After this morning’s service there will be a pot-luck lunch with members of the two refugee families we’ve helped sponsor in the past couple of years. I thought it would be a good time for us to consider what it’s like to find oneself in a country where almost everything is different in some small or large way from previous experience, and that we might ask ourselves what we may have undergone in our own lives that’s like that, and what’s been helpful at such a time? As you know, the title of my reflection is “Stranger in a Strange Land” and if that sounds like a book title, it’s not coincidental – I was very much struck by Robert Heinlein’s novel of that name when I first read it many years ago, and I’ll allude to it this morning.

Heinlein’s book deserves the name of “classic” although it was published as recently as 1961; it’s a story of the encounter of a man from Mars (the strangest of strangers) with human beings on the planet Earth, the strangest of strange lands. In the story, the man, Valentine Michael Smith, was born during the first manned mission to Mars and is the only survivor of that mission. He is human by ancestry, but having been totally raised by Martians he’s totally estranged from human life, human culture, human ways of thinking and being.

But first, having given you that little taste of the story, let me do what’s becoming my customary practice and introduce some thoughts from various sources, so that we can reflect on each one for a moment or two, as a way of opening up our minds and hearts to this theme of strangeness, a theme which may be particularly urgent to ponder at a time when the tendency is to divide the world into evil/ alien and good/ familiar nations and persons.

Abraham Lincoln: The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.

Mother Teresa: If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and author: Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.

Audré Lorde: The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

John O'Connor: Like most things, community is fragile and needs to be lost and found again and again.

As so often happens to me, it wasn’t until I’d been pondering this topic for quite a while that I was struck by a rather significant aspect of it – its duality, or doubleness. That wasn’t obvious to me immediately -- that the strangeness works both ways: the person is a stranger, and the land is strange – not necessarily just to him, but in itself perhaps -- intrinsically strange. This is part of what makes Heinlein’s book so powerful, I think – that there’s strangeness in the person, in the culture he finds himself in, and in the relationship between them – intense alienation or estrangement. I began to think about those very concepts.

Let’s look at the story for an illustration of estrangement. We often think of it as something between human beings, but it can be bigger than that – an estrangement from the whole world around us. Here’s how the space-ship captain who brings Valentine Smith back to earth from Mars describes it:

“Smith isn’t sick, sir,” Captain van Tromp said, “but he isn’t well. He has never before been in a one-gravity field. He weighs two and a half times what he is used to and his muscles aren’t up to it. He’s not used to Earth-normal pressure. He’s not used to anything and the strain is too much. Hell’s bells, gentlemen, I’m dog-tired myself – and I was born on this planet.”

I’ve had something like that feeling of strain when not being used to anything, have you? Not only when visiting countries with very different climates and cultures, but in my own country in a situation when things aren’t as I expect them to be. I’m quite easily “thrown for a loop” or discombobulated, especially if I find I don’t speak the language of my surroundings – whether linguistic or emotional language. As Captain von Tromp says in the story, “..... talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don’t get argument but you don’t get results.” Or as the man-from-Mars says to himself,

None of his thinkings were in Earth symbols. Simple English he had freshly learned to speak, [though] less easily than a Hindu used it to trade with a Turk. Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation. ..... his thoughts ... traveled so far from human experience as to be untranslatable.

This is wonderfully illustrated when someone asks Smith an apparently simple and straightforward question, “Feel like breakfast?” Here’s Smith’s mental response:

All [the] symbols were in Smith’s vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not “feel like” food. Nor had he [had] any warning that he might be selected for such honor. He had not known that the food supply was such that it was necessary to reduce the corporate group. He was filled with mild regret, since there was still so much to grok of new events, but no reluctance.

Oh my! What an enormous gap between what was said and what was heard! To use his own word, Smith did not grok the situation – didn’t take it in with a heartfelt understanding, which is as close as I can come to the meaning of “grok”. So much of our estrangement and alienation from ourselves and each other and the world we live in comes from this failure to grok, doesn’t it? And yet we can hardly be blamed for it; it’s natural to be strangers in our own personal strange lands. No blame – unless our failure to grok goes along with a refusal to even try to grok. Estrangement can be overcome, but it takes effort and patience and commitment and deep goodwill.

When John went to Guyana for two months last October, on the very first day he was there he found himself teaching psychology to a class of student nurses. Here’s what he wrote immediately after that experience:

They stood when I come into the class room and were silent and at attention .....  Now I knew I was in a different world!  And when I was finished they all stood up to leave but didn't .....  They were waiting for me to leave the class room....  It took me awhile to realize that .......

That was a quite painless and even entertaining realization for John, but can you imagine what it must be like in reverse – when someone from a culture such as that comes to Canada and finds, instead of an attentive respect for the teacher, a learning environment in which it’s up to each student to decide whether or not to listen, or complete an assignment, or leave the classroom at any point? It would be hard to grok, wouldn’t it? I can imagine that my own reaction would probably be deep anxiety, which would likely show itself in a withdrawn silence, for fear of doing anything which might not be acceptable in this strange land. In turn, I would seem to Canadians like a very strange stranger, unless they made some effort to discover what I was experiencing – and that would be hard if I wouldn’t talk.

A couple of weeks after that first day, John was picking up a bit more of a sense of daily life in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. He wrote:

Today ... is a holiday, Dhiwali, [the] Hindu festival of lights. They usually have a big motor parade with all the trucks all lit up but it has been canceled “on account of the situation".   This is a combination of the racial/political tensions here and the spree of indiscriminate murders.   Everyone in the country is quite fearful and it shows in almost every aspect of the culture.  It probably doesn't help that every night on the news you get a full pictorial of the dead bodies and a blow by blow account of where and how many times they were shot.   It’s not too gruesome for me because my little television only gets black and white.   One good thing has come of all this, I am much more polite with my language. .....  I figure all those people may have a gun .

That was a considerably more serious culture shock than the difference in classroom behaviour. And obviously most of us would prefer our own relatively safe Canadian situation to that one. I have a feeling, though, that coming from a dangerous country to a safer one would also be an experience of “stranger in a strange land”. Can you imagine the fear of people in uniforms if you come from a place where police and soldiers are major threats to your safety, the anxiety about driving at night if you’ve always been told it’s not safe, what it would do to your freedom of expression if you figured you might easily be shot for what you said?

Just one more story from Guyana. John spent time with boys at an orphanage, teaching them soccer, mainly. He wrote:

I had a cultural clash with my soccer kids.  [Another group of young men playing near us] didn’t have a ball so they asked us if they could borrow one [of the ones I had brought from Canada].  The kids were against it – because [it’s common knowledge to them that “everyone in Guyana is a thief”.   Well, [I think] you can’t live like that .… So I let them have a ball and then I bet each of the kids who wanted a piece of the action 100 Guyanese dollars [about one Canadian dollar] that they would bring it back….  I had to wait till the next afternoon and ......  they had brought it back..  At least I had taught one moral lesson here.  But .... I learned that my soccer kids who’d bet with me all reneged on giving me my rightfully earned [winnings]… Just like Canadian kids! 

I’ll bet they all thought this strange guy from Canada was either a little crazy himself or from a very strange land, where you can lend people something as valuable as a soccer ball in the expectation that they’ll probably bring it back. And if they came here, I’d guess it would probably be a long time before they’d stop locking everything up and treating people with suspicion, especially if they had very little to start with. On the other hand, there are even stranger cultures, with no locks on the doors at all ......

I’ve mentioned the fantastic strangeness of a man from Mars, and the very real alienation of someone in a strange country, but what about the estrangement between people in the same physical place or culture who simply do not grok each other -- who are, in each other’s company, strangers in a strange land? Starting on February 11th, I’m going to be facilitating a four-session evening course on Learning to Listen, which will touch the tip of the iceberg, at least, of all the ways in which we can attempt to become less strange to one another. I invite any of you who’re interested in diminishing the distance between us to sign up for the course. But the very first step, which can be taken by all of us, whether we’re free on Tuesday nights or not, interested in learning together or not – the very first step is to become aware of the strangeness, to stop pretending, especially to ourselves, that we already understand it all. Listen to this little piece from linguist Deborah Tannen’s book, That’s Not What I Meant (incidentally, Tannen is one of my favourite references; I’ve lent her book, You Just Don’t Understand to someone, and if you have it I’d be most grateful to get it back before the course begins!). Tannen asks:

What can we do to avoid .... misunderstandings in ..... intimate conversations? ..... we may try to clarify our intentions by explaining them, though that can be tricky. We usually don’t know there has been a misunderstanding. ..... Just letting others know that we’re paying attention to how they talk can make them nervous. When Henry Higgins, in the opening scene of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, is seen taking notes on Eliza’s accent, onlookers assume he is a policeman about to plunk her in jail.

Trying to be direct with someone who isn’t used to it just makes things worse ..... People intent on finding hidden meanings will look more and more desperately for the[m] ... the most important thing is to be aware that misunderstandings can arise [even].... when no one is crazy and no one is mean and no one is intentionally dishonest. We can learn to stop and remind ourselves that others may not mean what we heard them say.

This awareness that the strangeness most often resides in the interaction between two people or cultures or countries, rather than being intrinsic to the people or culture or country, is surely the beginning of the process by which strangers can become friends. If I am concerned enough about our interaction to recognize the gap in understanding between us – to realize that we somehow don’t grok each other, even though the words we use may be perfectly clear – then I’ve taken an important initiative towards bridging the gap. We may not so much be strange people, or in a strange land, as engaged in the awesomely strange and difficult process of communicating with one another. When we manage it, it’s close to a miracle, the miracle which the poet Rilke described as two solitudes greeting each other.

And why is it so vital in the end to move towards the miracle? Because we are not, ultimately, disconnected strangers, but part and parcel of humanity, of the interdependent web of all existence. Because what touches one affects us all, as one of our hymns says. Because, as my colleague Jonalu Johnston said recently, in the context of trying to understand fundamentalists, “We are as incredulous about his beliefs as he is about ours. That just shows we're beginning to understand one another.” And because, in the words of 17th century poet John Donne,

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Let me end, as I began, with thoughts for your reflection – just three, and by sheer chance (perhaps) they all happen to come from the Bible:

From Matthew’s Gospel: I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in.

Exodus 2, 22 (the origin of Heinlein’s title): [Moses said] I have been a stranger in a strange land.

The Epistle to the Hebrews: Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

So may it be. So may it always be.