It often helps to keep things in perspective. Despite my complaints about not feeling welcome anywhere for Christmas, I do have a home. I was also invited to a Christmas brunch in the common room of my building Christmas day, but had already made plans to be at church and not eat the brunch afterward, though I was present. I had mistakenly picked the salmon quiche (I am vegetarian) because someone had misguided me, and after choking up the small mouthful I had taken in the bathroom, decided that I wasn't really hungry after all (and I wasn't hungry) and simply didn't eat anything.
It was rather difficult getting through the church service since I felt really hostile towards everyone, and no one had thought of including me in their plans for this Christmas, so I went downstairs for a drink of water so I wouldn't have to exchange the peace with people I was angry at. I still got on well with people afterward, despite my feelings of sadness and hostility, had to field a rather unpleasant visitor who remembered me from the Flakers (my lovely pet name for the Quakers), and she really acted like she didn't know me, but to cut her slack, she had aged so much and so badly, that I didn't even know her. But she is simply not a pleasant person. I remember getting so sick and tired of her unrelenting rants against Christians (the Flakers are not exactly Christian) that I had to end the friendship almost eighteen years ago because she was so negative and abusive, so maybe she was too embarrassed or, like most narcissists, simply blames everything on others.
I'm not sure that she is aware really of the first time I really came in contact with her. That was back in the nineties, before we met at the Flakers. I was on the Broadway bus, westbound, near its conclusion at Alma Street. She and I were the only remaining passengers, and she was relentlessly nagging, and lecturing, hectoring and chewing out the driver about something that really didn't matter. I also wondered if she was picking him out because he was South Asian and wearing a turban. Finally, I spoke up and said to her that life must be very hard for people like her when they are so busy being the centre of the universe. She actually had the gall to reply that there was nothing wrong with being the centre of the universe. When the driver asked me for my phone number in case he needed a witness, given that he was going to file a complaint against her, I happily complied. Since she doesn't seem to have changed much, I only hope and pray that she was only visiting St. Faith's for Christmas Day and we are not likely to see her darken our doorway again.
I did end up sitting with two young Japanese women who are here to learn English. They were nice, humorous and didn't seem to mind visiting a church full of old people. The Christmas brunch was not really comfortable. Those things rarely are. It was downstairs in the church basement. There is no comfortable place to sit and just hang out and visit, and it all seems so perfunctory, so that no one can really relax and just be themselves, everything gets packed and cleaned up as quickly as possible so that everyone can go home to their Christmas celebrations with the people that really matter to them. Except, I as always had nothing to go home to, except for a couple of friends in Colombia with whom I could Skype, and one of them had to postpone till later because he was at work that day.
The Christmas brunch is better than nothing. But at St. Faith's, we really have to do a lot more for people to feel more included, and this is also going to mean redefining what we mean by family, since if people are going to continue to exclude folks like me and leave us to welter in our loneliness just because we are not related to them, well, that does not really reflect the Gospels or the teachings of Jesus, now, does it? But wish me luck getting any of this across to all those selfish and rather stupid and stubborn Anglicans.
Still, when I see that someone has to sleep out on the sidewalk in this weather, especially at Christmas, I know that I also have blessings to count. I could do a lot worse for Christmas. I could also do quite a bit better.
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