A Consequential Love
This week marks four years since these two dorks tied the knot. And what a 4 years it’s been!
7 new jobs between the two of us, a cross border move and immigration process for Dan, a dog that brings an inordinate amount of personality into our lives, and turbulent times that made us question a good bit of what we thought we knew about the world and ourselves.
I know less about some things than I thought I did, but here’s something I do know: love will unsettle you, make you see things from a different perspective. Love will make you see yourself in high definition when maybe you would have settled for an out-of-focus picture.
Love means I can’t let myself off the hook or make excuses when I notice negative behaviour patterns. (Did I always crave control this much?! What about those bursts of anger? That competitive drive that I just can’t turn off? Ugh.). Love means working on myself, because I can see up close how my shadow sides affect someone else.
Love means the other is not a prop in the story I tell myself (and the world) about myself. Some of the shine has come off that story, but I think I have some new emotional resilience and dialogue skills in its place!
Why am I saying all this in a blog about refugee welcome? Because of this page in Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness:
Especially this line: “my experience has been that whiteness sees love as a prize it is owed, rather than a moral obligation it must demonstrate.” Oof.
Love is sometimes used to soften the drive for justice, not undergird it. Calls for love often sound like calls to soften the message, to prioritize white people’s feelings over BIPOC access to safe housing, or the right to not die in the streets at the hands of cops, or the right to show up as their full selves and not have to pretend to fit into white norms.
Here’s another thing I’ve been learning the last 4 years, and especially during this pandemic as our Open Homes leadership team wrestles with what it means to be 4 white women leading a program that’s meant to welcome and house refugees (who are overwhelmingly people of colour):
Anti-racism has unsettled me. I have to wrestle with how white people have often used Christianity to oppress people of colour, whether that’s the KKK using Christian language and symbols in their ceremonies, churches in Canada sending nuns and priests to “kill the Indian, save the child” in residential schools, Reformed hero Abraham Kuyper’s theology being used to construct the system of apartheid in South Africa, or present-day churches putting limits on BIPOC members’ full belonging in a myriad of ways. Where has my theology been shaped by white supremacy? Am I missing out on the voices of Christians of colour? This wrestling sucks. It is uncomfortable. The days of knowing “the answer” to every theological question are no more for me, but I pray that my days of dependence on God are just beginning. (I am very very grateful to have found companions on this journey in Kenosis groups and a BIPOC theology reading group!)
Anti-racism has made me see myself in high definition.
Anti-racism means I can’t let myself off the hook. We already do guest debriefings, but do we have ways for people to tell us safely if they experienced discrimination of any sort in our programming? What would it look like to be held accountable by people of colour, since we know we have blind spots and biases?
Anti-racism means working on myself.
Anti-racism means the other is not a prop in a story I’m telling the world about myself. When I would like to post a picture of myself with a guest…am I honouring their full humanity? Am I eager for people to see me? Am I building my personal “brand” by using this picture?
And I wonder if that’s because anti-racism is in some ways another word for love. A fierce love, a love with teeth, a consequential love that honours the full humanity of BIPOC people (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour).
So at Open Homes Hamilton, we’re trying to aim for a consequential love, a love that has consequences in the real world that are actually positive for those we claim to love. Not assumed consequences—just because our intentions are good, doesn’t mean our impacts always are. (And even our intentions might have shades of wanting to “save” or “fix”!)
We have a lot more talking and wrestling to do, but I’m so encouraged by the cohesion we’ve already had as a leadership team around the direction we need to head. It’s not really fun to realize that despite our best efforts, we could cause harm if we’re not intentional and continually shaped by robust feedback from people of colour and especially people with lived refugee experience. But people have engaged transparently and courageously and worked through some discomfort and disagreements. Just feeling really lucky to work with the people I do!
Things we’re working on now…
Working with Leading in Colour, a BOMB organization that provides advocacy training to young BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) and also provides anti-racism consultations and trainings to groups like us. So far, I can’t recommend them enough!
Thinking through how we might expand the diversity of our leadership team.
Developing a policy for paying honouraria when people of colour share their lived experience with us.
Revising our photo policy so that we continue to respect the confidentiality and safety of current guests, but are able to share more photos of past guests with their consent, so that our social media more fully represents our community. Under our former policy, the faces that showed up in our newsletter and on our social media were mostly volunteer faces or covered-up refugee faces. We set up that policy with good intentions, but in reality our communications ended up quite white.
This stuff isn’t sexy! Revising policies, wrestling with anti-racism training, having hard conversations as a team…none of this photographs well. No cute photo-ops here.
But neither do some of the most loving moments of marriage—choosing to listen when you’re tired, washing the dishes even when you’ve done them twice this week, being careful what I share about Dan without his consent, having hard conversations with tenderness and grace when something is out of whack, staying curious about his perspective instead of assuming I know what he’ll say. (All you people who have been married far longer than 4 years are probably chuckling at me! We are babies. We know nothing.)
But you don’t get to the joy of real community without the difficulties of real love, right? So here’s to 4 years of marriage and here’s to a lifetime of learning a consequential love.
Some other things that are going on…
Surgery! - I’m waiting to hear the date for a second surgery on my arm in November. The surgeon will remove some stuff that’s blocking my mobility and take out the metal they put in last year. I’ll be mostly out of commission for 2-4 weeks while I heal and work on physio, but I’m hoping that I’ll gain 10-20 degrees more range of motion in my elbow. Right now I have about 100 degrees of range on a good day, where most people have 130 to 140.
A past guest finally has a date for their refugee hearing! This is encouraging. The Immigration and Refugee Board is still at only about 30% capacity, so long waits for hearings have gotten even longer. Pray for our friend, that he would be well-prepared, that his lawyer would be competent and not miss any relevant info, and that the board member deciding his case would a person of compassion and integrity.
We are ready to welcome a new guest, and are just waiting for a referral from a Toronto shelter! We’re praying that the right person comes our way. We have 4 new host families—a huge blessing in COVID times.
Our leadership team is going through a lot in our personal lives. Could you pray for strength and wise pacing for us?