We are sometimes quick to label others as “foreigners.” Perhaps they dress “funny,” speak with a heavy accent, have darker or lighter skin, or practice “odd” customs. Fr. Rolheiser writes that God breaks into our lives in important ways, mainly through “the stranger,” through what’s foreign, through what’s other, and through what sabotages our thinking and blows apart our calculated expectations. Revelation normally comes to us in a surprise, in a form that turns our thinking upside down. Take, for example, the incarnation itself. For centuries, people looked forward to the coming of a messiah, a god in human flesh, who would overpower and humiliate all their enemies and offer them, those faithfully praying for this, honor and glory. They prayed for and anticipated a superman, and what did they get? A helpless baby lying in the straw. Revelation works like that. Therefore, St. Paul tells us always to welcome a stranger because it could, in fact, be an angel in disguise. All of us, I am sure, at some point in our lives, have personally had that experience of meeting an angel in disguise inside a stranger whom we perhaps welcomed only with some reluctance and fear. I know in my own life, there have been times when I didn’t want to welcome a certain person or situation into my life. I live in a religious community where you do not get to choose who you will live with. You are assigned your “immediate family,” and (but for a few exceptions when there is clinical dysfunction) like-mindedness is not a criterion for who is assigned to live with each other in our religious houses. Not infrequently, I have had to live in a community with someone who I would not, by choice, have taken for a friend, colleague, neighbor, or family member. To my surprise, it has often been the person whom I would have least chosen to live with who has been a vehicle of grace and transformation in my life. What’s foreign and other can be upsetting and painful for a long time before grace and revelation are recognized, but it’s what carries grace. God is in the stranger, so we are cutting ourselves off from a major avenue of grace whenever we will not let the foreign into our lives.