By Jared Gonzalez, Assistant Head of Lower School Grades 4-5
My maternal great-grandmother was a second-generation Mexican-American woman. I can picture her bustling around the tiny kitchen of her quaint Santa Barbara home, her dark hair carefully braided and encircling the crown of her head. She is a paragon of beauty and grace. My family is visiting her for lunch, and she is busily preparing “just a little somethin’.” My brother and I watch her with anticipation as she prepares the meal. My brother is seven. I am eight.
There is something almost sacred about the memory of my great-grandmother preparing a cantaloupe, her delicate hands carefully slicing it into crescents and placing it on a platter. She crosses to the dining room table wearing her house slippers and a pair of turquoise slacks which contrast pleasingly with the 1970s burnt orange carpet in the dining room. “Here’s the sarsa, m’ijo, put it on the table for me, uh?” she says to me. As a kid, I thought my grandmother just had a funny way of pronouncing salsa. When I was older, my grandfather explained to me that sarsa is something in particular. It’s similar to a salsa but with larger pieces of tomato and chile.
The table is set simply but graciously. The food is humble—enchiladas, tacos, cantaloupe, orange slices, salsa, scrambled eggs and pinto beans cooked in oil, and Spanish rice—but it is abundant. My grandmother seldom sits and is constantly refilling our plates. Any child of a Mexican grandmother will tell you that you do not refuse seconds or thirds. We eat our fill and then go out back to pass the time on the patio furniture in the gentle California breeze.
Later on, my brother and I follow my grandmother eagerly as she shuffles along. “Aren’t these purty?” she asks as we walk beneath the shade of her orange trees planted along the red fence at the back of her little yard. My grandmother picks a few oranges. She gives one to me and another to my brother. We peel and eat them hastily. There is nothing like the taste of an orange fresh from the tree—from these trees, from those hands, at this home.
Hospitality comes from the Latin word hospes meaning “guest,” “stranger,” “traveler,” but also “host.” Hospitality or the Latin hospitalitem means “friendliness to guests or hosts.” Perhaps surprisingly, this means that hospitality is not only the relationship of the host to the guest, but is also the relationship of the guest to the host. True hospitality, then, requires a certain vulnerability on the part of both the host and the one being hosted. To love another in this way is risky. The stranger must risk humility to be taken in and experience relationship with the other. The host, in turn, must risk being taken advantage of or being disappointed. Their relationship is cultivated through simple gifts of food and fellowship and time.
Love is present in every instance of genuine hospitality. From the moment the host sets out to bring another in, for example, there is some amount of preparation, no matter how unexpected the guest. I did not realize it as a child, but these memories with my great-grandmother were my earliest lessons in hospitality. She was welcoming our sojourning souls into her home—seeing them, loving them, and giving them respite from the harshness of the world. Every dish lovingly prepared, every word spoken with tenderness, every cushion adjusted just so, were all conduits of her love, her hospitality.
Hospitality is also an essential quality of any good school. At the beginning of each year the teacher invites the children—still strangers—to come in and partake. The table is set with picture books, maps, long-division, and poetry. Each teacher stands before the class beckoning the students to take their place at the table, offering each one the opportunity to be seen and known and loved. The teacher waits expectantly for the children to respond.