A Reflection on Border Crossing
Rev. Kurt Walker (MDiv ’10)
A week before the world became disordered by a virus that would become a global pandemic, eleven members of the Andover Newton community traveled to Arizona and Mexico. The trip provided a unique opportunity for us to reorder our understanding of the immigration crisis along the southern border of the US. This occurred by coming face to face with the men, women, and children who are directly impacted by United States immigration policy. In the process, we were transformed.
Border crossers: (from left) Molly Mitchell, the Rev. Dr. Randy Mayer, Rafael Reuther, Emily Bruce, Benjamin Walker, Kelsey Creech, Ethan Loewi, Kayla Ford, Madeleine Walker, Laura Kisthardt,
and Alicen Roberts
When we walked into the dark, lawn-chair furnished room and sat around the circle to hear stories from the women who were fleeing their homes for their own safety and the safety of their children, we became disordered.
Some of them had been waiting weeks, some months, to be told they could finally make their way to the border for processing. In the meantime, they slept in crowded, sparsely lit dorms crammed with bunk beds while they boiled their water and cooked their food by the open fires on the concrete landings outside their living spaces. The children played in their bare feet.
I saw this trip as a chance to offer my eighteen-year-old twins, Benjamin and Madeleine, the opportunity to meet our neighbors to the south. By doing so, it was my hope they might better understand the privilege to which they have been the recipients as white middle-class teens living in the United States. I also hoped they would come to better understand Jesus’ lesson, “to whom much has been given, much will be required.” Founder of Liberation Theology, Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, wrote, “(our neighbor is) not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.”
Wall Mural in Nogales, Mexico
Our transformation comes about as the result of a lifetime of learning the order of things as they are in our life (perhaps as they have always been perceived), experiencing a moment of disorder (perhaps as the result of a traumatic event or major life change), and a reordering of a person’s sense of life (viewing the world, and our place in it, through a new lens). We might also call these three phases as: life, death, and resurrection.
To recognize the face of another as the face of God is a deeply transformative experience. To acknowledge the presence of the divine in the presence of those whose life experiences are not our own is transformative. To be able to identify God in the hungry, the thirsty, the downtrodden, the persecuted, the marginalized, the stranger, and the refugee is a journey of transformation on a path that never ends.