"Divine Hospitality":  Acting From a Higher Perspective by Christine Radel as seen on spirituality.com

Divine hospitality.

This phrase came to Rev. Whitney Roberson while attending a workshop where she’d been asked to write her own personal mission statement.

She wrote the words on her notepad, and as she pondered them, the question “What does it mean to be an agent of divine hospitality at work?” came to her. And then an answer—it means that all that we do at work is connected to something greater than what we can see. “It means,” she said, “holding to the greater perspective and acting from it.”

She realized then, “That’s what I am most passionate about, what I most want to experience, manifest and proclaim in my own life and work.” (This story is recounted on the Web site Spirituality at Work.)

Her passion for this idea of divine hospitality comes through loud and clear.

Whitney Roberson is an Associate Pastor at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and is also the Executive Director of Spirituality at Work (SAW). Her passion for this idea of divine hospitality—knowing our relationship to the divine source and living that relationship—comes through loud and clear when you speak to her. Her interest in finding ways to help people connect what they believe to what they are doing led to the development of SAW.

SAW focuses on facilitating and supporting conversations that help people make that connection. Though the individuals who participate can come from any spiritual background, the underlying assumption is that the Divine Presence is real and supports its creation. Everyone in creation, therefore, is invited to participate in the life-giving wholeness and hospitality of the Divine. Spiritual wisdom is open to all who seek it.

What does it look like when folks put their spirituality into gear at work?

What does it look like when folks put their spirituality into gear at work—when they are able to let their own sense of divine hospitality shine through the work they do?

“This varies from person to person,” said Rev. Roberson, and that’s partly what the SAW conversations are about. Some examples from SAW participants are as follows:

• One woman who is a director of a major think tank has the practice of praying for each member of her staff. She has about 60 employees. She has also structured the evaluation process so that each employee evaluates their own performance and sets their own goals with management. It’s a collaboration. The ensuing conversation becomes about how they have grown in the past year and how they want to grow in the coming one. She feels this is an outgrowth of her own spirituality.
• Another individual keeps a miniature chair on her desk at work. To anyone else, it might just look like she collects miniatures. But in the Jewish tradition, a chair is sometimes left empty, at Passover for example, for the Messiah. So her little chair is a symbol for her that reminds her that God is present in her work.
• One woman decided that when the phone rang at her desk, she would not jump to answer it. She would let it ring a few times and in the interim, she would pray that the conversation could be creative and beneficial to everyone.
• One individual uses her commute time for her daily meditation, and yet another uses her drive time to do intercessory prayer—to pray for her colleagues.
• Another shared how at Christmas time, instead of giving gifts, each employee took a turn being the focus of attention while his or her colleagues shared how that person had been a gift to them during the past year. These were spiritual gifts!

“The capacity to understand and live our spirituality is in us all.”

Rev. Roberson says that letting divine hospitality work through us has to do with being conscious of the “I AM” (or divinity) that each person expresses. It’s about acknowledging that each of us has within him or her a connection to the Divine. “The capacity to understand and live our spirituality,” says Roberson, “is in us all.”

The connection between what are often very private or at-home values and our at-work lives is there, it just needs to be uncovered or discovered or recovered. SAW helps seekers to reunite or integrate life and livelihood.

“As we open ourselves more and more deeply to the spiritual dimension, we begin to notice things we didn’t before. God meets each person in unique ways. My own particular slant,” said Rev. Roberson, “is that the Spirit is available to speak to everyone.”

Used by permission www.spirituality.com