Welcoming the Stranger

We have finished El Camino de Santiago! For those of you who are interested in the practical side of this experience, David will be posting on his blog what our daily life was like, what we ate, how our feet felt, and all that stuff over the next few days, and I promise to put in the links. El Camino is a pilgrimage, which for us involved hiking about 500 miles from St. Jean Pied de Port in France, to Santiago, Spain over about 31 days.

It was my fourth day of walking. I had injured my toes coming down over the Pyrenees mountains on the first day, and every step made me wince with pain. I was dying to take of my constricting hiking boots and put on my flip flops, but we had left the beautiful walled city of Pamplona early that morning, and I knew there was no place to go except the town that was still seven kilometers away. It was approaching my three o’clock melt-down hour. David and I discovered that no matter how short a distance we walked, if it got to three and we were still walking, I would become an emotional wreck. By the time I hobbled into the town, blindly following David, who was scanning the streets for the tell-tale yellow arrows that point out the way to the albergue (or pilgrim refuge), my feet were throbbing. We arrived at the albergue, and the hospitalero (volunteer host) greeted us with a smile. “Welcome! Please sit down, here is a glass of water. You must be tired. Just sit here until I am done checking these other pilgrims in.” We plopped down our packs and sat, sipping cool water and glad to be off our feet and out of the sun. I read a notice stuck up to the wall: “This albergue has been welcoming pilgrims since the 1300’s when the seminary connected with this church was first opened. The seminary students hosted pilgrims, and we continue this tradition today. Welcome home.” And that’s when I burst into tears.

Welcome home, pilgrim. You’re tired. Your feet are sore. You’re hungry. You come hobbling and weary. You come pretty much empty handed. But you are welcome. This is your home.

For the past month, this is what we have been doing. Walking (or hobbling) between little villages in Spain, with only one change of clothes in our backpacks, and praying for food and a cheap place to stay (since our South African rand do not go very far in Europe). And even though I did this for days and days, it still struck me every time– this bizarre warm welcome. I’m a stranger. I don’t speak the language. I have nothing to offer. But the churches (and sometimes hippy communities) who hosted us would fling open the doors and give us a place to sit, and serve us water, or cookies, or iced tea and give us a bed for a donation. We’ve been served hearty potato soap and salad in Logrono, cooked a communal meal of soup and roast chicken with 30 of our friends we met along the Way in Granon, been served a three-course gormet vegan meal at the hippy commune in Hospital, had strawberry short cake served to us by an Arizona church group working at an alburgue run by Cru, eaten our weight five times over in spaghetti at pretty much everywhere else, sometimes just alone, but often with other pilgrims who pitch in their garlic, or salt, or wine to make the meal better.

We were pilgrims, on a journey for different reasons. We wanted to see Spain, to have an adventure together before grad school, to transition between our South African home and our American home. But we also just wanted to see Christ better. That was my prayer each morning as I stuffed my feet back into my hiking boots. “Show us Christ today.” I had imagined that solitude and beautiful surroundings would have given me some kind of connection with God, but pretty much every place that I saw Christ was through people.

I know that God provides for all our needs, but the spiritual discipline of walking with basically nothing for a month, and seeing God provide again and again drove that truth very deeply into my soul. When people picture medieval Catholic churches, they probably picture stone and cold floors, hard benches, and weird icons– to us, they were warm, welcoming refuges. And we were basically just tourists- sure, we were doing this trip without a lot of money but if there had been an extreme emergency, we would have been fine. They could have charged us lots of money for a bed and food and not felt guilty about it– but they didn’t. It was in this context that I started hearing about the xenophobic attacks happening in South Africa. About poor South Africans who were frustrated with how life was no different for them then it was under apartheid, and who turned their frustration towards the immigrants and refugees who have been pouring into South Africa from other parts of Africa. Horrible, horrible violence. Not a genocide, but it suddenly made more sense how genocides can happen. And here was I, the stranger, walking through Spain with not a word of Spanish, being shown radical hospitality. I was reading the book Planted by Leah Kostamo, and this part jumped out to me:

The Greek word for hospitality–philoxenia–assumes a reaching out to those unknown. Taken apart, the word literally means love of stranger: philo, for love, and xenia, for stranger…The Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself, but in now fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.” Jesus joins the two in the parable of the Good Samaritan explaining that the stranger is really and truly also one’s own neighbor.

As I read more and more articles about the xenophobic attacks, and watched my friends Facebook feeds, I was saddened by what I saw. Often the people who were calling on others to “love the stranger” were the same ones who had been terrible at “loving their neighbors”– the poor South Africans in their communities. As this perspective, or this perspective of a poor black South African explains, “We see you coming in and giving food and blankets to the foreigners, and you’re so worried about their safety, but for the past twenty years we’ve been living in these townships and poverty, hungry and homeless and you never once came to help us.” While I don’t think anything justifies violence against other people, in these articles I could glimpse a sliver of the frustration and anger that systematic oppression had created in many people. And I realized that for many wealthy white South Africans, their neighbors are strangers.

The love of neighbor and stranger should extend to the poor, jobless refugees fleeing from violence and poverty and also to the poor, underpaid domestic worker living in your own home. It doesn’t have to be either/or. In Jesus, we see it’s both.

I’ve been a stranger for the past month. I’ve been confused about how to get where I needed to go, I’ve been needy and lost, and tired, (but I never once was living in terror for my safety or the safety of my family and friends)– and yet I’ve been welcomed by the church. I’ve been given refuge.

This is my prayer for South Africa. That the church will be a refuge.

That followers of Christ living in poor townships will be able to rise above the frustration and anger at the economic injustice and love the strangers in their midst.

That the followers of Christ in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods will stop living at the expense of the poor, and instead sacrificially simplify their lifestyles so that everyone has enough.

That we will welcome the strangers into our homes and our lives, and fling open our doors to give soul-weary and poor wanderers a place to call home for a while.

PS: GREAT series of blogs by Annie Diamond, a university friend, on the theme of welcoming the stranger here. You MUST read them. Dry Bones Denver, the organization she wrote these blog posts for, exists to serve the homeless youth and young adults in Denver, Colorado.