Dear Inner Circle,
There are moments in the life of a community that deserve to be named out loud. Last week, we paused to mark one of them.
On 6 May 2001, a door opened quietly at 66 Darlinghurst Road, Potts Point without fanfare or a ribbon cutting that the evening news would remember. Just a door, and on the other side of it, people who needed somewhere safe to be, and those prepared to be there, to give them what they needed.
That was the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, the first of its kind in the English-speaking world, and this week it turned 25. A fellow Waysider and I took a cake down there to celebrate this milestone, we blew out candles and, after about 15 minutes, the staff found a knife to cut it up to share it.
We celebrated twenty-five years, we celebrated 1,355,382 supervised injections, we celebrated the 12,292 overdoses that were safely managed and the innumerable lives saved on their watch.
Wayside and the MSIC share more than a postcode. Long before the facility opened at its current address, the trial began here at Wayside in 1999, when we made a decision that many considered reckless and few considered holy. We chose presence over policy. If people are going to use, let them use somewhere they won’t die. It was the kind of logic that makes lawyers nervous and keeps pastors up at night, and it was the right thing to do — which is rarely the “safe” thing to do. Last week in the horseshoe, which is the place where everyone can sit together, attend to the world’s problems, and tell jokes often with a ciggie on the go, a man I’d never met looked me up and down and observed: “You don’t look like a reverend.” “Well, what does one look like?” He thought about it for a moment. “Less happy,” taking a long drag. Maybe that’s a part of it, just showing up to the place where people are, looking like someone who actually believes something new is possible, just like they do at MSIC every single day. It’s nice to have a neighbour on the other side of the street that mirrors us.
There are communities across this country where people are still dying because no such door exists. The anniversary is worth celebrating, and it is also a chance to issue the call that more doors like theirs need to open.
Here at Wayside, we know what it means to be in the business of keeping people alive long enough for something better to become possible. MSIC knows it too. On their 25th birthday, we raise a cup of something warm and say: Thank you. Keep going. You are not alone in this.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
