Strangers/Friends

At the beginning of my introductory course in ethics, I tell the students I am going to share with them my most memorable, formative moral experience. It is not what they expect. Most presume it will be a problem, for we so readily conclude that is what ethics is about. Others think for a moment and say it has to be some momentous decision, but I do not remember making any great decisions, usually I just fall into them.

No, my most memorable, formative moral experience came ten years ago in the summer of 1976 when I was working in a chaplain's training program at the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Every Friday afternoon I would board the "F" Train subway in Brooklyn and ride it into Manhattan for the weekend. I have never forgotten those rides: hot muggy, summer afternoons, squeezed between people I had never seen before in my life, crushed between bodies of all shapes and sizes, wondering where all these people came from, where they might be going, and what stories their lives might tell. That is when the experience occurred.

I had been riding the "F" Train every Friday throughout the summer, but one day that ride became an awakening, one of those unforgettable moments that turns your life around, an experience that makes you see the world differently. I looked up at all those people with me in the subway car, maybe a hundred of us, and suddenly felt very close to them. I felt a sense of kinship, that even though in so many ways we were different, in other ways we were one. Rocking back and forth on the train that afternoon were people of different nationalities, different backgrounds, different concerns, different interests, different problems; and yet, packed together in that car that Friday I felt a peculiar intimacy with those people. As I looked around I began to realize how much we needed one another, how much we depend on the kindness of people we really don't know. It was a strange feeling, a surprising feeling. On the "F" Train that Friday afternoon, snaking our way to Manhattan, I realized how good it is to be together with strangers, how much we really want to love them even if we never come to know them, because to love them is to realize we cannot be ourselves without them.

We had a little universe tucked away on a train those Fridays, and as simple and prosaic as the experience might sound, I want to suggest that such an experience of so vividly coming to see how different we are from one another, yet how much we depend on one another, is the cornerstone of our moral life. For all of us, the moral life begins not in the problems we face or the decisions we have to make, as important as these can be, but in just such an experience of the profound and liberating difference of others. That is what moral experience is, it is an experience of otherness, an appreciation for what is not ourselves. Riding the "F" Train into Manhattan on a Friday afternoon is an important moral experience because through it we come to see that morality begins in and continues the discovery that something other than ourself is real. As Simone Weil reminds us, that is the hardest discovery to make, a discovery that often takes a lifetime; but if morality is always an implication of otherness, we can only be moral when we learn to appreciate what is not ourselves. Put differently, not being able to see that something other than ourselves is real, and to live from that awareness, is a kind of moral suicide because it is precisely those who are other than ourselves who are the key to our moral deliverance. Our moral deliverance, our wholeness and completion, freedom from the nefarious prison of self-absorption, lies not in our hands but in the hands of another, ultimately, to be sure, in the hands of God. And what sometimes makes this so disenchanting is that the ones who can do the most for us, the ones who can crack open our world to love, are strangers, the ones who enter our life by surprise and open us to a world very different from our own.

Riding the "F" Train on a Friday afternoon is a humbling, unforgettable experience because it reminds us how much we are enriched and changed, how better we are when we are willing to suffer the kindness of those who are unlike us, when we are able to receive the world of the stranger as a gift. Like Blanche DuBois says near the end of Tennessee William's wonderful play, A Streetcar Named Desire, "All my life I have depended on the kindness of strangers." Interestingly, when Williams wrote that line he intended it to be funny; however, on opening night when Blanche said those words a hush fell over the audience. Williams knew he had touched people deeply, and maybe the reason is that all of us can make those words our own. At some point we have had to depend on the kindness of strangers, at some point all of us have been blessed, rescued and redeemed by strangers we chanced to see as friends. What is striking about the moral life is not just that morality is friendship, this ongoing challenge to open ourselves to others, but that all our friends were once strangers. What is remarkable about friends is what a risk it is to let a stranger become one, but we take that risk. No matter how many times we might be hurt, disappointed or let down by others, we continue to take a chance with them because intuitively we know we cannot be a self without them. That is why, ironically, egotism is such seif-sabatoge; in such feverish attempts to protect the self it is exactly the self that is destroyed.

Enda McDonagh has written a little book about this entitled Gift and Call. McDonagh wants to pinpoint the basic moral dimension of human experience. He asks us to look at all the things that happen to us in our lives and pick from them the most basic moral experience. If we took all those experiences to which we give the name 'moral,' and broke them down to their most common element, what kind of experience would we have? McDonagh answers that it would always be an experience of another. Our primary moral experience is what happens to us in the presence of another person. The experience is moral, McDonagh argues, because we cannot be indifferent to their presence. The other person demands our attention, they call for some kind of recognition, respect, and response, and not to acknowledge this is to betray the very meaning of the experience. As McDonagh explains, the presence of the other person takes the shape of a 'call' to come out of ourself. Their presence impinges on us in such a way that we not only ought to respond, but a refusal to respond is to fail the experience, it is a gross misreading of what is going on.

As McDonagh develops this idea he notes that what most strikes us about this experience is the obvious otherness of the ones who stand before us. They are not who we are, they are clearly and intriguingly other. It is their definitive, irreducible otherness that captures our attention, and this means we can neither understand nor appreciate them by trying to make them like ourselves, by denying or reducing their otherness; no, We can only understand them when we realize it is precisely their otherness that allows them to be a blessing for us, that enables them to be a gift. An example of this is parents' relationship to their children. Every parent has hopes for their children, every parent has some values or ideals that guide how they raise their children; and yet, it does not take any parent long to realize the 'otherness' of their children, to sense their own unique personalities, their distinctive gifts, all those things that make them different; indeed, what parents constantly marvel at is the otherness of the ones they have brought into the world.

This is what the moral life is about, it is the abiding challenge of appreciating those who can be so very different from ourselves. All of us can recognize how our lives have been changed in encounters with people we never thought would be part of our world. It can be a child, it can be a friend we never expected to meet. It can be a person from a different background, someone whose home is in another land, someone with a religion other than our own. Our lives are constantly challenged, stretched and blessed by the intrusion of strangers, by our capacity to embrace the others who come to us, to welcome instead of repel them, to allow their otherness to become our gift.

This is not easy to do. As McDonagh notes, our ability to respond to the other depends on how we see them. How do we respond to those who are different from us? How do we react to strangers? The challenge, McDonagh says, is to see the other person as a gift, but the tendency is to see them as a threat. The challenge is to see them as a gift which "embodies a call" to come out of ourselves, but the tendency is to see them as a threat "provoking fear," a threat which prompts us to react not in hospitality but in violence, striking out against the other before we retreat into ourself. An example of this is how we so often respond to strangers. Is it not true that so often our first impressions of people are wrong? It happens all the time, but maybe the reason is that initially we approach them not as a possible blessing in our lives, but as a probable threat. Or what about prejudice? At the bottom of every prejudice, whether racial, ethnic, sexual or religious, is the perduring inability to see people who are quite other than ourselves as gifts. We fear certain groups of people, even nations, because of whatever it is that makes them different from ourselves. We see in that difference not something that could make us better, something that could bless and enlarge our world, but something we fear precisely because of its otherness; consequently, our immediate, almost instinctive response is not to welcome them and be changed by them, not to discover there is nothing more interesting than becoming part of another's world, but to view them hostilely, to respond with some sort of violence, often as subtle a violence as ignoring the other person, refusing to pay them attention, which is simply a way of saying our world is not big enough to include them. McDonagh concludes, our basic moral challenge is to let the gift triumph over the threat, to respond to others in a way that leads to communion and enrichment, not hostility and elimination. The threat we often perceive in others, especially those most different from ourselves, has to be transformed into a gift. That transformation from threat to gift takes place through love, a love that realizes our own liberation comes precisely from those most different from ourselves.

The world would look much different if we could perceive others as gifts instead of threats. It is such a simple idea, such a disarming approach to the moral life, but in its simplicity it is also revolutionary because it is the kind of principle that makes for another world. The world would look very different if we would see one another as gifts instead of threats. So much of our world today, its terrorism and violence, its wars and divisions, its chronic suspicion and mistrust, reflects a refusal to embrace those who are other as gifts. It reflects a refusal to consider any point of view other than our own. As Thomas W. Ogletree observes in his fine book, Hospitality To The Stranger, without the other, morality is nothing more than "the shrewd management of life's exigencies in light of my more or less arbitrary personal preferences. Whether it be refined and subtle and sophisticated, or careless and thoughtless and unreflective, such morality finally boils down to egoism, the assessment and utilization of all aspects of the world in terms of my own purposes." (p.35) Without the other to shake us up and prod us, even occasionally to shock us, we forget how narrow and self-serving our own view of the world can be. This does not just include individuals, it includes societies and nations as well. All of us have a deeply rooted tendency to see everything from our own point of view, to interpret the world in a way that serves us best. We need the sometimes shocking intrusion of others, particularly the stranger, to remind us of how self-deceptive our own predilections can be. As Ogletree puts it, the challenge of the other can shock us, "but the shock does not reflect my sudden discomfort at the other's unexpected challenge to my sovereign freedom. It reflects my painful discovery of the murderous implications of my own egoistic self-absorption." (p.47)

The world turns on how we perceive one another. Our lives, as well as our world, are so much richer when we open them to others. All of us can point to the people who have made the most difference in our lives, the ones who have done the most for us, and often it is the ones we would least expect, the ones who in their otherness could become our grandest blessings.

Maybe it is because in them we also meet God. There is the beautiful, powerful and disturbing story of the Last Judgment in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel. The end time has come. All the people of the world are gathered before God and divided into groups. The ones welcomed into the Kingdom are the ones who could spot God in those most radically other, the poor, the downtrodden, the imprisoned. Today those 'other' ones stand before us. They may be the other ones of nations we do not understand, the other ones of the disabled, the other ones of the poor, the other ones whose thoughts and convictions are not our own. But god lives in them too, and, as Jesus reminds us, if the kingdom hope of peace and justice is ever to be ours we must learn to welcome the stranger into our life as a gift. Anytime that happens we can have hope, for in that hospitality the Kingdom has begun.

Fr. Paul Wadell, C.P. is an Assistant Professor of Ethics at Catholic Theological Union and recently received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

For Further Reading:

• Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
• Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine the Mentally Handicapped and the Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.
• Enda McDonagh, Gift and Call. St. Meinrad, Indiana: Abbey Press, 1975.
• Thomas W. Ogletree, Hospitality To The Stranger. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.