The Hospitality Way of Life

For the Maritime Plymouth Brethren, hospitality has always been a way of life. Ever since they became a people in exile, they remembered the feeling of unwelcome and in turn opened their doors to strangers as a sign of abundance. My grandparents, perhaps the 12th generation of such people, remembered their own parents welcoming “hobos” for meals during the Great Depression.

Every summer when I went to visit, they had a different person staying with them or another visitor sitting at their table. My grandmother was so generous, in fact, that we would write her name on gifts in permanent marker to prevent her from giving them away to the next person who needed something. To our bewilderment, complete strangers would find her number and call to ask for help of one kind or another.

If you had asked those old Nova Scotians what hospitality meant for them, they would have given you a blank stare and offered you more molasses for your toast. To them, hospitality was just a way of life; it was as indistinguishable as oxygen running through their blood. It wouldn't have occurred to them to do anything other than welcome guests to their home on a Sunday afternoon or to grow twice as much food as they could possibly use. 

My grandfather's garden was his way of growing hospitality

Like many children of the Depression, my grandparents didn’t go to high school, so theological language wasn’t something they could identify with. But they went early to open the church every Sunday, welcoming their neighbours in the ways they new how: handing out hymn books and cleaning up after children. Hospitality was never glamorous, but became the building blocks of their life, together and in community. It is not uncommon, decades later and halfway across the country, for me to run into people who say they ate my grandmother’s cooking or were welcomed into her home when they had no where else to go.

My grandmother was not a perfect woman and could have used a lesson in boundary-making. But if I came up with a short list of the people I’ve known that most exemplify Jesus, she would make the cut. I think of her every Thanksgiving, when we celebrate harvest by welcoming guests into our homes.

I wonder what risks she took and sacrifices she made in order to care for the people God brought across her path. Was it hard work? Uncomfortable? Probably. But did she find in hospitality the fulfillment of being who God created her to be? I have no doubt. Nearly a century following the Depression, our neighbours are perhaps more in need of hospitality than ever; may we too become people of such welcome.

Radicals and Conformists: still following Jesus despite it all

This article was originally written in response to a request from UM Today at the University of Manitoba following the vote of the Anglican Church of Canada (narrowly) in favour of same-sex marriage. It has been published in both that publication as well as the Winnipeg Free Press.

I belong to the University of Manitoba, but there are times when I’m frustrated with the institution. I wish there was more funding for student services. I hope one day we don’t produce so much garbage. But my commitment to the university isn’t really about the institution - it is about the people. I believe in the U of M because I’m committed to holistic, accessible education, not because the institution itself is fail-proof.

My relationship with the Anglican Church of Canada has been much the same. As a married lesbian priest, I have been a minority among churchgoers, not to mention clergy. I have often wondered if I was investing both my faith and my career in the wrong place.

But I am not part of the Church because I’m a conformist. I have pushed against the status quo and asked too many questions from the time I was a child. I am part of the Church because I am a follower of Jesus. A younger me was worried about figuring out what “following Jesus” looks like. I feared that if I got it wrong, I would make God sad at best or, at worst, suffer eternal punishment.

After seven years of theological education and coming out as gay, I’ve come to understand that following Jesus isn’t like that. Such black and white thinking is a moralistic way of seeing the world that has no place in a deeply-rooted spirituality.

Jesus came to teach the way of God - the way of goodness, if you will - in a particular time and place. He showed us what that looked like as an illiterate man in his twenties, a former refugee who spoke Aramaic, living in occupied territory. But I am none of those things. So what does it mean for me to live the way he did, in the 21st-century, as a young, gay woman living in Treaty One territory?

Take a look at the people Jesus hung out with. They were at the edges of his culture, often pushed aside and unwanted: modern-day genderqueer folks, indigenous youth, addicts, and me. The most important things in Jesus’ life were living in harmony with others, with himself, with God, and with the earth.

Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality. He told us to give our money to the poor and live simply in community. He insisted that we love one another and that being a person of faith is not an individualistic venture. The African Church parallels this with Ubuntu: “I am because we are.”

Christianity is a 2000 year old religion which has constantly adapted to fit its context. Contrary to popular belief, the religion we have today is much different than any of the forms it took 800 or 1200 years ago.

As a lesbian who has often felt like an outsider in my small rural community, knowing that God welcomes me and created me as whole and good has been a lifeline. Unfortunately, the rest of the “family” has often struggled to understand this. I don’t believe this is because of Jesus, but because it’s easy to allow our own fears to become enshrined in the language of religion. Yet this doesn’t only happen in religion — people use all kinds of reasons to exclude or judge.

It has been a hard journey toward realizing that I’m wanted and loved by God despite the official non-acceptance of my faith’s institution. But on the ground, there have been many, many individuals who have welcomed me and acted more like Jesus than an institution ever could. When we thought same-sex was rejected at our national gathering on Monday, several of those people literally came up to me and offered me jobs. In essence, they said to me, “Being part of the Church is more about being like Jesus for us than it is about exclusion or conformity.” Sometimes that’s hard. But radical, grassroots movements have never been easy. Now imagine trying to be true to the cause for over 2000 years!

The Woman in Hijab and the Man on the Bus

This was the day I created an islamophobic confrontation at a bus stop.

I say I created it because when the man behind me said he didn’t want a woman wearing a hijab on the bus, I refused to leave them both alone. And when I got on the bus but she didn’t, I became the focus of his hatred instead.

Waiting for the bus in my lovely little diverse-but-crime-ridden neighbourhood this morning, a man stepped back to politely let me get on ahead of him. As the hijab-wearing woman walked toward us, I stepped back to do the same for her. “We’re all so nice to one another!” I thought to myself naively. 

“No,” the man told me as he moved to block the other woman. “Not her.”

“What? Why” I asked as we get on the bus, realizing the woman wasn’t wanting to get on anyway.

“It’s not safe” he muttered. “I know them. I was in a war.” He had an accent that told me he’d been in Canada for some years but wasn’t born here. Eastern European, maybe.

“Excuse me?”

“They’re Al Quaida. You have to be careful. We don’t want them,” he muttered as I looked at the bus driver, bewildered. 

All of my plans for such a moment fell out the back of my brain as I responded awkwardly, “No way. There is no space for racism on Winnipeg Transit.” The driver nodded, silently.

My conversation partner moved to his seat, continuing to mutter to himself about the danger of Muslims. And then, loudly: “I used to execute them!”

Incensed, I looked around the bus to see if anyone else was paying attention to this man. All eight appeared to still be waiting for their morning coffee. “Do you have a policy about this or something?” I asked the bus driver. “This guy’s talking about killing Muslims.”

A look of vague concern crossed the driver’s face before he turned back to his work. It occurred to me that it would be helpful to have a picture of this man, but as soon as I pulled out my phone his actions started becoming aggressive, even from halfway across the bus. He began looking at me with those angry, suspicious eyes that one has when they’ve become a victim of their own paranoia.

He was clearly fixed on me, and my presence was upsetting him, as he continued to mutter and look back and forth from me to the papers on his lap. I was pretty sure that if I actually lifted the phone high enough to take a picture, he’d snap. That wouldn’t help anyone.

Moving to the back of the bus to get out of his line of sight, I tried taking a picture from behind and pretending not to care about him anymore. In a weird mix of anger and confusion, he pulled out a flip tone and pretended to call the police, apparently reporting me for stalking him.

The call was way too short and one-sided to have been real, but for a moment I was relieved that at least SOMEONE was calling the police and would keep this guy from getting out of hand. A couple of minutes later, as I furiously texted a coworker about what to do if the man escalated, he seemed to calm down considerably.

We got off at different stops on campus and I warned security of his presence. I have too many dearly-beloved Muslim students to allow a man like that to just wander through their campus at will. 

Being in the middle of a homophobic episode is something I regularly expect. I have been denied jobs, housing, education, family, and friends for being married to a woman. But little white Christian me, in the middle of an islamophobic scenario? Not the usual start to a Wednesday morning.

And yet, is it really so strange that when one of us is targeted, we all feel it? A recent attack on a young Muslim woman in a London, Ontario grocery store has certainly made me question whether it’s a city I could ever feel safe in as a young gay woman.

While there is something strangely human about dividing ourselves into groups of “insiders” and “outsiders,” there is something fundamentally human about finding common group in connecting with our neighbours. To be human is to be experience belonging within ever-extending communities. When we cease to be connected, we die.

It is not uncommon for Christians to wonder why I work to make space for Muslim chaplaincy and students at St. John’s College. It is equally common for both Muslims and Christians to chastise me for marrying a woman. And I have come believe that this is never about Islam or Christianity or being gay.

It is about our fear of the unknown.

Humans are creatures of habit, and it takes a lot of hard work for us to expand those habits. Think about the foods you normally eat or the route you usually take to work. But when it comes to something like our sense of self or our understanding of what is right and good and true in the world, we are afraid to break our habits. We have no idea what the “other” might be like, and so we create systems of exclusion which put up barriers of false security between us.

Very often, it is this fear of what we don’t know that causes things like wars and racial hatred and shootings in America. It creates internalized hatred, where a gay man would hate himself so much that he would kill dozens of his own in an act of vicious anger toward his own community, his very self.

I know all too well what it’s like to belong to conflicting groups, where one is both insider and outsider. The push and pull sense of belonging and rejection can be enough to shut a person down some days. How will we ever create a world where our connectedness is more valued than our fears?

It will not begin with the end of Islam, or of religion generally, or even better laws around human rights. It will only begin when we are brave enough to put ourselves into the world of the other and get just a little glimpse of like as he or she sees it. It will only begin when we are brave enough to move into neighbourhoods where the “other” lives, to sit beside her on the bus, to share a coffee with her at work.

But it doesn’t end there. The angry man on the bus was the other as well. He is MY other, because I identified more with the young woman in hijab than I did with him. Learning to face my fear of the other means recognizing that this man was undoubtedly a victim of his own fear. An Eastern European war-survivor, I have no idea what he’s been through in his life to bring him to a place of such paranoia and hate. How do we bring him also into our community?

Gently. As the great liberation educator Paulo Freire teaches, the oppressed must constantly resist the temptation to become the oppressor. They must do power and politics and relationship differently, where both “us” and “them” are invited to sit down and eat together. Just speaking to such a man goes a long way toward inviting him into community, past his own fears and into a place that can be “home” for both him and the woman in the hijab.

It is what Jesus did, after all.