“Boy, I did a great job. I fulfilled the Gospel”: Harry Murray on the Challenge of Hospitality.

Harry Murray reflects on his book, "Do Not Neglect Hospitality" and the constant call of hospitality to step into risk and challenge us

Courtesy of Harry Murray

Roundtable caught up with Harry Murray, emeritus professor of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York, on Zoom.

Last month, Roundtable republished a chapter of Murray’s “Do Not Neglect Hospitality,” a book based on his dissertation from Syracuse University that Temple University Press originally published more than 30 years ago. Murray said he was inspired to crack open the book once again himself.

“I haven't re-read it in something like 30 years,” Murray said in a Zoom call, surrounded by books in his home office in Rochester. “It's been an interesting experience.”

When asked what his initial reactions were, Murray replied with candor, wrapped in modesty. “I hate to say this, but I think the basic argument has stood the test of time,” he said.

After completing his dissertation at Syracuse University—where he was mentored by Jerry Berrigan—the oldest brother of activist priests Dan Berrigan and Phil Berrigan—Murray started his career at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, where he taught sociology and directed the Peace and Justice Program.

During that time, he continued to engage in acts of Civil Disobedience, particularly at Hancock National Guard Air Base in Upstate New York, and remained an “outhouse” community member at St. Joseph’s Catholic Worker in Rochester, New York.

One author Murray has encountered in his academic life would have added more depth to his writing: Jacques Derrida. He recently gave a lecture on the twentieth-century French philosopher’s writings on hospitality for Maurin Academy. “Derrida says that hospitality is an aporia,” Murray said, that is, a logical impasse or contradiction.

“You'll always be falling short and you'll always be striving for an impossible ideal,” Murray said. Derrida’s dense ethical examination of hospitality jives with Dorothy Day’s writings about and practice of hospitality, Murray said.

“Trying to do Catholic Worker-type hospitality is never something where you can rest back and say, boy, I did a great job. I fulfilled the Gospel. I'm good,” he noted. Entering into relationships of host and guest, of hospitality and openness always means, Murray said, that you’re going to make mistakes or poor judgment calls, you get played for a fool or learn regret from being too stern. “You're stepping out into risk,” he said.

Derrida has provided retrospective illumination for Murray’s thoughts on hospitality. The origin of Murray’s book came when he was living and working at Unity Kitchen in Syracuse and the community switched from what Derrida might call “unconditional hospitality” to what Murray called “highly conditional hospitality.”

As a result of these debates about how to practice hospitality, Murray went to get a PhD, because he wanted to dive more deeply into the study of hospitality—its history and its practice.

“That was my purpose in going back to graduate school: to understand hospitality more,” Murray said. “And I figured the only way to do that was to go to live and live in a house of hospitality.”

Harry Murray lived at three different Catholic Worker communities for several months while researching his dissertation, which eventually became “Do Not Neglect Hospitality.” But his immersive study did not end with the publication of his book. For the past 35 years, Murray has continued to “not neglect hospitality” by running the Saturday meal at St. Joseph’s Catholic Worker in Rochester.

Although Murray ran the Saturday meal at St. Joe's in Rochester for 35 years, he said that that was not the same as living in the community. “I was always, as they say, an ‘outhouse’ person,” he said with a wry smile. As an “outhouse” person, Murray was removed from the fracas of community life and that immersive understanding of what was happening in the house.

But, with nearly four decades of Saturdays under his belt, he said he developed a sort of sociological thermostat for gauging the health of the community.

“If not many people remembered my name, that was a sign that the house was going well,” Murray said. “If too many people knew who I was, that was probably a sign that the house wasn't going all that well because I became more important.”

If Murray’s name was important to know because he became a key linchpin between guests and the meeting of their needs, then there was something off in the community of Catholic Workers who were interacting with the guests more frequently. “But if I was basically anonymous, that was the sign that people were really having their needs met at the house,” Murray added.

In his book, Murray notes that being “on the house” can be exhausting, and more experienced Workers could be harsher. But being an “outhouse” person had its advantages: it gave him a break, Murray said. “If something really traumatic happened, I had a week to recover and teach classes, talk to students,” Murray said. “I think that allowed me to run the meal maybe more loosely,” he added.

Other events impacted how he viewed and practiced his own hospitality. During the First Gulf War, shortly after the publication of his book, Murray served time in the Salvation Army Community Correction Center for protesting the Gulf War.

The federal probation office allowed him to go to St. Joe’s on Saturdays in order to keep serving the Saturday meal. “I would have breakfast with guys at the Salvation Army and then be released, serve some of the same folks lunch at St. Joe's, and then go back and have supper with them at the Salvation Army,” he said.

He said that experience changed how he ran the meal. “When someone comes to the door, you never know whether that person might be your cellmate one of these days,” he said, quoting the words of Alana Jacobs, a Catholic Worker from Missouri. More practically, he said, “I got much more of an appreciation of what it means to constantly be eating food that you have no control over.” As a result, Murray became more open to guests asking for certain adjustments to their meals or special ingredients. “I came to see how important having a little bit of control over what you eat was,” Murray said.

Tom Cornell and Harry Murray

If he could change anything about the book, what would it be? Murray noted that many of his observations about hospitality stood the test of time, but he said he would certainly pay more attention to some of the ways in which race and gender impacted guests’ and workers’ experience. “Certainly as I reread it, I was much more conscious of issues of race, class, and gender than was reflected in the book,” Murray said. “I tended to describe a black person as black, but if it was a white person, the race went unnamed,” Murray noted. He also said he did not address gender identity. Partly, he said, due to confidentiality, and using pseudonyms for the Catholic Workers.

When the book was published, Maryhouse in New York City hosted Murray for a clarification of thought. In New York City, a sociologist had run a similar participant observation at St. Joseph’s House, and, unlike Murray, she published her book using guests’ and community members’ full names. The Catholic Workers told Murray they appreciated that he used pseudonyms. But, Murray added, they told him: “We also all got together the night before and made a copy where we wrote down who is who, identifying everyone.”

At the clarification of thought in New York City, he said, Catholic Workers engaged with the idea of hospitality and challenged him to think more deeply about it. Cassie Temple challenged the language of hospitality, noting, “Most of the hosts come and go; it’s the folks you're labeling the guests who are here for the long term,” Murray recalled. “‘So, really, who is the host and who is the guest?’ And I did not have a good answer for that.”

While not all Catholic Worker communities might have those long-term “guests,” many of the older communities do, he noted. “That was a real legitimate question, particularly in the context of Maryhouse in New York City,” he said.

On the other hand, Murray said, in Rochester, the clarification of thought focused on a defense of professional social worker services and rehabilitation programs. Murray said folks thought he was launching unfair attacks on those professions, but overall, he said, the communities appreciated his writing and the fairness of his observations, although they weren’t sure others would.

“One person who was from St. Joe's in Rochester read the book and said to me, ‘Look, if I was looking for a book to recruit people into the Catholic worker, I wouldn't use yours,’” Murray recalled.

That was a sort of back-handed compliment for a sociologist. Murray felt that he had tapped into something real, not just the “public presentation” of the Catholic Worker. He compared it to the difference between Dorothy Day’s books,“The Long Loneliness” and “Loaves and Fishes,” which might inspire more “recruitment” than her diaries. But Murray loved the intimate revelations of Day’s diaries “because they revealed the trials and the misgivings that she had about the Worker,” he said, “a view of her own and the house's weaknesses.”

Just like Day’s diaries, readers have found Murray’s book enlightening, full of insights into the real sort of daily death one lives at a Catholic Worker, and full of wisdom applicable to community and family situations beyond the Catholic Worker.

Murray said that a woman recognized him as the author of “Do Not Hospitality” in a recent Zoom discussion with the Simone Weil Catholic Worker. She liked one of the concepts he discussed in the book—being “on the house”—as in, taking a shift at hospitality, so much that she wanted to apply it to her own large household.

When asked if he thought an accurate book about the Catholic Worker movement could be attempted without his immersive method of living at a Catholic Worker house, Murray responded: “I think it would be hard.” He felt it would be necessary to have some form of “participant observation,” a sociological qualitative research method where a researcher immerses themselves into a particular group. “I think you almost do have to live there to get a feel for what's going on,” Murray said. Or, at least, have a consistent presence in a house of hospitality over an extended period of time, he said.

So what might a second book look like? A “Do Not Neglect Hospitality 2”?

“One temptation would be to go back to the same three houses 40 years later, ‘cause all are still going,” Murray said. But, he noted, they have all transformed since his first immersive encounter with them.

At St. Joseph’s House in Rochester, the house he is most familiar with, Murray said a theme that attracted him would be the cyclical nature of a house of hospitality. St. Joseph’s House has persisted for eight decades and has experienced many seasons of winter and spring: “The house has been on the verge of closing down and then somebody comes and it gets rejuvenated,” Murray said. St. Joseph’s has consistently practiced hospitality by serving a meal. But other types of hospitality—like an overnight emergency shelter in the winter—varied depending on how many “staff members” there were.

Houses of hospitality are not immune to some of the “goal displacement” that other organizations are, Murray noted. As soon as an organization is created, hires employees, and begins its life, a second goal arises, which can be a sneaky parasite of its original mission: for the organization to persist.

“Often that goal becomes more important than whatever it was set up to, to originally do,” Murray said, pointing out the example of the YMCA. The Young Men’s Christian Association was established to preach the Gospel of Jesus to young men in the city, and everything changed when a basketball court was erected in 1891 to attract young men to a sport that would, in turn, turn them into a captive audience for the Gospel. The rest is history.

The Catholic Worker remains, Murray said, one of the great exceptions to Max Weber’s, one of the founding fathers of sociology, concerns about the routinization of charisma. Weber defined three types of organizational authorities: traditional authority, passed down through lineage, like kingship; or rational authority, bureaucratic authority, based on the claims of expertise, efficiency and effectiveness, and third, a charisma that attracts people to them.

Weber predicted that the death of a charismatic leader, like Peter Maurin or Dorothy Day would cause the organization to collapse, revert to traditional authority, or transform into a bureaucracy.

But the Catholic Worker is an exception to that, Murray said, noting that Day’s death was a rare example of a death of a charismatic leader whose movement did not die with them. “Part of that was Dorothy's emphasis on anarchy,” Murray said. But he found another sociological factor that could explain the Worker’s persistence in its anarchist form: Day’s age. “She lived to an age where she was no longer really interested or capable of running a nationwide movement. But as long as she was alive, nobody could claim her status. So by the time she died, houses were so used to running with no national leadership that there couldn't be an attempt to reestablish leadership.”

Despite his own desire to be an “objective” sociologist, Murray stressed that “there was real, real good” being done at all of the houses he studied. “I hope that came across enough in the book.”

To Murray, the hope is that the relationships we have in hospitality, based in this reverence, allow us “to relate to other people on a meaningful level,” working through the differences in class, gender, race, or sexuality.

“It's never perfect,” he said. But hospitality offers hope that these barriers can be transcended, that we can open our ears and hearts and hear another person’s story and encounter them as our brother or sister in Christ.

Murray told a parable. Several decades ago, when his boys were young, he would sometimes arrive early to prepare for the Saturday meal at St. Joseph’s House in Rochester, “because it would give me an hour of peace and quiet without the kids,” he admitted.

One Saturday, a gentleman was waiting at the door who was not at all sober. “I'm not good at picking up when people are really high,” Murray said, “and he was really high.” He made Murray aware of his mental state pretty clearly throughout the hours of preparing and then serving the Saturday meal. “It was just terrible. Terrible experience,” Murray recalled ruefully.

“So the next Saturday I get there early again and there's another guy waiting and I don't know him. So I drive around the block hoping he will go away. I drive around the block like three times and he is still there.

So finally, very reluctantly, I pull in. I go up to him and say: ‘Hi, my name's Harry, what's yours?’ And he says, ‘Jesus.’”

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