“Why does our country want you here but your country doesn’t want us there?” This was the innocent question that Panchito, my eight-year-old Guatemalan host-brother, asked me while we cleaned banana leaves to make tamales. This was the question I couldn’t answer then and cannot answer now.
Why did they want me there? I was there as part of the year-long PC(USA) Young Adult Volunteer program, and during that year I lived with a Mayan family and worked in community service. The program had taught me well in my ten-day orientation that I was not there to “bring Jesus” to people who did not know Jesus. I am glad that was not my mission because Jesus was already there – in a big way.
Cornfields were spread over the mountains in a checkerboard pattern with hundreds of tiny churches stitched across the slopes so that the entire country looked like a parament someone’s mother embroidered by hand. “Jesus loves you” was painted on the colorful sides of buses that bounced their way over the potholed mountain roads, belching diesel smoke.
Thankfully, I was not there to offer incredible worship leadership. The one time I stepped on stage before thousands of indigenous Mayans to offer what I thought would be a simple wave and smile, I heard the microphone woop with feedback as it was thrust toward me, and someone said, “And now, Sister Rebecca will sing a hymn.” No warning. My mind went blank. I could not harken a single hymn. So, I heard myself sing a tune that was terrifying in its familiarity. “Near… far….wherever you are… I believe that the heart will go on….” I sang the “Titanic” theme song in English because it was the only song that came to mind, a song I still pray never makes it to rural Guatemala. They clapped, and said, “Glory to God!”
If ever there were a moment when I asked myself “What in God’s name am I doing here?” it was then. But it was also then when I realized how much of the life of faith is improvisational, unscripted. Worship has the ability to transcend language, borders and even our own sense of what we think is possible.
“Why does our country want you here?” Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I was in Guatemala in 2002 and 2003, during the lead-up to the Iraq war. While I was learning Spanish verbs and nouns, I also learned their view of American history. My Spanish teacher, Daniel, said, “Listen… Guatemalans understand that there is a difference between a people and their government. We have learned that over centuries. But, here’s what I want to say to you and your country. Don’t help us if you’re going to turn around and [eff] us.”
He went on to share with me how his village, his family and extended family, had been wiped off the map during the civil war in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was the same sad story of so many in Central America. Guerilla groups battled the army and innocents were caught in the crossfire. But, it was all the long shadow of the Cold War domino theory, when the U.S. could not allow Guatemala or any neighboring country to harbor potential communist threats. The U.S. assisted in the toppling of the Guatemalan government in the ‘50s, which meant the government of Guatemala was run by brutal dictators for at least 40 years.
And, the dominoes are still falling. Those traumatized by massacres in their youth and schooled in violence throughout life grew up to lead the gangs of those displaced, humiliated and hardened. Gangs have now polluted, run off, or terrified into complacency a generation of Guatemalans.
So, why was I there? The simple answer was that it was good to be together. Like the psalmist wrote, “Oh how good it is when the brothers and sisters dwell together in unity.”
We were breaking bread – or rather, tortillas – together, and the presence of Christ was felt. It was sacramental, day after precious day. Even though we walked through valleys where drunken men lay passed out on street corners next to skinny street dogs, it was a daily walk to Emmaus. My eyes were opened to their joys and heartbreaks, like the day I harvested corn with the men or the day the children’s dentist asked me how to treat their teeth, since he perceived me to be an expert, based solely on the fact that I still had all of my teeth.
It was their eyes being opened to my joys and heartbreaks, which seemed meager by comparison, like when I was away from home on Christmas for the first time, or when I was hospitalized for several days with a stomach ailment, or like the day they met my family. That day, I translated for my dad, a lifelong Presbyterian, when he greeted the family that had cared for me for six months already. He said to them, “Scripture tells us that when you welcome one of my little ones, you welcome me.”
I still tear up thinking about how beautiful that exchange was. It took place, ironically enough, on Epiphany, the day the church celebrates the arrival of the kings to visit the new born Christ, bringing gifts and bowing low before the startling and humble one who would usher in a new world.
I spent a year with them. I shared life with them. I called them brother, sister, mother and father. I could not, however, invite them to my wedding five years later. Even if I had paid for their plane tickets, they could never have afforded the countless trips to the embassy to seek a visa. They would not qualify for a visa anyway, since they did not have enough money in the bank nor property in their name to prove to the governments of either country they would not overstay. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as a denomination did not have the power to bring delegations of Guatemala ministers or congregational partners to the States for shared worship or conferences like we once did. And, there is a wall between us now.
Josefa, my host mother, considered making the trip anyway, not because of my wedding but because there had been a season when her husband, Juan, was so ill he could not work. Their crops had burned up after a rainless summer, and her children were starving. She told me she had already paid the smuggler and gotten the birth control shot. “Excuse me, what birth control shot?” Most women who make the journey are raped along the way, she told me rather matter-of-factly. She did not come, mostly because the church there showed up in force, bringing her two months’ worth of food, dropping wads of bills and coins on her kitchen table, praying over her and her family and begging her to stay. She was accompanied when she needed it most.
But, the faces on the news this summer of Guatemalan, Honduran and Salvadorean children showing up “unaccompanied” on the rugged borderlands have broken my heart. I feel like I recognize them. I know those ruddy red cheeks, those wide set eyes. And I can actually imagine the love and fear that would cause a mother to let a child go, to send him in the smuggler’s pickup truck, to the top of a Mexican train that would snake along to a perilous river and desert when he should be flying kites in a Guatemalan cornfield. I can imagine it, only because I was allowed to accompany them for a time.
While political and economic arguments go back and forth, there is no biblical support for angry signs telling these children to go home. Those need to stop. And I would say that about most, if not all, angry signs that Christians use instead of authentic engagement in each other’s lives. I applaud those who have welcomed and even adopted the children who are arriving at our borders. I applaud those who have invested dollars and time in their education, their future, back home and here. I grieve with any parent – the addict, the child-mom, the campesino wife, the day laborer dad and so many others – who has had to surrender their children to the care of others.
It’s safe to say that any time hungry children are washing up on riverbanks, it is a watershed moment. It is the ultimate invitation to ask those “upstream” questions. It is the time to consider history, stark disparities, our biblical call to welcome the stranger and the shattering ramifications on our humanity if we do not.
I remember another mother who faced that horrible choice, to let go of her precious child because if she did not, he would certainly not survive in her arms. So, she covered a basket in pitch and sent this innocent little one floating down the Nile River, seemingly “unaccompanied,” though his sister watched from the reeds, making sure his passage was smooth. Pharaoh’s daughter lifted him from the water and took him into her home, and he grew up to be Moses, the one who would free the Israelite people from slavery and shake the foundations upon which the Egyptian empire had grown so rich.
If we take the great commandment seriously, that we are to love God and love our neighbor, there should be no person “unaccompanied” in this life. Everyone should have company in their time of need and their time of abundance. And if we take the Bible seriously that God actually dwells in the least of these, the children on our borders might in fact be “bringing Jesus” this way.
Rebecca Messman is associate pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon, Virginia, and a frequent Outpost blogger on pres-outlook.org. Click here to read her other posts.
