The Necessary Light of Borders
"‘What is it like to be in a war?’
‘It is beyond,’ Grace said when she had no words. ‘It is beyond.’”
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—From 2007, Paige Williams' piece on a refugee from Burundi who sought asylum in the US. In 2008, it won the National Magazine Award for feature writing. It’s a story about people who crossed borders they had no business crossing and the life they saved by doing it. With all this national talk of immigration and borders, this piece feels like a necessary light.
In the last few years, much of my spiritual and personal journey has been about investigating borders. What borders have I placed around my life? What are they protecting? Isn't the sacred about transgressing borders? If I wrote a paper on the Bible during graduate school, I tried to choose passages that do not align with my spiritual imagination. I keep coming back to a paper I wrote about Matthew 15:21-28.
Let me sum it up for you: A Canaanite woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus ignores her until his disciples urge him to dismiss her, and then he uses a racial slur to address her, saying that he was only sent to the people of Israel. All of this occurs in a borderland—a place where racial tensions run high. And Jesus, coming up to that borderland, dismisses the woman, but she refuses to back down. She takes on that slur (dog) and tells Jesus that even dogs eat the crumbs from the table. Then Jesus lauds her for her faith and heals her daughter.
I’m not going to pretend like I have easy answers for this problematic passage. Many people will have different interpretations of how to reconcile this story to their vision of Jesus, but I concluded that Jesus entered the borderland and was changed by it.
Borders change us, they force us to contend with the weak barriers of our identity. Barriers can become opportunities to reevaluate, to see that the “self” is not a walled-up container, but a porous amalgamation of our interactions with other beings. When we test the liquid borders of our identity (what does it mean to be christian? to be straight?) When we come up to the borders of our being that we cannot change (what does it mean to be white?), and ask how those elements of our self-ness manifest themselves in our world, we risk our identity.
But we also risk saving lives. Borders and barriers keep us from love and from change, they wall us off, they narrow our vision. They make us afraid.
There are two mainstays that I cling to from my studies of conflict transformation and religion:
That violence against others is possible when we reduce someone down to one of their identity markers
That there is a flicker of love and light in everyone, and that the way to peace is to believe in that flicker in the enemy.
What border keeps you from encounter, from transgression? Is it that that homophobic republican? Is it your gay neighbor? Your Muslim coworker? That Trump supporter? That Clinton-loving lib? Whose identity have you whittled down to a single story? (We all do it.)
Across which border do you believe you will not find light?
Go there.
