The third week of our Christian spiritual practice challenge is a powerful yet simple practice: talking with strangers.
Our principal, Alan Gregory, explains more about this week’s challenge.
Good luck!
Choose a place full of life
On the safety front, avoid dark alleyways, empty parking lots, and cemeteries after midnight. Chances are you won’t meet anyone, but if you did, you wouldn’t want to. Daylight is good, and somewhere not too busy or too empty. The busy won’t stop, and empty space will likely stay that way.
Town or city parks, especially the more central ones, and shopping malls, if not too frantic; wherever folk sit down to rest, in high streets, outside shops, cafés, seafronts, and places that offer something to talk about—museums, galleries, libraries—these all work pretty well. If you have a dog, go where people walk dogs. Also, choose somewhere you won’t run into family, friends, or neighbours, because that’s cheating.
Deepen your spirituality by talking with strangers
You don’t know who you will meet, nor if anyone will talk with you; you might have several conversations or none. That is the point, though. You give yourself over to what might happen or might not. You cannot guarantee that you’ll have the conversations you might hope for, nor can you control to whom you speak.
You might meet with the grumpy, the miserable, the earnestly chatty, the curious, the harried mother, a lost child, a park official, a truant teenager, someone unemployed, exercising, enjoying a walk, praying, grieving, lonely, looking for the cat, eating their sandwiches, or you might get Jehovah’s Witnesses. You don’t know.
Become vulnerable
To this extent, you are vulnerable. To this extent, too, you have allowed yourself into a space shaped like you actually live, unlike how we usually think we live. You are not your own; you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. That is the truth and also the truth into which the Holy Spirit draws and remakes us.
We are not in control. Even under normal circumstances, we manage less control than we think. Believing in Christ, though, we slowly learn to rejoice in not having the control we thought we did. We let it slip through our fingers and find ourselves the better for our loss. Our scrabbling for mastery of life did us little good anyway.
You are “in Christ,” Paul tells us; the source of your life is outside you. Your vitality, if you’ll let this be so, is the Holy Spirit; your worth and good name is Jesus. You don’t know who you’ll speak to or what you’ll say. So bless your uncertainty, and live gladly in uncertainty, because that is God’s freedom for the working of life.
Will they take up your invitation?
Don’t think of yourself as “doing good.” You’re not doing this as ministry or mission. Who knows what might happen, but don’t protect yourself in advance by taking up a role, setting an objective, or deciding what you or anybody else should “get out of” your hanging about for conversation.
All that risks shielding us from surprise, buffering us from experience by setting down conditions, disguising ourselves in a role. You are not in the ministerial cat-bird seat here. You may give, you may receive, neither or both.
This is important because your practice takes you among strangers. Most of our exchanges, especially with people we don’t know, take a conventional form: polite good mornings, nods of recognition, daily transactions, comments on the weather. Since you have no set purpose here beyond conversation, you’re rather out of place, like a busker on Wall Street.
That is what you bring: a piece of grit or a sudden, small obstruction in the flow of passing by. You want to talk. Many will barely register this, knocking away the pebble as they move on. Some, I hope, will take up your invitation to jump the familiar track, if only for a moment or two.
The disruption of Christ
The early Christian theologians understood that, through Christ, God has interrupted the flow of fallen humanity and derailed it, as it were. Like a family who returns to an old home, opening the doors and windows, pulling off the dust sheets, and lighting the fire, God has opened the space of a common life for which the only right of membership is sharing in the same humanity that the Son took to himself.
Neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female. “Satan has broken us up,” said the theologians, and Adam is divided over the whole earth, scattered in pieces. Now, though, “what was divided is made one; what was at odds is at peace.”
The odd conversation with strangers may not seem much, nor seem to lead to much, but in doing it, you show joy in the reconciliation that has gone before you.
The spiritual practices challenge—how it works
Each week, we’ll suggest a new spiritual practice to help you open your heart and mind to the mystery of God’s presence.
We’ve got four interesting challenges lined up for February, and we’d love for you to join us.
Share your progress
We’d love to see how you’re doing. Share your progress and inspire others by posting on Facebook or Instagram using the hashtag #StAugSpiritualPractice.
Ready to join?
Check our blog page and socials for weekly challenges, and let’s make February 2025 one to remember!
Watch our short intro video to learn more
In this video, Alan Gregory talks about the spiritual practice element of our upcoming Spirituality and Discipleship taster term, starting in March 2025.
