Life with the door open
By Rachel Lambie
Editor’s note: Every year St. James United Church in downtown Montreal welcomes tens of thousands of visitors, not counting those attending Sunday worship, weddings, funerals, concerts and other events. The Open Door program is coordinated by Rob Bull, editor of the Clarion/Le Clairon, who is paid a stipend by the church. Students like Ms Lambie are hired each summer to help. Rachel was raised in the United Church and is in her first year of religious studies at Bishops University in Lennoxville, QC.
MONTREAL — “Hello! Welcome to St. James. Bonjour! Bienvenue a St. James.”
I said these words for just about three months this summer, while working on the Open Door for one of Montreal’s oldest churches.
As with any experience, one collects a certain amount of anecdotes about day-to-day life. I would like to share three of those anecdotes. One is the story of my first Sunday at St. James, the second is about the prayer candles, and the third is about a conversation that I had with a man about God.
My first week of working the open door wasn’t particularly busy – well, for St. James, that is. The church had one to two hundred visitors each day… numbers that I have come to think of as ‘slow days’. (This point is especially true after the day we had seven hundred people… ever since then, most days seem pretty slow)
The first Sunday that I was there, there were about a hundred people who were there to worship, and another hundred or so who were there to visit the church. I was amazed! My home churches only get congregations of a hundred at Christmas. After everyone was inside, Rob looked in, and said something like, “Wow, small congregation today.” I just laughed. The idea of a hundred people being a small congregation…
In the front of the sanctuary, on the right-hand side of the church, the congregation of St. James has set up prayer candles, not unlike big churches in Europe, where one can pay to light a candle. These candles are little tea-lights, and they sit in little glass cups that come in blue, red, yellow, and green. They sit at the far end of the church from where the door is, and when the church is set up in the morning, there are always one or two candles lit so that they can be seen from the door, which makes it easier for people who are coming to light candles to see where they are. On really busy “candle days”, as I call them (days when lots of candles are lit) the wood panelling just above the candles starts to glow. If there are enough candles lit, you can see the glow from the door. This is one of the greatest images for me. Those days give me hope, because I can look into that dark corner and see the glow from people’s candles.
One thing that is good to know about working the Open Door is that the really hot days, the days when it is over 30˚C outside the church, tend to be slower days. It’s nice, though, because when it’s that hot, you don’t really feel like moving, and the people who actually make it into the church don’t really feel like asking questions, because it’s just too hot to function. We had a few of those days one week in July, and we ended up just sitting by the fans drinking water, trying to keep cool. The people who were coming in weren’t staying very long, and I suspect it’s because they were expecting the church to be cooler indoors. It wasn’t.
There was one man who came into the church who was wearing a ball cap. It’s customary in Montreal to take off your hat when you enter a church, and we told him so. He obliged, but asked why. He was wondering if it was out of respect for God. That ended up being a bigger discussion, and he asked many questions that people don’t frequently get the chance to ask. If you did something that you knew was wrong, would God protect you from punishment? Why does God allow wars to be fought in his/her name? What is the nature of God? These were questions that he felt he needed to ask, but that in retrospect are questions that are difficult to answer and need to be asked anyways.
It was difficult to answer him – I am not nearly qualified to be giving pastoral advice, I don’t even have a degree in religion yet. And I don’t think that it was about answering the questions, because there aren’t really answers, but about talking them through and coming up with feelings, or ideas, that make sense.
I told him what I could. I told him what I believe, and started off the conversation with, “This is what I believe, but what I believe may not be what other people believe.” I told him that in some ways, God is like a cut gem, with many facets. I may see one facet of God, and the facet that I see might not be the same one that he sees. That doesn’t mean that what I see is wrong, nor does it mean that what he sees is wrong. When wars happen in God’s name, what happens is that one side says, “My facet of God is the only facet – if you don’t see it my way, you’re wrong.” And that’s where the problem is. God isn’t just one facet of this gem. The beauty of the gem is in all the facets, and in how people see them.
It was a difficult conversation to have, because I was afraid of saying something wrong. But I think that it was a conversation that this man needed to have. He was looking for somewhere to have this conversation, to figure these things out, and one day when he was walking along St. Catherine Street, there was this sign in front of a church that said ‘OPEN’, and he went in, and was able to talk about things and try to understand.
Maybe that’s what the world needs: more church doors with signs that say ‘OPEN’ and someone inside who’s willing to have conversations. St. James gets two hundred people coming to their church on slow days. These are people who, for the most part, are tourists who just want to see the church. For some people, it’s their first time in a church. For others, they’ve been coming to church their whole lives. Some people are Roman Catholic, and come into the church and ask where the Holy Water is. Some people live on the street, and come in to find their way to the drop-in centre in the back of the church. But whatever it is that calls them to the church, the fact still remains that the church is open to them, and that they can go in.