9.20.15
“The strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as natives among you, and you shall love them as yourself…” Leviticus 19:34
The current Syrian refugee crisis has much been on my mind and my heart the last few weeks. Perhaps you, too, saw the photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on the shore.
His small body lays there face down in the sand: dark hair, red t-shirt, blue shorts, small shoes that someone who loved him helped him put on that morning, perhaps. You almost wish – hope against hope – that maybe he is sleeping. But he drowned, along with his brother and mother as they desperately attempted to cross the sea.
Around 11 million Syrians have been displaced, either within Syria or to surrounding and often inhospitable countries. Over half of the refugees are children. Half a million are pregnant women. They are all humans who have chosen desperate measures to save their lives and their family members’ lives.
Yet in much of America, Syrian refugees are seen as threats. U.S. Representative Michael McCaul said that accepting Syrians would create a “federally funded jihadi pipeline” to the U.S. Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has warned that we have to be “very careful about who we let enter this country.” We know that these arguments extend not just to Syrians but to most any refugee or immigrant to this country who we consider not white, affluent, or Christian.
Those who argue that refugees are leaving their countries in order to carry out terrorist plots fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be a refugee.
Alan Kurdi’s father, challenged us, saying: “We are human beings, just like Westerners.” Most immigrants are abandoning the home that they love because if they don’t they will die. The Somalian poet Warsan Shire describes this in the following poem. (Listen to her read it here or here.)
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
wants to be beaten
wants to be pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one’s skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child’s body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.
-Warsan Shire
The plight of refugees breaks our hearts.
Our faith calls us to respond to that heartbreak with action …because our principles affirm the “goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”
Our principles are not easy things. How do we strive for that goal?
I have spent days immersed in the Syrian refugee crisis, making my way through complex political, historical, and social issues. The “How” came to me (at least one “How”) – Radical Hospitality.
By “radical” hospitality I mean something like revolutionary hospitality – hospitality that revolutionizes our relationships with one another… for only a profound revolution can heal this brokenness. By “radical” hospitality, I also refer to the etymology of the word “radical” – related to root.
The root of hospitality is about inclusion and exclusion, welcoming someone in to our spaces and our hearts. And where we usually fall short is when that person is very different from us. How can we make someone comfortable when we ourselves are uncomfortable?
“In the face of diversity, most of us retreat.”
That’s what Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist wrote based on his research of Americans’ declining social engagement. Levels of trust and interaction are highest when people are surrounded with those most like them. He concluded that as the U.S. becomes more heterogeneous, people have stopped reaching out and instead hunker down, watching TV at home, maintaining fewer friendships, and engaging in fewer community projects.
Let us consider how often we are surrounded by people like us. Are there certain parts of town I never go in? Certain kinds of people with whom I rarely have conversations?
There has been a twitter campaign of people posting photos of themselves with signs saying, “Welcome Refugees.” This hospitality is heart-warming.
We must be clear about what it requires of us.
Too often in the U.S., even those immigrants we have enthusiastically welcomed have then had to dissolve their differences into our “melting pot.” Differences often make us uncomfortable.
The Quaker Educator Parker Palmer wrote, “the essence of hospitality…is that we let our differences, our mutual strangeness, be as they are, while still acknowledging the unity that lies beneath them.”
Letting differences be as they are can be challenging, even for those of us who consider ourselves accepting.
After college, I did an internship with the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. I sought out this experience because I had become disheartened by the so called “service trips” sponsored by my college. I felt our “service” was in some ways self-serving. The Center for Action and Contemplation said they hosted a different kind of trip. We went to both sides of the U.S. Mexico border, but we didn’t build any schools, or teach English, or any of the other things I had done on service trips.
We were there to explore the sentiment expressed by aboriginal activists: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” (aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s).
We stayed in Juarez with a community of people who have been forced to build their houses – mostly made out of particle board – on top of old landfills. Sometimes in the heat, buried hazardous waste ignites and burns down their homes. Like I say, we didn’t really DO much. The goal was instead to listen and learn. This meant there was little to shield us from some pretty raw situations.
One morning there, I was eating breakfast with the family I was staying with. The mother was looking around her small kitchen at her dirt floor – you couldn’t even really call it a dirt floor, since it was mostly compressed garbage – and she asked me (I swear: without any note of anger or judgment or self-pity, but just like she was making conversation)…she said, “You probably have carpet in your house at home, don’t you?”
The discomfort I had felt throughout our stay there, the glaring reality of my privilege – was laid bare. I could not run from it. Part of me wanted to say, ridiculously, “No, I swear! .. I live like this, too!” or “Yes, but here: I will give you money to buy carpet,” or “Yes, but I’ll give it all up and trade places with you.” I wanted to flee the discomfort, erase the difference.
But none of those responses made sense. She didn’t want handouts, she didn’t want my white middle-class guilt, she just wanted someone to witness the struggle she was in, to support the courageous, difficult work she was doing to care for herself and her family.
So I responded simply, “Yes, I have carpet” and we kept eating our rice and sitting there with each other. Parker Palmer said, “When we are insecure about our own identities, we create settings that deprive other people of their identities as a way of buttressing our own.”
The women living on that old landfill told us that well-intentioned North Americans would come through the landfill, not even step out of their cars, and just hand money out the windows. They told us that when this happened, of course many would run to grab some money, but it felt degrading, and nurtured hostility between neighbors.
Now: of course it is totally valid for us to send money to people in need. We can use our privilege in many concrete ways to help others. I have even included in the announcements for today links to petitions and funding sources related to the Syrian refugees.
But when it comes to solving the root of humanity’s brokenness, it will require a deeper shift in our ways of relating. When we were with that community on the landfill, we couldn’t distract ourselves from the fear and discomfort. We faced a vulnerable encounter with the other.
These encounters can shift paradigms. I remember when same-sex marriage passed in the state of Maine, the community organizers credited the success to their creation of one-on-one conversations between people who thought differently.
In their book Radical Hospitality : Benedict’s Way of Love, Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt say this, “Hospitality…is a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality.”
So, how is embracing difference a spiritual practice? Because in that vulnerable encounter with something other than us, we encounter the Beyond. We find that we are all held, despite or even because of our differences, in the unity that lies beneath, as Parker Palmer said.
Radical Hospitality is a spiritual practice because it requires of us courage, compassion, and being in community.
Let us practice Radical Hospitality with ourselves, with each other, and with our neighbors near and far. Then we will know truly the reality that we are not separate from each other. Blessed Be.
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Radical Hospitality
