Introducing...

Hi everyone. It was great to talk with many of you after the church service on September 18; I’m looking forward to meeting more of you in person during the coming months, now that we’re more easily able to do that again. My wife Rebekah and I landed in James Bay just a few months prior to the pandemic and it seems like before we were even done packing, we were being told to isolate from our new community!

We already had a few friends here (Rebekah had lived in Victoria for fourteen years before I convinced her to move to Seattle and marry me) but in our new hood, our most consistent interactions with neighbours were waving from across the street while we all banged pans and rang bells every night at 7pm. On walks, we’d sometimes recognize each other and (from a safe distance) say hi.

I remember being particularly moved by an elderly gentleman and a young guy I would see on the balconies of their neighboring apartments almost every time I walked out our door during that first summer, both shirtless and basking in the warm sun. At first, you’d see them doing their thing in their own private spaces, but over time, more and more, they’d be talking across the narrow gap between their two balconies, laughing and gesturing. Now, I sometimes see them going out for coffee together.

Not knowing what else to do when I began seeing so many people sleeping outdoors in our neighbourhood, I started going into the parks and asking folks how they were doing and if they needed anything. To my surprise, I discovered a bunch of my housed neighbours doing the same thing. Soon, we started meeting online every Wednesday night to support each other’s outreach work. In a few instances (including by members of this church) groups of volunteers banded together to find housing for someone they’d befriended, staying in relationship to ensure that that housing was sustained.

And that’s how I found my way into a community where I knew I belonged. I met Gordon and he introduced me to Karen and I think we all knew right away that we wanted to find ways to work together. In Seattle, I’d been involved in trying to solve homelessness for thirty years, directing church-based organizations that provided shelter and housing, as well as large- and small-scale research projects in Washington State. But what always sang to my heart were the simple grassroots efforts to offer basic human kindness and dignity to those for whom such things were too often denied. Things like thrift stores and community meals - places where everyone can feel that they belong.

When I spoke to the congregation on September 18, I talked a little about Fridays at one of the churches where I worked. In the social hall where we ran our programs, the day moved from hot breakfast for the shelter, to lunch and a thrift store, a big dinner with live music, and then shelter again that night, almost all of it staffed by volunteers. Not long after those programs were created, nearly half of the volunteers at the meal and thrift store were unhoused neighbours, invested in maintaining this community of theirs. Years later, I might run into one of them on the street, telling me that they were now housed because of us. And for the life of me I couldn’t even think of what specific thing we did other than just be there. I loved Fridays in that church, where it was just understood that Jesus really, really, really meant it when he said “the least of these.” It’s the same feeling I got when I found this congregation in my own neighbourhood. I can’t wait to see what we come up with!

At the service on September 18, I quoted from Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. During lunch afterward, a few of you asked about that book, so I’m happy to share the reference with everyone now, as it really speaks to the moment we’re living through together, with so many systems and institutions struggling and collapsing around us:

“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up – not all, but the great preponderance – to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even among death, chaos, fear, and loss. Were we to know and believe this, our sense of what is possible at any time might change. (p. 3) Disaster reveals what else the world could be like - reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings when it's absent from the stage." (p. 313)

I look forward to exploring together what that could mean…