I am writing this because I want you to understand my world, the world I live in, and the world I live alongside.
Nonfiction | Maggie Helwig | Issue 44
Excerpt from Encampment
Here
It is a secure place, both in the sense that it is indestructible and in the sense that it is safe for the most vulnerable.
– Rowan Williams
One day, as I was starting to write this book, I was leaving the church where I work when an angry woman stopped me, after throwing a bag of garbage into the encampment in our yard, and told me that a person had started sleeping in her yard, and that I needed to tell her how she could find out who it was and make him go away. I suggested that she ask the person himself who he was.
She stared at me as if I had suggested that she fly to the moon for information, and exclaimed, ‘But he takes drugs!’
‘You can still ask him who he is,’ I said.
And she stormed away up the street.
I tell this story not primarily to illustrate how I have come to be seen as responsible for all homeless people within about an eight-block radius of the church, although that is, for some reason, true. I tell it because there is a great gulf fixed, and very few people are willing to cross it. People who have not lived in the world of which encampments are part are afraid, and they are angry. And they cannot imagine that there is a way to cross that line, to speak to a homeless person as a fellow human being, without somehow themselves being harmed, being damaged, being touched by a world they would rather deny. A kinder, more well-intentioned, neighbour once told me he didn’t want to introduce himself to encampment residents, because if they knew he lived nearby, they might knock on his door all the time asking for help. It seems like a reasonable fear, and it is hard to explain that unhoused people have such deep and well-founded apprehensions about the housed world that, even when they are living against the wall of the church, and even when they know we are an institution that is here to support them, it is almost always my job to go out the door and identify need.
I am writing this because I want you to understand my world, the world I live in, and the world I live alongside. I have been an Anglican priest since 2012; I have been the priest at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, in Kensington Market in Toronto, since 2013. We have had, I guess somewhat famously, an encampment in our churchyard since about the spring of 2022, although there was no single clear point when it began, and it is tied up with events and choices going back for years, and is perhaps ultimately the responsibility of the poet and theologian Rowan Williams, who was once the Archbishop of Canterbury. I am writing this because I want you to understand that this is a world of real people, who struggle and are kind, who are often special and beautiful in ways that most of our society cannot and does not try to understand. I want you to understand that I have felt safer here than in most other places, hard as it has sometimes been.
It is a different world, and why I am easy with this world is hard to pin down. Because it is honest, and most people are not honest. Because I have waged my own lifelong battles with depression, anxiety, OCD, probably undiagnosed autism, and because I was viciously bullied through my whole school career and took on board the clear message that the normal world didn’t want me, and I decided fairly early on that I didn’t want them either. Because my parents taught drama and creative writing in the prisons, and there were social dynamics I met as a child that most middle-class people learn in training workshops as adults, if they learn them at all. Because at one point in my twenties, I looked at a man panhandling at Bloor and Bathurst, and thought that I needed to take completely seriously the proposition that he was Jesus. Because my autistic daughter has spent most of her twenty-eight years being expelled from program after program. Because I don’t dress very well, and my hair isn’t very good, and I look more like I belong in the world of the encampment than in the world of the others. Because 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. Because there are reasons I probably don’t even know.
And I am writing this because I do not have much optimism about what is coming in our society, in our world. We are standing at the edge of catastrophic climate breakdown and the fall of a long empire, and all the collateral damage which the fall of an empire brings. Nothing stable is going to last; and the only way that we, the small and the ordinary, might survive in any decent way is if we learn to take care of each other, to do it deeply and consistently and in ways that will change how we think and how we live. This is one story, flawed and incomplete, of people who have been trying to look after each other in very hard times, and some of the ways in which we have been changed.
And I am writing this because if you want to know who someone is, you can ask them.
Maggie Helwig (she/they) is a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, and is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, most recently Girls Fall Down (Coach House, 2008), which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, and was chosen as the One Book Toronto in 2012. Helwig is a long-time social justice activist, and also an Anglican priest, and has been the rector of the Church of St Stephen-in-the-Fields since 2013.
Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig Coach House Books, 2025
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