Last month I suggested that President Obama's rise was the most shining metaphor for the societal changes that have already taken place. And it is, of course, but it is still a remarkable feat. The landscape may have shifted ages ago but he is the first to break through a very important barrier. His achievement gives hope to many who thought barriers were solid and unmoveable. All it takes is one person to make the unimaginable, the unfathomable, suddenly doable.
I witnessed this myself last fall. My congregation, after much effort, much prayer, hard work, after years of bad luck and some bad management, after much debate and some more prayer and lots of hopefulness despite the seeming odds, recreated itself as a mission to serve youth and women in the economically challenged neighbourhood of Flemingdon Park in Toronto. (Church is often the last place one turns to for spiritual enlightenment and faith-deepening but there are many of us at Gateway Community in awe of how this mission came together – but that is another story and I will tell it one day. But it will wait its turn, behind many other equally amazing miracles from across the denomination queued to be shared.)
The mission begins with an after-school homework group, which in time will grow into a program to reach the mothers of those school children. Immigrant women are arguably the most difficult demographic to reach for social service agencies. The Flemingdon Gateway Mission is designed to work with them.
I dropped by one day and met with some of the older kids who act as volunteers for the school-agers. There were about a dozen, circumstantially all Afghans, all in their mid-teens. Each of them spoke a minimum of three languages; one spoke eight. They were all born in Afghanistan but most had left there by the time they were two years of age. They'd grown up in Pakistan or Iran or Uzbekistan, some in Russia and parts of Europe, on their way to Canada.
If you knew none of this about them, if you didn't notice that the women had some form of head covering, if you ignored their very slight accents, if you listened only to how they spoke and of what they spoke, you would rightly assume they were just typical teens, like any other teen; Canadian teens. They were flippant and serious; confused and hopeful; they had myriad questions about the future but were wary of easy answers. They made casual references to popular culture. They were aware of ubiquitous celebrity gossip. And the one name that came up most often was Barak Obama.
Immigrants are cautious folk. Being one myself, I have been in their company my whole Canadian life. They don't dare to dream big. They control their hopefulness; they have too many challenges to overcome. And certainly this was true in part for these youth.
One woman was worried about going to university and it was difficult for me to explain to her that if she really wanted to go and she had the grades, then there were enough ways within Canada to help her reach that goal. She was wary; but polite.
But here was a 15-year-old, less than two years in Canada, dreaming of being a doctor. Another of being a diplomat. Another of being a lawyer. I made a joke about this and one of the men laughed back, saying only “Obama.”
The impossible is now possible. Why not?
I wish the metaphor were Canadian, or Presbyterian, or Christian. But it's not. All three of those specific examples are mired in ancient templates, pretending to be modern, afraid of change for change's sake, as if that option were still a valid option. Of course, at any point over the past decade of American politics one would wonder if that country would ever grow up. But, something happened. So much so, that young people who have spent their lives in refugee camps suddenly dream of becoming world leaders. That's a miracle.
A miracle now housed in the care of another miracle that grew spiritually out of Gateway Community Church.
