by Maggie Helwig. From The Anglican, September 2012.

A rough circle of people, on a summer night, around a large flat rock beside a skateboard park, just down the lane from a garden, in one of Toronto’s poorest small neighbourhoods. Bread, made by a parishioner of St Matthias who is also the community centre’s coordinator of food programming, is baking in the park’s wood-fired oven. Nearby, parents pushing children in the creaky old swings, and a circle of tattooed, grime-encrusted young people sitting with dogs on strings and a bottle of something alcoholic. Just to the north, Toronto Western Hospital, ambulance sirens breaking through traffic. To the west, the troubled, transitional, fiercely creative Alexandra Park housing project.

We, gathered in a circle under the trees, are a group with no clear definition, people from the surrounding downtown parishes, from intentional Christian communities, gardeners and bakers and cyclists, monks and anarchists, an autistic teenage girl, me with hay fever and a broken tooth. There are people who enter a church daily or weekly or never. “O Christ, who holds the open gate,” we sing. On the flat rock, covered with a ritual cloth from East Timor, bread and flour and wheat are blessed, and a small loaf from the bread oven is consecrated, broken, given. After the eucharist, we spread food on another nearby rock for a potluck, take almond butter and apricot jam and corn tostadas to the circle of young people and their dogs.

The smaller parishes of Parkdale Deanery have begun to organize occasional joint services, working to develop closer relationships with each other. When the chaplain of Trinity College and I proposed that one such service might be a Lammas Day celebration in Alexandra Park, we knew that it would be about food and community, and the possibilities of sharing both. Lammas Day, an ancient feast celebrating the early harvest, has been little observed since the Reformation, although the Church of England has seen it recently revived. With climate change and impending food shortages threatening, but also an increasing interest in urban agriculture and community food production, it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on our relationship to growth and harvest and the natural world, and how these things connect to our faith.

But the gathering was also, I think, a more profound experience of public space than we had anticipated.

In one of his essays, Rowan Williams talks about the work of the church as preserving “a space where humanity as such is welcome … [a space which] is not defended against anyone; it exists because of the defencelessness of God in the crucified Jesus. Those who occupy it are not charged with marking it out as a territory sharply defined over against territory that is the property of others; they are to sustain it as a welcoming place.”

To become a people who can do this, who can live in a space of defencelessness, means changing ourselves deeply, for our society trains us to guard our territory, to compete for space and resources. It means giving up much that we understand as safety. It is not only about physical space, of course; but space is important. We must learn to use our spaces, the buildings we inhabit, differently than we have done, opening doors, taking risks. But we are also called to be present in those most vulnerable, least defended, public spaces, our street and our parks; to come into them in peace and humility and mutual human weakness, to share our time and food and music and words.

That this service “belonged” to no particular single parish, that people came for reasons often uncertain, that there was mild comedy in wheeling a chalice and paten around on a plastic serving cart, that some people went afterwards to sit with the tattooed kids and eat lentil hummus and talk about pagan/Christian syncretism, all these things matter.

“And when the field is fresh and fair,” we sing in the park, “thy blessed feet shall glitter there.” Christ holds the open gate, and we walk through it, as we can.