I am not old enough to remember what  my parents' generation can still recall-the long front porches and the leisurely visits with neighbors or whoever passed by. I am old enough to remember the leisure of summers and the visits of my childhood. Although I did not come from a big family of extended relatives, I do remember the occasional family member passing through; some distant cousins, a wonderful great-aunt, my grandmother, a friend of my parents. We lived in a small house and there were no accommodating guest rooms, but no one was ever turned away. Invitations to a barbeque in our backyard came easily.

Summers for my children when they were young, were visits to Grandma and Grandpa's farm, who lived nearby. I have almost twenty nieces and nephews and the summers were long days of the kids playing, swimming, hiking, catching frogs in the lake, finding insects, catching fireflies, and visiting with family. We now have the social Internet, even dating is not necessarily that first 'visit' with one another--that seems to come after you have gotten to know one another a bit online and decided if you actually want to meet. Although I am not advocating a return to pre-internet I do think we are beginning to lose what personally encountering someone means, what a visit means. 

This summer I had some visitors, and was a visitor myself. Each visit was a special grace in some way. At the beginning of summer I went away to "camp"--actually a religious art class in Connecticut. I went alone and had a minimal amount of information on what the class actually entailed. The class, "Illuminated Miniature Manuscripts",  was taught by a gifted artist, Jeb Gibbons. Gibbons paints in beautiful "Miniatures" (very tiny), religious paintings with a paint brush that has about five hairs on it. Each class he demonstrated the mixing of paints, technique, and answered questions as we progressed through the week. We would return to our art tables after each demonstration and paint under a microscope with a 'teeny-tiny' little brush, on a very tiny canvas. I learned a lot, but had I not met Terry I probably would have shot myself the second day. 

I have never been, and it doesn't look likely that I will ever be, a patient person. Yet I did patiently refrain from saying "#%!!*" when I hurriedly completed and messed up a section on the last day. Too much Starbucks and too tiny of brush I suddenly just didn't want to paint so little and aggressively went for it. The instructor helped me to fix the mess and saved my painting too.  I persevered until the end. I learned more than how to paint with small strokes. After more than forty hours of working on a 4 x 6 inch painting of the archangel St. Michael I wasn't quite so impatient. I even arrogantly began to think, "How hard can performing surgery actually be?"

Terry sat at the front of the class and immediately made friends with everyone there. A vivacious, witty woman, she works as an ob/gyn nurse delivering babies in a Manhattan hospital. She cries, laughs, prays and swears easily--taking big bites out of life. I immediately like her-plain and simple. So Terry becomes my new friend at camp; making me laugh, telling me great stories, hating the mornings like I do, drinking lots of coffee with me. She gives me Tylenol on the third day when I have an excruciating headache from my "patient painting". Terry tells me that she secretly believes that the class is for obsessive-compulsives and I believe this on the day we learn to make hundreds of the teeniest-tiny dots for the shading on St. Michael's torso. (I will have to say I was very thorough in this endeavor because this shading gave my St. Michael some great abs). The instructor continually reminds us during each demonstration to "stir, stir, stir" when mixing the paints (always saying "stir" three times ). At the end of camp I depart with a fabulous little painting of a pretty hot looking "St. Michael" and a new friend. We hug goodbye and exchange phone numbers and emails and promise to call. But... you never know if your new camp friends will survive past the summer. 

To my delight, two months later I get a phone call from Terry! She and her sister are driving from New York to Michigan and they are going to stop in Cleveland and say "hi"! I am excited beyond measure. I tell Terry to come with her sister and stay a day or two and they can "eat, eat, eat" when they arrive and then "sleep, sleep, sleep." The day Terry and her sister arrive, my newly married daughter has also arrived from Texas the day before. I invite my other two grown children to come by for dinner too. That night, as soon as my husband arrives home, the seven of us gather around the dinner table. Sweet red peppers and fresh corn, along with lemon chicken are thrown on the barbeque as the heavy blanket of the day's humidity begins to thin as the night air cools. In the woods behind the house the crickets, frogs and night sounds begin their serenade of summer. Terry and Maryann feel like neighbors who just happen to drop by for a visit and everyone seems to be enjoying the food and the company. I add a salad  to the table, and place a plate full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and ice cream on the table as we finish. To my delight everyone lingers around the table, sharing stories until it is dark and we are all tired. I show our guests to their rooms, plenty of which I now have since the kids have moved out. I show Terry the coffee pot for the morning, even before I show her the guest bathroom and we all retire for the evening. 

The next morning Terry and Maryann need to be on the road. My husband has already left for work, so its just my daughter, myself and our guests. We sit at the table waking up and watching the birds arrive at the feeders for their breakfast. My cell phone rings. To my surprise Father McCreary, the priest who had married my daughter just three months earlier, is driving in from Wash., D.C. and is going to stop by real quick to say 'hi'. Twenty minutes later I let my daughter answer the door to surprise him. I introduce him to Maryann and Terry and pour him a cup of coffee too.. 

These visitations demonstrate to me the effectiveness of God's love. Love spilled into my home unexpectedly. Only a few weeks previous my husband had been out of town and I had a quiet and empty house. Today my home was pulsating with the presence of people. 

Each year when I trek down to Kentucky for my visit to the Abbey of Gethemani I stop outside the front door of the retreat house when I arrive. I read the words on the large plaque of Christ's face with His hands reaching out, "Treat all guests as Christ." The Rule of Benedict strictly admonishes the monks to live out their faith by treating each visitor as if Christ Himself had knocked on your front door.

On these last days of summer as I opened my door to guests, I was the one who was richly blessed. 

In the Biblical scene of Mary's visit to Elizabeth, the visit is filled with excitement, congratulations, expectation, greetings and, I would imagine, hugs and good food. Mary travels to see her cousin Elizabeth to share the news of her pregnancy. Elizabeth is also expecting. There is something about the sharing of good news, particularly in the physical presence of one another--that heightens the joy and the excitement. I think the news would have lost something had it been delivered email or text message. As Mary greets Elizabeth, Mary is grateful, Elizabeth is excited, both of the women's lives are changed, validated, and embraced by their visit. We too reveal and receive Christ through our visitations.