A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Montreal, formerly known in the 1600s as Ville-Marie, or the City of Mary. The early Canadian settlement paid tribute to the biblical Mary for granting the colonists safe passage on the journey to North America. They built churches in her honor and spread the ‘Good News’ to the First Nations people of the land.

I want to acknowledge the grave horrors those early colonists visited upon the First Nations and indigenous peoples of that and other parts of North America. But I bring up Ville-Marie in order to consider a common tradition of using the figure Mary as a symbol of refuge and a safe place to land.

In a book called Untie the Strong Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, traditions and rituals which honor the Holy Mother across culture and time are explained.

One such ritual is La Posada, “a ritual for transforming the overculture’s cold shoulder toward the sacred…back into warm, open-armed welcome again”.

La Posada draws on the biblical story of Joseph and pregnant Mary seeking shelter in Bethlehem on the night that Jesus was born. In the ritual, weary travelers act out going door-to-door and being rejected eight times. On the ninth, at last, they find shelter, and a place is made for the travelers to rest and the Holy to be born.

In Montreal, I visited a chapel downtown called Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, Our Lady of Good Help, which became known as the sailors’ church and a site for weary pilgrims to rest. In keeping with this tradition, Canada took in more refugees last year than any country in the world.

How is it then that we, a country with ten times the population of Canada, have so hardened our hearts to the weary traveler? We, a ‘Christian nation’, have ignored the exhortation of Exodus 23:9 – “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt”.

For a Christian, Love is the most sacred – not just earthly love, but holy love. As Pinkola Estés writes, “In us during the time of La Posada, [we] prepare the rooms so that Love will find its place to be born into the World – with us, for us, through us”.

This is our charge.