I just had the pleasure of working in Cleveland Ohio and I met the extraordinary idea of radical hospitality, a term used to describe the welcome policy of Trinity Cathedral, The Episcopal Church in downtown Cleveland.
I attended an evening program and had the pleasure of studying with some members of the church community along with their clergy. I am a book person and as I marinated on their welcome policy, I realized radical hospitality is what good readers practice. Readers, like travelers meet new characters and go new places and Good Readers have to be open-minded. A story encourages you to step inside the shoes of another person, commonly referred to as empathy. Books allow us to reach outside our own world. I suggest you begin to evaluate the books you are reading by asking yourself, “How far did you go in your thinking?” Nobody wants to live in an acorn!
All my life I lived in a coconut.
It was cramped and dark,
especially in the morning when I had to shave.
But what pained me most was that I had no way
to get in touch with the outside world.
If no one out there happened to find the coconut,
If no one cracked it, then I was doomed
to live all my life in the nut, and maybe even die there…
A person who chooses to live in a coconut!
Such a person is one in a million!
But I have a brother-in-law who
lives in an
acorn.
Ingemar Leckius
