Parker Palmer in his book The Company of Strangers; Christians and the Renewal of America's Public Life writes eloquently about the importance in modern society of welcoming the stranger and embracing the strange. He notes that it is often our fear of the stranger and the strange which causes us to retreat into the private, comfortable world of family and friends. When we encounter the stranger openly and without fear we create a space for both us and the stranger to experience communion. He writes:

The key figure in public life is the stranger. The stranger is the central figure in biblical stories of faith and for good reason. The religious quest, the spiritual pilgrimage is always taking us into new lands where we are strange to others and they are strange to us. Faith is a venture into the unknown, into the realm of mystery, away from the safe and comfortable a secure.The very idea of faith suggests a movement away from our earthly securities into the distant, the unsettling, the strange.

Chris Page