Rev. Joseph Boyd
Growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, I visited a lot of people door to door. It was odd to live in such an insular culture with the expectation that we would intentionally go door to door to visit our neighbors. The hardest moments for me were when I would knock on a door, and one of my classmates would open the door. They would see me dressed in a suit and tie, carrying magazines, and I would ask them – “Are your parents home?” They were too young to grasp what I was sharing, even though they were my age. They would see me at school the next day, and sometimes they would be curious about what I was doing, sometimes they just looked at me and said nothing. I would visit with them only on my terms, if they were interested in studying the bible or the magazines I handed out. Otherwise we remained strangers – polite strangers, but strangers.
I see now this being a common human predicament. We will gladly visit with certain persons on our terms, whatever they may be, and otherwise we’re content to be strangers. Polite strangers, but strangers. And sometimes we value being polite so much, that we seem committed to keeping people strangers.
“Well, I don’t want to come across as pushy. I don’t want to to invite them to church…they’ll probably think I’m trying to convert them. Or the best excuse – people are just so busy nowadays. They probably don’t have time to visit.” Visiting is a risk, especially if we open ourselves to the unknown. When we don’t know someone well, we don’t know how they’ll respond or what they’ll ask. We can’t predict their mannerisms, their trains of thought. New visitors in a strange way allow for the most immediate intimacy, because they’re completely unknown. We may make assumptions about visitors to try to manage the situation, and this is natural, but only goes so far. There is still an unknown factor that we’ll never know unless we decide to meet it.
Sometimes when we visit someone, they don’t act the way we expect them to. When I was being trained as a hospital chaplain, I remember getting a request to go see this man who was just recovering from a heart attack. I walked in to his hospital room, imagining how scary it must have been to experience a heart attack, wondering if this would be his death. I was thinking this as I walked into the room, and I said plainly – Hello, My name is Joseph. I’m a chaplain.
He responded quickly – Can you get the hell out? He was scribbling something on a piece of paper. He didn’t even look up at me. Then he said “Can’t you see I’m working here? So get out!” I went immediately from feeling compassion for this man to feeling extreme irritation. He irritated me.. I was completely repelled by him, and as I walked out of the room, I wondered to myself why it was important he stay alive. That shift happened in an instant. I shared all this with my supervisor – it’s part of our training to share our honest responses to visiting with people. She handed me his file. She narrated as I read that his wife had died suddenly 6 months earlier, he has no relationship with his children, and he was taking serious anti-depressants. She told me if you look at his file, “there is only one thing he still has – his job. So let him have it.”
ost of us don’t get the luxury of receiving a file on every person we don’t like. We don’t get to hear the back story, the events that have worked on them over the course of years. We usually just stop at what we can see, what people tell us about who they are – they’re a criminal, they’re undocumented, they’re a drain on our resources, they’re not worth visiting. And of course the gospel of Jesus says the opposite. It offers a counter point, saying explicitly whoever the nation or society tells us is unworthy, expendable – those are the people we must visit.
It is sad but true that we clearly label people as expendable, not worth our energy to get to know or understand. And the shame of labeling is used to detract us – criminal, undocumented, – and there is a prescription for how we should treat these people. It’s pretty clear – we take them to jail. It doesn’t matter that before they were were the owner of downtown grocery, and a beloved member of the community for over two decades. They are labeled, and with the label comes a sentence. It doesn’t matter that a woman is unable to find a safe place to sleep, or a way to get around – she’s a criminal, and that means she belongs in jail…or at the very least very far from us. And it’s one thing if they are charming and generous, and treat us with kindness. It’s another thing if they express bitterness, anger, being impolite if their desperate. For us that reinforces their destiny.
In short, we punish people for speaking and living their immediate truth. We want them to be polite, to be grateful, to be nice.
I love Camus’ story about Daru and the Arab. Did you notice the turning point of the story? Daru decides to finally take the Arab to jail for one stupid reason – he was irritated. He was irritated with him – irritated that he didn’t behave the way he expected him to. He was irritated he didn’t run away, and alleviate his moral crisis. He used his irritation to make his decision, feeling he was probably teaching him a lesson. He leaves the Arab out in the middle of nowhere with no shelter, no friends, and no kindness. He appeases his own conscience by telling himself the Arab must make a choice. The Arab chooses to go to jail. Daru tells himself the Arab made a choice, but the reader knows the truth – it was Daru who made a choice by forcing him into a situation with few kind options.
The choice is always ours, even if our society tells us we never had a choice. This is a time to pay attention to our irritation and fear, and pray we choose wisely.
