Conversatio Divina

Part 8 of 18

Welcoming Moments

Janet O. Hagberg

Conversations invited Janet Hagberg, coauthor of The Critical Journey, to offer some portraits of welcoming the stranger. As you read, we invite you to reflect on what comes up in you—the things with which you resonate, the things that cause resistance in you. At the end of the article, you’ll find some reflection questions to assist you in exploring your own journey with hospitality. These vignettes can be taken individually, or as a whole, and are meant to invite you into your own “welcoming moments.”

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Table of Contents

  1. 01.  Holy Homeless Hug
  2. 02.  Working Our Way toward Home
  3. 03.  A Stranger in My Family
  4. 04.  Reflecting

01.  Holy Homeless Hug

During each Christmas season, God assigns me a role in the nativity scene so I can focus on something besides painful memories that can derail me at the holidays. A couple of years ago, God assigned me the role of the innkeeper. In that innkeeper role, I became the midwife for Jesus’s birth—and also a midwife for people who are experiencing their own rebirth at the manger. I felt this role as a profound calling and I was grateful for this compassionate gift from God. But God, in infinite wisdom, had more in store for me that Christmas. 

The first sign that something new was opening in me came from a verse that happened to be my daily journal scripture on that day in early December when I taught at my church on the theme “Finding Home at Christmas”: “I’ll heal the maimed; I’ll bring home the homeless. In the very countries where they are hated, they will be venerated. . . . All those painful partings turned into reunions!” (Zephaniah 3:19–20, The Message Scripture quotations marked (The Message) are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright (c) 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.). God would attend to my own homelessness of spirit, which rises up each Christmas. 

In the next week I felt as if a deluge of themes about homelessness mysteriously enveloped my life. I saw the movie The Blind Side, a story about a family that was deeply affected by a homeless teenager. As I was describing this movie to a friend, he asked me if I had read the book Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. When I said I hadn’t he quickly replied, “Don’t buy it. It’s in the mail today.” When I got it and read it, I knew something deep was stirring in my soul. I felt I was embarking on a Christmas journey not unlike Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem. 

02.  Working Our Way toward Home

Same Kind of Different as Me tells a powerful story of a deeply entrenched homeless man and an international art dealer and his wife who encounter each other and are mutually transformed. The two women—the mother in The Blind Side and the woman in Same Kind of Different as Me—are strikingly similar. I read the book twice in the next two weeks and copied a number of quotes. One of them, spoken with the wisdom of the streets, captured my sentiments about home: “We’re all just regular folks walkin’ down the road God done set in front of us… this earth ain’t our final restin’ place. So in a way, we is all homeless—just workin’ our way toward home.”Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008) 235. Homelessness was still mostly an abstraction for me, though. I had led pilgrimages to homeless shelters and met several homeless people, but I had not been very close to a homeless person—so I was unprepared for what happened next. A week before Christmas I casually greeted James,This is not his real name. who was homeless, and asked him how he was doing. I’d known him informally for three years as a regular customer at my favorite coffee shop. He looked at me, smiled and said, “I need a wife. ” 

I asked him why, and he said he needed a wife to help him fill out paperwork for some permanent housing. I replied that I wasn’t available to be his wife but that I could help him with his paperwork. To myself, I wondered how he would get that paperwork and wondered if there was even housing available. 

Coincidentally, a friend invited me to accompany her to a memorial service and dinner honoring the 150 homeless people who had died in our state that year. I went. One of the speakers was a woman in charge of outreach and permanent housing for the homeless. I spoke with her, got her card, and told her about my friend. She said the outreach workers knew of him and would love to help him. Amazing grace. The next day I left a message for James at the coffee shop, saying I had a surprise for him. Here I was, serving in my nativity role as an innkeeper and helping a person find his place in the inn. 

I didn’t see James again until Christmas Eve, when our whole city was snowed in. As I walked home from breakfast at a local restaurant, snowflakes were falling gently and the temperature was about 20 degrees (which we consider balmy for this time of year in snow country). Just as I rounded the corner in front of our local grocery store, I bumped into James coming the other direction. I greeted him and gave him the business card from the outreach worker. He seemed pleased. But I sensed something was wrong. I asked him how he was and he said he was bummed out by an article in the paper about a sexual predator. I asked if he had anyone to talk to about his feelings; he said he should probably find someone. 

I responded to an urge within and told him that sometime I would like to hear his story. He said, “No, you wouldn’t,” and looked at me out of the corner of his eye for a few seconds. Then out it tumbled, there on Christmas Eve as we stood in the new-fallen snow. He’d grown up in what he called an Ozzie and Harriet home and was active in a boys youth organization as a pre-adolescent. One of his leaders, who had a lot of problems in his own life, sexually molested him for several days when the two of them stayed together in a cabin while working on a special project at a youth camp. It is one of those tragic, heart-wrenching stories of imminent loss that can never be restored, but only held in healing love. I felt deep compassion for him. He went to camp a happy eleven-year-old and came home a mean and angry boy who turned to drugs. 

I told him it saddened me to hear his story. As he looked at me with my tears welling up he said, “It’s not what kills you, but how you live your life.” I told him I agreed with him and that I, too, had experienced abuse,—a different kind—and that it had been hard on me, too. He touched my shoulder gently and I patted his arm, and then he ran off, distracted by a friend who drove by in a pickup truck. 

Several days later I saw him and asked how he was. It was colder now—below zero—and so I told him I was worried about him. He said he was okay, but hadn’t called the lady yet about the housing. When he asked how I was, I told him one of my good friends had died the day before, that I was bummed and could use a hug. He gave me a gentle hug there on the street by the coffee shop in the sub-zero temperature. 

Our hug was one of those holy moments. We were both in pain. We both had a ways to go to heal, although our journeys were different. But our encounter gave me another sense of home, of an emotional home, in an encounter of mutual pain and shared compassion. It was love reaching across boundaries and being real. God is showing me where home is even in homelessness. 

Sometimes a person we know and love—even someone in our family—becomes a stranger to us. We might not call that person a stranger or outsider but in reality they have become so in our experience of them. Other times such a person becomes a “stranger” because of behaviors he or she chooses or appears to fall into. Those behaviors stand between you and that person. Welcoming such a stranger feels complicated, and we need discernment and wisdom to be able even to begin the process of safely opening the door. 

03.  A Stranger in My Family

My brother died recently. This was not a gentle death coming at the end of a life well-lived but a tough death at the end of a multiyear struggle with strokes and seizures brought on by chronic drinking. The week he died he had a major seizure followed by heart failure at his home in a rural area of our state. He was pronounced brain-dead after he was airlifted to a regional trauma center, but he was kept on a respirator until we were ready to release him. A dramatic and sad ending to a difficult life. 

My brother suffered from the disease of untreated alcoholism, a legacy from my father. Almost every family has a member with either alcoholism or mental illness that, if untreated, wreaks havoc in the family. And since there is usually shame and judgment associated with both of these maladies, we may not talk openly about our experiences. In my brother’s case, he did not choose treatment or other recovery options so his disease went unchecked until it killed him. 

While my brother played out his chaotic role in the family, I did the opposite. It fell to me to be the achiever and performer, being good and doing well. While unconscious of this at the time, I now know that part of my motivation for success was to camouflage the family chaos. I was not much healthier than my brother because I was so caught in my life script of achievement, which took its toll on me as well. But my life script was more rewarded by the culture than his was. Most people would have said that I “made good.” My brother would have called me the “goody two-shoes” of the family. Does this sound familiar to anyone? 

In my brother’s final hours, I went to the hospital to be with my sister-in-law, and we were exceptionally present to my brother. We rubbed his face, arms and legs with lotion, told him we loved him (things he’d never let us do when he was conscious), told our favorite stories about him, recited the twenty-third Psalm, and told him we would be alright. We did our best to soothe him and send him on his way to the other side, where he would be lovingly received and would be without pain or disease. 

I was able to be present to my brother at his death because seven years before we had a powerful reconciliation. For much of my adult life my brother’s disease caused a major rift in our relationship. Sad stories and harsh treatment were my primary memories, and for several years we had no contact because it was too stressful. But about ten years ago, I felt drawn to make a scrapbook for him depicting the first twenty-five years of his life, before his downward spiral. It was good for my soul to do this and it softened his heart towards me as well. 

So just a few years later when he suffered his first stroke and was semi-conscious in the hospital, I visited him and whispered in his ear all the things I wanted to say by way of forgiveness and compassion for him. Miraculously, he came to and for one hour he opened the door of his heart to me. We talked about our childhood, his resolve to get help and stop drinking, and about our relationship as brother and sister. It was one of the most amazing hours of my life. What a gift he gave me in that hour of reconciliation. Then his inner door closed and we never spoke of these things again. We were in contact but did not grow closer. 

Thankfully, during his last hours I was able to be present to him compassionately because of that hour we spent together seven years ago. I had a sense of peace at the time of his actual death. We had both done what we could do and it was good. I can honestly say I loved my brother and will miss him and the long family history that we shared. And because I understood that he suffered from an untreated disease, I could better understand his pain, even though I still had to process my own lingering anger and deep sorrow about the loss of him as a brother and how his life affected mine in negative ways. This all leaves me with deeper questions, though. I understand that he chose not to get treatment for some reason and that this decision caused him and others a lot of pain. I cannot judge him for that because I, too, have seen the consequences of choosing not to face my own pain. 

But another question arises for me: How do we find meaning in a life that seems on the surface to be wasted? I think of the homeless, the chronic addicts, the alcoholics, the people with untreated mental illness, and those who are incarcerated. I’ve worked with marginalized people for a long time, and ironically, I’ve learned some of my best life lessons from them: generosity, survival, and simplicity. They’ve taught me what is more important than security or even sanity—and that is love and community. They have taught me compassion for my own brokenness. So I know you do not have to be well or sane or dry to make a difference. But these “teachers” of mine were someone else’s brother, daughter, or son—not my own brother. I didn’t see the make-a-difference things in my own brother. 

In my grieving process, though, I began to open myself to a wider vision of my brother’s life, and I asked God to help me see the meaning of his life. I listed my positive memories of him. I asked his best friend from childhood to tell me some good stories of his early years. At his funeral, I saw his colleagues in the military and the police force honor his thirty-four years of public service in which he continually put his life on the line. And from comments people made to the online obituary, I saw a side of my brother I had not experienced—a humorous and generous people person. 

Now I think of each life as incredibly complex, wounded, and in various stages of healing. Some healing is accomplished here, but total healing is only completed on the other side. I also affirm that God gives each life worth, even if we don’t see it, and that there are beams of light that shine from each life, no matter how these lives may appear on the surface. And I know that love and community come in unexpected and unusual ways. 

As I listened to the stories of my brother’s life, including stories of him saving the lives of three peoples, I could see a few beams of light emerging from his life. And I gradually began welcoming this stranger back into my life in a way he had never been present before. 

04.  Reflecting

When have you experienced a meaningful coincidence? 

How did you feel God might be at work in it? 

When have you experienced someone you considered very different from yourself? 

What, if anything, did you receive from them? perhaps love, wisdom, or healing? 

What, if anything, did you find you had in common or how are you like one another? 

Is there someone you know who logically should not be a stranger to you but who is separate or apart from you in some way?  

How do you cope with the estrangement? 

What might God be inviting you to be or do to take a next step in the healing of your relationship (at least on your side)?

Footnotes

Janet O. Hagberg is an author, spiritual director and healer. The activities she savors most are quilting contemporary icons and keeping score at baseball games. Her spiritual deepening blogsite is atriversedge.wordpress.com and her website is janethagberg.com

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