Some good stuff.
I’m all about thrifting and buying less stuff, but I can’t practice what I preach when it comes to books. Pretty soon the walls of our apartment will be so covered in books that we won’t have room for any other decorations.
I love to write in my books, to add my own input to the margins (whether that’s “YES!” or “this is BS”), underline the good stuff, dog-ear the pages, and sometimes add stars to the dog-ears of the underlined pages if the book is really rocking my world.
One book that has stars on its dog-ears on its underlined pages is Radical Gratitude by Mary Jo Leddy. I want to say this book changed my life, but the truth is that I’m still working on allowing it to change my life. Mary Jo calls me out of the pit of despair where I sometimes live into my best self, grateful for the gift of each new day and ready to pour out my gratitude in generosity and hospitality. (It’s probably time to read it again, because some days I set up a couch in the pit of despair and settle right in. Which can also be necessary—can you be fully human these days without being *really* sad sometimes?--but writing about Prophetic Lament by Soong-Chan Rah is a post for another day.)
The gratitude Mary Jo describes is not a gratitude for middle class comfort or illusory Western progress. It’s a grittier and more fundamental gratitude for life itself, for the Creator who makes loaves multiply in times of scarcity, who can walk on waves, a gratitude for the strange arithmetic of grace. This gratitude is fuel for a life of seeking justice—the life of Mary Jo, the majority of which has been spent at Romero House refugee house in Toronto is a testament to that. (Read the book, seriously.)
As a way of practicing that gratitude, I want to share some things I’m grateful for at Open Homes Hamilton recently.
These strange times have been strange for us too—our last 2 in-house guests found long-term apartments recently, and we’re guest-less! Since the borders are closed, only the tiniest trickle of refugee claimants are arriving in Canada these days, and we’re getting creative in strange times, like everyone else.
And yet…there is so much to be grateful for.
Stable long-term housing for guests! – A single person on Ontario Works (OW) receives $390 per month for shelter, and a bit more for basic needs (eg. food). The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in Hamilton is $1,367. Add discrimination against guests for their race, OW, or immigration status, and you can understand why we really party it up when a guest finds safe, affordable housing. Thanks to our stellar housing search volunteers, a network of creative companions, unbelievable patience and resilience on the part of guests, and the occasional Christian family who offer long-term accommodations at below-market rates, we keep finding safe long-term apartments. Honestly, this is nothing short of miraculous to me.
City grant! – Last week we heard that we received a City of Hamilton grant that will allow us to quarantine new guests in a hotel for 2 weeks before placing them in a host home. This is a huge gift. It means we’ll be able to welcome a few new guests again—probably secondary migrants who started out in another city like Montreal and Toronto at the beginning of the pandemic and have now decided to move to Hamilton. Yippee!
Church partnership agreements – We’re in the process of discussing partnership with 3 Hamilton churches, from 3 different denominations. These churches will commit to engaging with Open Homes in a variety of ways and we’ll commit to supporting their learning about and involvement with refugee claimants.
Safe Third Country Agreement overturned - Many Open Homes community members had to cross the border at unmarked border points, like so many other refugee claimants. The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the US is the reason--if they tried to cross at an official border crossing, they would be sent back to the US, even if they wouldn’t not safe there. Even if they may be detained there. Thanks to a brave refugee claimant plaintiff who was turned away by Canada and ultimately detained in solitary confinement in the US, and thanks to the support of the Canadian Council of Churches, Amnesty International, and the Canadian Council for Refugees, this agreement was overturned by the Federal Court recently. We pray that this decision will mean that more refugee claimants can seek safety in Canada!
Racial equity review - The Black Lives Matter movement has deepened our leadership team’s thinking around racial justice in the past several months. The reality that we are 4 white women (and teams made up mostly of white volunteers) running a program serving people of colour has hit home for us. We know that because we do not have Black skin, we experience the world differently and we will have blind spots related to the impact of our programming on people of colour. That's why we are working towards a racial equity review of our model, and setting up feedback/accountability loops that will help us to evaluate future decisions for their racial equity impacts. You can read more about the thinking behind this here on the IAFR blog. I am *so* thankful for a team that sees the need for us to do some deep thinking around this, and to submit ourselves and our programming to the insights of people of colour.
Ride for Refuge – 6 teams have signed up to ride, walk, or hike for Open Homes Hamilton. Wow! Some of them are getting pretty creative, from challenging their members to bike the equivalent of the “last leg” of a refugee journey (often from the Fort Erie border crossing to Hamilton) to hiking 200 kilometres of the Bruce Trail as a family.
The biggest gift of them all are the refugee guests themselves, people who have chosen to trust us. I pray and hope that we will be worthy of that trust.
I’ll leave you with this poem from Mary Jo Leddy:
We are grateful.
You have given us this day
and have given us this way
to say Thank You.
We thank you for giving us
what we need to be grateful.
We offer back to You
all that we have
all that we are.
We know our thank you
is as fragile as we are
--it can be crushed
by the care of the moment
--it can disappear
in the heat of the day
--it can be blown away
by the winds of suffering.
And so we ask You
to take our small thank you
into Your great act of Thanksgiving:
You, Lord of the loaves and the fishes,
You who are from God
with God and for God,
You in whom it is all
Yes and Amen.
(Mary Jo Leddy, in Radical Gratitude pp. 69-70)