Stranger Danger - Part 3

The earlier parts of this series considered two voices that can help the church better extend hospitality to strangers in its midst. In part one, Coralie considered how philosopher Richard Kearney critiques the way the West has traditionally dealt with strangers, foreigners and notions of ‘otherness’ and suggests that fostering ‘a radical attentiveness to the stranger [can function] as a portal to the sacred’. In part two, Coralie considered the biblical witness to the importance of hospitality as discussed by Christian ethicist Christine Pohl.

When my three children were young, I was a mother committed to an open-door policy toward their friends. Blinded by a type of self-righteousness mixed with maternal absolutism, I thought this to be a rather magnanimous disposition. Gradually, though, I noticed that two of my children were always playing in the homes of other people and that seldom were the neighbourhood kids gracing my door.

One day, my ‘protective bubble’ was shattered by the innocent words of a six-year-old lingering on the doorstep of our home. When I graciously welcomed her and tried to coax her into the house, she promptly replied that she didn’t want to come in because ‘that strange boy lives here’. ‘Stranger danger’ was thriving in yet another context.

Meet Samuel

Samuel Bridle—or ‘that strange boy’—is now a 25-year-old young man living with profound and complex disability. He is seemingly confined to the cognitive capacity of a baby. Conceptual realities, communicating through language and social relating, are concepts and realities that fall outside his mode of being. Samuel’s physical body is incapacitated by spastic quadriplegia, cortical blindness, epilepsy and global developmental delay.

Like every other human being, Samuel’s life depends on support of one sort or another. Yes, he does look different but, identical twins withstanding, everyone looks different. What the child on my doorstep noted was the differences rather than the commonalities. What the child on my doorstep needed from Samuel and me was a diffusion of the anxiety we experience whenever we encounter difference. Samuel, created in the image of God, with the dust of humanity slightly rearranged, carries the desire for welcome, inclusion and embrace that is the longing of every human being. It is therefore my contention that Samuel and his ‘story’ expands our notion of what it means to welcome the stranger.

Strangers come in many guises. Christian ethicist Christine Pohl comments that ‘strangers’ are generally identified as those disconnected from relationships that provide a secure place for them in the world. Those with profound cognitive and physical disabilities would fall within this broad definition. As speech and language therapist Dr Rozanne Barrow observes, ‘Traditionally, Western society values those who are independent and who are able to walk, talk, hear and see and who have mental agility. Indeed, our society is designed around people who have these abilities.’

In such a setting, Samuel is expected to live a tension between visibility and invisibility. On the one hand, his difference marks him out as a highly visible ‘stranger’; on the other, his disabilities, in a society that values cognitive and physical agility, confine him to invisibility. Samuel is different, and the different occupy the margins.

Samuel has thus become both a highly visible and simultaneously invisible stranger—potentially occupying no secure place in the world. This tension of ‘visible and invisible stranger’ broadens our definition of the stranger and alerts us to the fact that both are a reduction. Both positions hold the capacity to render Samuel less than human. In the first, he is simply the sum of his function; in the latter, he is the sum of his lack of function. This double reduction of the stranger leads to a frighteningly global dehumanisation that is anathema to the gospel. To welcome the stranger is to seek after a comprehensive vision of humanity.

God as ‘stranger’

There is a degree to which God might also be seen as ‘stranger’, and Samuel’s situation helps us recognise that. To claim that we ‘know’ God and that he is thus not a ‘stranger’ is a theological claim fraught with tension. It is here that blind worship at the altar of rationality carries the potential to lead us astray.

A position that holds that to know God is to understand him at an intellectual level automatically alienates the intellectually impaired. The God who says in Isaiah 55:8–9, ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways’ is not a God given to full disclosure. At some level, his unknowability maintains his stranger identity. What we know about God we have received as gift. Christ and creation form part of that knowing. Samuel and his incapacity to ‘know’ in the cognitive sense opens the infinitely more glorious dimension of the reality that we are known by God. Our response entails an act of reception, participation and presence.

Samuel is incapable of ‘hosting’ or ‘welcoming’ in a thin understanding of the notion. He cannot make a cup of tea or offer a biscuit. However, there is a tension resident at this juncture as well. Confined, as he is, to a wheelchair and unable to verbally indicate his willingness to engage, he has no choice but to welcome the stranger into his orbit. The only obvious tool at Samuel’s disposal to avoid this is to avail himself of sleep.

To welcome Samuel is to learn the grammar of unconditional love. Authentic welcome can flow from no other source. It is a welcome that does not count or consider what it can receive out of the interaction. It s a welcome that does not try to change the other into a mirror image of myself. Samuel teaches us this concept well. He has no power to influence how, or for what purpose, he will be welcomed. I suggest that Samuel is therefore representative of what the contemplative tradition understood as loving God for God’s sake. When we encounter the stranger, love dictates we love them for their sake.

To welcome Samuel is to make space for him. This involves the more overt signals of welcome, such as building accessibility and appropriate facilities, along with the less obvious. In a church setting: does the preaching welcome Samuel? If the notion of salvation is restricted to the four spiritual laws and a confession of faith then Samuel has not been made welcome. Perhaps Samuel will worship differently, engage more loudly or not respond to the traditional overtures. To welcome the stranger is to reconfigure space so that the other might have access to simply dwell.

The praxis of welcome

Articulating a holistic understanding of what it means to welcome the stranger is just a beginning. To theorise over how it might feel to be a stranger will not be as illuminating as to actually experience the reality. It is one thing to claim an attitude of hospitality; it is an entirely different thing to reorder our home, church or community life. As Pohl comments, ‘Hospitable attitudes, even a principled commitment to hospitality, do not challenge us or transform our loyalties in the way that actual hospitality to particular strangers does. Hospitality in the abstract lacks the mundane, troublesome, yet rich dimensions of a profound human practice.’

When we welcome the stranger, both guest and host potentially bring new life to each other. It is therefore a precious and fragile process, a process that cannot be manipulated.

In the church I attend, we had a practice of attaching a small red rose to the lapel of strangers as they came into join us in worship. The argument for this practice was that we would then be able to easily identify the visitors and make sure they received an appropriate welcome. Although I understood this practice on one level, it was deeply disturbing on others. First, it indicates that those already part of the community were not well known to each other in the first place. Genuine community implies that we recognise each other and thus strangers would be immediately noticeable. Secondly, it makes highly visible those who may wish to remain invisible. The stranger is in a sense ‘marked out’. I would suggest that this denies the stranger a certain freedom. Genuine hospitality does not take charge of people but provides a space in which the guest can locate herself in the midst of others.

The praxis of welcome to the stranger must be directed away from the notion of instrumentality with ‘strings attached’. Within the church, for example, to welcome the stranger should not mean implementing church growth strategies. Pohl warns that when we use hospitality as a tool, we distort it.

Amongst ancient philosophers, hospitality was considered a principal virtue, but it also stressed the notion of ‘reciprocal benevolence.’ This notion is rejected in the Gospel. It is those who can hold no hope of responding in kind that are welcomed to the banquet table of God (Luke 14:12–24).

The praxis of transformative welcome toward the stranger calls for a posture of humility in tandem with a willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing. As Kearney points out, we are quick to scapegoat, adept at forgetting and slow to repent and seek forgiveness. But to lay down one’s pride, confess injustice and repent of judgemental attitudes and actions is to pull the weeds and till the soil in which genuine and long-lasting relationship can be forged.

To welcome the stranger challenges familiar ways of being in the world. It calls us to examine underlying assumptions about ‘my way being the right way’. A genuine encounter with the stranger will call summon us to a new frame of reference. As Amy Oden comments in And You Welcomed Me, ‘When we realise how we have inflated our own frame of reference and imposed it on all of reality, we know we have committed the sin of idolatry, of taking our own particular part and making it the whole.’

In regard to the welcome of God, Samuel, for example, has no use for being told about it. Concepts such as salvation, obedience or the Lordship of Christ hold no meaning for him. God’s welcome needs to be experienced in the welcome of those who share, live, care and minister to him. This is the welcome that the church is called to live in the world as a both a sign and a foretaste of the eschatological reality that will be consummated at the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9). This eschatological hope, is described by John, ‘After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands’ (Revelation 7:9).

We have considered the question ‘What does it mean to welcome the stranger?’ from three different perspectives. Kearney challenges us to dismiss clichéd or minimalist approaches to this question. He calls us to self-examination, to dismissal of our scapegoating tendencies, to recognise portals to the sacred and to the observation that hospitality is a wager in which nothing is a fait accompli. Pohl charts the comprehensive biblical narrative that begins with the welcome and incarnation of God and extends through to the practice of welcome in his body, the church. Samuel reimagines our understanding of the nature of welcome and the identity of the stranger.

I remain challenged by the story Kearney relates of Etty Hillesum, who wrote the following words in a concentration camp shortly before she died: ‘You, God, cannot be God unless we create a dwelling place for you in our hearts.’ Similarly, strangers cannot be made welcome unless we create a dwelling space for them in our hearts.

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by Coralie Bridle (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 8 August 2015, pp12-13.
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