Where God waits in line

The border between the United States and Mexico resembles the elephant in the Indian tale of blind men who discern that it is just like a wall, or a rope, or a snake, or a tree. To the Trump administration, the border is a battleground overrun by rapists and thieves and drug dealers. To travelers fleeing from beatings and death threats in Central America, it is a gateway, closed today but perhaps open tomorrow, to new opportunities and reunions with long-separated family members. To ranchers and landscapers and restaurant owners across the United States, it is a filter through which many of their most valued, if least compensated, workers must pass. For residents of the borderlands like me, it is a battleground not between marauding criminals and law-abiding citizens but between political factions unwilling to address immigration in a coordinated way and always ready to exploit it for political advantage.

In this brief and personal narrative, Cristina Rathbone, a journalist ordained to Episcopal priesthood in midlife, offers a fresh and insightful perspective on the border. Her field of vision is intentionally narrow. On a border 2,000 miles long, she focuses on one pair of cities and on one of the four bridges between them. As migrants arrive from around the world, she immerses herself in the life of one tent camp near that bridge. In the long history of US efforts to control immigration and keep people of undesirable nationalities out, Rathbone zeroes in on half a year, late in Trump’s first presidential term. The Asylum Seekers, she writes, offers “nothing like an objective or a comprehensive account of the border” but rather something more personal and ephemeral:

a collection of stories about myself, and the border, and of a handful of people who tried to survive there, even as they sought something more. And it is also, I pray, a story about God: not as God is so often portrayed, tucked away in the corner of a pretty church someplace, or floating, disembodied, above the fray, but of God enfleshed and incarnate, out in the heart of the suffering world—with and as and in the people who wait so vulnerably there.