This month, we the Moot Community are exploring the application of "hospitality" in our spiritual lives, as it states:

We wish to welcome all we encounter, when we are gathered and when we are dispersed, extending Christ's gracious invitation to relationship, meaning and life in all its fullness.

The application of these words is high, simple to say but challenging to live, and I am really happy that the community aspires to this.

One of the most moving moments in my life, was when I was with the Taize community in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, before the collapse of Yugoslavia. I was there protesting and praying for peace with the people who were demanding the right for free elections for the first time since they could remember, where we faced the army and secret police of the Yugoslav state. I was taken aside a few times for taking pictures, and I learnt for the first time that people can only hate if they see you as less of a human being. I learnt that hatred is directly related to being able to see someone as less than you rather than equal to you. As a Christian Community, Taize has prayed and campaigned for a post-world war Europe free from oppression. One of my dear friends, who suffered dearly in a Serbian concentration camp - yes concentration camp in the war which the British Government refused to accept was happening until too late, was to his face called a 'dog' and had to walk around with a black star on his jacket, where thousands literally starved to death. He is now scarred by what happened to him.

The second most moving moment was at a U2 concert where they sang a song of hope and hospitality and on the large screens wrote out the United Nations Charter on Human Rights. It still sends a shiver up my spine. Here - visually those who are usually perceived as 'less than us" where displayed with dignity and love - the exact opposite of my Croatian experience. I always find it very difficult that so many Christians are so negative about the United Nations and the concept of Human Rights. For me, Human Rights are the starting place of hospitality, of seeing yourself as equal to those who are different from you, and even those you may desperately disagree with, who may even hate you. The equivalent for me, of allowing someone from the Lawyers Christian Fellowship to be allowed to say what they think. A challenge I attempt to live by. So Moot's short little rhythm entry summaries the values and essence of the international charter on Human Rights, and calls us to live generously, so that we live out the great Hebrew Shemah that Christ commands us to follow. To love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself..... There is no greater command than this. Imagine what would happen if we really lived like this!