Spirit On The Margins

I remember when I first started working with the poor 5 years ago.  I was afraid that my car would be vandalized in some of the neighborhoods I was going into. I was worried that some of the participants in City House programs would find ways to harm me or my family.  I was hearing stories from participants that were so far out of the realm of my experience I was shocked by the reality of them.

Some of this fear was and is justified. It is easy to be naive.  Once, I was asked to give a ride to a newly released inmate from the Hennepin County work house. I worked my way through a crowd of inmates being released in the early hours of a cold winter morning.  When I found the man I was looking for, he asked, “Would you mind if we gave a ride to some of my friends?”  In those early days of doing this work, I wasn’t prepared for setting the right boundaries in the spur of the moment. So, I foolishly said, “yes.” 

Four other released inmates got into my car and each paid the guy that I came to pick up $5.00 for arranging to get a ride in my car!!! It wasn’t the first or last time I was conned. Fortunately for me, nothing dangerous happened on the trip.

But, what I have learned in the last five years is that while I need to be careful about boundaries and safety, they can not be my primary focus. If they are, I lose the opportunity to encounter God in the people I meet. I forgo the chance encounter with the Divine.

This was said so well this month by Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, in her sermon at the Anglican Peace Conference, Towards Peace In Korea (TOPIK) in Seoul, South Korea. 

TOPIK 

How do we perceive the stranger – as threat or as the image of God? There is a part of each one of us that awakens to full alert at the presence of a stranger, an unknown, one who is “other.” That reaction is an instinctual survival skill, and in itself is neither good nor evil. But what we do with that heightened awareness is a moral decision. When we become profoundly aware of the presence of “the other” we are confronted with a series of choices. Is this other a threat, a potential blessing, or do we need to gather more information before we decide? We might do well to remember that the unknown stranger just might be a divine messenger, or an angel. I begin to be convinced that every such stranger may bear a divine message if we are able to discover and receive it. Certainly every encounter brings an image of God, an image we do not yet know, and that meeting must therefore be rich with creative possibility.

Where and in whom did we meet God anew? How will we discover an unknown image of God in this meeting here? That divine image is most certainly here, all around us, and it is found more readily when we receive the stranger with openness, and even vulnerability.