From the Archives: "Hospitality and the Great Fifty Days"

Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.

Mary Frohlich writes to help clarify the gifts of the Great Fifty Days of light and joy that follow the Day of our Lord’s Resurrection. For the fifty days after Lent (a time of fasting, prayer, and increased giving to those in need) and then Easter, we have an opportunity, she tells us, to practice being the church that is an open door. We have a chance to see ourselves in others, to deny the desire to build a tower of Babel where we settle in for self-protection with our own kind, warding off the challenges that come with newness. God invites us to move into the wider world in these fifty days to encounter what is strange and even disturbing in order to live out the welcome to strangers than God has given to us.

Selected Quotes from

“Hospitality and the great fifty days”

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To walk into the Great Fifty Days is to walk through an open door into God’s house. In this
house, God rejoices with abandon over each and every one who comes through the door, whether they come walking tall, scrambling for cover, or just looking for a good time. Christians know the door as baptism; the house is the body of Christ, the “dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:22). We are being built into this house in a special way during the Great Fifty Days that Tertullian called the laetissimum spatium, the “most joyous space.”

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A lot of us celebrate the fifty days by taking a post-lenten vacation. We treat ourselves to all our favorite addictions. . .  It was not like that in the early days of our church. "Pentecost" was the name of all fifty of the days, all equal and all full of power. All that we now associate with the fiftieth day, the day of Pentecost––the call to mission, the experience of Spirit-filled unity, the giving of charisms, the imagery of fire, living water, and light––was formerly associated with the whole period as one great day, one fifty-day-long Sabbath in which God was marvelously and powerfully at work.

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Hospitality is frightening. If we open ourselves a little, the cries of the needy only increase.

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Ultimately, hospitality will set us free. It will teach us to open the clenched fist of our many defenses into a hand that gently touches others. It will open us to receive the new, the strange, and the disturbing as gifts. It will enable us to know ourselves as defined by loving, not by owning or controlling.

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According to early Jewish commentators, the sin of the people of Babel was to ignore God’s command to “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28). God preferred diversity, spreading out, the conquering of the wilderness, to the building of the single, secure city.

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Hospitality . . . means an openness that is quite unconditional and unhedged about, even by an earthly Jerusalem, through an attentive desire to welcome the unpredictable God. It is to recognize that we are all equidistant from God and that another’s mere being there is the inalienable place of God’s self-disclosure. [quoting an anonymous writer in Jerusalem [Seabury, 1980)]

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Mary Frohlich, RSCJ, a noted scholar of Carmelite spirituality, has been on the Chicago Theological Union faculty since 1993 and served as president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality in 2007–2008. She has published widely especially on Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and John of the Cross in addition to broader issues.

Frohlich, M. “Hospitality and the Great Fifty Days.” Liturgy 3, no. 1 (1982): 22–27.

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