Life as Performance Art 34

I am attending a small Anglican parish church that is located in a wealthy West Side neighbourhood of Vancouver, attended largely by wealthy West Side gentry. This is so strange. I am neither wealthy, nor am I gentry. I still haven't figured out just how I could have ended up in a Christian denomination full of well-heeled and well-moneyed folk, as is often the case with Anglicans, often old money, especially given that I have always been poor, my roots are decidedly working class/ proletariat. I did not finish university, for the simple reason that I was too poor and struggling to stay alive. I only stumbled quite by accident into the Anglican Communion when I was a callow 25 years of age. I should not feel at home here. I feel at home. Yes, it is awkward at times talking with some of them and visiting in their homes (hey, I have been invited into their homes! Not at all bad, this!) I seem to be able to fake it rather well, except for one little detail. I have not been faking it. I am at home here with these people. I have spent time in other Anglican parish churches. In St. Paul's, by far the most diverse and least wealthy, I did the absolute worst, where I was treated like a pariah by parishioners who would have been assumed to be my peers and likely my best friends. I think this says something rather poignant: that the good will and love of other people is indeed going to go quite a bit further for building community, than being around people with whom you have a lot in common, but you all seem to hate each other. I still want to challenge some of the burghers in my church about their privilege. I am not sure that they really appreciate what they have, nor that they are aware that they represent a very privileged minority. I have absolutely no expectations here. I am not a gold-digger, and I harbour no expectations of being funded or getting a free ride for being poor. I do sense that these people are serious about their Christian faith, as I am. I also recognize that I have a perspective and wealth of experience in life that some of them lack, primarily for my own experience of poverty, the street, homelessness and having to live very creatively on very little. But many of them also have a wealth of life experience that is in some ways going to be similar, in other ways, completely different from mine, and this is where I stand to learn from them. I think this is also God's way of building community by bringing together in his love people who come from very different life circumstances. This week I will have been in this church for one year. I still want to keep coming back each Sunday. I still want to go on building relationships with people here, as they seem also to want to do with me. They have helped make this possible in the way that they have helped me feel welcome, at home, wanted and needed. These are people who, like me, honestly want to be friends, and I sense that, like me, they value friendship. And that for us friendship is a force for good that has to extend beyond our own lives and social and class circles to include and welcome in others from diverse backgrounds and experience. When we love one another, there is no other.