It is an all-too familiar scene for many of us. It is nighttime and we are on a train home. We might have been at a movie with friends or a social event with colleagues, but now we are alone. The disturbing figure of a man comes walking through the carriage and sits down a few seats away. He could be old and dishevelled. He could be younger and wearing headphones. Maybe he’s walking unsteadily or he just looks very different to us. It doesn’t matter. The common denominator is that he makes us feel uncomfortable. We begin to imagine who he is. Someone who is mentally unstable? Someone accustomed to violence? We hunker down in our seat and bury our head in our phone. When the train comes to a stop and we—or they—get off, we feel ourselves relax. We have had an encounter with a stranger and some part of us is relieved it is over.
Where does this feeling, this desire for distance come from? We are engaged with strangers all of the time. We learn from their books, listen to their podcasts and read their articles. We don’t actually know them, but neither do we feel threatened by them. Probably, it’s because we’re able to hold them at arm’s length.
learned disconnection
In the West, from our earliest years we have been trained to keep strangers at a distance. Recently, I had the opportunity to view a film made in 1963 to educate school children. It was called Say No To Strangers and it involved teaching its audience to be careful of elderly men who wanted them to pat their puppies, and narrow streets where unknown people might lurk. There is no doubt that we need to teach children to behave in a way that maximises their safety, but this was not a film about caution. It was a film about fear. See a stranger? Create distance.
We live in societies that fear or actively avoid the stranger. We do it almost instinctively. We insert earbuds or put on headphones. We look down. We avoid the eye-contact that might suggest connection. We walk past the person in the park with at best a nod towards our shared humanity. Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman has labelled this behaviour as “civic inattention”. Consider what you do with your eyes. We see a homeless person on the street or someone offering to wash our windscreen at an intersection. We stare ahead or interest ourselves in some other detail, refusing to be drawn into a connection. We willingly fragment our society and so we miss out on what we might potentially learn about the world around us. I owe a lot to the theologian AJ Swoboda for helping me think this through. He suggests that we lose serendipity—the opportunity to learn unexpectedly:
“In years past, to find information about anything, we had to wade through books and conversations and libraries to find answers. Along the journey, we would learn about things we weren’t even looking for. This is serendipity. Serendipity is the learning we never were looking for but got as a prize for the journey. Searchable content shields us from this kind of learning because in a search engine world, we only find what we’re looking for.”
In effect, we miss worlds that are different from our own and worldviews that might sharpen us. Instead of learning from strangers, we make assumptions about them. Because someone is different from us—the stranger on the train, but just as easily our new foreign neighbours or that rough-looking soccer dad—we perceive them as an uncomfortable uncertainty, perhaps even a threat. We make up myths about them based on nothing more than how we feel. We easily attribute motives we would not attribute to ourselves. I notice this most in my life when I am driving. A huge utility pulls in front of my tiny economic car and I frown. I think the driver in front of me is unconcerned about the environment. I might even imagine what they do on their weekends and how their choice of leisure activities don’t match with mine. More, their driving tells me they are rude and so unconcerned about me or anyone else. However, if I engage in my own sharp manoeuvring around the city, I remind myself it’s only because I am running late, that I said I would pick up my son in a few minutes, that I am still in control of my car. In short, that I am reasonable in just the same ways that the stranger in the car in front of me is not.
the neighbour effect
Now, what would happen if I were to actually meet the driver of that ute in some sort of social situation? My presuppositions would not last. As Swoboda notes, intimacy in any form destroys myths. And isn’t that what we hope for as Christians? In my early days of scriptwriting, we referred to this as the “neighbour effect”. You could believe all sorts of things about your neighbour, but if he lent you a shovel one day or put your bins out for you while you were on holiday or maybe even dropped in some cupcakes because she knew you had kids, then it would wear away your inculcated uncertainty. If, after all these interactions, you then discovered that they were a Christian, it would be very hard to think badly about them, whatever your opinion of religion. So, in scripting, we would create programs that were first and foremost reasonable and informed, entertaining and affirming, and save the Christian foundation and invitation to the end where it would do the most good.
Intimacy destroys myths. We need to overcome our own reticence and encourage connection if we want to create bridges with each other. Those of us who are people of faith need to pray to be open to meeting people, entering their world and exchanging viewpoints if we hope to share our own. But relationships with strangers can also be mutually transforming. When we finally meet someone from a social group that has been distant to us, we suddenly discover that they’re not all that bad. Better, we may even respond with love. We should, of course, be wise in our dealing with strangers. We shouldn’t accept everything they have to say. They may, after all, be wrong. However, they might also have something to share that will helpfully challenge our own viewpoints. But we will never know unless we engage.
The Bible challenges us to connect with strangers. The nation of Israel was instructed to take good care of strangers, along with widows and orphans. Strangers were to be treated fairly, like any other member of the community, and judged in a way that reflected God’s standards, not insular ethnic ones. The same encouragement progressed through to the early church. The New Testament writer to the Hebrews says that God can test us through our attitudes to strangers:
“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2). But possibly the most powerful example emerged on a dusty road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Two believers were walking along when they came into the company of a stranger. They had every reason to avoid him. Their hopes had been recently dashed. Their friends were hiding from the authorities. Their whole community was afraid. This was not a time to be making new acquaintances; it might have seemed entirely reasonable to keep to themselves. But against the odds, they fell into conversation with Him, and He shared with them insights in the Scriptures that made their hearts sing. They found themselves rejoicing rather than cast down, and keen for the company of this Stranger. And why shouldn’t they? This Stranger was Jesus.
