Enemy or Guest

I am finding myself in a certain time in my life, when I have the time to reflect upon my relationship with myself. Usually I have thought first of my relationship with others. But now, perhaps led by the Springsteen song, "Your Own Worst Enemy Has Come to Town"-- meaning, of course, oneself-- I am feeling a sense of burden and dread: Have I indeed been my own worst enemy?

One of my favorite spiritual writers, Henri Nouwen, contrasts "enemies" with: "guests!" Of all things! Not "friends," but "guests." He writes in Reaching Out that "our vocation" is "to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest...." Coming as I have from a "hospice" background, I think it would do well for that movement to talk of those under its care not as "patients," but as "guests." They certainly aren't "enemies!"

But I also took in this meaning personally. What if my "vocation," my spiritual "work" with myself was to "convert" my way of looking at myself from that of being my own worst enemy to being my own best guest? Nouwen is writing about the virtue of "hospitality"-- again, which I usually think of in reference to relationships with others. But what if I were to be more "hospitable" to myself? What if I were not always at war with myself, but instead took it upon myself to be welcoming of myself: my moods and moodiness; my foibles and my failures? How much differently would I live in my own skin if I worked more to make myself at home there? As opposed, for instance, to struggling with myself, or blaming myself, or even berating myself? How much more at ease I'd be in my everyday life, if I would aim to be my own best guest than to blame myself for being my own worst enemy!

Everyone might agree that hospitality begins in the home. But maybe, even before that, hospitality begins in ourselves. I am working at welcoming myself-- even into my own world!