For example, to gather at a round table is experienced differently from taking your place at a rectangular table, with its hierarch or patriarch at its head, in the only chair that has arm rests however discreet they may be. In a society and church of heterosexual coupledom as social and moral norm, the guest who is single, and even the gay or lesbian couple, will feel more at ease at a round table, and the host will feel no pressure to ensure an equal number of men and women. Personally, I like to become acquainted with a stranger in the kitchen. Here the newcomer can relax over a cup of tea or a glass of beer or whatever, while the host can carry on preparing a meal or polishing the brass. Neither has to look too much at the other.
Travellers can recover from their journeys.
Alan Jones, travelling in the desert, with its heat, dust and loneliness, longed for the simplicities of welcome good, shelter, and companionship. It is indeed costly or time, possibly of money, certainly of that part of us that does not want to change or grow, or give up all those labels that we wear to shore up our precarious sense of worth. Hospitality if more than kindness and friendship. The Church, government, university and other institutions depend on it because it makes for the informal conversations which stimulate creative thinking and action. Such conversations nourish the genius, the prophet, the saint or the artist.