Borat and Christian Hospitality

Hospitality is the theme of the week. Noel Edmonds of Deal or No Deal fame is welcomed back into the celebrity fraternity winning a gong at the National TV Awards. This week also, many of us welcomed strangers seeking favours to our doors. I even interrupted the Chelsea-Barcelona show-down to share.

Tonight, Borat—the movie opens. Or, to give it it’s full name Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan. Now if you haven’t heard of Borat then you must have been in solitary confinement in some far-distant, pre-industrial, post-soviet gulag…Not that Kazakhstan is any of these things you understand. Borat is the creation of Sacha Baron-Cohen, late of Ali-G notoriety, portraying a misogynistic, racist journalist from Kazakstan. Who is so offensive that the Kazakhstani government took out a 2-page ad in the New York Times saying that their country isn’t like this.

Baron-Cohen defends his creation by saying that he adopts this persona and persuades the gullible to expose their own inherent racism by agreeing with his views. Maybe. Now I haven’t seen the movie, but it strikes me as an interesting reversal of the usual pattern. Borat, the stranger, subverts the welcome he receives by exposing the hypocrisy of it.

And how about this. Apparently three times as many Americans have moved permanently to Ireland as the numbers of Irish people who have moved to the US. The Republic needs 10,000 new people every month to meet the growth in the economy. 1,500 migrants come to the UK every day.

Yes, hospitality is the theme of the week. This island is changing. In the last 2 years there have been more than 32,000 applications for National Insurance numbers here. I work in East Belfast, and the changing nature of the community is visible all around. East Belfast Mission has Hindu parents and their children in the parent and toddler group. Stepping Stone, the Mission’s employment service which has met the needs of people unemployed in east Belfast for most of the last 20 years now runs classes in English and supports people from Poland, Slovakia, Liberia, Somalia, Ukraine and China who are seeking work here.

The Shared Future is upon us, and hopefully our politicians have noticed, even as they themselves were welcomed into a new house on Tuesday.

It seems to me that Christians, of all people, should be predisposed to the stranger. After all, isn’t the centre-piece of our liturgical life an invitation from God to a shared meal. All sorts of things happen at this meal, but at least one of them is the invitation to hear again the injunction to receive the stranger.

(BBC Radio Ulster Thought for the Day, Friday, 3 November, 2006)