Meanwhile, four other safe consumption sites in Toronto have been closed, along with five more across Ontario, and the funding, scope and nature of the government’s much-touted HART Hubs remains obscure. As far as we know, some are beginning to operate, but our only experience with them so far is having one person who had asked for rehab services refused because he didn’t have ID, a bar that is likely to exclude most unhoused people.

The Toronto Drop-In Network, an umbrella group for drop-ins for unhoused and marginally housed people, asked us, before the sites were closed, to begin collecting statistics on the number of overdoses at our sites. Based on the data from the drop-ins that submitted information most consistently, they recorded a 288 per cent increase in overdoses during June 2025 as compared to March 2025, before the sites closed.

Most of these numbers represent people who survived thanks to intervention by drop-in staff and others, but staff and volunteers, often unprepared and sometimes inadequately trained, are more and more traumatized, and because many drop-ins are not allowed or able to have oxygen tanks on site, people who overdose are sometimes hypoxic for periods long enough that they are likely to suffer permanent brain damage.

I don’t want to make this a story about myself, but it is hard for all of us to remember times we’ve been in the church’s yard, leaning over someone whose lips have turned blue, wondering if we can get them back, while people shout and cry in the background and someone is checking the time and calling, “Two minutes… two and a half minutes…” as we try to decide whether to give another dose. It is a world away from the calm, supportive atmosphere I’ve seen at the overdose prevention sites. And while our neighbourhood’s site is still operating (at least as I write this in August), there are fewer sites, and more people. They cannot be open around the clock, and they cannot be funded for the expansions of their operations that are really needed.

I mention St. Stephen’s yard because, inevitably, the encampment there has grown again, as others are cleared and many people are pushed into more remote, hidden locations as the city continues to try to make suffering as invisible as it can – because people with homes complain about being required to witness suffering, and people with homes are the people whose voices are heard. Some people have lived in our yard for years because there is no indoor space that will accept them. Others come for days, or weeks, or months, and sometimes if they wait long enough, they get a shelter space – never housing. But since human beings cannot wait nowhere, it has been a space, a place where they can rest, something like a stable point. Our outreach worker cleans wounds and changes dressings, walks people to the hospital, and tries to navigate the bizarre maze of city bureaucracy required for someone to be considered “housing ready.” This week, we learned of three deaths, one of them a sweet and troubled soul who had been part of our community for more than a decade, who had wept in the arms of one of our lay anointers once at Pentecost, whose last words to me had been, “I don’t go out much anymore. People just aren’t nice anymore.”

Some of our neighbours blame us because people are still sleeping outside, because people use drugs, because people have no options, as if this were a state of affairs the church actively desired and was striving to maintain. It is hard to be the focus of discontent for people who may have been friends, and who need to blame someone for a disintegration of our society that seems to be beyond anyone’s control.

Across Canada, and in the United States and the UK, various pieces of legislation are bringing us ever closer to waves of forcible confinement of all those who don’t fit neatly into the economic engine that is our society – sometimes under the guise of “treatment” without consent and of indefinite duration.

I am finding myself more and more often quoting Lawrence, the third century deacon in Rome, who, when bidden by the Imperial prefect to hand over the treasures of the church, gathered up the poor and ill and homeless people in his community and declared, “These are the treasures of the church!” (Adding, according to some accounts, “You see, the church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor.”)

We need to retrain ourselves to see this. We have been taught that they are frightening, dangerous; we have been taught that they are bad and dirty and making wrong choices. Sometimes things are noisy. People are suffering, people are not well, they do not have the space or safety or health they deserve, and they wear that lack on their bodies. And certainly, human beings make wrong choices on a very regular basis. But I have been welcomed in this space for years now, and I can only say that whatever it may cost us, these are the treasures of the Church. And we are here to cherish them. For if there is no one else in the world to care, then we – and our colleagues at the Overdose Prevention Site, and all the other people still struggling on – must be the ones. And far richer, in that, than Trump or Musk or anyone else can ever be.

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As for the people who left the churchyard, nearly all are still living in encampments. I know of one person who went to a shelter-hotel the night of the eviction, and seems to be thriving there, but most of the others are in Bellevue Square Park, or Clarence Square, or down by the lakeshore. We visit them as much as we can, and they visit us at our Friday night drop-in; we try to retain those relationships. Some of them have been evicted from other encampments several times since leaving the churchyard. In most cases, their mental and physical health has deteriorated. And at the same time, the provincial government is well on the way to closing both of the nearby safe consumption sites, meaning that we will find more bodies in our yard, more bodies in our stairwell, more deaths we were unable to prevent.

There is nowhere to go. In a particularly depressing exercise in cognitive dissonance, Gord Tanner, the head of Toronto Shelter and Support Services, recently presented the city’s winter plan, admitting openly that it would not be anything close to sufficient to meet the obvious need, but also saying that it would include city workers going out to “encourage people to shelter indoors.” Why, in this crisis, the city persists in rhetoric that blames vulnerable people for failing to go to an “indoors” that doesn’t exist is something I still cannot understand.

The City of Toronto has been better than many. They are creating some new supportive housing – not nearly enough, but probably as much as they can without more assistance from other levels of government. Mayor Chow did not sign, and openly criticized, the letter sent to Doug Ford by 12 other Ontario mayors, demanding that the notwithstanding clause be used to suspend the Charter rights of homeless people and empower these mayors to “move encampment residents along.” (Along to where, we must wonder; perhaps medically assisted death?)

But right now – and although it has been an exceptionally, indeed frighteningly, mild November, it will surely be cold by the time you read this – there is nowhere to go. During the warmer weather, we worked with the two people on church property, and others with whom we have close relationships, to sort out some of their longstanding legal issues, connect them with primary care and help them attend hospital appointments. But during the coldest months, our focus is mostly on just trying to keep people from freezing. Giving out blankets, gloves, handwarmers, hot food, hot coffee – the small things we can do.

Last year, when the city put out a request for spaces to offer themselves as emergency warming centres, we submitted an application, along with a number of other Anglican churches. And along with a number of other Anglican churches, we were turned down, without an explanation. The diocese wrote to Gord Tanner asking for an explanation and received a reply saying that they had examined the sites and decided against them, and that Gord Tanner was not happy that people were sleeping outside St. Stephen’s and Holy Trinity, still with no explanation as to why we, and others, were not suitable for indoor warming centres. This year, no request was openly issued.

And in the great world around us all, we see the predications coming true that when the climate emergency truly arrived, when the floods and fires and food shortages became undeniable, people would turn to hatred and exclusion and choose authoritarian governments in the belief that this would save them. Terrified people are searching for targets – trans people, immigrants, “drug addicts,” the chronically homeless, whoever seems easy to exclude. In a time like this, that ancient and absolute instruction to love your neighbour is more radical than ever. We must train ourselves in that love when it is hardest, not a love that centres on people whom we may love easily. Because everyone is your neighbour. And we must love most of all our unchosen neighbours – our strange, unruly, foreign, frightening neighbours. The person lying unresponsive in a ditch, and the heretical outsider who pulls them out. Never what we want, and never what is easy. But the neighbour, finally, whose presence can save us too.

Canon Helwig’s book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, will be published by Coach House Books in May.

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Though the KMOPS is one of the smallest sites in Toronto, it has saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives. As the toxic drug crisis has escalated, staff have taken it upon themselves to become a sort of mobile crisis unit, dashing through the streets and alleyways with naloxone and oxygen tanks, in response to emergency calls. I have worked alongside them to reverse overdoses near the church. The workers at the overdose prevention site distribute a full range of harm reduction supplies and also package them for my parish to distribute. They provide community, support and compassion, as well as connections to medical care, mental health care and addictions counselling. Many people have moved from being clients of the site to entering the Neighbourhood Group peer worker program, which has given them a sense of meaning and value, and often helped them significantly reduce their use of street drugs. Although Kensington Market is a hotspot for overdose deaths, there has never been a single death at the site, and a study in the Lancet last year showed that overdose death rates had actually declined in the area immediately around it.

Unusually, the KMOPS serves not only opiate users but also users of crystal meth, who may be less vulnerable to overdose but often need a calm, quiet space in which they can come down. Indeed, the site has been a space of peace for reasons quite unrelated to street drugs. Last year, when one of the residents of the encampment outside the church was dealing with the terminal illness of his beloved dog, the overdose prevention site became a space where he and his pet could have privacy and rest together. When people are in distress or escalated emotional states, it is normal for outreach workers or church volunteers to take them to the site, not for overdose prevention but for peace and community.

And it is this small oasis of safety and kindness that the provincial government has seen fit to label as a “drug den” and a threat to children and public safety. The KMOPS is one of 10 sites scheduled to be closed by provincial mandate, in March 2025 or before.

The Ford government has tried to create a false dichotomy between harms reduction and treatment, but all experts and frontline workers in the field know that they are part of one continuum and that harms reduction, and especially safe drug consumption sites, are one of the most efficient pathways into treatment. It’s now widely known that even the expert reports commissioned by the government did not recommend shutting down any sites, and in fact recommended creating more.

The story has been spun as being about the safety of children (ironic, coming from a government that seems fiercely dedicated to making round-the-clock access to alcohol as easy as possible, including at convenience stores right beside schools). But we know that if these sites are closed, children, and everyone else, will be much less safe. There will be deaths in our parks, in our streets, very possibly in our schoolyards. There will be more discarded needles, since the government’s proposed new “treatment hubs” will be banned from having needle exchange programs. There will be more infectious and bacterial illness, as people use old and contaminated equipment. There will be more drug dealing, more organized crime, more violence. Just as clearing encampments does not make homeless people magically housed, so closing overdose prevention sites will not somehow make drugs go away.

The alternative: allow these spaces of kindness, encourage them, resource them, create more. They will not solve all the problems of our very troubled and broken society. But they will keep some people alive, and some of them for long enough that they can heal, can know themselves to be loved, can live without being driven to use street drugs for a momentary feeling of value. And to save one life, as Rabbi Hillel may have said, is to save the world entire.

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A year ago, I wrote in this paper, “We will be, until we can be no longer, the last safe place.” On Nov. 24, after months of negotiation, struggle, compromise and crisis, that safety was broken.

It was not as bad as it might have been, when City of Toronto crews came to clear our encampment. I know that there were people within the large and complicated structure that is the City of Toronto who tried to make this less than brutal, who did what they could, and they did make a difference. Shelter Services had reserved shelter-hotel rooms for the people in the encampment who wanted them, though what this meant was that those rooms were not available for others seeking indoor space the previous night, and we know that many were turned away that night. Some people took the rooms, and that is a very good thing, though the rush, the stress, the need to pack a bag instantly and go, led to several breakdowns and medical crises over the course of the day, and some emotional damage that has not yet healed. Others were squeezed onto the small area that is indisputably church property, though we don’t know how long they will be permitted to stay. Some had already left two days earlier, when city staff first told them that the area was going to be cleared.

Then, at some point in the afternoon, one person refused to move. They had accepted referrals to shelter-hotels twice over the past year, and both times had been evicted within days for trivial reasons. This was their home, the one place that had never told them to leave. Staff from the Department of Transportation handed them a notice of trespass. They read it over, said, “You got the name wrong,” and handed it back.

We stood for hours, then, in the bitter cold – supporters, media, residents trying to rebuild their tents along the side of the church. We brought hot water bottles and French vanilla coffee and vegetarian curry to the one person who wouldn’t leave, as they wrapped themselves up in blankets and quietly whispered prayers. It was after sunset, and church volunteers were trying to serve our weekly drop-in dinner, by the time the city staff brought in the machine that we know as the Claw, a huge piece of heavy machinery that seizes tents and belongings and recycling bins indiscriminately and drags them into a trash compactor. In the dark, the Claw was driven through a narrow residential street, to scrape all signs of human occupation from half of the churchyard.

In the other half of the yard, the remaining resident and I stood protected by a patio umbrella, watching. We didn’t know if the police would be coming to take them. But police did not come for them. Good people in several different places, that night, people I know but can’t name here, were able to shape some decisions. Supporters blocked the Claw for a while, and others used the time to gather up the belongings of the people who had been hastily dispersed. The Claw moved back and forth across the small street, and neighbours, seeing it from their windows, ran down from the apartment building next door to join our supporters. It was nearly midnight by the time it ended, by the time an eight-foot- high security fence went up around half of the area that had been used as the churchyard for over 100 years, which has now been claimed by the Department of Transportation as their own. A few days later, more city trucks arrived, and, with no warning, deposited huge concrete blocks over the entire fenced area. The yard which had, for so long – long before the encampment, long before I was the incumbent – been a place where people could come when they were lost or hungry or in need of help, was now fenced and blocked, and made as inhuman as the resources of the city could make it.

But when the crews left, the one person who would not leave was still there, with their tent and their belongings, and they are still there now as I write this in early December. Others are still camped along the side of the church. The human community that has grown here has not been destroyed. And so we enter Advent. Let the skies pour down righteousness.

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Around 1349, during the first and most horrific episode of the Black Death in Europe, John Clyn of the Friars Minor, Kilkenny, wrote a chronicle of events that includes blank pages at the end, and this passage: “… so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.”

Here, at my little church, I stand under a sky weirdly dim and orange, and smell the acrid scent of wildfires hundreds of miles away. The weather report some days reads simply, “Smoke,” and the people in power seem as unwilling or unable to take meaningful action as the kings of Israel and Judah were to listen to Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah. The world is on fire, and nothing is normal anymore – there is no such thing. The food suppliers for our meal programs are increasingly likely to have shortages, and prices seem to rise every week. Refugees sleep on the street outside the Streets to Homes referral centre.

Crisis intersects with crisis, over and over. Late one night I have to crawl across the bathroom floor to get into a stall where someone has overdosed. A few days later someone goes down in the churchyard, but before my colleague and I get there, a small person dressed in black, with dark glasses, has taken control, grabbed a naloxone kit and administered the first dose, assigned my colleague to time doses while I am doing crowd control. When the man who went down is conscious and responding, the small dark person disappears. No one is sure who they were. A child of humanity, called to the moment.

I find myself obsessively watching livestreams from a feral cat rescue centre in British Columbia. Wildfires and smoke are their constant background too, but in the livestream, gentle people tend to small creatures with keen individual attention, responding to their particular needs, understanding their traumas, giving them the kind of precise and personal care I can only wish for every being in this world, the struggling people camped outside my church, the hurt people in the streets. If the feral cat livestream is the only place I can reliably find this model of care right now, that is at least something.

I think that I cannot summon the hopefulness of the writer we call Mark, but then I also remember that his telling of the good news concludes, in one of literature’s more daring moves, without a resurrection appearance, and with the sentence, “They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” Like us, Mark lived in a seesaw tension – the good news beginning, yet enveloped in silence and fear; perhaps, like John Clyn, leaving a blank space in case someone came after him, without even being sure that someone would. I search for ways to believe that there is a beginning in all this, for reasons to leave those blank pages towards the future. Last spring I cycled through a path of hurricane damage on Prince Edward Island; great trees devastated, dunes erased along the north shore, but below the fallen trunks the pale Jurassic shapes of ferns slowly unfolding, the survivors, so much older than anything human. Marsh marigolds along the stream banks, among the stripped branches. Creation’s persistent, the dearest freshness deep down things which Hopkins named. Though the last lights off the black West went.

So I get up every day under the strange skies, and I say morning prayer, and I try to take my anxious and irritable self into the world to hold on to a small island of humanity, a community which, we may hope, can bide in the shade of the great events, can try to believe still in the value of care, in the discipline of the needs of others carefully understood, in the possibility of acceptance, and of forgiveness when we fail. There is no certain future. But here and now, this is what we can do.

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The intersection of pandemic illness, an economy more and more polarized between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, a massive shelter and housing crisis, a breakdown in social solidarity, and the growing effects of climate change, crash over us all like waves, but most of all over those who are made marginal in our system – Indigenous people who carry the generational trauma of Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop, racialized people, people who are ill or weak or unable to cope with a viciously competitive society, people for whom one piece of bad luck can turn into an avalanche. Parks are increasingly policed since last year’s wave of violent evictions, many park areas are fenced off, and anyone trying to find space there is evicted rapidly. Shelters are more and more overcrowded, often dangerous, and, simply, almost always full. Our volunteers have spent the last months, even in the depths of winter, phoning Central Intake, trying to find beds for some of our drop-in participants, and being told that their best option was to wait outside the Streets to Homes office on Peter Street, in case a chair in the lobby opened up at some point during the night.

So when tents began to gather in our yard, as other encampments were dismantled by City workers, there was never any question that we would allow people to stay, that we would offer them food and what services we could, that we would learn from them their names and their stories, stories of suffering and survival, of pain and faith and work and fragile hope, of their attempts to live and build in a world that makes no room.

Though the decision was obvious, and everyone in our congregation has been supportive without hesitation, I can’t pretend that it has always been easy. We have had to network with a multitude of service agencies, organize harm-reduction supplies, deal with arrangements for garbage collection and mail delivery, provide first aid and connections to medical care, help with mental health crises, and manage neighbours who are uncomfortable or angry. It has called on all the resources of our staff and key volunteer leadership. It has meant giving up any attempt to maintain our community garden this year. And, perhaps most of all, it has meant that we must live, every day, every time we walk through the yard, with the heartbreaking knowledge that some of our most vulnerable community members are living in tents, in the rain, in the wind, trying to figure out how to carry on basic tasks like laundry, to manage sometimes serious medical conditions, to lead as dignified a life as anyone can while encamped in a churchyard for lack of better options.

But, in a complicated world, our calling has rarely been so clear. If the Church is to be, in our day, the body of Christ, of the Word who “pitched his tent among us,” as the literal translation of the first chapter of John says, then we must be at this sharp edge; we must witness, accompany, live out in our own bodies the tasks of healing and feeding, and of speaking out for a better way of living together. St. Lawrence famously took a Roman prefect, hoping to confiscate gold, into the churchyard, showed him the poor and sick and hungry gathered there, and announced, “These are the treasures of the church.” And so they are.

I am writing this in late October. Recently, the City informed us that our yard is not, in fact, church property, but a transport right-of-way and a “City asset,” and that, therefore, the people we have come to know here may be evicted, even if the church itself is committed to giving them a safe space until they have an acceptable alternative. We do not know what will happen, while shelter hotels close down just as the weather gets colder. By the time you read this, there may no longer be people living in the yard at St. Stephen’s. Perhaps – unlikely as this hope seems – everyone will find safe and dignified accommodation suitable for their needs, and if that is the case, we will be one step closer to honouring God in all of God’s children. Perhaps, even if this doesn’t happen, some kind of temporary indoor shelter will be available, and everyone will get through this winter as they can.

But if the people living in our yard are compelled to leave, are evicted by civic authority and its powers of coercion, it will be without our consent, and over our voices of protest. Until we are no longer able, we will be the last safe place.

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“… the sound of harpists and minstrels and of flautists and trumpeters
will be heard in you no more;
and an artisan of any trade
will be found in you no more;
and the sound of the millstone
will be heard in you no more;
and the light of a lamp
will shine in you no more;
and the voice of bridegroom and bride
will be heard in you no more.”

As the economy of Babylon begins to collapse, it is not the powerholders who are the first to be trapped in the rubble, but the innocent musicians, the ordinary artisans, the slaves working in the mills, the young couples in love. Babylon must fall – the institutionalized oppression and exploitation of the empire must and will crash under its own weight – but it cannot fall without tragedy. And the scope of the tragedy will be immense.

As I am writing this, the COP26 talks are wrapping up, without any substantive or meaningful commitments to truly reducing emissions and containing the climate emergency. And as I write this, every highway into Vancouver has been shut down by flooding. Entire towns have been evacuated, barely months after the absolute material destruction of the village of Lytton by wildfires. Indigenous communities are cut off by mudslides, without food or medicine, and much of Abbottsford is now under water. It will not stop with this. The angels, to use John’s imagery, are pouring out their vials.

It seems certain, now, that our world of uncontrolled capitalism, fossil fuel addiction and end-game consumerism will fall. It is falling. We are living in a global Babylon, with which the Church has collaborated for a long time, and more thoroughly than even John of Patmos could have imagined. We, all of us, are entangled so deeply in structural sin, and our leaders, our merchants and kings of the earth, are so unwilling to step out of it, that there is no realistically possible future which avoids collapse. And perhaps this is, on the larger societal level, even a kind of justice.

But many of the people most directly affected by the BC disasters are Indigenous – the descendants of those who cared well for this land for so long. Most of the people who are watching their homes wash away are not wealthy, and they have had few choices. Some of them are musicians, artisans, low-wage workers in the mills of the service industry, young couples in love. They are innocent casualties of the empire’s falling.

Faced with the demand to live truthfully amid this tragedy, John suggests a stance of withdrawal, non-cooperation, detachment. Up to a point, it is helpful advice; we must still try to pull ourselves out of the matrix of sin, to live without unnecessary consumption, to choose smaller lives, to grow our vegetables and put up our solar panels. And to build, as well, community resilience, the skills and relationships and shared bonds of mutual aid, the sense of a common and interdependent life and destiny.

But there must be more than that. The Canadian government continues, even now, to build pipelines and to expand our fossil fuel industry, and it is primarily Indigenous land defenders who are standing in their way. We must name this, we must name the apocalyptic riders of our time, and we must be prepared to stand with those who are opposing them. We must name the fact that the Church itself is deeply tied up in the fossil fuel economy and consumerism; we must change ourselves, and we must be ready to help those who will suffer from this change, too.

And we must make space for lament. For it is too late now to save much that was beautiful and good; it is too late to spare our descendants the pain and struggle that will be created by our decisions. As the angel’s lament over Babylon disrupts John’s vision of avenging justice, we must hold a place and time for mourning, mourning for the light of the lamp and the music of the flute, for the polar bear and the coral reef and the last white rhinoceros, for all the lovely things that were and will be no more. To remember, to memorialize, and to grieve – this too is the work of the Church in our time, and may be the work that only faith, and a fierce irrational hope, can enable us to do.

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This should be – this could be – one of the most important sentences our tradition has to offer; a statement of interdependence so deep it embraces our breath and blood, of the interconnectedness of creation, the Church’s equivalent of the Indigenous expression “all my relations.” And in the earliest months of the pandemic, we were given a swift and sometimes frightening illustration of its almost literal truth, when the virus multiplied around the world as it multiplies in individual bodies. For a short time, it seemed like we might respond with an understanding equal to the moment, might finally think and behave as if the interests of the whole body mattered.

But nearly two years into this, we are seeing, in most places, something quite different, an exhausted and fractious breakdown in social cohesion, in any sense of social solidarity; an elevation of the interests and specious freedoms of the individual. At the extreme, groups with ties to white supremacy and the extreme right are storming shopping malls, blocking ambulances, harassing health care workers and hurling death threats at journalists. And those waves of hatred and anger burn through our society, make us all more angry and more afraid, and more inclined than ever to judge everything from the standpoint of our single individual selves, our desires and needs, as if all the rest of creation existed to compete with us.

The Church should be able to offer a powerful counter-narrative, a story of personal sacrifice and corporate love. And in practice, many people in Anglican parishes have done so, have acted as if the interests of the body as a whole were primary, have taken precautions not for their own sakes but the sake of their neighbours, have served the community in a difficult time and at sometimes great cost to themselves. These are realities that should not be underestimated. But we also have to ask if we are obliged to speak in ways we have not yet spoken – and if we truly own and understand our own stories.

The Church has, for some centuries now, largely surrendered to the individualism upon which modern societies are built, and has seen its role as promoting personal salvation (for relatively conservative churches), or personal health and development (for relatively liberal ones). There have been some good consequences of this – for some, it has been deeply life-giving and liberating. But it has left us a diminished language, has lacked a story of communal liberation. Only in scattered places can we hear voices saying that our individual interests are not, in fact, sovereign, that we are baptized into a body, and that our connection with all the other members of that body, with all of the creation breathed into being by the divine word, requires us to submit our personal freedoms and preferences to the health of the whole; and that, if we fail to do so, the entire body will be damaged. The climate emergency, the housing crisis, the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and the crisis of living conditions in Indigenous communities, all are signs pointing us towards that truth.

It has many names, this understanding, and some of them are deeply rooted in our own traditions. Gregory of Nyssa spoke of the pleroma, the mass of all human bodies that have ever been or ever will be, which makes up the fullness of the body of Christ; and because of this theology, he became the only known voice in the ancient world to oppose slavery as a concept. Archbishop Desmond Tutu used the language of ubuntu – “you can’t be human all by yourself” – and used it to guide his creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And the Indigenous Church now is calling us back to a new vision of relationality, of life in community.

As I said above, during the pandemic many Anglicans have lived out of these values instinctively. But perhaps, though our denomination has always and often wisely preferred doing to saying, we also need now to think and to speak. We need to learn again our deepest metaphors, live into them until we can speak them once more. To be visible, audible, the bodies performing a narrative of bodies in community, and also the voices telling the story, a story that says that we are one body of diverse parts, that each of us is only well when all are well, that my salvation is bound up with yours. That we are all unavoidably, inevitably, even painfully, knit together. That we all go down into the water together, and together we must rise.

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For some of us, the Christmas we anticipate will be the strangest we have ever known, without most of our usual practices of community and worship, without carols or choirs, without the ability to visit parents, grandparents, siblings. But for some, it will be very much like any other Christmas, alone, outside of the celebrations, or maybe part, willingly or unwillingly, of the unchosen spare festivities of the nearest shelter or respite centre.

Despite a brief sense of social solidarity, despite all the signs saying, “We’re all in this together,” the pandemic has in fact worsened existing inequalities at all levels. Large corporations have seen their profits skyrocket, while small independent businesses collapse. The building of pipelines on Indigenous land has been rapidly designated an “essential service.” The bulk of the increased burden of childcare and unpaid domestic labour has fallen on women. The burden of high-risk, poorly compensated work, and the inevitable illness and death, has fallen mostly on racialized people. It is possible to look at the maps, week by week, and see the virus migrate from the lakefront condos of Toronto to the struggling northwestern suburbs; while in the meantime, homeless people have largely taken the situation into their own hands and set up encampments in parks and green spaces around the city, so that they can maintain limited and safer social bubbles. The spring lockdown has been described, brutally but not without some truth, as “middle-class people hiding while poor people brought them things.”

And yet, out on the roads at the height of the first wave, along with those given no real choice – the warehouse workers, PSWs, cleaners, couriers, and retail clerks – there were also the riders of the People’s Pantry and the Bike Brigade, delivering free food from Mississauga to Scarborough and beyond. There were, and still are, the staff and volunteers of those drop-ins and food banks that have stayed open: the Anishnawbe Health Bus doing mobile testing for the most vulnerable; the Encampment Support Network bringing supplies and care to the people living in tents. A band of ragged Magi, following a beacon of hope. And in their own homes, the Sewing Army, making thousands of free masks, scrub caps and gowns, including most of those now being worn by the volunteers at my own parish’s drop-in and meal programs.

And, as well, the data analysts, the investigative journalists, and the tireless activists and advocates who have ensured that this crisis has been an opportunity to make visible the chasms of inequity in our society, rather than papering them over – who keep drawing attention to those few central things such as stable indoor shelter, access to handwashing, safe employment conditions and paid sick leave, and to the vulnerability created in our whole society when some members are deprived of these.

In the long nights of Advent, we remember that we are waiting for one who came to us in isolation and displacement, who lived in obscurity, who was tortured and executed finally by the powers of the day. And if Christ’s presence and Christ’s kingdom breaks in fragments into our reality now, it is in these obscure and hidden acts by the small people of the world, in the heart of empire or out on the fringes. And it is in the work of those who can learn the lessons of the tents and the bicycles and the darkness, and articulate them, over and over if necessary, to our contemporary powers. Much of what the Church might normally do, we cannot do now. But perhaps we can rise to this moment.

There are days when I am afraid that “building back better” is too extreme a hope, and that the very best we might manage, if we all insist hard enough and long enough, is building back something not greatly worse. But Advent is a promise. That the arc of time will turn, that the light which has been born will be born once more, maybe in strange hidden places we never expected. That perhaps we can still learn to love each other and our endangered earth, to share more justly, to demand a new vision.

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Home to 40 per cent of Ontario’s petrochemical industry, with more than 60 major industrial facilities concentrated in one small area, Chemical Valley, near Sarnia, is also situated directly beside the Aamjiwnaang First Nation Reserve, and it is the youth of Aamjiwnaang who have taken the lead in organizing today’s Toxic Tour. Lindsay Beze Gray, an extraordinary young activist, tell us what it is like to live in a community where chemical spills and the blare of warning sirens are part of everyday life, where whole classes of children are sent home from daycare with rashes and burning eyes, and where rare cancers are frequent causes of death.

There are few more obvious examples of what Bishop Mark MacDonald, writing in the Anglican Journal, has called the “second phase of colonization … vast economic, cultural and environmental control.” Aamjiwnaang residents have had no choice about the industries eating up the land all around them; but they are acting now to protect their people, their culture and their land, and part of the responsibility of the church in restoring right relationship is to walk with them. So we have come today to do that, for a very short time, in the literal sense; nearly 500 people, we estimate, have journeyed from Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, Kitchener-Waterloo and elsewhere. Most of them are young activists, but there are also families with small children, some older people, some walking with difficulty. Anglican, United, Mennonite and Roman Catholic congregations are represented. “We were driving along the river on our way here,” says Alicia Good, a Mennonite pastor in North Leamington, “and we got to those industrial plants, discharging into the river, and we realized that river flows into our lake. This is our water, too.”

Through smothering humidity and scorching sun, during the world’s hottest summer ever recorded, we pass facilities belonging to Suncor, Hydro One, Dow Chemicals; we pass huge gravel pits and towering chimneys. Lindsay tells us that Aamjiwnaang residents are used to constant flares from these chimneys, and that they hardly pay attention to the sirens any more.

Between the Styrolution facility and the Cyeco facility, near where the village of Blue Water used to be, where a historical plaque commemorates its now-erased existence, Kelly Kiyoshk of the Aamjiwnaang community gets onto the back of a flatbed truck to speak. “I wasn’t expecting to say anything today,” he tells us, but then delivers one of the most eloquent speeches of the day.  “These plants, these animals – they’re still carrying on the way we’re meant to carry on. The laws of creation haven’t changed.” It is still possible to see that this could have been a beautiful area, and that it could be again. “I feel sorry for white people,” Kelly goes on. “I mean, what can you do with your lives? The economy controls everything. You have to pay to live on the Earth. Think about that. We’re the only species that has to pay to live on the Earth. We have a very big crisis, we have a very big change to make. I don’t know what’s going to happen for these kids if we don’t. And what it’s going to take is us here, all of us. We not only have to learn to stand up, we have to learn to be kind to each other, to share with each other. That’s what the Creator gave us. If we do that, we can do more than build a movement. We can create a life.”

The Toxic Tour is neither the beginning nor the end of the work in Aamjiwnaang. Lindsay and her sister Vanessa, with assistance from some settler activists in Sarnia and elsewhere, are spearheading a project of comprehensive soil and water testing, something no company or government has yet been willing to do; they and others are involved in the campaign against the reversal of Enbridge’s Line 9, which runs by their community and will, if Enbridge has its way, soon carry highly toxic and corrosive diluted bitumen from the tar sands. This February, a group of Aamjiwnaang residents filed a suit against Shell for a documented 2013 spill which released mercaptan, benzene and hydrogen sulfide, making many of the children in the daycare ill and potentially causing long-term effects that won’t be visible for years.

But we cannot leave this struggle to the community alone. As Bishop Mark MacDonald reminds us, “We now see human culture organized toward a new Tower of Babel, a denial not only of God’s design, but in its moral presumption – that economic life rules all other life – a denial of the sovereignty of God. We cannot tolerate a faith that calls itself Christian and separates our salvation, our morality and our world, a faith that is silent in the face of such injustice.” The Toxic Tour was one small act of solidarity, one small way of recalling ourselves to our responsibilities. There must be many more.

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