What would you do if you were taking a bath in your new apartment and suddenly a stranger opened the bathroom door, claiming the apartment was his? What if you opened the door of your apartment and found a stranger taking a bath in your tub? Would you treat that person as an intruder? I think I probably would. Yet remarkably, the central figure in this movie finds it in his heart to treat the stranger as a guest.

When our discussion group looked back at this movie, we weren’t sure just who was the visitor in the title. So many people are visitors … from a visiting piano teacher in the first scene, inadvertent visitors in someone else’s apartment, visitors to America, a visitor to a prison, visitors to new kinds of musical experiences (African drumming, a Broadway play). The movie shows that some visitors are welcomed and treated with hospitality. It also forces us to look at ways in which some are not.

 We’re all visitors … in our families, our friendships, our country, our jobs, even our own bodies. Remembering this, perhaps we can learn to be better hosts. Our church said goodbye this morning to Father Brendan, someone who has this gift of making people welcome. He's been a visitor in our lives, and we've been visitors in his, as he moves on to wherever God is calling.