Happy Friday! We’re back again with another issue of The Wonder Report. Last week, we began a new theme of gathering, and we’re continuing this week by talking about hosting.
As much as I love inviting people to our home, I’m not always the best host. I’m often running a little behind schedule. I notoriously forget something and have to scramble at the last minute. And by the end of the gathering, I feel like I’ve never really connected with my guests because I was too busy refilling drinks or directing people to the bathroom.
But one thing I’m learning about hosting is that the experience is more about the guests than it is about me. When I invite and welcome people into my home or meeting or event, I have the opportunity to create an experience that will delight and inspire them. I can introduce them to others and help them form new and lasting connections. I give them an experience where they’ll learn and grow. Or I can make the gathering all about me and my tastes and preferences. Rarely can both happen.
In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker devotes a whole chapter to hosting called, “Don’t Be a Chill Host.” I’ll admit I was taken aback when I first read the title, because who doesn’t want to host a gathering that’s laid-back and relaxed and where everyone feels comfortable doing their own thing. The problem with being “chill,” though, is that too often hosts really just want to “wriggle out of the burden of hosting.” This “abdication of power,” as Parker describes it, “often fails their guests rather than serves them.”
For one, if the host isn’t leading the gathering then someone else will, and “those others are likely to exercise power in a manner inconsistent with your gathering’s purpose.” Also, events need a host from start to finish: setting up the parameters in the beginning and then letting the gathering run on its own often creates a similar leadership vacuum. The host also is responsible to keep an event on schedule and ensure everyone has the opportunity to participate fully.
When a host is able to pull all those things together—protecting, equalizing, and connecting guests—Parker calls that “generous authority.”
“A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others,” Parker writes.
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One thing I love about this idea of generous authority is that hosting becomes more about what guests need than about how I’m perceived by them.
More Will guests be comfortable in my home? … and less Will guests be impressed with my new couch?
More Will guests enjoy this dessert? …. and less How can I show off my latest baking skill?
More How can I be sure all my guests are safe and have a chance to share? … and less How can I avoid offending anyone by cutting someone off or suggesting a change in topic?
Even more Will this help guests get to know each better? … and less Will guests think I’m being “too much” by suggesting this activity?
And like having a clearly defined purpose (which we talked about last week), holding guests at the heart of a gathering gives us a framework for making plans and deciding details. For instance, when I consider who’s coming to a gathering, I can make choices that make the experience more enjoyable for them specifically. There’s no sense in planning the “perfect” party that the actual participants won’t like.
In an old episode of the Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and her business partner Sookie were catering a child’s birthday party, and the menu Sookie had planned included very non-kid-friendly foods, like assorted charcuteries, smoked salmon, Jalapeno-Chipotle Macaroni & Cheese, and a chocolate cake with rum raisin tropical fruit ganache. When one of the children tastes a carrot spritzed with Sookie’s lemon garlic aioli, she spits it back on the crudité tray.
“What did you just do?” Sookie asks. “You just stuck that carrot in your mouth and then put it back on the platter. Why would you do that?”
“It tastes like diapers,” the little girl says.
To save the party, Lorelai sends one of the sous-chefs out for frozen mini pizzas, pigs in a blanket, chips, and cup cakes, food the guests will actually like.
Generous authority also means planning events so that guests are attended to from the beginning to the end. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any awkward moments or embarrassing gaffes along the way. It simply means that I plan each aspect of the gathering with the guests in mind.
Does the menu meet everyone’s dietary restrictions?
Are the chairs, along with any planned movement throughout the evening, conducive to guests with limited mobility?
Can the food be prepared ahead of time so that I can greet and introduce guests to each other as they arrive?
How will I keep the dogs occupied so they don’t jump on the guests?
What task can an early arriver help with?
When there’s a lull in the conversation do I have a plan for restarting it?
If there’s a hard stop to the event, how can I be sure to end on time?
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I can’t help but think that being this kind of host would flow more easily if I lived this way in all areas of my life, “not merely looking out for my own interests but also the interest of others,” as Paul writes in Philippians 2:4. How might I (not just my parties) be different—as a wife, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, writer, neighbor, citizen, or club member—if I spent more time caring for others than about how I am perceived by them? And what if in my life (not just in my gatherings) I focused more on loving and serving the actual people around me rather than some Photoshopped, Pinterest version of family and friends I don’t actually have?
The bottom line is this: How can I live, not just host, “selflessly, for the sake of others”?
Wonder Challenge
How are you at hosting gatherings?
I guess the real question is this: When you’re planning to welcome guests into your home, meeting, or party, do you think more about a.) how they will feel during the event or b.) how they will feel about you?
Here’s the challenge: The next time you’re planning a gathering, don’t start with your favorite recipe or the room you just painted or your own ideal seating arrangement. Start with a list of your guests. Pray over them, and ask God to help you plan a gathering that will honor them and Him.
This and That
Here are a few articles, essays, and more to give you hope, to make you think, to grow your faith, and as always, to help root you in love.
1. The Strange Language of Our Home Lives by Kathryn Hymes for The Atlantic. This fun essay talks about the special words and phrases that families, or family-like groups of friends and roommates, establish and share over time, a “familect,” if you will. As we invite people into our homes again in the coming weeks and months, clueing guests in on our special family words is just one of many ways to make them feel included.
From the essay: “While living under the weight of what can feel like constant, history-shaping upheaval, we might be tempted to dismiss these words as frivolous, at-times-embarrassing artifacts of everyday life. But everyone I spoke with valued their familect. They delighted in sharing it. They saw it as an intimate extension of their home. As we talked, I could feel the energy between us shift, a mixture of pride and vulnerability, as they trusted me with the family dictionary. Gordon told me that sharing one’s familect is also the act of welcoming outsiders into one’s clan. ‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘moment by moment, in everyday language use, we create our families.’”
2. Can You Have More Than 150 Friends? by Jenny Gross for the New York Times. While we’re thinking about gathering, I thought this was an interesting article about friendship and its outer limits. A 1993 study by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that humans were limited to around 150 meaningful relationships, or what became known as Dunbar’s number.
But new research casts doubt on Dunbar’s research, finding that people could have far more friends if they put in the effort.”
From the article: “Dr. Dunbar posited his theory decades ago, in the early days of the internet and long before social media sites changed how people communicate. ‘This number would make sense if we still relied on a Rolodex and talking to people, but that’s not the world we live in,’ said Angela Lee, a professor at Columbia Business School.
“Networking tools like LinkedIn have made it possible to increase the number of connections we can maintain, and this is important because research shows that people on the outer edge of our networks are often the ones who end up being the most helpful for career advancement or generating creative ideas, she said.”
3. Minari, a film written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, available to buy or rent on DVD/BluRay or multiple streaming apps. After weeks of wanting to, Steve and I finally watched this film last weekend, and we weren’t disappointed. Minari tells an important story about what it means to be a society that invites people in, that welcomes immigrants and refugees, and helps them move from being guests to being part of the family.
From the producer: “A tender and sweeping story about what roots us, Minari follows a Korean-American family that moves to an Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.”
More from The Wonder Report
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from the Gathering Theme
Visually Speaking
In this section, I'll highlight visual and performing artists and talk about how their work inspires mine. I'd love to hear about artists you love and whose work you admire.
For the month of May, I’m sharing the work of Amy Grimes, an artist who calls herself a story painter. This week, I’m sharing her painting called “Gathering Together,” an illustration she painted for “The Cultivating Project” as part of a series titled “Lighting Candles By Starlight.”
I love this group of children fighting off the darkness by bringing their lights together. It’s hard to tell now, but I suspect it started with just one candle lit, and the one sharing her light the others. When we gather together, that’s so often the result: more light in our lives and in the world.
Here’s what Amy writes about this painting: “I loved painting this cozy autumn picture of friends in the forest! It’s a picture of what I long for here in this divided world.”
**Remember, I’ll be giving away a print of Amy’s painting “Wonder” at the end of the month, so be sure to watch for more details to come.**
Writer’s Notebook
One of my greatest joys is to encourage writers as they hone their craft, develop their voice, and live a meaningful writing life. Here are some tips, insights, prompts, and more to help you as you write.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, recently published a blog post about “favorable conditions,” that ideal setting we all dream of when we can finally do the work we’ve been called to. Those favorable conditions often look like, once …
the kids are in school
the kids have all graduated
the kids have finally moved away
school is done for the year
school has finally started again
I have the schooling I need
we’ve moved to a bigger house
we’ve moved to a smaller house
we remodel the spare bedroom
we don’t have so much yard to mow
winter is over
summer is over
I finally retire
my husband retires
I find a different job
I get that promotion
I could go on and on and on. There’s no end to the favorable conditions we’re waiting for to finally get to work. And maybe it’s just me, but writers seem especially prone to putting off their poems and essays and novels and books until everything is finally in place. Only to discover the shocking truth that everything will never finally be in place.
Here’s Newport quoting C.S. Lewis: “We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
There are definitely times when we have to set aside our work to deal with a crisis, care for a family member, or take a much-needed break. But just as often, before those things are completely resolved, we need to get back to work.
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In case you’re interested, I’ll be leading a book discussion in June over at Tweetspeak Poetry on Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us by Lawrence Weinstein, cofounder of the Harvard University Writing Center.
In the book, Weinstein invites readers into a journey of well-being through the intentional uses of grammar. It’s a clever approach, based on Weinstein’s more than 15 years noticing the “effects of my grammatical choices on my own quality of life”: From changing his respiratory rate by using the first-person pronouns in his language to actually feeling more energetic when he interspersed the passive voice with the active voice, what he calls a “potent combination.”
The bookclub is for patrons of Tweetspeak Poetry, which you can join for as little as $2 a month. I’m a patron myself, though this is not an affiliate offer. I just appreciate the fun, creative, and unique work Tweetspeak does to bring poetry and poetic things to our lives. And you might, too.
Find our more about the bookclub in a free introductory post I wrote by clicking the link below:
Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report! Thanks again for sharing this time with me. If you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. It’s one of my favorite features of this platform.
Thanks again for being a subscriber. One of the reasons I write is because of readers like you!
Until next time,
Charity
What a beautiful reminder of why we gather together! We met at your book signing in Frankfort a couple years ago, and it was so well-done - I never would have guessed that it wasn't flawlessly prepared and executed! Thank you for sharing your writing gifts! I especially wanted to thank you for your book recommendation a couple months ago for 'Prayer in the Night" by Tish Harrison Warren. I am reading it through for the second time. It has been such a gift during this time in my life, with a diagnosis of cancer and all that it entails.
Perfectly timed here in the UK as we’re allowed to visit one another’s homes from Monday! Lots to think on. My friend Heather once told me she prays for each guest as she sets their place at the table. I’m often rushing in the shower/still cleaning/barking orders ... working on it all!