When Strangers Interrupt Us

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, occasioned by her new book Once Upon a Stranger, makes a simple claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and forget how much ordinary human contact can enlarge a day. Sandstrom’s research-based counsel is practical and humane. Most of us, she suggests, are carrying around a nervous inner narrator that warns us not to speak first, not to risk embarrassment, not to cross the little invisible boundaries of modern life. And so we pass one another by.  

That is sound psychological advice for an age of loneliness. But the religious tradition goes further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a missed opportunity for self-improvement. The stranger is a theological event.

That may sound like too much weight to place on a passing encounter in a waiting room, a coffee shop, or a church narthex. But the biblical imagination has always given unusual attention to the stranger. Again and again, the stranger appears not simply as a social type but as a moral claim, even as a bearer of divine significance. Abraham receives strangers by the oaks of Mamre and finds himself in the presence of promise. Israel is commanded to love the stranger because Israel was once a stranger in Egypt. Jesus, in one of the most haunting lines in the New Testament, identifies himself with the stranger: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” In that world, the stranger is never just background.

That is precisely what makes the modern situation so revealing. We have become remarkably skilled at turning other people into scenery.

It is not difficult to understand how this happened. We move through crowded spaces with earbuds in place and eyes fixed on screens. We inhabit a culture of efficiency, curated affinity, and managed risk. We arrange our lives so that as much as possible is filtered, chosen, personalized, and predictable. The unknown person in the room is no longer a possible neighbor or even a possible nuisance. Very often, he or she is simply not there. We have trained ourselves not to notice.

There is, of course, a certain logic to this. Modern life is busy. Public life can feel abrasive. The news teaches suspicion. We have all learned, for reasons both prudent and painful, that openness must be tempered by caution. No serious person should romanticize public space. Not every stranger is safe. Not every interruption is grace.

And yet something is lost when caution becomes our only grammar.

The biblical traditions of Judaism and Christianity both understand that communities need boundaries. But they also understand something else: if a people comes to define itself entirely by familiarity, tribe, and self-protection, it will eventually forget both God and neighbor. The stranger keeps a crack open in the closed world of the self. The stranger reminds us that life is not composed entirely of people we chose, mirrors we recognize, and stories we control.

That is why the stranger is so often a figure of judgment in Scripture. Not judgment in the crude sense of condemnation alone, but judgment in the deeper sense of revelation. The stranger reveals who we are. A society may proclaim its values in speeches, prayers, and policies. A church may speak beautifully of grace. But what happens when an unfamiliar person appears at the door? What happens when someone enters who does not know the cues, the language, the customs, the dress code, the liturgy, or the hidden etiquette? What happens when the stranger interrupts the smooth narrative of who we imagine ourselves to be?

That interruption matters.

For one thing, the stranger unsettles our illusions of self-sufficiency. We like to imagine that our lives are built out of chosen commitments and intimate relationships alone. But that is not true. Human life is also made of passing encounters, small dependencies, unnoticed kindnesses, and fragile moments of mutual recognition. The cashier who remembers a name. The new person at work who asks a genuine question. The fellow traveler who offers help without being asked. The neighbor whose face is familiar long before his story is known. A life is not made only of its great loves. It is also made of its minor recognitions.

For another thing, the stranger confronts our habits of moral simplification. In a polarized culture, it is easier to sort than to see. We classify first and attend later, if at all. Red state, blue state. Native-born, immigrant. Educated, uneducated. Safe, unsafe. One of us, not one of us. The stranger appears first as a category before ever becoming a person. But religion, at its best, is one of the disciplines by which such simplifications are interrupted. The stranger is not an abstraction. The stranger has a face.

And perhaps that is why this small contemporary literature on speaking to strangers has struck such a chord. It is not just offering conversational tips. It is naming a hunger. People want some release from the sealed chambers of the modern self. They want relief from the exhausting burden of living only among the familiar, the curated, and the ideologically sorted. They want, even if they do not say it this way, to recover the possibility that public life might contain grace.

That recovery will not come through sentimentality. It will not come by pretending that every conversation is transformative or every unknown person is a hidden saint. But it may begin with something more modest and more demanding: attention.

To notice a stranger is already to resist one of the dominant temptations of modern life—the temptation to move through the world as though only one’s own purposes are real. To speak to a stranger, when prudence permits, is to acknowledge that the world contains persons, not props. To welcome a stranger is to make room for the possibility that what interrupts us may not be an annoyance but an annunciation.

The religious traditions know something psychology is now rediscovering: strangers are good for us not only because they improve our mood or widen our networks, though they may do both. They are good for us because they break the spell of self-enclosure. They remind us that we are not the sole authors of our days.

Sometimes the stranger is simply another person in line at the grocery store.

Sometimes the stranger is Christ.