On Radical Hospitality: Welcoming the Stranger in an Age of Fear

A Reflection on Reimagining Hope through the ancient practice of welcoming and embracing the “other.”

Permit me, if you will, to pull up a well-worn chair by the hearth of your imagination, and speak with you plainly, as one old friend to another. For there is something pressing upon my heart of late — a matter which, like the persistent knocking of rain on my aluminium roof, demands we lift our heads and take notice. 

It takes only a few minutes’ scrolling through my news feed to see it: stories from every corner of the globe, heavy with the ache of displacement and exclusion.

A boat of migrants capsizes off distant shores. Families, weary and hollow-eyed, are turned back at borders drawn by unseen hands. In the old days — by which I mean the days before we all carried pocket-sized windows of worry — it was not unusual to welcome the unknown traveler to one’s table. There was a recognition, perhaps naive by today’s standards, that in offering bread and warmth to a stranger, we were entertaining something larger than ourselves — some sliver of divine mystery.

I was first introduced to the beauty of radical hospitality not in some grand theological treatise, but in the quiet power of an old film.

It was the 1978 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables — and I can still remember how it stirred something deep within me.

There, amidst the shadows of a harsh and unforgiving world, stood Bishop Myriel, the Bishop of Digne: a man who welcomed a weary, broken ex-convict into his home with no questions, no caution — only kindness.

With simple bread and shelter, he offered Jean Valjean not merely comfort for a night, but the gift of a new beginning.

That small, luminous act — the unguarded welcome of a stranger — changed the course of a life.

It remains, even now, one of the most quietly powerful stories of grace I have ever encountered. 

I dare say, this is not mere nostalgia. It is a memory etched into the marrow of our humanity, as vital now as ever. Radical hospitality — the brave, deliberate opening of our lives to those we do not yet understand — is no less necessary in an age of fear. It is more so.

It is a rebellion, in fact: a gentle, stubborn resistance against the spirit of suspicion.
When we open our door to the unfamiliar, we declare that fear will not be our master. When we set another place at the table, even for one we do not fully know, we proclaim with our very lives that love is still stronger than fear, that trust still outpaces cynicism.

This, I believe, is not only a moral calling, but a profound act of self-preservation.
For in welcoming the stranger, we become more fully ourselves. We remember that we are not isolated islands, but part of a great and glorious archipelago, bound together by unseen bridges of grace. And it matters now more than ever. Because every small act of hospitality is a quiet protest against a culture of fear. It is a declaration, however modest, that love still has agency, that belonging is still possible. It may be as simple as an invitation to coffee with the new neighbor, an extra place set at the table, an act of noticing someone most would pass by.

It is the refusal to see another person merely as a category or a risk, but rather, as a living, breathing miracle.

Let us then consider,  each of us  in our own quiet way, how we might extend the threshold of our welcome a little wider.  A listening ear, a shared meal, a simple act of curiosity and kindness — these are no small things. They are the stitches that mend the frayed fabric of our common life.