“When we succeed in persuading our readers to take the homeless into their homes; having a Christ room in the house as St. Jerome said, then we will be known as Christians because of the way we love one another,” Dorothy Day wrote in her 1939 book, House of Hospitality. “We need more Christian homes where the poor are sheltered and cared for.”

In founding the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin hoped to persuade every Catholic parish to maintain a house of hospitality, and every Christian home to maintain a Christ room—a space set aside in someone’s home to receive Christ in the disguise of the stranger in need of shelter.

In the early 2010s, Casa Alma Catholic Worker (Charlottesville, Virginia) began investigating ways to promote Christ rooms within their extended community. After several years of research and reflection, Casa Alma launched its Christ Room Network in 2016, a support system for individuals and couples willing to open their homes to those in need. By 2019, four hosts had provided Christ Rooms to five guests, offering them a safe and stable environment to heal, save funds, and prepare for the next stage of their lives.

The COVID pandemic shuttered the program, but it also prompted Casa Alma to create a guide for other Christian communities to replicate its experiment. The guide is available here and at the bottom of this page. Casa Alma also created a 10-minute video to show people interested in opening Christ rooms in their homes. That video is password-protected at the request of some of the individuals who appear in it; the link and password can be obtained by emailing info@catholicworker.org. For the quickest response, please include “Christ room video link request” in the subject line.

What follows is excerpted from the 28-page resource document Casa Alma created. Christians have been opening their homes to the poor for two thousand years without such a guide, and certainly Casa Alma’s recommendations are only one way to go about doing so. But it is hoped that the research, reflection, and lived experience that went into creating this resource will provide a helpful starting point for individuals or communities starting a Christ room.

(The following excerpts have been very lightly adapted for clarity; the original text is available in the PDF available at the end of this page.)

Introduction

Warm greetings from Casa Alma! We are pleased to share this resource which emerges from our practice of Christian hospitality—as a community, we receive people in need as Christ, extend welcome, and provide housing and support. We believe the communal, spiritual practice of hospitality is vital in these uncertain, unjust times to provide safe and stable housing to people in need, and to serve as a spark to transform individual lives and motivate people to work for justice.

This resource describes our Christ Room model and provides a set of foundational materials so that other groups can replicate, adapt, and expand this approach to hospitality in their own communities and from their own faith traditions.

Enclosed in this resource are:

• Background: brief history of how and why we developed Christ Rooms
• Foundations: centering the needs of prospective guests; a spiritual framework for hospitality.
• Components of our Christ Rooms: hosts, supports, guests, advocates, and covenants.
• The potential for personal and communal transformation
• Programmatic materials: process and timeline; house guidelines and boundaries
• Relationship resources: communication, reflections on class and race, conflict resolution, motivational interviewing.
• For reference: guest application and referral, host and support application, exit interviews.

The Genesis of the Christ Room Project

In 2010, Casa Alma opened our first of two houses of hospitality where we provide housing and support to families who would otherwise be homeless. Immediately, we came into contact with many more families and individuals who needed safe and stable housing than we could serve. We encountered single moms and single dads, multi-generation families, women leaving abusive relationships, young people aging out of foster care, adults reentering the community from time spent in prison or in the hospital, refugees whose resettlement support had ended, and immigrants vulnerable to exploitation.

We began to think about how to expand our efforts and welcome more people in need without losing our character as a small community of volunteers living as Catholic Workers. We knew people within our own faith community (and others) who had spare bedrooms in their homes and an inclination to share them. We were friends with empty-nesters whose guest rooms were occupied by family on occasional visits. We knew couples and singles who had a garage apartment or in-law suite. But we didn’t know how those with available rooms could have sufficient support to safely welcome a stranger in need into their extra space.

Meanwhile, we encountered the concept of “Christ rooms” in the writings of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. She wrote, “When we succeed in persuading our readers to take the homeless into their homes, having a Christ room in the house as St. Jerome said, then we will be known as Christians because of the way we love one another.”

Over the next few years, we undertook an exploration of the concepts of “Christ rooms” and Christian hospitality. We read and re-read the excellent and inspiring book Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl. We encountered writings from other spiritual and religious traditions on the practice of hospitality including a beautiful article by Peter Morales, “Religious Hospitality: a Spiritual Practice for Congregations.”

We hosted book studies and community meetings on hospitality and listened to the stories told by people who had hosted someone in need in their home, and those told by adults who had grown up in homes where hospitality to strangers was practiced. We reached out to other Catholic Worker communities and to individuals across the U.S. who had opened rooms in their homes to welcome someone in need. What were their motivations? What did they learn? What kind of support did they have or wish they had as they practiced hospitality as a spiritual discipline?

In 2016, we began integrating these learnings and developed our Christ Room pilot project to equip and support individuals and couples to welcome a person in need into their home. We developed applications for prospective hosts and guests, orientation and training materials, methods of ongoing support, and reference resources. By 2019, four hosts had opened Christ Rooms in their homes and five guests had received safe and stable housing.

During their stay in the Christ Rooms guests had time to rest, advance their healing from trauma, save funds, pay down debt, and regroup for the next stage of their lives. Hoping to build upon these positive outcomes, Casa Alma planned to expand its hospitality network in 2020. We hoped to recruit more hosts and individuals to support their efforts, and we wanted to rewrite all our Christ Room resource documents to incorporate not only the Christian practice of hospitality, but other spiritual and religious perspectives as well.

We anticipated that our expanded Christ Room effort would still remain relatively small, as it is coordinated by volunteers who maintain personal relationships with hosts, supports, and guests. We believe that modest efforts complement wider-reaching programs that advance affordable housing on a larger scale. When it comes to supporting people who are underserved and struggling, we believe every effort, large and small, is important.

The emergence of COVID-19 led us to postpone and modify our plans to expand our local Christ Room effort. However, we believe that there will only be an increase of families and individuals in need of safe and stable housing in the coming months and years as a result of increased poverty due to job loss, evictions, and insufficient social safety nets. So we decided to compile our materials and distribute them in hopes that other groups in other communities would use this time to incubate and launch hospitality efforts of their own.

We invite you to customize these materials to fit your own local context and spiritual lineage and hope that our small exploration and practice of hospitality will seed more robust efforts in other communities. Goodnight

A Spiritual Framework

“True hospitality is a spiritual practice, a religious practice. Like meditation or prayer, hospitality connects us with a deep truth and compassion that transcend our selves. Our sense of isolation and individualism is an illusion that cuts us off from what is real, true, loving, and sacred in life.”

—Peter Morales, “Religious Hospitality: a Spiritual Practice for Congregations”

As a Catholic Worker community, Casa Alma is rooted in a spiritual tradition that instructs us to welcome the stranger in need, to shelter those who are homeless, and to provide food to those who are hungry. We understand these acts of hospitality as spiritual practices, stemming from what we believe is true and real. In this section, we present an overview of the spiritual framework of our Christ Room effort and invite you to consider the ways in which your own faith lineage or spiritual practice would similarly inform your practice of hospitality.

The term “Christ Room” was first used in the 4th century by St. John Chrysostom when he said, “Every family should have a room where Christ is welcome in the person of the hungry and thirsty stranger.” This references the Christian scriptures and these lines from the Gospel of Matthew:

“Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’ And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”

(Mt 25:37-40)

In our practice of hospitality at Casa Alma and in our Christ Room effort, we are oriented toward welcoming others because we are oriented toward welcoming the Divine. We extend welcome and assistance especially to those who are poor and marginalized, who are God’s beloved, trusting that God is already at work in their life, that we can learn about God through them.

In Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine Pohl writes, “The practice of hospitality forces abstract commitments to loving the neighbor, stranger, and enemy into practical and personal expressions of respect and care for actual neighbors, strangers, and enemies…Claims of loving all humankind, of welcoming ‘the other’ have to be accompanied by the hard work of actually welcoming a human being into a real place.” (p.75)

Later in the book, Pohl asserts, “A first step in making a place for hospitality may be to make room in our hearts…welcome always begins with dispositions characterized by love and generosity.” (p.154) We believe that this disposition of love and generosity mirrors the reality of a bigger Love. Our hospitality to someone in need is the smaller story within the bigger story of God’s great welcome and unconditional love for us.

Hospitality undertaken as a spiritual practice is also grounded in humility. We are neither saviors, nor experts. Guests who receive hospitality may leverage the experience and exit into market-rate housing, and some may leave the valuable respite only to return to housing instability. In our Christ Room effort, we believe that providing hospitality, even for a short time, is a concrete practice of faith, a way of being and living. As such, we recognize that we will never be fully prepared or equipped to embark on this journey, and that is alright!

Components of our Christ Room Model

Host households open a room in their homes to receive a guest for a defined length of time —whatever the host can joyfully offer. We recommend a minimum of 12 weeks and a maximum of one year.

Support households assist hosts through regular calls and check-in times, and through occasional offers of meals or transportation. Supports and hosts gather on a regular basis to share ideas and experiences.

Guests are referred by local social workers and case managers who know them. Each guest names for themselves an advocate who is someone they trust. Advocates assist with problem-solving as needed. We encourage hosts and guests to create a covenant, a written description of the hopes for their relationship.

Coordination is provided by Casa Alma volunteers. We receive and review host, support, and guest applications. We organize trainings, provide resources, facilitate meetings between prospective hosts and guests, and accompany all involved, offering connections and support as we can.

“In hospitality the stranger is welcomed into a safe, personal, comfortable place, a place of respect and acceptance and friendship…Such welcome involves attentive listening and a mutual sharing of lives and life stories. It requires an openness of heart, a willingness to make one’s life visible to others, and a generosity of time and resources.”

(Pohl, p.13)