Uncommon Courtesy
“We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness.
We are made for togetherness...We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. ”
How will we be remembered by the living? How will we be welcomed by the dead?
In northwest Liberia, guests are received with an ancient ceremony of welcome. Immediately when newcomers arrive, traditional elders and members of the community approach to offer a formal welcome through the exchange of symbolic gifts. To welcome guests is to strengthen community, including the community of ancestors and the Natural World.
The most important of these gifts are kola nuts and a white chicken. The kola nuts connect us to the other world. Through them, the ancestors are notified of important gatherings and events, including the arrival of guests, the need for divination, as well as marriages and other important occasions when people gather to celebrate, mourn or seek solutions to a dispute or dilemma.
The kola nuts are put in a calabash or banana leaf and handed to the leader of the group of guests. Kola nuts reassure guests that they will be loved and well cared for because the hearts of their hosts are pure. The white chicken shows that the hosts' intentions are peaceful. The chicken is blessed and delivered from the hands of the hosts into the hands of the visitors.
Recently, a group of new friends traveled from far away to the compound that is home to everyday gandhis, the peacebuilding non-profit I co-founded with Liberian colleagues in 2004. The everyday gandhis guest house is located in the small, bustling town of Voinjama, in northwest Liberia, near the borders of Guinea and Sierra Leone. After the gifts were presented and words of welcome were shared, our culture troupe performed traditional music, drumming and dances. The guests were made to feel welcome and safe.
The eg team is made up of grassroots peacebuilders from different tribes and ethnic groups who have worked for the past twenty years to repair the relationships destroyed before and during the Liberian civil war of 1989-2004. That war was itself an expression of the imbalances create by the slave trade and, later, colonization by freed slaves from the US who were sent back to Liberia in the 1840's. The ancestors of those newcomers had been taken from their ancestral lands. When the free men and women from America arrived in what became Liberia, they occupied the best coastal and agricultural territory and put themselves in charge of the government. Indigenous people were displaced. It is a well-known pattern, as heartbreaking as it is common: traumatized people often take on the beliefs and behaviors of their tormentors. Later, during the cold war, Liberia became a pawn in the global chess game, with CIA manipulation and rapacious multinational companies seeking timber, diamonds, oil, iron ore and gold.
Before the excesses of modern commerce, there was a time when trade was an extension of the dialogue between realms: it was a replication among humans of natural courtesies. Even now, most Liberians will choose to buy from a newcomer or traveling salesman out of sympathy and a desire to help them succeed. It is an ancient custom rooted in spiritual practice.
The souk of Aleppo is a beautiful example: in the past, it was renowned for the careful complexity of relations among its vendors. The Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni writes that,
The merchants of Old Aleppo believed on religious grounds that you are blessed by being good to your neighbours, and that you earn your place in the community... The merchants had small chairs to sit on outside their shops once they opened in the morning. When a merchant had sold his first item, he would bring his chair inside as a sign. When another customer entered, he would then stretch his head out over his wooden counter to see if any chairs remained outside. If he saw one, he would direct the customer towards it, so as to benefit his less fortunate neighbor.
Exchange among humans was understood for what it is: a stand-in for the exchange between realms that make Life possible. Peace in and with the Other World creates peace in this one; disarray in this world indicates imbalance in our relationships with other realms. When we are grateful, we are generous. When we seek peace we seek balance.
Ceremonial gift exchange is a language in itself - one that is spoken, shared and understood in the Other World as well as in this one. Music, offerings, sacrifices, dreams and gifts are all part of this shared language: they comprise its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Together they shape the dialogue that aligns the energies that flow between realms.
The treatment of guests - and the behavior of guests, indicate how we're doing. By that measure, the torment of migrants is a stark indicator of how far we've fallen short. Our behavior as guests on Earth is even worse.
What would it mean to practice the courtesy of welcome among humans and beyond humans? Not as a human conceit or preference or whim; not as an adventure, experiment or strategy, but as an ongoing commitment to connection through dialogue with Life, which includes Death, because life and death rely on each other for sustenance. It is useful to wonder how our treatment of strangers in this world moves in the Other World.
Let us imagine ourselves newly dead: we arrive in our coffins surrounded by rose petals, pink with the fragrance of grief. We find nuggets of myrrh cupped in our hands to remind us that we are between worlds, no longer alive, but not yet fully ancestors, either. On our withered tongues is a drop of honey containing the wisdom of the hive. It melts with our bodies into the soil to make poems that give birth to the trees.
What sort of welcome will we receive from the ancestors? It depends on the welcome we offered when we were alive.
