Justice, Interfaith, and Bathrooms

by Allyson Carr

It’s funny how something as ordinary as the need to use the washroom can spark a profound moment of solidarity.

This past week, I spoke at a conference in Ottawa and attended a community forum as part of our Justice and Faith project. Both of these events featured a performance of Just Faith?, the one-act play that was developed out of the research for that project. Since the play was in many ways a product of our research, it was intended for a Christian audience (the community upon which the research was based). And yet, the way that MT Space (the theatre company we engaged to write and perform the script) works draws on their own life experience, and so there were multifaith elements present throughout the play. The actors’ lives woven into the scenes set it in an interfaith context, even as a play that focuses on Christians struggling to understand Scripture’s call to pursue social justice.

This time around, MT Space introduced a new scene, replacing one that had originally been written by an actor who could not attend the Ottawa performance. In the new scene, a woman recounts the story of her mother and her grandmother opening up their doors to an unexpected swarm of strangers who appeared one day, walking through their small home village in India. The strangers were from all over the world—different ages, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds — but it turns out that in that particular moment these hundreds of people were all united in their need for one thing: a bathroom. While there was only one toilet in the home, the women told us how her mother and grandmother welcomed these hundreds of strangers into their house, fed them what they could, and allowed them to rest for a bit from their travels. She recounted how there were people covering every possible surface in the home and yard, exhausted, but content—now that they had been able to get to that bathroom.

In the new scene, a woman recounts the story of her mother and her grandmother opening up their doors to an unexpected swarm of strangers who appeared one day, walking through their small home village in India.

As the strangers left again a few hours later, they profusely thanked the mother and grandmother, explaining that they were on a walk marking the 75th anniversary of the Salt March—the 1930 protest against British rule led by Gandhi. The actor closed her scene by asking, “I wonder what the world would be like if we all just…opened our doors to each other?” Watching that scene and thinking it over, I wondered too.

For some time now, the CPRSE has been part of a group called the Canadian Interfaith Conversation. The Conversation meets around four times a year, bringing representatives of a number of faiths together to talk about issues facing Canadian society. One of the things we do each time we get together is discuss the various projects we are all working on—many of which, it turns out, have to do with justice. And one of the things that I have enjoyed most is seeing just how much common ground there is among the various faiths present: not so much in what the different faiths believe as in what social issues are important to them, and how they want to act in the public sphere.

At the last meeting, for instance, we heard about a movement that is fasting in order to bring attention to the problem of climate change, and all the damage it is wreaking. We heard about a need to address poverty and homelessness here in Toronto and across Canada. We listened as another member spoke of ways to address the forces that are often root causes of radicalizing youth. We spoke about immigration issues, and policy issues, and working to prevent violence. We heard about groups that are working to promote love and tolerance and respect and peace. We all sat around the same table, shared some food, and, whether we agreed with all of the specifics of what any other person was saying—because of course there were areas where we did not all agree—we listened to what each other had to say.

Different groups host the meetings on a rotating schedule, but as I thought these meetings over after having watched that play, I reflected how these kinds of meetings can only happen in places where we have “opened our doors” to each other. We are all, in one sense, the “strangers” who appear at each others’ doors, having pressing basic needs—even those as simple as needing to use the washroom. How do we respond to each other? How do we treat the sudden stranger in our midst? How are we treated when we are suddenly the strangers? Would you harbour me? Would I harbour you?

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I thought about wrapping up my post on those questions—which are good questions, that already had me thinking quite a bit. But there was one other question raised by this play that has stuck with me, and which is worth raising here. When we spoke at the conference and had the play performed there, it was for an audience that was not its originally intended one. Most of the people at the conference were either academics or community activists, and many of them came from a secular background. We had brought the play to the conference to showcase it as a way that theatre can be used to engage a community, but we were unsure how the play itself, speaking so specifically about Christian faith, would be received.

It was received very well, but it also hit a nerve—as theatre and stories often have the power to do. The first question raised in our discussion period was also the most difficult one: this play is all about justice, and mobilizing Christians for justice, which sounds great, but how can you talk about that when your community continues to exclude and harm my community? The woman who spoke had a rainbow pin stuck to her bag, and the room, I could tell, could feel the emotion, and the justice, behind her question. Suddenly, the presentation became a lot less academic and a lot more personal: strangers, face to face, trying to do what is right and to meet each other, but unsure whether it’s safe to go through the open door that could open—or shut—either way.

Suddenly, the presentation became a lot less academic and a lot more personal...

There is no pat answer to the woman’s question. We could (and did) talk about how there are groups within the Church who work to respond to her question and to right past and present wrongs. But what it all came down to was a question of people working to embody justice in their lives and their faith—and the acknowledgement that people will understand what justice means in different ways, as people understand faith in different ways. Just as when we sit around the table in the Interfaith Conversation, we don’t always agree on everything. Even when we do, it may be for different reasons. Regardless of that (sometimes even because of that) we need to work to reach more common ground, and (truly) common good, or we (where “we” can mean any number of different groups) will continue to harm each other. There is already far too much harm that has been done. We need healing. But before we can begin to heal the exclusions and the harm we have all felt and perpetrated in different ways, we have to be willing to open our doors.

A final note: all through the work of writing this post, I have been thinking as well of the Truth and Reconciliation process that is now officially wrapping up. Apologies have been spoken and doors opened. But, as has been pointed out already by many people, action needs to follow apology in order for true healing and justice to unfold. We can’t act well without first listening to each others’ stories: our joys and our pain, our ignorance and understanding, our hurt and our hope. But to craft justice together, to live well with each other, we have to be able to learn how to act well, together, bridging all the different communities—religious, ethnic, cultural, and identity—that comprise our whole society.

Allyson Carr is the Associate Director of the Centre for Philosophy Religion and Social Ethics at the Institute for Christian Studies.