Tag: love

2. Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

I started Maggie Helwig’s Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community late last fall, mostly because of Sadiqa de Meijer‘s post on Instagram about the book (if she says something’s good, I pay attention), but in the rush of work at the end of the semester, I put it down and forgot about it. This week, I decided to finish it, finally, which meant starting over again, since I couldn’t completely remember what had happened in the first half. This time, I read it quickly, reaching the end in two evenings. I’m glad I did. It’s a powerful, beautiful book.

Encampment is about Helwig’s experience as the priest at St. Stephen’s-in-the-Fields, an Anglican church on College Street in Toronto, just on the northern fringe of Kensington Market. In 2013, not long after she started working there, homelessness started becoming a crisis in the area, as people were kicked out of their apartments so that landlords could turn their properties into Airbnbs. Along with members of her congregation, Helwig began ministering to the needs of the unhoused, providing food and shelter in the church. As the crisis grew (as James Cairns points out in In Crisis, On Crisis, if a crisis is permanent, it’s no longer a crisis, so I’m probably using the wrong word to describe the massive problem of people who can’t afford housing, which is present in every community in this country), so did Helwig’s involvement. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the problem got worse. People began pitching tents in Toronto’s parks. Before, encampments tended to be hidden in the city’s ravines or under the Gardiner Expressway, but now they were out in the open. In the spring of 2021, the city began clearing those encampments. People who were unhoused still needed a place to go, and it wasn’t long before they were living in the churchyard at St. Stephen’s-in-the-Fields.

Most of Encampment describes Helwig’s relationships with these new neighbours–some of whom were old neighbours, people she knew from when the church was a drop-in centre. She explains what those of us who have homes don’t understand about those of us who don’t. Being unhoused, for instance, means constant loss: identification, possessions, pets, friends, family members. The shelter system is completely overwhelmed, and getting permanent housing next to impossible, because of arcane bureaucratic rules. There are few supports for people experiencing mental illness, and next to none for people with substance use disorder. But the people Helwig introduces to her readers are more than people with problems:

there are other things I need to explain. And the most important of these is that encampments can also be spaces of grace; that encampments, in a time of great affliction, can be home to creativity and community, healing and mutual support. I need to tell you that this, more than anything else, is what I began to learn in the summer of 2022, and after.

When I read those words, I was reminded of something I was once told by a person who had worked with unhoused youth on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: they were the most generous people she had ever met. The values Helwig identifies in that passage, creativity, community, healing, and mutual support, are the book’s primary focus, but she also presents a scathing analysis of the structures that are causing what’s becoming a permanent population of people without places to live in Toronto and everywhere else, since what she says about that city could be said of every place, including the city where I live.

Helwig’s neighbours are often less supportive. They’re angry and frightened by what they see happening in the churchyard and elsewhere, which is, as Helwig notes, understandable. The brokenness of the unhoused reminds those of us with houses of our own brokenness. That’s what’s scary. She writes,

The world is ill, and the world is fragile. But some people in the world can pretend that they are well. This pretence, on which many people base their identities, is so thin, so threatened by reality, that they must fight constantly to defend it, and fight against anyone who might make them think that it is not true. In the end, more than anything else, it is this, I believe, that drives the complaining neighbours, drives the City bureaucrats when they are brutal or callous, drives the violence that housed people can bring against the unhoused, drives the anger and the fear.

One of my favourite moments in the book is Helwig’s conversation with one of her angry neighbours. She agrees with that woman: “it is terrible, and it shouldn’t be like this, and coming up hard against the truth that we live in a society that will dump people like garbage on the side of the road, and there is no good thing we can do, is an awful moment for anyone who has not been through it yet.” The woman begins to cry and asks to volunteer at the meals the church serves to those who are hungry.

Against that terrible fear, and against the horror of the way late capitalism discards anyone who is not economically productive, which eventually will include all of us, Helwig marshals love. She takes the injunction to “love your neighbour as yourself” seriously. We see that love expressed in the chapters of the book which reproduce homilies she gave; we see it expressed in her actions, in the compassion she offers to others even when she’s facing her own challenges. During Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in 2022, she tells the people who have joined her in the church’s sanctuary, “you are worth loving, you, all your particular, difficult, struggling self, and this world, for all its terrors, is still the world which God declared to be good, and will not abandon.” She calls on them–and us–to be that love, “inasmuch as lies within your human ability,” through our actions:

Love is health workers still going to work in the face of a collapsing system, exhaustion, demoralization. Love is continuing to care for other people in a world of self-interest; love is resisting racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia; love is the baptismal call to strive to respect the dignity of every human person. Love is picking up garbage, wearing a mask, being vaccinated. Love is mutual aid, love is protest, love is bread and coffee and boiled eggs. Love can be very tiring, very boring even, very lonely. But the Word came in loneliness, the city around the stable paying no mind to the infant’s cry.

In a world where billionaires–no, sorry, trillionaires–tell us that empathy is civilizational suicide and try to rewrite human history in a way that excludes the love empathy represents, the love Helwig is talking about in that homily, well, her words are radical. Or, perhaps, it’s the Elon Musks of the world who are the true radicals, the ones who are ignoring the thing that has enabled our species to survive. Anthropologists have found evidence that Neanderthals cared for members of their families and communities who were disabled or injured. How is it that we’ve come up with an economic system, and an ideology that supports it, which ignore the fact that empathy goes that far back in our history? Still, I understand how hard it must be to show other people, especially the ones who are difficult, the kind of love Helwig is describing here. I’m not sure I could do it. I’m not sure it’s in me. Not that Helwig is putting herself forward as a candidate for sainthood, but she doesn’t dwell on the frustration or exhaustion she must’ve experienced dealing with her housed and her unhoused neighbours. Maybe her experiences of being bullied as a child, her lifelong battles with depression, anxiety, OCD, the fact that her parents taught drama and creative writing in prisons, which exposed her to people most children would not meet, and that her daughter has autism and requires constant care, have insulated her from such feelings. When she reflects on the reasons she has a sense of ease with the unhoused, she offers those biographical facts as possibilities, but she also notes that “people on the street, exhausting as they can often be, have also been kind to me, and to my daughter, more consistently than almost anyone else.” Their kindness and empathy, perhaps, have called forth her own.

Helwig is a novelist and a poet, as well as a priest–in fact, she entered the priesthood in middle age, after she had established herself as a writer–and so it’s not surprising that Encampment‘s prose is lovely. I can’t say enough good things about this book, both its form and its content. No wonder Helwig won the $20,000 Toronto Book Award last fall. She deserved to.

10. The School of Life, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

This tiny volume–three essays, 69 short pages–hardly counts as a book. Sometimes, though, that’s all the time someone might have available. The authorship of Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person is credited to a collective, The School of Life, which is the brainchild of British philosopher Alain de Botton. De Botton has a M.Phil. from King’s College, London, and started a Ph.D. at Harvard, but he quit to write books for the general public, or so his Wikipedia profile tells me. The School of Life is his vehicle for reaching that broader audience; it’s an entrepreneurial venture that provides articles that discuss various issues to subscribers. Writers are trying to find ways to earn a living, and maybe de Botton’s method is more profitable than a Substack or relying on revenue from books. He has published a lot of books, some of which seem to be short ones like Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, and others longer and more thorough. The School of Life seems to be a collective venture, with anonymous co-writers following de Botton’s direction. I say “seems” because it’s hard to tell who wrote this book. The title essay, or at least a shorter version of it, was published in the New York Times in 2016, and became that newspaper’s most-downloaded article of that year; I ran across a mention of it somewhere and, curious, decided to get a copy.

Of the three essays, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” is the most successful. It’s a funny and poignant look at long-term relationships. Half of marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many other forms of coupling fall apart. De Botton sets out to explain why that is. The first reason is that we don’t know ourselves. In particular, we don’t understand our own particular craziness. “A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet),” he writes, “it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening accommodation between their relative insanities.” Nor do we understand other people. We enter into marriage without knowing the attitudes of our potential mates towards things like introspection, sexual intimacy, money, fidelity, and “a hundred things besides.” Without that knowledge, we go by physical attractiveness, and that’s not enough for two people to build a life together. We aren’t used to being happy, either. What we learned about love in our families of origin might’ve been tainted by abandonment and humiliation, and since that’s what we believe love to be, we end up choosing people who will cause us more suffering. “We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong–undeserved,” de Botton argues. “We marry wrongly because we have no experience of health and because we don’t–whatever we may say–ultimately associate being loved with being satisfied.” We also marry because being single is awful, and being tired of being alone causes us to choose the wrong person out of desperation.

All three essays argue that, historically, when the Marriage of Reason–marriage as a kind of business contract rather than a love match–was replaced by the Marriage of Instinct or Feeling, the Romantic marriage based on love, we merely changed one source of misery for another. Instead of either of those forms of coupling, we ought to develop a Marriage of Psychology, in which aspiring partners would submit to a process of examination, learn about “the daunting complexities of our respective psyches,” discovering how our potential partners are mad, how we can remain friends, how we can “accommodate our competing needs for extracurricular sex on the one hand and loyalty on the other.”

We also need to understand that happiness is fleeting and inconstant, and accept its impermanence. We need to realize that we’re not special–that most marriages are unhappy, at least sometimes, and ours will almost certainly be, too. Marriage can’t “end love’s painful rule over our lives”: “there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal inside a marriage as there is outside of one.” A psychological marriage, one that accepts this bleak picture, is the only solution to the conundrum of long-term relationships.

The second essay, “When Is One Ready to Get Married?,” continues the rejection of Romantic marriage we see in the first essay, but instead of proposing the psychological marriage as the solution, it suggests that a marriage based on Classical principles would make more sense. So, we are ready for marriage when we give up on perfection; when we realize we won’t ever be perfectly understood; when we realize we’re crazy and in what way; when we’re ready to love rather than be loved; when we’re ready to take on administrative tasks, since running a household with someone is similar to running a business; when we understand that sex and love both belong and don’t belong together, a paradox that must be mastered, since over our lives we may “be called upon to demonstrate both capacities”; when we are happy to be taught and are also calm about teaching; and, finally, when we realize that we’re not that compatible with our partners. Marriage is not intuitive; it is a skill, and it requires practice and instruction.

The last essay, “How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives,” argues that while fiction can teach us important lessons about love, the wrong kinds of stories–Romantic rather than Classical–mislead us. The Romantic plot is about finding a partner, for instance; the Classical plot is about tolerating a partner, and being tolerated by them, over a long period of time. The Romantic story ignores the overwhelming importance of work; the Classical story does not. The Romantic story forgets about children; the Classical story understands that children can create “unbearable strains” between a couple, and those strains are also love. The Romantic story doesn’t consider practicalities; the Classical story emphasizes things like laundry and other household tasks. The Romantic story teaches that love and sex belong together; the Classical story “knows that long-term love may not set up the best preconditions for sex,” and that sexual problems don’t necessarily indicate that a relationship is failing. The Romantic story thinks that harmony between the protagonists is fundamental to a successful relationship; the Classical story accepts that relationships include misunderstandings, secrets, loneliness, and compromises. Again, love is a skill we need to learn, not an instinct. “The Romantic novel is deeply unhelpful,” the essay concludes. “By its standards, our own relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory.” We would be better off if we told ourselves “more accurate stories about the progress of relationships, stories that normalise troubles and show us an intelligent, helpful path through them.”

You might think all of this feels rather bloodless and overly rational, as if Spock had become a couple’s counsellor (when he’s not experiencing pon farr, that is). Or you might think about your relationship(s) and realize that the arguments this little book makes contain a lot of sense. I think there’s a lot of sense here, but I also think it might be almost impossible to put much of what’s advocated here into practice. That’s okay. I’m curious about de Botton’s other writing–he’s published dozens of books, translated into dozens of languages, according to Goodreads–and I might dip into them in the future. I’m curious about How Proust Can Change Your Life, for instance. Maybe it would encourage me to take the shrink wrap off my multivolume edition of In Search of Lost Time (I think I have the one with the new title, not the one called Remembrance of Things Past). That would fill a gaping hole in my education.