Theologian Miroslav Volf once said that there is no greater injunction in the Bible than to welcome the stranger.

So last Friday I was delighted to see a Refugee Week event being held in Rundle Mall, in the centre of Adelaide’s city shopping strip, doing just that! Multicultural Youth SA had set up a hospitality area with the theme, ‘Have Tea with a Refugee!’.

I decided to make a little video for their Facebook page – a little gift, a memory snapshot for them. Discovering their initiative certainly made my day. I hope it also gives you a lift!

It immediately took me back to the central idea we had with Oasis at Flinders University. A space dedicated to ‘hanging out’, being with others who shared a need for connection in their new environment – sharing stories with the added bonus of serendipities arising from the people who happened to be around at the time.

This is the art of creating intentional, stimulating, open-ended environments. It is the antithesis of the rationalistic, western, linear, Industrial mindset. It’s risking that there is enough already in the lives of people themselves to create new futures. It is not about programs that channel human endeavour into where you want them to go.

I realise now that I have been intuitively honing this art for a long time.

I remember an opportunity I had as a High School Teacher in the mid-70’s. I was Senior Master in charge of science at a largish suburban high school at the time. But the school found itself with too many senior teachers. The Principal approached me and asked if I would consider stepping aside to work with him on a new initiative he had in mind. I’m glad I said ‘yes’.

The Principal wanted to proactively promote well being in the school. Like most schools, it already had a Student Counsellor. But if the Student Counsellor was a receiver of student problems, the Principal wanted the flip side of that coin – initiatives in the school curriculum that would pro-actively educate for well being.

We set up various initiatives for student-community and school-community engagement; and for the classroom, the formal vehicle I chose was the newly emerging discipline of Health Education.

What aspects of Health Education would be appropriate, given the limited time it would have on the school timetable? My co-teacher (a biology teacher married to a doctor) and I chose to focus on mental health.

What would the classroom look like? Certainly not rows of desks and chairs, which would give, from our point of view, the wrong message. With the help of an art teacher, a year 12 art class designed and built new furniture – low benches for sitting that could be shifted around easily for group discussions, or as hard surfaces for writing, sitting on the floor. I traded my ‘book allowance’ for a thick multicoloured shag carpet, so students could comfortably sit on the floor and sound would be absorbed. And I got a little speaker system so we could have music playing to welcome students to the class, setting a relaxed tone, and again, sending a message – about youth culture and what might be expected in the room.

What style of ‘teaching’ would we adopt? It certainly wouldn’t be reading text books! We would have visitors, like local youth workers telling their stories about ‘drugs, sex and rock’n’roll’. A local doctor to talk about issues like abortion and answer anonymous medical questions. A film like ‘Go Ask Alice’ about the drug culture and a recording of a comedian-psychologist talking about human happiness… All the while using group dynamic exercises to set up opportunities for small and whole group discussions.

Along with the curriculum and classroom innovations, I had been attending weekly workshops in alternative classroom management and was undertaking studies in educational counselling. So I decided to put some of these learnings to work.

I remember one occasion when, the lesson after lunch, two students came in who had been fighting during the lunch hour. Everyone in the class was on edge, so there was no point beginning to show the film I had booked.

I asked the pair if they would like to explore their differences, and if so, to come to the front of the class and sit opposite each other on chairs. They agreed. Then we proceeded to role play what had happened during the lunch break.  Then they reverse role-played the scene by acting out the scene as if they were the other person.

The effect was dramatic. They realised they had been fighting because feelings had been hurt. But now the ‘replay’ had made things clear; they ended up smiling and joined the rest of the class with renewed friendship. The whole time, the risk we each took, the novelty of it, and the drama of it, had the class on the edge of their seats. They were amazed at what they had just seen!

All this was happening well before I started being a chaplain at Flinders University. There, with the help of others, I discovered a framework that made sense of my creative intuitions for well being – Henri Nouwen’s conception of hospitality as making free space for the other. That helped me understand myself, that in whatever role I was being asked to play, I was an agent of hospitality, in the process hopefully promoting and helping recover an endangered creative art, critical for human survival.

I wonder what you think?