The Unhoused in Guelph: A Conversation between Cathy Stewart and Kevin Coghill

This is an interview that Rev. Cathy Stewart initiated with Kevin Coghill around the situation of the unhoused in Guelph. We have reprinted it with permission. (Cathy Stewart’s voice is in bold, Kevin Coghill in normal text.)

Encampments have returned to St George Square. What are the challenges you see in this, and are you aware of ideas or plans (RCM or the city) to address this need?

There are many challenges with people sheltering in the square, but unfortunately it has taken the visibility of our homeless population to get a response from municipal leaders.  This is a Provincial and a National problem but ultimately it is within our city. 

RCM is working to address the basic needs of those who are sheltering outside, and we are seeking solutions to meeting the need, however, this is a massive cost. We have been working with the Guelph Tiny Home Coalition to find suitable land to build tiny homes and community space (kitchen, showers etc.). 

The city has passed a bylaw that will limit “where, when and how” many people are able to live on public lands, along with a map that outlines these spaces, although the map and parameters of the bylaw have not been fleshed out for the public. The struggle is that the Supreme Court has challenged some of these bylaws in other cities because they go against Human Rights. If the city is to enforce the bylaw, there will be a lawsuit that will cost a significant sum of money that could have gone to a solution instead of a legal battle. 

Many people get uncomfortable when seeing people living in tents, minimally housed. What do you see and how do you feel when you see this?

It is very uncomfortable for everyone to see people living in tents. I believe this is a multifaceted response but it should assault our sense of “right and wrong”. It is wrong that people who have trauma and mental health issues, are removed from housing, or banned from shelters, but not admitted into programs that could help. With a 10 year waiting list for both housing and programs we will continue to see this problem grow. People fear those who in living in tents because they see a desperation, a lack of hope and wonder what a person experiencing that kind of hopelessness might do. 

I see people who are not valued in society, who, even if they were to find a job, that job couldn’t sustain them because of the cost of living. 

I see people that Jesus hung around with and who we are meant to learn from and welcome in. 

I see the ones who Jesus says: “You visited Me in prison, clothed Me, gave Me a drink of water.”

I too am uncomfortable…that our systems keep people in poverty….that housing, while declared a Human Right, is not being built for those who are most vulnerable…that we still have a huge stigma around people who struggle with mental health issues and addictions.

And I am uncomfortable that local businesses are struggling in the downtown, although I do not believe this is only due to the encampment situation,  but also a change in how people shop, and the amount of disposable income people have.

Many people get uncomfortable when they see people injecting themselves in public. What do you see/feel in that situation? 

I also am uncomfortable with people injecting themselves in public and I acknowledge that I have a home to consume a beer so that not everyone sees me partaking. 

Some of the  people who have come to express their concerns over public drug use, host parties in their own home with excessive alcohol and even designer drugs..they simply have a home to do these things privately. 

Most of the drug use we see is a direct result of trauma and a desire to escape the pain that life brings…if we could help address the trauma, we would see less open drug use. 

My heart is broken for those who use in open spaces, it is a reminder to me of the pain they experience every day…and of the judgment they receive for dealing with trauma in the only way they know. The terrible reality of this is that the stigma makes drug use worse…people are more and more rejected and most experts tell us that it is community and connection that helps to heal. 

You have noted that the current housing crisis is 40 years in the making, and caused by many factors, so there is no quick fix.  What do you see as the root of the challenge, and do you know of any models that seem to carry some hope?

There are models in other countries that are working, however,  Canada is behind in social housing.

“In January 2023, Scotiabank released a report calling on governments in Canada to double the country’s stock of social housing – deeply affordable housing where rent is set at 30 per cent of household income. Currently, Canada is an outlier amongst OECD countries: social housing makes up about 3.5 per cent of Canada’s housing stock, as compared to the OECD average of 7 per cent.” Canada Centre For Housing Rights. 

We need to push all levels of government to address this issue while looking for ways to fill in gaps. I have wondered if the Church could address the hosing issue by taking existing buildings that are underused and transform them into housing (not very popular with churches). RCM has been looking into how our building could become partial housing.

What spiritual practice helps you stay focused and grounded in your work?  And/or hopeful?

Contemplative prayer has been very helpful in keeping me focused and grounded, my favorite  comes during early morning walks as I mediate on “And God breathed the breath of life upon his face”. 

This prayer reminds me that I am made in the image of God. 

In the rain…in the snow…in the heat…in every situation, God is breathing the breath of life upon my face. This helps me to see that God is also breathing the breath of life into each person that I encounter…those living in tents…those who are just released from jail…those who are struggling with mental health concerns…those who are uncomfortable seeing tents in the square. 

My connection to those who are struggling keeps me hopeful…seeing God’s image hidden…looking for ways to show that person whose image they are made in…knowing that Jesus was criticized for who he hung out with, all help me in my work. 

10 Years

The nexus of Two Rivers Church was a mostly ordinary living room in a mostly ordinary townhouse on a mostly ordinary street in a mostly ordinary city called Guelph. This was just over 10 years ago, so, you could say that, loosely, this is our mostly ordinary 10th anniversary! We are people who celebrate the ordinary, because, we trust that God is always arriving into those ordinary places opening up the possibility that we will notice something is happening that is not immediately obvious to the casual observer. We are talking about the distinct possibility of encounter with the holy. This does not have to be, and rarely is, an earth shattering experience; it is more like an ‘aha', an insight that brings one out of a stupor and into aliveness. We think that the wonderful possibility of more aliveness in Christ is a wonderful thing to discover in the world, and a wonderful thing to offer to the world as well. So this Fall, in our 11th year, we continue to gather in Living Rooms to share these experiences, and to remind each other that they happen more often than we know, and to encourage each other to stay alert to the possibility. We hope you can join us there and get in on the ordinary to discover the extraordinary joy of life with God. GS

Dr. Paul Farmer

Dr. Paul Farmer died this week, and many people made note of this in the media. He was a physician who did extraordinary work amongst the poor and suffering of the world in Haiti and Rwanda amongst other places. Once when he was asked by one of his admirers what had kept him in global health when so many people had become disillusioned or burned out, his answer was "Doing hard things with friends". I found that moving and inspiring. This month we are going to reflect on the concept of 'ministry' at Two Rivers. A definition of ministry is 'to serve, or attend to the needs of others'. Those are hard things to do, and the practice has fallen on hard times as we are more obsessed with our own needs, wants, desires, rights, and opinions than ever before. It seems to me that a defining mark of a healthy church is its willingness to do ministry together, or perhaps as Paul Farmer described it - do hard things with friends. Come and join in our conversations about these matters. GS

Advent Is About Invitation

Come Lord Jesus. Christians have created a season in which to restrain the impulse we have towards completion in order to inhabit the not yet (although we haven’t been very successful at it). The guest has not yet arrived, but, we have set the table and prepared the feast. Some have learned that there is a deep wisdom and deliciousness in planned waiting that is fulfilled when the feast is finally engaged.

Covidtide has discouraged us from invitation, and has put boundaries on our hospitality, in fact, it has squelched it! So, we have learned habits of dampening our enthusiasm for guests, and sought comfort in isolation. This will not be sustainable! May we seek even more diligently to exercise creativity in invitation. May we begin with a hospitality that makes room for the coming of Christ in our hearts. Then in a hospitality that sees him in the guests that we are missing, but, so desperately need at our tables: friends, neighbours, strangers, and even enemies. Let us find new ways to invite and host, that will be different, but no less critical for the growth of the Kingdom. Come, Lord Jesus! GS

Watch The Goodness Project Video — Stories of Our City: Tragedy Ann

Local musicians, Tragedy Ann, discuss their origin, the reciprocal nature of connections in the artistic community, their latest album, the friendships they've formed through their music, and where they find inspiration.

Nothing to Say

There is so much to comment on right now. If you run into someone on the street, or in the grocery store, even if you don't know them, it is easy to strike up a conversation, "How are you coping in Covidtide? Do you have that problem with glasses fogging up too? Can you believe the US political fiasco? Do you think the vaccine will get here soon?" Ad nauseam.

Right now, I feel like I don't want to say anything at all. Perhaps the only hope I can offer in this Advent time is to shut up and look someone in the eye and hold the thought that we are suffering together, and we both know it. Perhaps with the raising of an eyebrow, we can communicate that it's okay to have pain. If we can acknowledge it without having to probe the wound with trite words, then maybe we won't suffer as much. I don't suggest being rude or unkind or impolite, I'm just wondering if it would be ok to resist speaking.

Perhaps that's what Advent waiting will look like this year, being a people who convey Christ's love and gracious presence by having nothing to say. GS

Watch The Goodness Project Video — Thin Places: The Ward

The Ward is an old Guelph neighbourhood near the downtown that used to be a manufacturing district with housing for the factory employees throughout it. The area has many unique features including murals, repurposed old business and church buildings, and a community garden. The song playing in the background is a cover of "93 Million Miles" by Jason Mraz performed by Sember Wood.

A Sacrament of the Ordinary

As we continue to draw your attention to the Goodness Project videos week by week in this blog, I’m reminded of the beauty of ordinary people and places. It is human nature to exalt and draw attention to celebrity, extraordinary human achievement, and exceptional places in nature and the built environment, but at Two Rivers we have always emphasized the sacrament of the ordinary.

In fact, we want to be set free from the addiction to hyperbole that we mainline day in and day out on our media machines. The irony is that we’re using media machines to tell these stories, but, maybe while there, we can learn the arts of temperance and modesty and humility, those unwelcome strangers in our lives.

The people in these videos are not slick or polished, particularly eloquent or brilliant, they are simply aware (and becoming aware even as they are asked great questions by the interviewers off camera) of the importance of having an ordinary story that is woven into the fabric of goodness that exists here in our neighbourhoods.

We also have discovered that this kind of practice leads us closer to encountering God in the ordinary, and the awareness that God inhabits the small and ordinary things of our lives with great love. GS

Watch The Goodness Project video — Stories of Our City: Lisa Downey

Lisa Downey describes the similarities she sees between her home of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Guelph, the connections she has formed with The Vienna customers, and how the restaurant has become a cornerstone for many generations of Guelph citizens.

The Goodness Project

The Goodness Project video features a story on how a common interest in sporting competition creates opportunity for young people to learn effective skills for navigating life. That’s all good, but, what I found most inspiring was the notion of mentoring. In this ‘goodness’ story, here was a clear relationship identified where a wiser and experienced individual took an active interest in passing on what he had learned to younger people needing direction. 

Robert Bly’s book ‘The Sibling Society’ laments the loss of mentoring. The great flattening of our world, where the ‘freedom’ to be ourselves eschews structures and ancient ways, in order to be authentic. He argues that no one is being called into a life of growing up, becoming an adult. What we fail to see is that we are always being formed by forces and pressures that overtly, and perhaps more often subtly, have an agenda for us.

The question to be asked is, what will we allow, or choose, to form us? This requires a great deal of careful thought and attention. At Two Rivers Church, we believe that the life of following Jesus benefits greatly from thinking of ourselves as his apprentices, being trained and formed in his ways. That means finding wiser and more experienced mentors to help us in that task.

Are you looking to be formed in a meaningful way? Consider joining us on the journey of being mentored in the life of Jesus for the sake of a healed and beautiful world.

Glen Soderholm 

Watch The Goodness Project video — Shaker and Ayden Adeyanju-Jackson

Shaker talks about starting his basketball training program, creating more courts, and the inspiration he draws from the kids he's worked with that have overcome adversity. Ayden, a basketball player and student at Queen's University, speaks about the role basketball and Shaker have played in his life.

Closer to God

One of the practices we try to encourage at TRC is culture making. Every human is a culture maker, because each one is required to make something out of all the raw materials that life gives. Here is a great reflection on making by Jeff Tweedy the frontman for Wilco:

“I just like writing songs. It’s a natural state to me. I like to believe that most people’s natural state is to be creative. It definitely was when we were kids. When being spontaneously and joyfully creative was just our default setting. As we grow we learn to evaluate and judge. To navigate the world with some discretion. And then we turn on ourselves. Creating can’t just be for the sake of creating any more. It has to be good. Or it has to mean something. We get scared out of our wits by the possibility of someone rejecting our creation.

It bugs me that we get this way. It bugs me a lot. I think just making stuff is important. It doesn’t have to be art. Making something out of your imagination that wasn’t there before you thought it up, and plopped it out in your notebook or your tape recorder, puts you squarely on the side of creation. You’re closer to God. Or at the very least, the concept of the Creator.

If a work of art inspires another work of art, I think it’s accomplished its highest sense of duty. People look for inspiration and hope. And if you have it, you share it. Not for your own glory but because it’s the best thing you can do. It doesn’t belong to just you.

No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, ‘Thank God I didn’t make that song. Thank God I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank God I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.’ Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something. No matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been.”

Jeff Tweedy

Watch The Goodness Project video — Thin Places: Heffernan St. Bridge

The Heffernan Street bridge has a long history dating back to 1914. Its elevated position provides not only an excellent point to look out over the river, but its high arches are beautiful to view from the shore as well, casting impressive reflections into the river below it. The song playing in the background is a cover of the song “Places We Won't Walk” by Bruno Major, performed by Sember Wood.

‘Our Days Have Always Been Running Out’ by Margaret Renkl

(From a New York Times article by Margaret Renkl)

Autumn light is the loveliest light there is. Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world an illuminated dream. Dust motes catch fire, and bright specks drift down from the trees and lift up from the stirred soil, floating over lawns and woodland paths and ordinary roofs and parking lots. It’s an unchoreographed aerial dance, a celebration of what happens when light marries earth and sky. Autumn light always makes me think of fiery motes of chalk dust drifting in the expectant hush of an elementary school classroom during story time, just before the bell rings and sets the children free.

In fall, the nights are cooler and clearer, too, with the harvest moon floating steadfast in the night sky, the most reliable promise in our lives. Along the roadsides, wildflowers are blooming: ironweed and white snakeroot and the glorious goldenrod, all as high as my head and all food for the monarch and painted lady butterflies, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds, on their long migrations. Every kind of New World warbler is on the wing now, heading south like the raptors and the water birds, but they linger a little while before moving on again, and for a time Tennessee is filled with exotic songs.

(If you want to read more, check it out here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/opinion/our-days-have-always-been-running-out.html?referringSource=articleShare )

Watch The Goodness Project video — Stories of Our City: Susana Miranda

Susana talks about being in a touring theatre group in Cuba, the help she received from her friends during her move to Guelph, and her involvement with ballroom dancing.

Cultivating a Community of Resilience

The image of church as garden appeals to me. There’s a lot you can do with that, which is why I like the word cultivate for the kind of thing we are trying to do here. Cultivation is about preparing space and tending to plants in a patient, hopeful, and non-manipulative way. We also know that plants can be bred to be hardier stock when tough conditions threaten. 

We’re all agreed that we are in tough conditions right now. Our intention is to learn from one another, as a community, about what it means to be resilient. Most of us have experience that we can draw from to encourage and teach each other. This will be the theme upon which we will hang talks and discussions in our Living Rooms, Liturgies, and Learning Rooms this Fall. 

Resilience is not synonymous with victory, overcoming, or success as the world defines it, it is about persevering, remaining, and abiding while everything else is falling apart. We do this with courage that God is with us, and that it will form the kind of church we dream of being, and that it will create a haven for all those looking for a way to make sense of their place in the world in turbulent and uncertain days.

Watch The Goodness Project video — Thin Places: Speed River Kayak:

Sharing Goodness

I think it is often confusing to know what is good, and what isn’t. Have you ever heard someone say they loved some Netflix series, and inside you are thinking – I thought that was rubbish!

But in the end, what is good is not just personal taste, it is adjudicated by some standard or value we trust. Those standards and values are up for grabs in our culture; we are deeply divided about what is good and bad, wrong or right, oppressive or anti-oppressive, because there are many distortions of what is good that compete to shape our judgement.

The sponsorship of The Goodness Project this summer was a way in which we as a faith community sought to discern where goodness was evident in the ordinary lives of our Guelph neighbours and citizens. Identifying, recording, and publishing those stories is a way of helping shape a robust and healthy vision of what it means to be a good human in our community!

I’ve always been intrigued by the story where Jesus is called good teacher by the rich ruler and Jesus says to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” (Luke 18: 18-19) For followers of Jesus, that’s our starting place – the good God seen in Jesus. He was deflecting attention from himself in this encounter, but in the end, he became the standard by which we judge what is good and what is not. Our ‘project’ so to speak, is to attend to his life, learn and share his goodness, then celebrate and honour where it is played out every day in our world.

Watch the Goodness Project video featuring our very own John Martin-Holmes:

(Many thanks to Ben Wallace, Sember Wood, and Dan Veldhuis for their great energy and gifts in putting the whole project together.)

The Goodness Project Guelph

This summer Two Rivers Church had the pleasure of sponsoring two students, Sember Wood and Ben Wallace, in developing a video series highlighting local stories of goodness in Guelph. Over the next number of weeks and months, we’ll be sharing videos from their series on our blog. Here’s their introduction to the project:

The Goodness Project Guelph

Created by Ben Wallace and Sember Wood

Sponsored by Two Rivers Church

The Goodness Project is a video series about how people connect and feel fully alive in our city. We’ve tried to visit the places that are often overlooked, connect to the spiritual sources of beauty, and make sense of how we can still work towards goodness despite brokenness, injustice, and the negative impacts of a pandemic.

Stories of Our City

Short interviews of people from all walks of life: waitresses, musicians, administrators, dog walkers, and everyone in between. We’ve talked with people from across the city to find out what they love about Guelph, how they’re involved, and where they’re hopeful for change. 

Thin Places

Eight meditative videos that view locations in our city in a new light. Each video starts with a quotation to prompt thought and reflection. Some of the places featured should be familiar to most people who call Guelph home, but some may be more unorthodox. If you watch all eight in order, you should get a sense of time progressing through the day from sunrise to sunset. 

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