“My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” —Thomas Merton
“Dear stranger ….”
I really enjoy the publication Open Secrets. This digital magazine has a feature called “Letter to a Stranger,” consisting of letters addressed to people the writers have noticed or crossed paths with but don’t personally know. “To the Woman on a Park Bench in New York City.” “To the Taxi Driver Who Looped Back to Get Me.” “To the First Responder After the Storm.”
A few of us writers use this idea as a springboard for our own work. For example, a writer friend wrote a beautiful letter to the man she had noticed selling roses on a street corner in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. I wrote a letter to an obstetric nurse whose chance comment to me in a hospital lobby 30 years ago convinced me to be examined again (I thought labor had stopped and was heading home). The exam revealed that my baby’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, and the doctor’s quick action likely saved her life. I never learned the nurse’s name or saw her again.
I grew up in the heart of New York City, where the unspoken rule was never to engage (or even make eye contact) with strangers—on the street, on the subway. To do so would make you vulnerable to attack. As a child, I was terrified of people I didn’t know and learned to assume the worst about them. Even today, when walking (briskly) in the city, I tend to stare straight ahead, making sure my body language reads “do not approach.”
When my husband, Steve, was a kid living in Valdosta, Ga., in the 1960s, there was a billboard as you entered the city on Interstate 75. On the billboard was a picture of two hands clasping, with the message “There Are No Strangers in Valdosta.” Steve used to joke that this was because all strangers were asked to leave. But seriously, in those pre-civil rights days, the billboard seems to have been an attempt to reach across the racial divide in that Southern town.
My grandparents’ generation would share memories of people who, down on their luck, hopped freight cars to travel from town to town during the Depression. It was the custom that residents who had enough food would share it when these strangers came to their doors. These migrant workers even made signs with pictures of cats on them to mark the households where a “kindhearted woman” lived.
A better world can start with a single action. … Take a few minutes, pick up a pen, and write a letter to one of the strangers you’ve encountered. Thank them for simply being in the world and acknowledge the humanity you share.
We are decades removed from the time when (at least in the suburbs) most doors were left unlocked and there were no video cameras to screen the strangers who knocked. It’s hard to imagine ever returning to that societal trust, but if we don’t start moving in that direction, surely nothing will ever change.
There are no strangers to God. We are, all of us, known by God entirely and loved utterly. That includes refugees and immigrants lacking permanent legal status; people of different faiths and ethnicities; the LQBTQIA+ community; children, the elderly; those living with disabilities; people experiencing mental illness. Every single one of these groups has been marginalized by others over the years, has been seen as “less than.” Do we not understand the disconnect between human actions, impulses and those of our Lord?
Why do we insist on remaining strangers to each other? Well, it is much easier to demonize those we don’t know. It is easier to ignore their needs. But it’s much harder to hate someone we see as our sibling. How can we turn our backs on people we have learned to care for? Human beings have made a fraying, frightened, distrustful world in which we struggle to find happiness. Recognizing our unity—the original unity Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton believed is still within us—may be the only thing that will ever give us lasting joy and peace.
What if we all made new signs for our towns, for our front yards? “There Are No Strangers Here. Welcome.” “Kindhearted Person.” What if enough of us do this that it becomes a movement? What if, in a not-too-distant future, alienation and division simply cease to exist?
A better world can start with a single action. Look back on your week. It’s very likely you’ve been among strangers at some point—in line at the grocery store or at the bus stop, for example. Then take a few minutes, pick up a pen, and write a letter to one of the strangers you’ve encountered. Thank them for simply being in the world and acknowledge the humanity you share. Say a prayer for them. Even if you can never send that letter, this exercise will bring them to your mind. Prayer, after all, needs no physical address to reach its destination.
And who knows? There may be someone you haven’t met, someone who saw you this week, who is thinking of you, right now. Who is writing you a letter. Who is praying for you, from their heart. A stranger no longer.
