Amidst the number of new immigrant and refugee families arriving to our city, many churches are opening their doors and hearts to serve and care for our new neighbors. One of these churches is St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Milton with Pastor Hall Kirkam, which served as a day shelter site for many of our new community members from Haiti.
Read below to hear Pastor Hall’s reflection on the experience and how they have lived out Jesus’ call to welcome the ‘least of these.’
P.S. While the state has asked IFSI to pause on day center services until further notice, there are two urgent opportunities for congregations to serve our new neighbors:
- Coordinating a Neighborhood Support Team, with up to $10k grant funding for teams that apply by 7/31
- Coordinating an Intensive English class with IFSI, where churches provide space and volunteers for a three to six hour session so individuals can practice English towards job readiness. Contact Sheldine Jean-Baptiste to set up a call to discuss the details!
I open my windows on days like this, sunny and warm in June while kids are still together before summer, in order to hear the preschoolers on a playground made tidy and furnished with games and such by The Village School, which rents space from us. I watch as a little one wears butterfly wings and chases another who’s on a tricycle (without a hint of the danger that butterflies face from moving vehicles on the highway).
Mark 9:30-37 tells us that Jesus was on his way to Capernaum in Galilee when he told his disciples a second time that he was going to be handed over to the authorities at some point and be killed. After they arrived, he asked them what they were talking about on the road, and they were quiet, because they’d been talking about who was the greatest among them. He told them, “Look, if you want to be ‘first’ as it were, you will need to be ‘last’, the servant of all. Like this child before me: If you welcome one of these children, you welcome me, and you welcome the one who sent me.”
I listen as families from Haiti, parents and preschool children working with Immigrant Family Services Institute (IFSI), make their way through our Memorial Chapel into the Lower Parish Hall for instruction, administrative help, a hot meal, and maybe a suitcase or clothes or a blessing bag of personal hygiene items, safe from the streets and from the gangs they have escaped back home, safe for now anyway in a place that is beautiful, well- and lovingly-cared-for, and made welcome, by the good people at St. Michael’s.
The children who file in are, well, children, thankfully curious and mischievous, mostly ready to play and eager for whatever is next. They, too, are butterflies, chasing one another or peering from a doorway, and on the playground after school has let out.
We began hosting families in our Lower Parish Hall early April 2024, when Rev. Laura Everett from the Massachusetts Council of Churches reached out to parishes in the Milton area to see if any wanted to learn about sharing space. I did, my parish responded to the plan I shared first with Wardens and then Vestry, and then members gamely raised their hands to offer ESL skills, daytime availability to play with kids, and cars for transporting food prepared at Church of the Holy Spirit in Mattapan. We assembled a Signup Genius and an Amazon wish list.
It wasn’t easy. There were challenges with the increasing flows of traffic, which was alleviated as a few parishioners signed up as cab-wranglers to help manage the coming and going of Haitian families while school families were coming and going as well.
In early June, IFSI decided to ‘pause’ at this location, perhaps as things with MassPort, IFSI, the Commonwealth, Haiti, and all the constituent details seem to float in unpredictable patterns and each day brings – as each brought – something unexpected. The generosity of spirit of St. Michael’s parishioners, and then of The Village School, has helped many of us to open our eyes in order that we open our hearts to hold space, resources, and compassion for folks who come to our door.
Matthew 25:40 tells us that, when we welcome the least, we welcome the King.
And Elizabeth Barrett Browning reminds us that:
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God
And only he who seeks takes off his shoes
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.
Our world is hard, butterflies get smooshed by trucks, and people get hunted, tossed aside, and executed by greed and prejudice. Fear turns his wheel indeed, again and again, like Yeats’ widening gyre. “Be not afraid”, Jesus encourages.
If we can allow the possibility of solidarity with the least of Jesus’ siblings – the vulnerable, hungry, and stranger – we’ll discover God without having to squint so hard.
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