I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. (And the Boston addition — I needed a place to park and you moved your lawn chair — AMEN!)
Matthew 25:35
I grew up south of Buffalo, New York, so I have no memory of the “blizzard of 78” that many of you natives talk of with awe. (We did have a blizzard of ‘77, where areas of Buffalo got almost 9 feet of snow and whole houses were buried. The 2-3 feet snow totals in ‘78 sound like Buffalo on a typical evening commute.)
Nevertheless, I have enjoyed reading memories of the blizzard on its 40th anniversary in the Boston Globe. What especially impressed me was how many people were motivated by the storm to help each other. Young people shoveled out their elderly neighbors. A movie theater and a church opened their doors to shelter stranded motorists from route 128.. It brought out the best in people.
But if all I knew about New Englanders was their altruism during this great blizzard, I would be shocked by their attitude toward shoveling. I did not have a car when I lived in Boston in the 1990’s, so it wasn’t until my second winter living there that I noticed the strange phenomenon of putting out “space savers” to claim a parking space that one has shoveled. I found a ride on a snowy day to my student-teaching stint at Somerville High (so not Boston proper, but close enough), and we struggled and struggled to find a place to park. Most of the street spaces had lawn chairs, or buckets, or other bits of flotsam and jetsam marking their territory. Clearly, shoveling gives ownership rights here that I had never heard of growing up in western New York. It took us a long time to find a space free and clear.
Why, in some situations, like a blizzard, are people so willing to help stranded strangers and neighbors alike? And in other situations, like sharing parking spaces on a crowded street, so determined to claim what’s “theirs” to the point of absurdity? Recently I had a conversation with a fellow teacher at my school about immigration. She said she appreciated my view that families are being torn apart and children harmed. “But if they’re illegal they don’t pay taxes,” was her main concern, and “I do.” If this same teacher saw an injured child at our school, or in her neighborhood, she would not hesitate to help. Whether or not the child’s parents paid taxes would be irrelevant. Why does the (perceived) lack of tax-paying matter so much to her when real children are being harmed by our immigration policies?
I don’t have an answer. What I have is a hope. When someone puts out a space-saver for their parking space, they are not imagining a real person who needs that space. They are picturing a “lazy” person who did not shovel and will get the benefit of their labor. But in a blizzard, when a cold and confused motorist pulls over to get help, they see another human in need. When we think about the millions of displaced people on this planet, all struggling to find a space, we need to remember that these are our fellow-travellers, just looking for safe shelter. Every time we tell their stories, or say their names, we are helping to replace the image of the lazy parking-space seeker with the stranded motorist on 128 — a human in need, wind-battled, worried, and stuck. We need to pull on our boots, hoist our shovels, and give them aid. I pray and hope that we can all find that better part of ourselves, put away our space-savers, and welcome the immigrants in our midst.
Help us, O God, to find that better part of ourselves. Amen.