“I’m a person with no address”

I was sitting in a hospital room one morning with a dear old saint whose last few years have involved being shuffled from home to home, to the hospital and back again, and whose next destination is unclear. At one point, this person looked at me with a mixture of sadness, resignation, and nearly defeated longing and said, “I’m a person with no address.”

I walked through the hospital hallways, past the innumerable falling-apart bodies for whom the aggregate of these sterile white walls and beeping monitors and anguished cries and faux food housed in plastic might represent their final address. I thought about how hard it must be to feel like all your belonging and permanence in the world has been used up, to feel like you are little more than a problem to deal with, one more sad soul to be shuffled efficiently off toward death.

I thought about the Syrian families that we are hoping to welcome to Lethbridge, Alberta, very soon. I thought about the things they have seen, the things they have experienced, things that I, who have only every known belonging, can scarcely imagine. I thought about what it must be like to be constantly drifting across borders, searching for security, for welcome, for answers, for direction. I thought about what it must be like to feel that you don’t belong anywhere, that you are unwanted, discarded, incidental to the machinations of violence and business-as-usual politicking of a world gone mad.