Why, Physically and Emotionally, our Gated Communities Aren’t an Option
My Spiritual Director asked me this summer if there was a particular verse of Scripture that was refreshing me over these slow, hot months. I didn’t answer with a biblical verse, but rather with a song that had been in my head since the beginning of July. It’s a traditional, but I know it as a Johnny Cash song. My husband Dan and I purchased Cash’s late-life, stripped-down masterpiece, American V: A Hundred Highways, thirteen years ago at a stop on our first cross-Canada road trip:
You can run on for a long time
Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down.
I have always found the dark and threatening tone of Cash’s singing appealing. I hear it and it is like the skies open up for me, recalling the big prairie skies of Saskatchewan where I heard this song for the first time.
Something else opens in me, too. For any of us who have known what it is to be backed into a corner of our own making, we can’t help, deep down, to long for the possibility that God’s terrifying redemption could actually set us free. Ultimately, that freedom must be connected to the song’s inherent promise: we’re not in this alone. We can get pretty far along the road of self-reliance, but we will come back to this truth. We can’t out-run the relationships on which our lives are grounded.
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Not that we aren’t given every opportunity to try.
Our level of material wealth and the very fast-paced nature of technology make religion and community seem quaint and unnecessary in today’s world. More importantly, we are relentlessly shoe-horned into believing that a reasonable goal in life is to keep what I, myself, have. We are sold skin creams to keep our face from getting wrinkles. We are sold insurance policies so that all that we currently have will be protected in the case of disaster striking. We are sold diets and health fads so that we can “maintain” or “get back” our figure. We are sold ever-shifting advice on how to stay healthy, this holy grail promise held out to us, so thoroughly promising that death and decline can be held at bay… if we just eat the right number of vegetable servings and get on the most recent band wagon of the right cooking oil.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with insurance or skin cream or healthy lifestyles. But when we are primed to think that this life is about guarding ourselves, protecting and attaining what we are told is the status quo, it becomes difficult to imagine that there might be anything outside our religious pursuit of our own maintenance.
Sometimes, though, the lie of it all catches up. Sometimes you can’t run any further. Sometimes it all comes crashing down.
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I serve as an Anglican priest in a downtown southern Ontario church, St. George’s, St. Catharines. This summer, we have been stuck on essentially one topic of conversation. In June, our Parish Council agreed to offer space to a temporary shelter seven nights a week through July and August in an endeavor called Out of the Heat.
The program has been eye-opening. I didn’t know that we at St. George’s needed to have our eyes opened. We have offered a daily free neighborhood breakfast for more than twenty-two years. We are very familiar with the local population experiencing homelessness, and those living on poverty’s edge in our downtown. Yet none of us really had any idea that the offer of a mat in our gymnasium would be the only option for so many people to find a safe and comfortable sleep. None of us realized just how much the need in the core of our small city keeps mushrooming. Our staff have this summer picked up more opioid needles from our property and called more ambulances for suspected overdoses than can be imagined. The number of guests at our morning breakfast has at least doubled. Out of the Heat ends in the morning and spills out into our parking lot, where spaces are rented out to help support our programs. Our staff have had to play make-shift security, asking people to leave our property so that others can also use it. And we know we are asking these good folk to leave when they have nowhere else to go; we can see the variety of illnesses—mental and physical—that are plaguing them, and yet we have only the faintest idea of how we might be able to help.
Our church is one of the most beautiful and historic buildings in all of St. Catharines. It has become appealingly simple to imagine that if we just disband Out of the Heat, everything will return to normal. And yet, short of moving our church into a gated community, these problems are right here, right where we are. You can’t see the level of need in our downtown and not come to the crashing realization that the system is failing far too many people. You can’t see the suffering in our community and then go back to your neighborhood bubble, thinking this isn’t about you. You can’t come to this brink, this overwhelming brink, where whatever we have to offer so clearly isn’t enough and not fall on your knees, praying to God that the call to love our neighbor be heard far and wide and that a whole city might figure out how to work together as brothers and sisters.
The hardest thing about the summer has been the realization that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We might want to play the ostrich, sticking our heads into the sand of our individual spheres of self-concern. But it simply isn’t possible to make believe that we don’t also have a share in these problems.
This is hard. And also freeing.
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The Anglican Church of Canada has been profoundly blessed now for many years by the faithful leadership of Indigenous people who have tenaciously continued to walk with us, despite historically and continuously causing them so much harm. They have been willing to pursue reconciliation with the colonial church, even though we really have no right to ask them.
From our Indigenous Church has come hard-earned wisdom, hard-earned from being on the front lines of community trauma and crisis for generations. Several of our Canadian Indigenous communities have made global news headlines when waves of youth suicides have marked them as the highest suicide rates, per capita, anywhere on the planet. Every one of our church’s Indigenous leaders has not just had to be versed in Scripture and theology, but also in suicide prevention and addiction counseling.
There has been a tendency in the colonial church to imagine that what we really need on the road to reconciliation is to give our Indigenous people the space to “be themselves.” We’ve been working for a long time toward self-determination in our church, building in the structures that allow Indigenous people to make decisions in ways that are consistent with their own traditions and cultural norms.
There is a grave delusion baked into this approach. First of all, we can’t just simply quarter off part of our church, and part of our country, and imagine that if we just give them space, the rest of us should just continue going about our regular business.
Second of all, to attempt to do so is to miss out.
Our Indigenous leaders have fiercely named the suicide and addiction crises in their communities as being, at its heart, a spiritual crisis. And what they have learned is that the commonly accepted methodology of connecting individual people with the available supports and resources doesn’t work.
What they have learned instead is that these spiritual traumas require communal interventions. What needs to be strengthened and attended to most is relationship. People need to reconnect to one another in healthy ways, and they need to feel rooted to the earth and to the One who created that earth. One of the most dramatically successful suicide intervention programs currently offered is a youth music program, first piloted at Six Nations near Brantford, Ontario.
It isn’t enough to just share with Indigenous people the space to tend to themselves and learn their own lessons. Those of us who are not Indigenous need to pay attention. They are leaders. Their story may even be our story.
The crises we have witnessed and lived all summer in St. Catharines, these are not disconnected from those of our First Nations’ people. We are also in spiritual crisis. And we also need communal solutions.
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These communal solutions need to start at the level of changing our hearts. This is the ultimate spiritual trick, pride. It is said to be the greatest sin, the biggest barrier to relationship with God. It is certainly the biggest barrier to relationship with one another. In a million different ways, we trick ourselves into thinking that we stand alone, that we go it alone, that we are self-sufficient, that we don’t need. We get so fooled into thinking this, that sometimes when our self-sufficiency comes crashing down—and it always will, because we can’t and don’t stand alone, we do make mistakes, we get sick, and we will each die—sometimes when that self-sufficiency comes crashing down, we think all is lost and that we have nowhere to turn.
The status quo sets up shop in the gated community of my heart too. I make believe that this life is about doing what I want; I just need to follow my desires; I am in charge of my own destiny; my worldview is the one that represents the truth.
Ultimately, it’s the urgency of Johnny Cash’s song that sounds most hopeful to me. Our false idols will crumble one way or the other. Mistakes, heart breaks, illness, mortality—it will all catch up with us. The dire need of our world will crash through those gates. Our beautiful edifices will be confronted by the ugliness we so want to ignore.
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Out of the Heat ended on the last night of August. On the first day of September, a Sunday, our parking lot was strewn with debris, make-shift tents, shopping carts full of each individual’s worldly goods. Some of the homeless population had already started to migrate toward the park to claim a place to sleep under the trees until November comes, hoping for a mild autumn as they wait for the next temporary shelter to open its doors. Even if we wanted to extend the program at our church, the city’s bylaws are now prohibiting us from doing so.
We had to begin asking those still lingering on our property to clean up and leave.
Our church’s work now re-directs itself into advocacy, seeking those communal allies that can work together to seek solutions to our housing and addiction and mental illness crisis. We are opening the doors of a newly renovated part of our church to offer counseling and mentorship to at-risk youth in our city in a centre we are calling STEP. We have a hunch that the most important thing we can offer to the need around us is ourselves: community.
We will keep opening our sanctuary, and the sanctuary of our hearts, in prayer. We try to remember, and to offer others this truth too, that our false idol of self-reliance has long ago crumbled, that the only hope we have is doing this together.
Martha Tatarnic is the lead priest of St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, and author of The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating Once, When I Was Young - Helen McClements
