(Be)Coming Home and (Re)Building Community in the Face of Displacement

The destabilization of home and community through social, political, and geographical displacement in our present geopolitical context reminds us of our own interconnectivity beyond political borders. Against the backdrop of an ever-worsening climate crisis and exploitation of the earth, life as we know it on the planet is threatened. Amid war, violence, oppression, and due to the ongoing impacts of colonialism and capitalism, millions of people are forced to leave their homes, and their homelands. These multiple and intersecting realities are felt around the world and are challenging us to reconsider the scope of what makes home, home.
 
As practical theologians, how can we respond to questions of home, community, belonging and displacement in this context? What kind of resources and tools can practical theology provide to untangle the painful reality in which we live while at same time offering glimpses of hope?  

Home and Community

Home can be a critical space of negotiation in which the deep emotions of love, nurturing, and kindness are experienced. It can also symbolize historical spaces of profound pain and suffering. Indeed, home is much more than the physical dwelling, the reality of a national or cultural identity in a collective sense. It can also be a space of privation and dislocation when people—individuals and/or entire communities—are forced to leave or to migrate because of war, violence, discrimination, contamination, or poverty. The ideas of home and community are intertwined; community encompasses a complex web of relationships and responsibilities for the collective well-being of its individual members. But communities are often destroyed as a result of the realities of our globalizing world including capitalism, socialism, colonialism, racism, climate disaster, etc. These realities can also force home and community to be forged in online spaces, which can be sources of profound connection and trauma. In light of these realities, how can we rebuild a sense of home and community? Because practical theology helps us appreciate the embodied nature of faith experiences, practices, and stories, it can also help us ask critical questions about the nature of home as well as its desecration. What do faith communities contribute in the face of these crises in terms of counselling, trauma-support, ritual, community support, etc.? What resources can we draw from long standing traditions and practices to do so?
 
Home and the Land

The notions of home and community are also connected to land, belonging, and identity, especially for Indigenous peoples in Canada and beyond; people are dependent on the land for sustenance, and they are bound together in a web of relationships with each other and with the land itself, in treaties and covenant relationships. Our senses are connected to the way we relate to the land and they remind us that our faith is embodied. What does home smell like? The salt sea? Honeysuckle? Sweet grass? Coffee? What does home look like? Azure blue skies? Thunder clouds? A vast snowy expanse? What does home sound like? Crickets and cicadas? Whipping winds? Geese calling? What does home feel like? Soaking humidity? Cool breezes? Dry winter cold? What does home taste like? Honey? Hot chillies? Bannock? Bison? Refreshing fruit? Mother Earth nourishes us all in so many rich and diverse ways. Yet this richness and these relationships have been disrupted when historical treaties have been dishonoured, when the connection to the land is destroyed or the land is violated, or when individuals and communities are forced to leave their homeland, to live in temporary homes, to make homes that are inadequate, or to seek multiple sites where home is made. Indeed, religious communities have participated in the destruction of homes and communities. The recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s inquiry (2015) into the impacts of residential schools for Indigenous peoples in Canada is one such example. Through colonialism in Canada, Christian denominations and churches were complicit with the government in the dislocation of peoples; in particular the residential school system removed children from their homes, their communities, their cultural traditions, and tried to erase their Indigeneity. The discovery of the unmarked graves of children tragically illuminates this reality. The ongoing crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada accentuates the fact that home and community continue to be elusive for people who are racialized, poor, and suffer gender-based discrimination.
 
This ongoing crisis also exposes the interconnected nature of the desecration of land and the commodification of peoples and other forms of life as part of the legacy of colonization. As a result, our challenge is to work holistically simultaneously reclaiming the dignity of lands, peoples, and life itself. So, we are called to reflect in humility about how we can address questions of (be)longing to, (re)building, (be)coming, and nurturing community and making homes for all beings without repeating the evils of the past.

Practical theologians can ask how we can become treaty and covenant communities and work toward reconciliation. How can we work towards restoring human relationships with and responsibilities to the land and the creatures of the land built on respect and care rather than exploitation and fear? How can we make homes without destroying the creatures and plants with whom we share the land? How can we honour all our communities rather than feed off the most vulnerable? How can we draw from religious thought and practice to foster forgiveness even when historical treaties have been broken? How can we work against the weaponization of notions of home, community, and the land? How can we (re)story treaty-covenant relations?

Home and the Cultural/Theological

The concept of home and community have deep—and different—cultural and theological resonances. For instance, for some it is connected to the intimacy and identity of a family unit. While for others, it encompasses a broader web of kinship and cultural identity. Home evokes questions of hospitality, relationships, cultural practice, nature, land, and locatedness, as well as brokenness, homelessness, longing, isolation, loneliness, and fear. It can be life-giving or death dealing. It can be marked by mutual love or by unjust power dynamics due to age, gender, ability, etc. It can be forged in material and virtual spaces. Amidst our current reality where life itself has been commodified, the idea of home and homeland, as well as community, gain new theological meanings. Indeed, home and community are knitted into the fabric of our religious practices and theological reflections. Home and community are connected to how we understand our place in the world, the way we relate to our ancestors, and to how we express our faith in the Divine. Places of worship too evoke home and are marked by denominational and religious particularity. And home embodies our spiritual pilgrimage and journey as well; many understand the ultimate connection with the Divine as coming home, or being called home, either in death or through a state of spiritual wisdom.

Practical theologians can make connections between life and death issues, our connection to ancestors and land, and our relationship to the Divine, home, and community. Also, attention can be given to different cultural and spiritual ways of understanding home and community in material and virtual forms. From various faith perspectives and traditions, practical theologians can also address questions of welcome and hospitality.
 
Displacement

The idea of home remains contested as people confront barriers to rooting themselves in new places because of discrimination, xenophobia, access to resources and services etc. Others struggle to make meaningful homes while erecting these sorts of barriers, uprooting homes and severing communities for sake of their own gain. Saskatoon, like other Canadian cities, is no less contested. People in Saskatoon know well the histories of displacement and the search for home. The original inhabitants of the territory have included Nehiyawak (Cree) along with the Saulteaux or Plains Ojibwe, Dakota and the Nakoda or Assiniboine. Other First Nations peoples in Saskatchewan include the Dene, Swampy Cree and Woodland Cree located in northern Saskatchewan, as well there is a Lakota First Nation in southern Saskatchewan. These communities were displaced and their cultural traditions destroyed when European settlers arrived and forced them to live on reserve and attend Indian Residential Schools, despite a negotiated treaty (number six) that is meant to govern the territory. Treaty Six  is also homeland of the Métis Nation, peoples descended from Indigenous and early French or Scottish settlers. Established diasporic communities of exile experience an intense loss of the family in their forced displacement. Saskatoon and the surrounding area has also become home for historic waves of immigrants, especially including Ukrainian, Anabaptist from different cultural traditions, South Asian, Chinese, and Black. Saskatchewan is also home to the Fransaskois, descendants of the French-speaking settlers originally involved in the fur trade.  Many immigrants migrated and established a liminal identity between their cultures of origin and emerging Euro North American colonial cultures.  Now Saskatoon is home to Indigenous people from throughout Turtle Island, as well as immigrants from around the world. Land and sky meet in Saskatoon as multiple people groups with varying degrees of power navigate geographic and political borders in a quest to make home.
 
In the face of displacement, practical theologians can ask what we carry with us when we journey far from home? What does it mean to return home changed by experiences of migration and dislocation? What bears home for us? What kind of theological response and/or practice can confront the walls, barriers, and hostilities that result from brokenness of home, community of nation-state? What kind of theological response and/or practice offers solace, comfort, a sense of home and community, despite displacement and marginalization?

Displacement, Home and Community …

Indeed, displacement is a stark reality experienced by many throughout the world due to the ongoing and intertwined influences of colonization, globalization, capitalism, racism, poverty, gender and sexual discrimination, the climate crisis, contamination, pollution, food security, gun and other forms of violence, etc. All these social and ecological evils are redefining our understanding of home. For instance, seasonal workers make temporary and secondary homes in Canada every summer to work on farms and are vulnerable to exploitation and discrimination. Many others migrate without proper documentation; they risk their lives and remain socially vulnerable in our societies so that they can feed their families back home. During the COVID pandemic, some got stuck far away from home; others experienced profound isolation, losing their sense of home and community; and while some built community in online spaces, others were forced to be alone in hospitals away from home, family, and community.

When the agents of capitalism promise to build homes for some and tear down the homes of others, what possibility is there for practical theologians to publicly and politically critique systemic oppression so that peoples’ capacity to create home and community can be nourished? At the same time, how can we tear down walls that threaten the safety of home and community? How can we work to (re)build homes for those who live in inadequate housing, who make temporary homes, who leave and return home–and perhaps even those who exploit housing for economic gain?

Practical theologians help to make clear connections between theoretical theological articulations and their practical expressions at the grassroots. The conference committee invites participants to engage in these difficult conversations and imagine alternative practical ways of reflecting about and transforming these interconnected realities. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, participants are invited to engage with how practical theology can help us create home spaces that are life-giving for all beings, communities that are thriving, and resources to assist those who face the reality of displacement and hardship. Above all, how can the International Academy of Practical Theology become a better home for its current and future members, fostering interdisciplinary conversation where theory, theology, and practice engage with the purpose of building another possible world.