is to serve. And when you serve, give your very best.”
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Lorri carries that lesson from that long-ago breakfast into every table she sets at Stillpoint. The Stillpoint is an Oasis Rest retreat site at our northwest Montana home near Glacier National Park we affectionately call The Stillpoint as it is located between two of the last remaining natural quiet zones (NQZ) in the United States. Oasis Rest offers retreat sites in multiple places across the United States, Europe, and Central America, each one designed to give leaders, pastors and missionariers room to breathe, heal, and re-enter the work of ministry and leadership with the relationship with Jesus back where it belongs as the reason why the ministry is done in the first place. The Stillpoint, sitting in a NQZ surrounded by Montana mountains and a few miles from Glacier, is one of those sites.
What we offer guests at The Stillpoint are a few delicious days of rest, stillness, ancient Christian spiritual practices, and meals. More on the meals in a moment. Every religion offers spiritual practices. Many of the practices offered by Christianity are carried in the contemplative stream of Christian theology and spirituality. Most of these rich practices have been replaced by shallower spirituality, leaving all of us including our leaders and guides depleted and gasping for spiritual oxygen. While we all know spiritual disciplines can become merely another way to prove your religiosity, the old contemplatives knew better. They knew the practices were a way of sinking a well into a reservoir that’s already there, a way of drawing water up into a soul that’s gone dry. Without them, a person can be religious, but they can never be transformed. These old practices are simply how the Spirit of God gets into us and changes us.
So, here at The Stillpoint, our guests get a chance to recover core practices that breathe healing and life back into us. One of those practices is an evening meal set around an old farmhouse dining table for every evening our guests are here at The Stillpoint. Lorri creates a dinner experience for our guests that sets the expectation each day that the time here can heal and restore. Every time, every meal, the preparation takes the better part of a day.
The dinner begins with a tablescape, something Lorri’s been arranging in her head since the guests were confirmed weeks earlier. Then candles and crystal, the good stuff, not the everyday glasses. Finally, cut flowers. The meal itself is built from old recipes where we’ve served communities of Quakers and Mennonites, places where we were learning how to guide others into a deeper life with Jesus.
The meal doesn’t arrive by delivery. Nothing is assembled the fast way. It is, on purpose, the old way of preparing a meal, built with love from the ground up, the way everyone used to prepare meals. As the season allows, much of the meal comes from our own garden.
I’ve always appreciated that breakfast meal and fellowship around a moving crate the day our friend, Elton, moved to Philadelphia. It was a nice touch bringing closure to a decade of learning, the kind of thing a gracious man does as he leaves. But I’ve come to think of what he did and that meal as a spiritual discipline itself, one of the oldest we have.
Meals show up repeatedly in Scripture setting the stage for the kind of conversations we had with Trueblood one last time. A supper set the stage for the longest, most important conversation in the entire Bible. That tabletalk around that Last Supper meal was rich and lasting, something we turn to again and again to understand what it means to follow the ways of Jesus. Mary and Martha wanted to serve Jesus a meal in their home. And in spite of their humanness spilling over into the meal, they did two remarkable things: they carefully prepared a meal, and they paid attention to their guest. I know Lorri often thinks of that meal when she prepares her tablescapes and dinners. A then there’s the meal that fed a large crowd of at least five thousand with next to nothing to serve as meal starters. And then there is the meal in Psalm 23, the meal spread for us in the presence of enemies.
I think of the Psalm 23 meal often as our guests sit around our table prepared for them. The enemies that everyone around that table have faced, including me, are the most deadly kinds for our souls: hurry, noise, pressure to perform, and the absence of anyone who really knows what this work costs you.
So, Lorri sets a table, not because it is fine dining for the sake of fine dining or elegance for the sake of elegance. It isn’t Martha Steward in the mountains of Montana. It has a much different motive: the practice of service for the sake of opening hearts and souls to the healing mercy of God. A table and a meal is prepared because it says something to a tired leader that words alone can’t say. We have prepared for you. We have prayed for you. We know something of what it costs to do what you do, and we want you to be served for a change instead of doing what you always do: serving others.
Most afternoons I find Lorri in the kitchen before anyone arrives, adjusting flowers and trying different arrangements and I think of a linen cloth thrown over a shipping crate. Give your very best when you serve, Trueblood said. Lorri listened to those last words spoken at our last meal with our friend. She hasn’t flunked that course since.
Gratefully,
— Gene
“And when you serve, give your very best.” Not, how many times, or how long, simply give your very best…Trueblood’s teaching moment is a great reminder for all of us. Serve as unto the Lord himself.