There is a distinct lesson from my Humanities class during my senior year of high school. Our teacher gave us a piece of paper with a few concentric circles drawn on it (circles within circles as shown below). We were instructed to write the names of the people closest to us in the innermost circle. In the second ring we were to write the names of those next closest to us, and so on and on until the outermost ring was labeled “strangers”. I don’t remember the intended lesson of the activity, but I do remember clear as day just noticing how my classmates got right to work and I felt paralyzed. I didn’t want to be an annoying student who intentionally disobeyed the teacher’s instructions, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write out different names. All I could write was “Everyone” in the center circle and hand it in.
That was probably the best decision I could have made that day. I believe the teacher knew I had deeper questions about humanity that were being left unanswered and she helped work with me after school to dig deeper about the questions of life. She introduced to me an author, Henry David Thoreau, which led me to voluntarily step into a school library for the first time in my life. I felt like a total nerd. However, I write that with immense gratitude because picking up a book that day would eventually lead me to another author, Father Gregory Boyle, SJ.
Boyle writes about kinship with the ‘poor’, with those marginalized by society. Jesus had to face this himself from the beginning. Jesus grew up hearing “nothing good comes from Nazareth”, the marginalized town at the time. Going to Church in Cinnaminson, I had to grow up hearing “nothing good comes from Camden”, yet isn’t that exactly where Jesus would have been born today? Jesus embraced these narratives about the margins and decided to go there in order to preach, heal, and break bread. Speaking with a Samaritan woman at the well is a defining moment in the Gospel of John. Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman that all are meant to drink the living water that provides eternal life.
Our responsibility as Chrisitans is to constantly be on guard for the barriers and dividers that society creates. Margins are created physically, economically, socially, and even religiously through strict laws and customs that become worshiped rather than a tool for worship. We are called to break down these walls and to build longer tables instead, so that all can gather together for the Eucharist.
God does not only desire to be the center of our circles, but God truly is the center of our circles and there’s nothing we can do to alter that. However, God also desires each of our Sisters and Brothers to be joined together in that same intimate circle and it is our responsibility to welcome the stranger back into that circle of love and kinship.
“No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away”
Tattoos on the Heart, Gregory Boyle
