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Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community
by Maggie Helwig, published by Coach House Books, Toronto, Ontario, 2025.
ISBN 978-1552455043
Half a block from where I live on the East Side of Vancouver, Canada, there was a tent city, a collection of some three hundred tents, and many more people. For about a year, around about the time of Covid, the tent community was there, through the heavy rains we have, the mud and the cold. Propane tanks blew up frequently, people were injured. There were fights and injuries, and one death. Throughout my neighbourhood there was a mixture of emotions and opinions about what was happening in the biggest park in this part of the city.
At the same time, halfway across the country in Toronto, writer and Anglican priest, Maggie Helwig, was living with an encampment of a much smaller number of tents. She'd come to know each of those who lived outside her church's doors, and to care for them. Her parishioners came to care, too, as she mediated with the city--which claimed the property under the tents, even though it appears to be part of the church yard. There was no paper to prove where the lines might be.
Mother Maggie was a writer before she was a priest, and her prose is moving, meaningful, poetic. She includes some of her homilies, as well as images of the time. Mostly, from opening page on, she desires to introduce one human to another--the reader to those who, for a disparate set of reasons, live outside of her church. Her need to connect and heal is evident throughout.
I'll share a paragraph with you, and if you wish to purchase from your local independent book-seller, use the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) above. It makes the ordering process easy!
"The Word has come to dwell with us. The Greek word is literally something more like 'pitched a tent with us.' When I preached on this reading on Christmas Eve two years ago, I said that 'we are called to love's encampment.' I really did not suppose that we would be called quite so literally as we have been this year. But there is so much hope in the way that this congregation has risen to this challenge, without hesitation, even in the face of hostility, and there is so much hope in the way that the residents in the encampment have supported each other; that, although human lives are always difficult, and living in a tiny dense circle of tents is not how human beings should live, people have struggled through all their circumstances to be kind. This is where the Word has pitched a tiny, human tent."
review by newsletter editor, Alison Acheson
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