Radical Hospitality in a Time of Trouble

By Rebecca Roveto, MA, LMFT, PhD

In November of 1863, amid the devastation of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln delivered what would become one of the most iconic speeches in American history—the Gettysburg Address. Contrary to common misremembering, this wasn’t in 1865, nor was it a victory speech. Lincoln’s words, brief but profound, were spoken at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles.

The speech honored the Union soldiers who died there and reaffirmed the values of unity and democracy. But even in Lincoln's lofty vision of a "new birth of freedom," the nation remained deeply divided—not just on the battlefield, but in the ways we remembered and memorialized the dead.

Gettysburg became a national monument to those who fought for the North. Union soldiers were buried in a federally funded cemetery, with their graves tended to by caretakers paid through public resources. But the Confederate dead—those who fought for the South—were not afforded the same dignity or visibility. Though they, too, died on that field, they were buried in smaller, largely unmarked cemeteries, often relegated to less prominent ground.

Tending to these graves was not an act of the government, but of the widows and women of the South, who organized and self-funded efforts to honor their dead. These women understood that even the defeated deserve remembrance. Eventually, from these Confederate Veterans organizations, the remains were moved largely to southern states. This story is not about sympathizing with the Confederacy’s ideology—certainly not with white supremacy or the institution of slavery. Instead, it’s about recognizing the layered and painful complexity of what came in the wake of war.

The Civil War fractured the country, and that fracture was never fully repaired. After the war ended in 1865, Reconstruction offered a brief and fragile glimpse of what reconciliation might look like. But by the late 1870s, Southern Democrats had regained power and began to systematically dismantle those efforts, instituting Jim Crow laws and effectively reversing many of the gains made in the immediate aftermath of the war.

What we often forget—or choose to forget—is that the South, even in defeat, did not disappear. The people who had fought for the Confederacy were expected to reintegrate into a country they no longer trusted or believed in. They were punished, politically and culturally, yet never fully confronted or rehabilitated. Meanwhile, the North wrote the laws and celebrated the victory, without acknowledging the deep cultural rupture that remained. There was no national reckoning, no mutual grieving, no shared ceremony of healing. Only the winners were celebrated.

This kind of societal banishment—this refusal to see or sit with the defeated—is not just political. It is psychological. As any therapist might tell you, banishment after trauma can create complicated, even destructive, responses. Because banishment is traumatic. As a nation, we experienced collective trauma, but we never dealt with it. We never offered a true welcome to the unwanted consequences of that trauma.

In Rumi’s poem The Guest House, he invites us to greet every emotion—joy, sorrow, meanness—as a guest, as if each were a messenger sent from beyond. The poem encourages us to treat every experience with reverence, even those we did not invite. This is radical hospitality.

The word “radical” comes from the Latin radicalis, meaning “of or relating to the root.” It suggests something fundamental, rooted in our very existence. “Hospitality,” meanwhile, comes from the Latin hospes, meaning both host and guest. To practice radical hospitality, then, is to treat the presence of others—especially the unexpected, the unwanted—as central to our humanity.

That doesn’t mean allowing everything in without boundaries. But it does mean resisting the instinct to wall ourselves off from what makes us uncomfortable. It means being willing to sit with grief, shame, and difference. To hold the memory of the defeated without glorifying what they stood for. Because when we fail to acknowledge or welcome what we’ve lost or feared, we disconnect from the very roots of what it means to be human. And those roots wither. The traumas deepen. The ghosts linger.

What might have been different if the U.S. government had, after the war, truly welcomed the South—not its ideology, but its people—into a process of painful but honest reconciliation? What if Reconstruction had included not just rebuilding, but healing? Not just laws, but shared mourning?

As we navigate today’s troubled times, perhaps the times themselves are like a guest at the door—unwanted, disorienting, even frightening. But maybe they are also an invitation. An invitation to respond with radical hospitality. To stay rooted in our shared humanity. To fumble through the darkness with patience and courage. To build a future not only from victory, but from the honesty of what has been forgotten.