062: hospitality isn’t a gift - it’s a posture | Heather Heaton
In this episode, Deb Knupp sits down with Heather Heaton, a writer, an unconventional pastor, and Deb's friend and fellow resident of a town of fewer than eight thousand people.
"We cannot love through closed arms. We cannot thrive through closed arms."
The subject is hospitality, but not the version involving hors d'oeuvres and hot dishes. Heather's argument, formed in seminary while she questioned and unlearned a great deal about the role of women in the church, is that hospitality is not an activity and not a gift some people happen to have. It is a posture. She talks with her hands, and by her own admission she'll be doing it the entire conversation.
Underlying it is a reframe that quietly upends how most of us use the word. Hospitality is not one person hosting another. It is reciprocal, which means a hospitable person has to know how to receive as well as how to host. Heather traces the idea back through table fellowship in scripture and forward into a divided present, where opening your arms to someone who holds different values feels less like generosity and more like exposure. Her question for that discomfort is a simple one: is there actually a threat here?
Key Highlights
The salt table. Heather opens her home to any woman in town, and when they RSVP she does not ask them to bring a dish. She assigns ingredients. Bring lemons and butter. Strangers cook a meal together and then sit down and eat it, and the table does the rest.
Hospitality as a two-way dynamic rather than a gift or a service. "A hospitable person knows how to host and how to receive," and Heather is candid that receiving love has historically been the harder half for her.
Practical starting points: watch your actual body language, notice which way you are angled toward the person who disagrees with you, and remember that unity is not sameness. Also, crack the joke. Humor is an open posture. Heather is clear this applies to everyday disagreement, not unsafe or abusive situations.
Henri Nouwen's "Reaching Out," and the line that reframes the whole conversation: the opposite of hospitality is hostility.
About Our Guest
Heather Heaton is a writer, speaker, and self-described unconventional pastor whose work centers on hospitality as a posture rather than a practice. She came to the idea in seminary, in a season of deep theological study spent questioning and unlearning what she had been handed about the role of women in the church, and it took root through the study of table fellowship, a thread running from the Old Testament forward as a way people remember God. After seminary she went to work behind the bar at a hole-in-the-wall whose regulars were retired truckers, and within a year some of them were calling her Pastor Heather. Today she writes the Substack A Holy Ruckus, where her prose has the quality Deb describes as being able to taste the coffee, and she hosts the salt table in her own home for any woman in her small town willing to walk through a stranger's door. She is a mother of boys who have absorbed the lesson well enough that one of them once invited the grocery store cashier home for dinner.
Connect with Heather Heaton
Read Heather's writing at A Holy Ruckus
Listen to Heather on 2FightFor Podcast
Heather Heaton on Instagram
About the HX Collective
The HX Collective explores the human experience through three lenses: work, relationships, and self, through raw, authentic conversations rooted in human-centered design. Each episode offers gripping stories, thought-provoking discussion, and concrete tools that help you rethink your relationship with distress and strengthen your whole human experience.
