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Category: Books
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Title: I Was A Stranger; Untamed Hospitality  | views:109 |  Review John L Ng Nov 09
I Was A Stranger: a Christian Theology of Hospitality
By Arthur Sutherland, Abingdon, 2006
Untamed Hospitality: welcoming God and other strangers
By Elizabeth Newman, Brazos, 2007
Sutherland’s book is thin with numerous personal muses; Newman’s is thick with theological and philosophical discourses. Both call us back to this missing virtue of the church and its congregants. Hospitality is practiced among God’s people since the time of Abraham. In fact, in many cultures, old and present, hospitality is a social norm. And yet, according to the authors, and I agree, it is glaringly missing in today’s churches.
It is not there maybe because we have a distorted notion of hospitality. Some think it is nothing more than social entertainment. Some reduce it to sentimental nicety. Some assume it is a woman’s thing and should be left to them. Some see it narrowly as a professional tool in the market place. Some see it widely as inclusion in a diverse society. Whatever the reasons or excuses, it remains that most of us do not practice hospitality.
According to Newman, hospitality is an intentional, responsible and caring act of welcoming, in public and private, friends and strangers without regard for reciprocation. She spends 200 pages with footnoted research to propose a doctrine and practice of this definition. At times her arguments are pretentious and darkly negative. Sutherland, on the other hand, needs a little more than 80 pages to be lightly funny. As different as their approaches, both always return to the Biblical texts as the content and context for hospitality.
There is where we need to go to inspire our practice of hospitality. Three iconic images illuminate our way. The classic image is Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 welcoming strangers to their tent. It says that Abraham ran to greet them and bowed to the ground in their presence. He provided water to wash their feet; Sarah baked fresh morsels of bread and a servant prepared a calf to feed them. At day’s end, they hosted this enjoyable evening with strangers under the shade of an oak tree and had an epiphany that changed their lives for good and ever.
On their way home from a horrific week in Jerusalem, two disciples (probably husband and wife) were terribly sad and emptied of courage (Luke 24.13f). Along the way they met a stranger and three of them rehearsed the events surrounding the crucifixion. Toward sundown, they arrived in Emmaus and the couple invited the stranger to stay with them. A hurried meal was prepared. Their guest took break, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them. In that Eucharistic act, Jesus, the guest who became the host, brought joy to their hearts, emptied them of sadness and gave them courage.
Acts 16.11f tells the story of Paul and company’s encounter with Lydia in Philippi. At a prayer meeting, they met Lydia and shared with her the gospel. After she prayed to embrace Jesus as her savior, she invited these strangers to stay at her home. At first, Paul refused her hospitality. But Lydia insisted and prevailed upon them to stay with her. The scene is at once poignant and awkward. A bunch of strange men, at least five, staying with a single woman would break every social mos. Be that as it may, Lydia’s single act of hospitality was strategic in securing Paul’s missionary efforts in Macedonia.
No doctrine of hospitality is as effective in convincing our practice of hospitality as listening with our eyes to the above three narratives. Ultimately, hospitality is an act of the heart. It begins with and feeds on the compassion we feel for others, be they family, friends or strangers. Who knows – maybe we are welcoming God when we are welcoming others into our lives.
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| Review submitted: 2010/1/10
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Inception | views:8 | Review by John L Ng August 10
As visually stimulating as Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is, it is not a gratuitous action-thriller movie. You cannot watch it while munching on popcorns. You have to stay alert, pay attention, keep up and take mental notes. Like reality, the narrative is complicated, layered and not always coherent at first glance. You just have to let the story run its two-and-a-half-hour course; glean what you can for later musings.
The plot is simple enough. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate espionage specialist. He and his team are hired to pull off a heist. But instead of robbing a rich man’s casino like the plot in “Ocean’s Eleven” or stealing back from a traitor’s stolen loots in “The Italian Job,” Cobb and company are engaged to raid a man’s subconscious. There are two types of subconscious raids. Extraction is the type that enters the subconscious and extracts secrets from it. Inception is the other type that posits ideas to control the victim’s subconscious. Taito, a wealthy tycoon (Ken Watanabe), wants Cobb’s team to plant an idea in the subconscious of a young heir who is poised to inherit a conglomerate of Taito’s old rival.
But you don’t have to read Freud, watch Hitchcock or take Psychology 101 to know that the subconscious is an unruly space – a labyrinth of desires, hopes, sins and fears. One’s entry can cause havoc in your cognitive and emotive. Cobb’s team enters the subconscious through induced dreams. Dreams, unlike boundaries of reality, are limitless. In dreams, Ariadne (Ellen Page) envisions an entire Paris neighborhood enfold on itself like an origami paper or Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) flows through hotel corridors like a weightless astronaut.
As liberating as dreams may seem, probing the subconscious can be a dangerous game. Suppressed emotions and inadvertent memories can run amuck when in dreams. Cobb’s unresolved guilt toward his neglected children and haunting memories of his deceased wife, Mal, (Marion Cotillard) threaten to unhinge his sanity and sabotage their cerebral heist.
No doubt the movie’s subtext is control. Can one control reality by controlling dreams. There are several layers of our desire for control. On one level, we want to control our circumstances – Cobb’s team wants to control the young heir’s situation by attempting to orchestrate his dreams. On another, we are anxious of losing control – in dream sequences, Cobb’s team experience the common sensation of helpless free falls. Still another, we seek to change our past from effecting our present – Cobb wants to build a bound space to keep his wife in his memories so they can be and grow old together. Finally, we want to control how our narrative will end – Cobb dreams at last he would go home to his children.
Ultimately, to have total control over our circumstances is but a day dream.“We plan, God laughs,” so goes the Yiddish saying. We can try all we want, only the Creator is truly in control. Even Cobb with his dream controlling machine is not really effectively in control of his past or future
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| Review submitted: 2010/8/11
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