These are the treasures of the church

It was late July, and I was at a small reception around the corner from St. Stephen in-the-Fields to celebrate a couple of community awards being given to the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, still open in our neighbourhood thanks to a court injunction while its Charter challenge is considered, when I heard someone in the hallway shouting, “…right across the street from the church!” The KMOPS team on duty grabbed their equipment, ran from the reception to the street and saved another life.

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.