Associated Baptist Press – New monastics practice Jesus’ hospitality and find stability.
I would encourage you to read this article about Rutba House. It is worth it.
I have met Jonathan, the man at the centre of this story, not long ago, at the Duke Summer School on Reconciliation, in Durham, NC.
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Here is a quote:
“Rutba” is the name of an Iraq village where members of a peace contingent the Wilson-Hartgroves were traveling with in the first days of the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq received medical care from an Iraqi doctor.
They had been evicted from the country, where they were bearing witness that “Christians” were not bombing their Muslim nation. Everything on the lone road from Baghdad to the Jordanian border was being bombed as they drove out in three taxis.
The last taxi wrecked and its occupants were rescued by Iraqis and carried into the town of Rutba to a doctor working in a makeshift clinic after the hospital had been bombed.
“Three days ago your country bombed our hospital, but we’ll help you,” the Iraqi doctor told the injured peace advocates. When Wilson-Hartgrove asked what he owed the doctor for his service, he said, “Please just go and tell people outside of here what’s really happening in our country.”
“We got commissioned to tell the Rutba story by the doctor who saved our friends,” Wilson-Hartgrove said. “The more we told it the more we realized this is the Good Samaritan’s story and this is what God’s love looked like — the surprise of being loved by your enemies.”
Wilson-Hartgrove walked past the beggar in Washington, D.C. while he was interning in a U.S. senator’s office. The encounter changed his direction, in large part because he never actually engaged the man. He walked past.
Now, Rutba House is a concrete reality to living out the hospitality he received in Iraq, and the radical hospitality he sees in the life of Jesus.
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