I get that sometimes it really does become safe to go back home, if by home we mean the physical coordinates of where we grew up. It is as if they are saying we could go back to the Garden of Eden, that after eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we could still find our way back to innocence. So it is puzzling to me what the writer of Hebrews means when saying that “they would have had the opportunity to return,” from a spiritual perspective. Even if she had never left, it would have been taken right out from under her feet anyway. What had once been streets filled with working class, Eastern European immigrants and their shops and modest homes, has now been gentrified out of existence. Nicola described to me her experience recently of going back to the neighborhood where she grew up, on a trip with my sister to Chicago. I suspect it is also the case that the Homeland changes as well. Leaving, growing, facing adventures alters who we are, such that our homeland cannot be our homeland again even if we wanted it to. Our old homeland can only be our homeland if we are a certain way. As Thomas Wolfe wrote, there are ways in which “you can’t go home again.” The act of leaving changes us. She had been excited to go, but when she got there, she just didn’t fit in any more. ![]() My Grandma told us stories about her trip back to Hong Kong after living in the states for a while. She wanted to return.Īt the same time, it probably isn’t quite so simple to return. ![]() Having grown up as a young, black, Muslim woman in America during the time of Trump, she felt respected, comfortable in public, aware of who she was, in a way that she simply had not experienced before in America. Her relatives in Africa took such good care of her, so excited to have an American in their midst, that she wanted to stay. The woman I was talking to had originally wanted to send her daughter to stay with family in Africa to help her understand where she had come from, and how lucky she was to be in American. Except that now, with the miracles of modern transportation and signs of stability returning to East Africa, it really is a possibility for the first and second generation to go back. A lot of it sounded familiar, how one generation struggles to pass on the knowledge and values of the other old world to the new how the second generation struggles to form an identity that can encompass both worlds. I am reminded of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a woman from Somalia and a man from Djibouti, both of whom were talking about what it was like to raise children in the US. With respect to geographic immigration, I can understand this more easily. ![]() Why would God give us the opportunity to return, if our calling is to be migrants? The writer of Hebrews goes on to comment that “If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return.” It’s fairly easy to understand what this means in the context of physical immigration from one place to another, harder to decipher the meaning for our spiritual lives. Rather than honor those who seek a homeland, we tend to make it harder for them to work and live and raise their families.įor those of us who come from immigrant families, we know, however, that even without facing prejudice, people miss home no matter what. And yet unfortunately, when a “real Mainer” has to have family living in the state for generations, Kawczynski’s thinking is just the most extreme version of an all-too common prejudice. It allows that kind of thinking to become normalized. Mike’s point in the article was that no media outlet-conservative or otherwise-should give airtime to a guy who literally puts Hitler on his Christmas cards, and openly calls for the creation of a white ethnostate. The Bangor-based conservative radio station, WVOM, put Kawczynski on the air, because they wanted to allow him to explain himself, after he was fired from his position as the Jackman town manager for being an avowed white supremacist. Mike Tipping, a colleague of mine, recently wrote a piece for Beacon about Tom Kawczynski, the leader of the so-called “Maine for Mainers” organization. In the US, and in Maine in particular, we rather than praise those who “seek” a “homeland,” we tend to trust only those who can claim America and Maine as a homeland for generations. The writer of Hebrews situates their theology in the long Biblical tradition of migration, comparing our spiritual experience to the Old Testament patriarchs, virtually none of whom had a “homeland.” Hearing that sentence, I cannot but help to think about the asylum seekers that made their way from Congo and Angola, through Latin America, across our southern border, to the Portland Expo, and then even, this week, to Lewiston. Ben Chin – Pentecost 9, August 11,2019 – “The Ready State”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |