Encounter at the Wall

A few days ago, after returning from our deepest penetration of the trip into migrant-land, we were at the Nogales wall. We were on the Mexican side of the border and viewing this monstrous steel structure of 20 plus feet of recycled landing strip (courtesy of Desert Storm). Cecelia (our wonderful Mexican guide), who originally hails from Nogales was telling us that before the wall, the residents of the twin city would come together for fiestas and events. She said that that they would dance and party back and forth across the little fence that marked the border, and when it was over, they would each go home. But the families on either side could visit and have holiday meals together at any time.

Now looking at the impenetrable steel barrier, you could see no one and no thing. It felt inhuman and divisive. How could you have a relationship with anything you could not see? It was about then that through a little crack under the steel I saw some movement. I went to have a better look and saw two boys playing along the drive the Border Patrol use to police the wall. So I stuck my hand through and called to them. Nothing happened and we figured that they were scared of what might be over here, or afraid that they might get in trouble with the BP. So I gave up, but just as I was turning to go I saw a little chunk of rusted metal shoved through the hole.

I knelt down and pushed it back to the edge. It got pushed back to my side. And the game was on! Back and forth like the game of "football" we used to play in the cafeteria with folded triangles of paper. He stopped for a minute and I thought he had quit. Then the hand came through holding a dirty silk flower! I was stunned - a gift from a boy, a thank you for momentarily dissolving the wall. I took the flower and put my hand through to wave to him, and said "thank you, I have to go now."

My most prized memory of the day - perhaps of the whole trip - was this (maybe) 5 year old hand pushing through the hole waving goodbye to me.

Walls are constructed from fear, but children and families know that once you reach out to the other side you don't need a wall to protect you from the "other." There is no other in brotherhood and love.

Mass in No Man's Land

January 27
We just returned to Casa Misericordia from our trip to Altar. I am so filled with images and thoughts. There was undeniably a sinister air about Altar though the CCAMYN center for refugees, where we stayed, stood out like an oasis in the desert. The accommodations for the migrants were clean and new and the meeting/meal room itself was beautiful and spacious.

This morning we went to the Catholic Church (the only church in town) for mass and the children were the choir and the lectors. It was a ray of sunshine to hear their beautiful and powerful voices in this church when only moments before we were interviewing migrants and watching out for the coyote in the square outside. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen. Picture this town only a few blocks square with a central square at the hub. On one side of the square is a church and on the other three sides are openfronted shops selling either ready-to-go food or hats, coats and rucksacks (all black for heat absorption and cammouflage). Roving the square are small groups of migrants (all men and boys that day and due to the cold and rainy weather, not as many as the 1200-1500 usually passing through). The coyotes carefully watch their groups from fixed positions on the corner or nearby. They eye us with a mixture of scowls and distrust.

When we walked around the square telling the migrants about CCAMYN and asking them questions, I was watching for the coyote. Brita (our professor) asked me how I recognized them and I told her about how they stayed fixed to one place and would go over to the group we had talked with and then returned to their position. I also said I had noticed their energy.

And then, at 10AM the church bells began to ring and everyone filed into the church. Regular members, children, migrants, coyotes and our band of seminarians and professors. Truce! It was miraculous - for that entire hour everyone was Catholic and prayerful. The children sang like angels, the priest gave a lighthearted but spirit-filled sermon, people commmuned - and there were no borders, no migrant or resident, just God's children gathered together as one family.

When it was over, the priest introduced us to the parish and we went up front to speak to the congregation and they applauded us. But we all felt that they deserved the applause for keeping a faith in such a place.

Afterward he escorted us to a boarding house where the migrants stay in their short time. It was horrific and he said that this one was one of the better and cleaner (there are no "ratas y cucarachas" there). The accommodations weren’t much better than the Amistad bulkhead.

Traveling so much and so far in this cramped van has really taken a toll on my back and legs. There are three of us who have L5S1 problems and we call each other the L5 club. We are all taking care of each other but it is hard. Our only consolation is that we know that the migrants have to travel in rougher conditions than we have, sometimes 20 or 30 in the same size van as we cram the 14 of us and our equipment.

Migrant Sendoff

Jan 25
One month after Christmas and 46 days since Daniel left Argentina. This morning we had breakfast with about 20 migrants and prayed with them before they left for the border. It was a tearful goodbye and I really did not want to see them leave. As each one went out of the door, he would turn around and smile at us. It felt like seeing a platoon of young soldiers off to the battle front. Carlos with his cut hands. Hector with his torn coat. Both victims of last night’s failed attempt. But they each had to keep trying.

From there we went to the wall and had a memorial service for the ones who hadn’t made it. One of the names I read was Roberto age 27 months old and I broke down crying again. Do people actually think that his mother or father intended him to die in the desert? Do people actually think that their crossing is anything less than the last desperate effort for survival?

These are people, men women, boys and girls just like us just like Ari. How can we look at them and feel anything other than love and compassion? If I get nothing else from this trip, I will take home these two things:
Flesh and blood have no borders – we are all part of the human family.
Those who want borders for safety have it all wrong – it is in the moment we are vulnerable that we dissolve the fear, break down the barrier and become safe with each other.

Conversions at the Border

Jan 24
What a remarkable day. Today we met with Mark Adams at Frontera de Christo, a Presbyterian minister who lives the word better than anyone I have ever seen. His commentary and commitment were beyond that of Jim Stevens of C2C. Truly a man on a mission. He talked about how he saw examples of faith in the people in Mexico that he had never seen before. He choked up telling us about when he had been first invited to a cement block walled (with no roof) new construction of a house for some bible reflection. The house if he could call it that was two rooms and one bedroom the size of a small apartment. There were six people living there. That night they read the gospel of John and he was thinking “how could these simple uneducated people understand such a complex and theoretical passage?” But when asked how they had heard God speaking in the passage one man said, “and the word became flesh and dwelt among us… that means that God understands what it is like to be out of place, because he left heaven and divinity to be with us. He knows what we feel.” On a subsequent visit there were 12 people living there and by Christmas there were 20. Mark asked if some could come and live with him but the home owner said that he had plenty of room. He said that when he had left Chiapas he thought about building a casita but he had decided instead to build a big home where many people could stay. Mark could not finish the sentence with the thought that what he had considered a tiny house was to this man a spacious home with room for everyone.

It has us all thinking about the scarcity that we Americans operate from. If only we saw life with the abundance that these people lived with we might approach it all differently. He spoke so openly and articulately about this like it was a conversion experience. Yesterday we listened to Mike Wilson of Tucson who diligently puts out water bottles at various stations along trails in the Tohono O’odham nation lands. Mike was a former Special Forces green beret in El Salvador and one day he was working and it was hot. So he decided to have a banana split. He was outraged by the price of $3.60 he had to pay but, heck, he had the money and paid. Later that day he was to have dinner with some people he had befriended so he went home with the wife and her two kids. After dinner her husband came home from his job of driving a bus along the rural routes. He was exhausted and he put a mason jar of change on the table and began to count out his days wages – over 12 hours of driving. As he stacked up the coins and tallied his entire wage for the day, Mike was crushed with guilt and embarrassment – the man had not even made as much as Mike had paid for his ice cream treat.

These little events are the conversion experiences these folks describe. Mike thinks of himself as Saul turned Paul – a former trained killer now saving lives on a daily basis. Where yesterday I was so weighed down by the gravity of it all I could hardly speak, tonight I have hope.

We are staying tonight at a refuge called CAME in the Mexican border town of Agua Priete. We had dinner with some of the migrants – some who are on their way to the US and two who had just been deported after 13 years in Phoenix. One of the men going north was Daniel, who had waked on foot from western Argentina through Peru, Ecuador, Panama and then was canoed through the jungle waters of Panama into Costa Rico and eventually walked into Mexico. He had done this in just 45 days. This man was determined. The stories are all like that. Two young men from a little further south who were trying to go across were just the most polite and wonderful young men you could want to meet. Neither spoke a word of English and none of us had much Spanish. But we communicated with the occasional help of our interpreter.

We spoke with two of the volunteers – one of which was just 18 years old. Steven had been volunteering every day after school for the last four years. I asked him why he did this and he said that everyone in his church does it - it is needed so he does it. Just that simple. I told him that I hoped my son would grow up to have those values as well.

Everyone is asleep now but I have stayed up – filled with good thoughts inspired by people who are living their mission and who see god in every person they meet.

Notes From BorderLinks, Tucson

Greetings from near the BorderLands. At this point in our trek, we have been pummeled with so much information on all sides of this border issue. Each presenter has been opening our eyes to more and more of the elements that contribute to the problem of migration and our borders. There is a point in assimilating such devastating information that one starts to numb out. (I rarely drink coffee in the afternoon, but am taking a hit as I write). The problem though that is forming in my head right now is how will I ever become articulate enough to string together some kind of coherent thought pattern to open the eyes of others?

As I look into each issue, my particular lens is trying to see through to the complicity of our various corporate entities. In what ways do the sourcing patterns, the employment practices, the consumption and distribution of all of our products and goods and services impact this problem. Take for example the inclusion of corn syrup in most of our foods in the US. Hybrid and genetically altered corn not only produces corn syrup but floods the corn market driving down the prices in Mexico so that the farmer cannot sell his own. So our addiction to sugars, our inclusion of corn syrup in cereal, catsup, baked goods, mustard, you name it, combined with NAFTA has resulted in a greater poverty, driving someone potentially off the land to seek employment and food for his family elsewhere. But that is such a little example of one complicit event adding more fuel to the conflagration.

As of yet I do not know how I will be changed by this experience. But I do know that I must stay alert to take in each next moment and message. God help us all.

Sidebar From The Developing World

Ok, I can't be fully serious and all theology all of the time. And thanks to one of my magnificent daughters, I am now enlightened regarding some of the "excellent" efforts of the Indian peoples toward the prevention of AIDS and overpopulation. The link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTLj_3R0-2g is a very pop view of sex-ed featuring four men dressed as condoms (complete with a Michael Jackson-esque dance troupe of backup singers) doing a little ditty on the benefits of the love glove! I was hysterical, but you know what, if it works for them, you gotta love it!

Living by Faith - from Thomas Merton

In getting the best of our secret attachments - ones which we cannot see because they are principles of spiritual blindness - our own initiative is almost always useless. We need to leave the initiative in the hands of God working in our souls either directly in the night of aridity and suffering, or through events and other men. This is where so many holy people break down and go to pieces. As soon as they reach the point where they can no longer see the way to guide themselves by their own light, they refuse to go further. They have no confidence in anyone but themselves. Their faith is largely an emotional illusion. It is rooted in their feelings, in their physique, in their temperament. It is a kind of natural optimism that is stimulated by moral activity and warmed by the approval of other men. If people oppose it, this kind of faith still finds refuge in self-complacency.

But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us light -- then we find out whether or not we live by faith.

Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961, page 257-8.

Make It Worth It

I just learned that the wife of a friend and associate, a vibrant and beautiful woman of just 42, died suddenly a few days ago. What makes this already tragic loss hurt even deeper is that my friend had worked diligently for many years to achieve a level of success that would afford him more time with his partner and friend. And through all of that she had been a champion, running the race with him both figuratively and literally (as they had run several Boston Marathons together). Last May the ship came in and my friend, then the president of a thriving firm was rewarded for his efforts as his company was bought. When we talked then he said that though he was staying on in a consulting role for a while, his delight was that he could spend some quality family time.

Part of that ended Thursday. I cannot begin to imagine the depth of his pain and emptiness. I can only take notes and learn. When my son was first born I used to evaluate everything I did other than work in terms of trading time with Jesse. The "Jesse factor" as it became known would literally cause me to leave a meeting if it seemed to be going nowhere fast. "Am I willing to trade two hours of Jesse's life for this?" I stopped doing that after a while; I thought I had things pretty well in control.

But this event has just kicked me in the can. I didn't even know her, but I knew how much he loved her and how he smiled when spoke of her and the kids. She had to have been special. As Sarah and Jesse are to me. It seems like a platitude to talk of making every moment count, or to be reminded of what Thoreau called the "arrogance of tomorrow." But damn it all, it's the truth and we do need to burn it in - I need to burn it into my flesh or write it with Delores Umbridge's quill until it bleeds through where I can never forget it.

I am leaving on a class trip for nearly two weeks next Monday. I am all signed in, paid and packed. I damned well better make it worth it. There are no "trade-back's" in the game of life.

Dazed and Confused

I have always been in charge of my career or at least that's what the self-reflective organ in my skull would have me believe. I have always gotten the job I wanted and even when a job disappeared I quickly secured some temporary work (cooking or tending bar) to bridge through the period of searching. I did that, my determination, my sense of responsibility.

But my confidence in that as fact is crumbling and as each chunk succumbs to gravity, what is revealed is the core engine that has been at work all the time - driving my machinery all along. That force is God; the divine force of pure intention. So I am faced with the possibility that none of this past was of my doing but that I have been led through all of those changes, peaks and valleys for the express purpose of getting here with, now, with these particular experiences and tools.

Thank God!

There are two problems with this realization: 1. I am now faced with having to discern God's intention for me - like what do you want me to do next, Oh Great One? and 2. My profession classifies what I am now doing (talking openly and regularly with some unseen force or entity) as delusional. Let me start with the first. This conversation I keep having with God goes something like this: OK God I give up, you win, I'm yours. Now what would you have me do? (Otherworldly Voice in my head) I cannot tell you that. (Me) Might I ask why? (OV) Sure, if I tell you, then you will try to "do" it and do it your way, and if you have surrendered to me, then I would like you to do it my way. (Me) And that means not knowing? (OV) And trusting completely. (Me) But that is no way for a professional to manage his career. (OV) So manage your career, this is my work we are talking about. (Me) Which is...? (OV) Sorry.

And so it goes - round and round.

So that is when the other voices of my professors and the ghost of Dr. Freud kick in: (SF) You are actually hearing voices? (Me) Duh, I just wrote it out in plain text. (SF) That, son, is delusional, whacked, touched in the head, a couple of bricks shy of a load, well you get my drift.

But the truth is that I have longed all my life to have an active and conscious contact with God. I envied Abraham as he walked and talked with his God. Heck, it was nothing for people in biblical times to hear voices or to see God walk into their village and sit down for a meal with them. Were times so different? Did God get bored of us or were they all whacked back then?
As for me, I am just confused.

But I will not give up. Fifty eight years of doing it my way had some severe limits. So I have done the Sam and Elijah thing and uttered those fateful words,"Here I am, take me." Dazed and confused, but putting one foot in front of the other.

The Next Border to Cross

I have begun looking at activities from the metaphor of Border Crossings: where and what are the boundaries (real and artificial) that we or I have established in our living and in our professions? I look at all of the rubrics of my profession (I am an executive coach). I must not cross into the land of the spiritual - at least I think that is the unspoken mandate. People I coach must be allowed to be their own person; free from moral challenge from (especially) their coach. But it seems to me to be an artificial barrier. It relegates people into feelingless and flat doings not beings.

The question becomes how and where do I cross the borders? Do I need some coyote to lead me across this border? Do I sneak across under the cover of night or do I brazenly flaunt my rebellious character in front of the cameras and guards? Hey, I regularly cross the skin color line and the homo-hetero line - they aren't a challenge anymore! Every PC do-gooder has done those. And the political Hillarobama righteousness is even beginning to be acceptable - gosh how these walls are falling!

But the spiritual/moral boundary (unless you are willing to be a conservative, right wing fundamentalist - for God and for Country) - that one must not be touched. That one is verboten. See, we dare not think of what it means to be economically successful in spiritual terms, because that means we might have to think about the women in the sweat shops just across the border of El Paso and Nogales who assemble parts at unthinkably low wages. That means we have to consider that our smart use of vegetable fuels for our oh-so-PC hybrid cars means that the Mexican farmer whose balanced protein formerly came from corn and beans now must eat ramen noodles instead of his own corn. Oh, and we dare not talk about Jesus of Nazareth, that radical great great great grandson of a Moabite refugee intermarriage (Oh did we forget that too?), this potentially illegitimate son of a teenager, who dared talk to women, children, tax-collectors and heathen, and who dared to call the ruling power elite "vipers!"

I am a border crosser. I am a follower of that rebel. I choose to call the question. I dare to taunt the guard enforcing his arbitrary boundary. I can't stay quiet any longer.

This trip is not a metaphor. This trip is my coming out party. Bring it on! Where is the next line? If someone must be the first to step there, let it be me! Here am I Lord, take me!

Aliens Among Us

Oh here we go again! The thing I keep coming up against in the Christmas season is this whole CB DeMille view of the star and the pristine manger and cutsie lambs and shepherds all stunned into silence by the choirs of heavenly beings singing "Glory to God."

But in my mind I imagine a good man with a (somehow, but by his doing) pregnant teenager as lost and homeless aliens in a foreign territory where even the language was so different they didn't recognize what people were saying. So they found, as so many homeless do, the only shelter they could, a barn, ripe with manure, probably crouching in the back so none of the "real people" of that territory could see them. And to this alien, homeless, scandalous couple, was born a child - not a king, not a floating avatar of divinity - a baby. Little. Helpless. Undocumented alien. Perhaps unwanted, at least for now.

God, the all-powerful, supreme all, the incomprehensible source of all, chose a homeless, undocumented, unmarried alien couple to host this divine coming out party! Crossing the threshold from divine to incarnate/human might be easy if you happen to be the Almighty, so why cross over in such an enemy, foreign, and hostile place? Unless... unless there is some reason, some message that these inhabitants of the third rock from Sol needed to learn. So I go there and follow the Christmas story.

And the lessons abound, none the least of which is that entry. So if it was purposeful, then perhaps I am called to see Christ in the homeless, see God in the most desperate situations, and hear my calling as a beckoning to cross the many arbitrary thresholds (boundaries and barriers we erect to keep us in and the "other" out). I am recently inspired by Jerry Gill's Borderland Theology (2003) and the analogies he finds in the life of Jesus as a "border crosser." It fits with my understanding of this God-like message. (Oh I love God's twisted sense of humor!)

It seems to me that the reason God speaks through the poor and infirmed, that the reason God chose a child of an undocumented homeless couple as an entry portal, that the reason Jesus continually worked through the unwanted and outcast is simply that any other way might have seemed magical. In my work life I have seen companies so cash rich that they literally could do anything. But when times got tough they faltered. It is those who with little who do much that really set the standard of excellence. Had Jesus been a rich man, or apparated as an adult in full glory, we would be left with an awe of his grandeur but just as clearly with a sense that none of that was within our grasp.

But when we walk among the poor, when we cross over the boundary from our station into the realm of just being human - with not even a single trapping of civilized and pampered existence - then we have access to understanding the true human experience. Then and perhaps only then can we begin to feel true compassion. And when we give of ourselves from that (presumed) nothingness, we are capable of divine love.

Two millennia ago, love passed through the portal and smiled up through the darkness. And it just may have been quite alien for anyone who noticed it.

Prayer and Meditation

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer and meditation lately. Interfacing with The Divine, with God, or at least my experience of God. Now, in order to do that, I have to deal with a lot of abstract and previously defined concepts (or at least defined previously by others, or maybe even defined in other ways by others). Take for example the experience of God. I need to use that terminology to distinguish between how I become aware of God’s presence in my life, as differentiated with what others have identified as God-like characteristics (ranging from anthropomorphic God – you know, bearded and robed and sitting on high like some sky father – to conceptual referents like omniscient, omnipotent, and the omni-lists of catechism). I also need to be wary of confusing the God of my experience with the true experience of God and getting present to how else that might manifest in each unfolding now of my mortal existence. And that’s just for starters!

So I start with an assumption of God – that God exists and is, like life itself just “is.” And I recognize that for some, that is a leap of faith – “How do you know God is?” That one at least is easy for me: because I look for God in everything, I see God in everything. The same logic is true for the atheists: because they doubt God’s existence, they are looking – in essence for the absence of God – that is their perception. But for me, there is God; present in through and around every living thing. But I stop there because right behind that statement follows a whole raft of self-defined experiences I have had of God’s presence. I am wary of ascribing what I experienced as the expression of God-ness to being what God is, because to do so would immediately begin to limit The Divine though and by those definitions. They are just my experiences of God’s presence to me. So I think it must be true of others, that how we experience God becomes what God is. Therefore, the God of our understanding is a uniquely defined and individual experience.

Perhaps in organized church religions, God may be described by the masses in similar ways creating a “majority view” of God-ness. But weren’t they told what they were looking for in the first place? Isn’t it true that we always see what we expect to see? It’s like what I call the “new car syndrome.” The day before buying my new midnight blue Saab 9-5, I was not terribly aware of how many others there were on the road. But that purchase shaped my seeing such that the experience was almost as if that same day hundreds of other Bostonians went out and bought midnight blue Saab 9-5’s – there were suddenly so many of them. So likewise, if we are told to look for God as manifest in bread and wine, or the smiles of children, or as the Virgin of Guadalupe, or whatever, that will be what we see. But that is not simply the power of suggestion. Rather it is the opening of eyes to what is already present, but to yet another select set of manifestations, as opposed to the complete, total and incomprehensible range of God’s infinite possibility.

So meditating on God for me is not looking for the predefined but rather trying to be present to what wants to be seen this time. Surprise me! I am waiting and open to what you would have me see. Open like this, the experience of God washes over me and opens my seeing to some new (and sometimes renewed) awareness. That hasn’t changed much in recent years – that sitting and opening to the next experience of how God presents “I am-ness” to me. But what has evolved is prayer – my communing and attempting to open the other channel of communication with The Divine.
I remember all of the different classifications of prayer I learned in my childhood: prayers of request, prayers of and for forgiveness, supplication, contrition, and so on. But those were to a God of otherness for me; a great God of the sky, who could and would grant wishes, or wash me to be “whiter than snow.” But what becomes of that type of prayer when God is infinitely incomprehensible? How do I commune? In fact, if I start from an assumption that God is in everything, knows everything and completes everything, then why (if at all) do I need to inform “him” of my needs, wants and wishes?

I don’t.

And suddenly prayer shifts from “out there” to “in here.” Prayer becomes speaking out loud that thought path to alignment with The Divine purpose already at work, and already manifest even before I become aware of it (like the ubiquitous Saabs I had not noticed. As I sit in prayer, I mentally and verbally begin to align my thoughts to Divine intention. And as I do that, the language of my prayer shifts from my laundry list of needs, wants and fears to seeking the humility to become an instrument of God’s work in my world.

It isn’t easy. I want a God who will fix it for me. But, like I always say, I am on a journey here, not looking for the end point, just on the path.

Still Puzzled

Beginning the new year has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Why is this day any different than any other (sounds like a child's question at the Seder meal)? Really? What is so special at this point? Why don't we just celebrate the day after the solstice as the beginning back to light? Or why not March first or December first? Heck why not the start of each month? I think it's just that we need to mark beginnings - a chance to wipe clean the slate, drop the guilt of last year's attempts bobbled and relieve the guilt of missions failed. Jews and Muslims do this in the fall with their high holy days but the rest of the people of the book choose to close the book at the end of December and start clean in January.

So I look back at the year - marked with less than exemplary performance at work, but balanced with a hat trick of "A's" in seminary courses. Our charity, Operation ELF, served more than twice last year's number of kids, but the satisfaction is quickly staggered by the recognition that poverty seems to be growing faster than we can counter it. So we just press on.

And this year, as we head into January and I anticipate a trip to Nogales and Altar and the land of despiration that drives even women and children to attempt their futile crossings of Desolation and Sonora, I wonder what value I can put into the stream of life. I don't even know really what my calling is or even why God has me going this way. So I press on.

Still puzzled.