CROSSINGS
JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES
In her new book Finding Jesus at the Border, professor of religion Julia Lambert Fogg tells the stories of people caught up in the U.S. immigration system, putting today’s stories in dialogue with boundary-crossing by Jesus and Paul in the New Testament.
Central Americans proceed into Mexico on foot after crossing the Guatemalan border in October 2018. The migrant caravan’s movements were sensationalized and viewed as threatening by some U.S. news outlets. Professor Fogg asks, How do stories like this look from the migrants’ side? These book excerpts are abbreviated, condensed and edited. Names have been changed.
A Crisis of Belonging To hear the border narratives in our Scriptures we must listen to the stories of those who cross borders and those who live at the border of belonging: the immigrants, the undocumented, the asylum seekers, children separated from their families. With this book I invite you to make that effort. I invite you to really listen to your neighbors’ stories, to wrestle with their experiences as undocumented people, and to imagine what it’s like to walk in their shoes, navigating the public school
4 CLU MAGAZINE
system, the emergency room, a courtroom or an insurance claims office. I invite you to ask what it’s like seeking help from a local congregation instead of giving it, receiving charity rather than making an offering, figuring out the tax system, seeking worker’s disability or understanding tenant rights. Transformation begins here: listening to our neighbors’ stories. Along the way we will meet neighbors we may not have even known we had. Santiago came across the border from Mexico almost 33 years ago, a baby in his mother’s
arms. Her name is Maria, and at that time she was fleeing poverty and the violence of an abusive marriage to seek a better life for herself and for her son. Once she reached California, she settled in an immigrant Mexican community. She remarried. She had another son. She lost her second husband—a U.S. citizen—to military service abroad in Iraq. She moved again. Her boys grew up speaking primarily in English and some Spanish with an American accent. They went to public school, played soccer, attended church and got fairly good grades. There were gangs in the area, but Santiago managed to keep himself and his little brother out of trouble. Around Santiago’s 15th birthday, everything ground to a halt. He found out he was different from the other kids. He had no legal documents, no birth certificate, no Social Security number, and therefore no legal identity. Everything he had always taken for granted—life in California, his friends, his education, his family, even his being American—fell away. If he wasn’t American like all the other kids, what was he? Who was he? He had no memory of Mexico or his Mexican father. In grade school, Santiago had studied the U.S. government as “our” government. He had learned U.S. history as “our” history, “our” democratic experiment, and “our” land of opportunity, but this American identity was no longer his. He was not part of “us,” and—this was the ultimate betrayal—he never had been. It was all a lie.
Santiago withdrew from his friends, his church, even his brother. Omar, three years younger, had a California birth certificate and baby photos with his American father. Somehow, Omar belonged. Santiago had no one to talk to about his discovery. His mother didn’t understand much English, let alone the future implications of his legal status. Omar had no idea his older brother had been born in a different country or that they had different legal rights. Santiago was terrified someone would discover his secret. What if his mother were arrested and sent back to Mexico? What if the police came and took him too? He couldn’t focus at school. He stayed home or sat in detention for acting out. He failed that year and attended summer remedial classes. The school held him back a grade anyway. He was a ghost, drifting through his life because none of it was truly his.
What Would Jesus’ Family Do? The flight of refugees recurs across the centuries and echoes through the biblical narrative. In every generation, under different empires, God’s people were on the move. In times of political turmoil, famine, and economic hardship, individuals, families and tribes in the ancient Near East—today’s Middle East—sought shelter or grazing lands in Egypt, and, when circumstances changed, they moved north and east, away from Egypt. Following the same migratory patterns both before and after the exodus,
