The Other Face of God: When the Stanger Calls Us Home by Mary Jo Leddy (review)

Toronto, the namesake of this journal and Canada’s most populous urban area, often claims to be the most multicultural city in the world. This claim is buttressed not only by the heritage and continuing presence of economic and cultural migrants from across the country and around the world, but also by persons who have fled conflict and claimed refugee status. Seeking to move beyond merely labelling people in this latter cohort as “refugees,” in The Other Face of God, Mary Jo Leddy explores how the difficult and imperfect moral task of facing and welcoming the stranger acts as a form of summons to peace and justice, which can lead to integral community building, despite the pulls of contemporary Western imperial culture and metropolitan lifestyles of anonymity.

Building upon, but also challenging the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, she bases her “theopoetic” reflections on experiences living in a transitional community at Romero House, which, properly speaking, is a collection of houses on Wanda Road in Toronto. Here, sometimes literally with a first contact being made by a knock on the door in the night, Leddy lives with those recently arrived in Canada seeking a new, safer home after their lives have been interrupted by conflict. Among other aspects of her identity, Leddy also works as a social and ecologically concerned writer, acts as an instructor at the Toronto School of Theology, holds a PhD in philosophy, and is a member of the Order of Canada. In the present volume, the skill sets the preceding list suggests are woven together with several experiences of being in community at Romero House to form an accessible and compelling monograph that effectively fuses the personal and political with a level of authenticity that is all too rare in monographs today.

For example, while acknowledging her own fears and reservations, Leddy speaks of the summons that occurred when “Sir George” arrived at the door of Romero House. George had earned the nickname “tiger” for his tattoo, which became an unfortunate coincidence when one day his friend called to him across a crowded room. As a result, he was denounced to Sri Lankan authorities concerned to root out ltte members (Tamil Tigers). George was subsequently tortured; a metal stake was driven through one of his eyes. By the time he came to Romero House, George was in the grip of a deteriorative brain cancer and had essentially arrived to request a place to die in safety.

George’s condition meant that he needed care, which would soon become an around-the-clock task. Yet the residents, inclusive of those who had lost so much, voted to accept George into Romero House. In the process, some who had employed servants in their homelands became servants to George. He tried their patience, but they took care of him because he was without family in a strange land. Literally in the face of George, they were all transformed as indifference become untenable via the process, which Leddy names as “facing.” Similarly, it was no longer possible for Leddy to speak of “the poor” as an abstract category, after facing Teresita, an evangelical Christian who fled from Guatemala when pregnant after her husband was “disappeared.” In Toronto, Teresita worked a midnight shift cleaning the gum off theatre seats to support not only her own son but, motivated by Gospel values, also a foster child in Mexico.

Moreover, Leddy emphasizes that such encounters are multidirectional. For example, Leddy first came to Romero House as someone who was herself displaced, “in between jobs, perhaps in between lives” (20). Within the context of her new community, Leddy grew there in her humanity. Further, perhaps partially because of a policy that prevented efforts at religious conversion, her Roman Catholic identity was enriched by deep cross-cultural and interfaith encounters on the human level with people she sometimes distrusted...