By MARY jo kietzman
It was one of those cold snowy days we’ve been having when the university couldn’t decide whether or not to close and I was talking to about half the students who usually filled the room. We were working our way through the opening books of Homer’s Odyssey—books which detail the coming of age of Odysseus’ son, Telemachos, who must set off on his own voyage to find his father and become a mature man. To illustrate the custom of hospitality—Telemachos is received with wide-open arms by the war heroes Nestor and Menelaos—I told the students about my own experiences in Turkey where I taught in 1994. “I travelled around the country by myself a lot, and wherever I went, no matter how small or poor the place, the children of villagers would pursue me to bring me home for tea and sweets. I remember a particularly cold day in March when I was hiking in a remote valley of Cappadochia, a boy saw me: “Chai, chai,” he insisted, grabbing my hand and leading me into a one-room shanty full of colorful fabrics, pads for sitting on the floor, steam from the Turkish tea pot, and sweet smells. This was the norm in Turkey. There was no way for the stranger to be alone, to write in a journal, to meditate. No way. I would inevitably be found and brought into house after house to be fed and watered and welcomed.” The students smiled and some of them looked astonished. A few commented about how you would never find such a custom in our country, and I had the fleeting thought that this generation of young people sitting before me grew up with ideas of “stranger danger” rather than “love of the stranger” which is the core ethic of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world since ancient times.
The stranger (who could always be a god in disguise) was and is viewed as sacred or God-sent. Why? Because he calls attention to the fact that all of us share the same predicament. Shift my circumstances, and I, too, could be sold into slavery, or, at least, be a wanderer in need. We are, all of us, established on this earth as God’s guests, as partakers and guardians of his household, or his creation. By depriving ourselves of the grace of extending hospitality to the other, we deny ourselves the possibility of identifying with the other. Cut off from the other, we isolate ourselves from communion and the world becomes something we use for ourselves.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachos (son of the hero) proves his nobility by leaping up when a stranger comes to the door of his house, occupied by a riotous group of suitors. They are a bunch of greedy selfish men who pay no attention to any other human being, marking them as ultimately doomed, but Telemachos offers hospitality—despite his depression! This young man (probably in his late teens) has no father. He was an infant when the great hero, Odysseus, went to fight in the Trojan War and, ten years after the war ended, this absentee father has still not returned. Is he dead? The family doesn’t know. They have no closure, as we’d say today. Telemachos knows he needs to act, but he isn’t sure what to do because he has no role model. But there is no question that the stranger must be welcomed. As it turns out, the man who introduces himself as Mentes (friend of Odysseus) is really the goddess Athene in disguise, and once she is invited to sit and eat, a conversation ensues in which she, the stranger, gives Telemachos hope that the father he longs for is alive and will return. And hope along with the positive images of his father spur Telemachos into action. By offering hospitality, the host received much more than the guest … winged words and shining pictures that left in his spirit determination and courage and filled his heart with wonder.
The God that most Christians believe in, Jesus, came into the world as a stranger, born in the manger of a hostel. If you are a Christian, you know that we are required to love and serve the poor, to see the least of our brothers as Jesus Christ. This is directly in line with Greek teaching on hospitality. We may very well nod our heads and pray about these beliefs in church on Sunday, but they are incredibly hard to practice in our highly individualistic capitalistic culture. Too many of us either rush here and there in the workaholic rat race or else we live in solitary confinement with Facebook and video games. Because we don’t have time or can’t be bothered, we shut our doors on the stranger or ignore his cries and his knocks. “Frank, I gave you five dollars yesterday. No, I don’t have any pop. If you don’t stop pounding on that door, I’m calling the police.” The stranger trudges down icy steps, and rationalizations fill the silence. Reading about other cultures and other times that practiced hospitality, that believed in the real possibility of seeing and talking to gods, and that imagined good children as beautiful and fragile and in need of protection as growing plants can help us to almost hear the quiet, almost silenced, voices of such traditions in our own contemporary secular society.
In our world today, care for strangers, for the poor, and the mentally ill is handled by social service institutions. Even when these institutions are working at their best, the downside of farming out hospitality is that individuals lose the visceral sense of living in a web of connectivity with others for whom they are responsible and who will, in turn, take care of them if they become needy. In the world of Homer’s epic, human beings need one another, and they need the gods. In the Greek pantheon of gods, there are gods that look after specific areas of human endeavor (the hearth, war, handicrafts and invention, thievery and deceit) and feelings (Love or Aggression). The gods take a particularly keen interest in the lives of mortals: both major and minor gods and goddesses support human life and create life lessons for their favorites. The gods can appear to human beings or manifest themselves in many different ways. For example, when Odysseus is finally released from Calypso’s island—Calypso, shining among divinities—after seven years of sexual servitude, Poseidon scopes out his raft and prepares to destroy it. Poseidon, along with many of the gods have reasons to be angry at Odysseus, and their anger produces trials that he must undergo and that will change him. Clinging desperately to a piece of the raft, a sea bird lands on what is left of the mast. The bird is, in fact, the goddess Ino, offering the desperate man an immortal veil: “fasten it under your chest; and there is no need for you to die, nor to suffer,” instructs the bird. Odysseus isn’t sure whether to trust the talking bird or her instructions, and he decides that it’s better to cling to the timbers. He changes his mind, though, when the next enormous waves piles high above him. He strips off his tunic and trusts the proffered gift of the life line. Ino told him that when he made it to shore, to release the piece of fabric, diaphanous as sea foam (the sea is the source of all life for the Greeks); and he does it, remembering to thank the goddess. He swims for over two days, and as he approaches the shore, he hears the crashing of waves on rocks. It will be no simple proposition for him to get out of the sea even though land is so close by. He accomplishes it only with “inklings” about what to do—intuitions sent from the goddess Athene that move him to avoid the rocks and keep swimming toward the mouth of a sweet-running river. By this time, Odysseus must be exhausted, but he has enough presence of mind to pray to the river god, announcing himself as a fugitive from Poseidon and a suppliant of this other Aqua-divinity.
“How can he be praying?” one student asked, half-jokingly. “I’d be done with all forms of water and water deities after what Poseidon put him though.”
“Well, maybe,” I say, “but I imagine that Odysseus must feel incredibly grateful for that river that allowed him to get clear of the salt sea and to escape the killing rocks.” Prayer is a way of saying thank you, of acknowledging that he was not alone in the struggle, that he had help. Whether or not Odysseus knew about this river god or believed in his existence, what is truly important is that he is grateful, and gratitude, for the Greeks is a central pillar of the excellent life. Wonderful things outside your control are constantly happening for you, and prayer, supplication, thanksgiving are ways of acknowledging one’s attunement to this larger reality.
The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the gods. As philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it: “We are thinking the essence of the Homeric Greek gods … if we call them the attuning ones.” They attune human beings to their interdependence, and, at the end of the Odyssey, Athene prepares Odyssey to return home (after 20 years!). After the war, after the adventuring, after battling monsters and sleeping with goddesses and escaping the sea, this middle-aged veteran is returned to the shore of Ithaka, washed up, asleep. He thinks it’s a trick until Athena meets him as a shepherd boy and gradually reveals herself to him. Together they plot the best way for him to re-enter civilian society and to kick out the suitors who have invaded his home. Athene tells him that he cannot rush in heroically and pick up where he left off twenty years ago, but he must ease back into his old life in the guise of an old, damaged, man, which, in some sense, he is. At the touch of her wand, the hero withers up into a beggar man, and it is in this form and from a position at the very bottom of the social ladder that he must re-enter his home land. This experience serves as a big lesson in humility for Odysseus, and, because he must first go to meet his loyal swineherd, he must also learn to value and to trust ordinary men, regardless of class, as intelligent and capable.
Many of my students really appreciated this part of the epic and one of them, Olivia Miller, had this to say about the swineherd, Eumaios: In stark contrast to Odysseus, we see the common man who is humble, loyal, grateful, and even a surrogate father for Odysseus’ own grown son. It was really valuable for me to see this relationship because while showing us the post-war life of the warrior, we see the life of the man who stayed behind. The Odyssey has more lessons and connections than I could ever analyze, but some of the most important for me were the fact that Homer believes that being a common, loyal man is just as honorable as being the heroic warrior and that the transition from war to civilization is filled with many trials comparable to the war itself.
The goddess, Athene, knew what Odysseus needed to learn, and she intervened to help him heal and become whole through the exercise of coming home as a stranger-guest in need of hospitality. Some give richly, and some abuse him. He learns about character—what makes men and women truly good, truly noble. Teaching such classics from the pagan world that are filled with divinities who interact with humans and intervene to support their lives opens the world in all its shining moments to students who dwell in a nihilistic secular age where too many people are burdened with the awful sense that nothing matters at all. I believe they come away from studying works like Homer’s Odyssey with the knowledge that hospitality matters, gratitude matters, interconnection matters, and attunement to the potentialities in ourselves and in individual moments also matters. They also learn how fragile the human being and human goodness are: very one of us could be as graceful and supple as a tender palm or green shoot. When it begins, every marriage could be like Odysseus’s marriage, symbolized by a tree. Odysseus builds his home around an actual growing olive tree, and the trunk of that tree becomes one of the four posts of his marriage bed. By symbolizing human beauty and excellence as a plant, classical literature teaches us that neither people nor relationships can thrive without the right conditions: sunlight, rain, care, and attention. If the land is invaded, if the marriage is abandoned, if the children are forgotten, then the whole society is blighted. We need each other, and we need the gods, those agents of attunement, who, for me, appear every day in the guise of students. They speak well, wisely, and I water these shoots of life with attention and praise. When I do, the blah rooms of French Hall in Flint, Michigan are lit with faces that shine. Shhh, do not blab when you sense the presence of the gods, Odysseus tells his son. Note it. Treasure it. Be grateful for it.