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Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
We stood at the southernmost and nearly easternmost point of the
Wall
dividing the US from Mexico.
I wondered whether my colleagues,
who held tightly onto the wrought iron 16’ bars,
or set a finger on a rust spot for so many minutes,
were offering a silent holy kaddish,
or were they channeling the pain of untold numbers of lives affected and lost by it?
We were clergy and laity from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Kansas.
We were UCC, Presbyterian Church USA, United Methodist and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
My roots are in Norway and Germany
and Ireland –as landed gentry up my mother’s father’s line—
My British great grandfather—my father’s mother’s father,
assimilated into an American culture far away from home and family
and a Pennsylvania Dutch great grandmother, my father’s mother’s mother
and my French-Canadian Grandmother, my mother’s mother
who was also my Roman Catholic godmother
made lives and loves and children as immigrants.
My family is white
representatives of north-western Europe proven by DNA
the test gifted me by my sister
because we wondered if our blue-eyed mother’s blue-eyed mother’s French-Canadian line
included indigenous Turtle Island (it doesn’t)
I am the product of the Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Sets
Because my blue-eyed father’s blue-eyed grandfather emigrated
And I wonder what my blue-eyed great grandfather’s impetus for emigrating was
--war or opportunity.
I am a genealogical product of my mother’s mother’s French-Canadian Roman Catholicism
And I am the theological and genealogical ancestor of Pilgrims who emigrated
out of a brutal theocracy for safety;
I am a genealogical ancestor of the religiously persecuted Anabaptist
Who emigrated for safety, fleeing a violent chaotic religious persecution in Europe,
and became Pennsylvania Dutch.
Europe is merely small peninsulas sticking out from a
much larger, broader, more populous continent to its East
and maybe Europe has been compensating by colonizing and oppressing the world
so that I can cross borders and get by with my native and only language
Standing at the Fence,
we were products of a theological Reformation that had protested
an oppressively brutal theocracy,
Pilgrims who emigrated as refugees
and then, as Congregationalists with religious fervor,
accompanied the colonization of
a large broad populous continent to the west
We Fence-touchers were a manifestation of the Wholiness Project,
which is funded by a grant from the UCC Council of Conference Ministers,
to do joint ministry in the three Northwestern UCC Conferences:
Montana-Northern Wyoming, Central Pacific, Pacific Northwest.
We were Latina or Hispanic or Honduran or Puerto Rican or privileged white,
we were gay, and we were mothers and fathers and veterans.
We had wrestled with words like migrant and refugee,
asylum and legal documents
and immigrant.
We’d held holy thought and deeply sacred talk about emigrate for the last three days
wondering why one would leave a dangerous unpredictable violent chaotic famine- overwhelmed and underserved home
for the predictable deportation and kidnapping and waiting in a shelter
for days and months and months and months
behind thick cement walls
for an appointment to be granted access into the Home of the Free (Because of the Brave).
We had heard the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a trauma-based reaction to Genesis 14,
which reads like the US cavalry forcing native Americans into closed canyons to their deaths,
except with Biblical tar.
We had heard the Book of Ruth from the perspective of women in ancient Israel,
through the stark simplicity of Ruth 1:1,
Long ago, in the days before Israel had a king, there was a famine in the land.
Then, the biblical story tells us,
a family made the difficult discernment to emigrate and
leave the home they loved for food and safety,
becoming immigrants in a foreign land
where they formed family and lived and loved
until their beloveds died.
Then, as the biblical story reports,
two women from two different lands reversed the status of
resident and emigrant
to become refugees in the “City of Bread,” Bethlehem,
which had already exiled one of them,
where they relied on the safety-net of a theocratic state that mandated welfare—gleaning. Then, our biblical narrator tells us,
the native Naomi and immigrant Ruth employed the stereotype of
exotically erotic immigrant women
to attract Boaz
for their own food and safety.
Ruth, an immigrant refugee
who used her body to provide food and safety for herself and her mother-in-law,
is an ancestor to Jesus.
At the sacredly sobering oldest section of the Wall,
which was really more a Fence--a very, very tall Fence--
we were watched by the Border Patrol,
first one dark-windowed white pick-up truck with sans serif large-point dark font,
then a second,
as a storm rumbled thunder and threat.
As the first big raindrops fell,
we stood before the historic marker marking a historic ferry
and prayed for reconciliation,
or maybe it was forgiveness,
for traveling mercies and the healing of the desperation that makes you make
decisions and difficult journeys for food and safety.
I read Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” aloud to the van of
weary and wet and sobered colleagues.
And I cried all the way back to our shared house.
I hadn’t cried earlier that day at the grounding meditation on the beach that we’d needed—touching sand and salt water and breath to remember our bodies and souls,
nor had I cried the night before at the beautifully celebratory first anniversary worship of
UCC Rio Grande Valley, our angel hosts.
Certainly not at the second of two shelters in Mexico that we had visited the day before in the heart of a cartel’s active kidnapping region,
where I saw an old-model Nissan or Datsun truck with
two young men in hunting camo hunched in the back.
We were safe, and we were watched.
We were watched as we ate baked and fried fish with hot sauce
and shrimp soup with lime
after sweating in the dripping wet hot central courtyard of the second shelter,
which currently housed 160 refugees seeking asylum in my country.
My colleagues had needed a photo with a very tall statue of the Virgin de Guadelupe
in the triangle made by the confluence of three roughly paved roads
connecting the two shelters and the seafood restaurant
Three rough roads,
lined with rusted cars and Casinos and Pharmacies
because drug prices are cheaper on the Mexican side of the Wall-Fence-Bridge,
where the old Nissan or Datsun and its camo-hunched passengers patrolled
The refugees waited behind thick cement walls,
In a shelter run by badass nuns,
because they had been kidnapped by the cartel,
which had demanded a hefty ransom from their family.
The cartel released the ransomed on the corner near the shelter
because the badass nuns had stood up
to the boys in the Nissan or Datsun 2 decades ago.
The recently kidnapped-ransomed-released were glad to be safe behind
thick cement walls and a heavy metal gate,
even if they were also a bit bored by seeing only
thick cement walls and the heavy metal gate
for days and months and months and months on end.
Upon entering the sweaty hot wet courtyard,
we had been greeted by an adorable multiply handicapped big-grinned girl,
who slammed her little body into my 6’4” colleague,
who smiled and returned her hug,
and the oldest tiniest rheumatoid-arthritis-affected badass nun.
Although now I cry at the Christ of it all—
the badass nuns and the desperate bravery
of Naomi and Ruth,
and our angel hosts who made lunch and dinner for us
and I cry at the injustice of refugees waiting in the hot wet courtyard for an appointment to come into my country to begin the process of applying for asylum,
But standing in that sweaty hot humid courtyard I had my hackles up, grateful to be behind thick cement walls and the heavy metal gate.
something there is that doesn’t like a wall
The Wall-Fence rose toward the grey roiling sky,
it kept us from getting close to the river that is the actual border
between two of the three NAFTA countries,
a treaty which was signed into law by the same Administration of my country
that had ordered this sacred section of mud and sorrow to be Fenced.
Through the Fence we could see the Mexican side of the former historic ferry landing
where now a bridge crosses the Rio Grande
which is littler than the beautiful wide rocky Yellowstone
which cannot compare to the muddy Ohio River
and it’s meaning of freedom on the underground railroad in Ohio where I grew up,
also a border state,
where we knew the difficult border issue of Canadian quarters being too light
to buy a favorite canned fizzy artificially sweetened pop
from a very very tall
lit-from-within
pop-machine.
We were a pop-not-soda state seventeenth state free-not-slave state
I am a blond haired blue eyed childless gay cat man
standing in a sunny sweaty hot humid courtyard
so freakin scared and safe and
Watched
I am blue-eyed Huck singing I see from blue eyes what you see from brown
Worlds apart
On our last evening together
Standing at the Wall-Fence-Bridge complex, I sigh-pray
Jesus we have a need to enlargen,
With swagger and bravado,
Our Fences and Guns
to protect our freedom from a seep of brown refugee bodies not broken
by leaving a violent chaotic faraway home country
for predictable kidnapping and ransoming and waiting.
(10 Far Away Countries if you start from earthquaked and hurricaned and politically and physically unstable Haiti)
The thickly growing grassy and brushy Rio Grande Big River
cannot compare to the Big River Missippi
a wide muddy river that doubles with the confluence with the Ohio
after doubling with the confluence with the Missouri
which doubles with the confluence with the Yellowstone
which enlargens with the confluences of the Boulder and the Gallatin
which were named by men who looked like me
and house holy places with questionably dubious indigenous names like Miminagish
I share one of the Corps of Discovery hero voyagers’ surname--
a common surname that is easily pronounced in most places.
At the airport awaiting the first leg of a homeward journey,
my 6’4” colleague’s icy cold Euro centric Nordic name was a stumbling block for
soothing soft Spanish tongues.
He and I shared this final moment
of paradoxes
of being Euro-Christian northern-border-state-born male white patriotic privileged progressive clergy.
We had heard superhero stories of the
badass-est oldest littlest rheumatoid-arthritis ridden nun
who pulled kidnapped-not-ransomed refugees out of a once-new Datsun or Nissan and the camo-clothed passengers.
We both had experienced the strangeness of inserting ourselves into the lives of so many people loving their neighbor
and people exploiting their neighbor for the betterment of themselves
Standing at the Fence
we had just learned that if migration reform in the next administration is weighted toward mass deportation,
this whole area inside the US for 100 miles north will probably become militarized.
Militarization of the border would make the area around the welcoming center
an unwelcoming warzone negating any work of the Welcoming Center that gives
kidnapped-ransomed-waiting refugees
at least a little welcome to their new chosen homeland,
where we had given out razors and knit hats and pizza to migrants
who had just minutes before crossed the bridge from Mexico on foot
after their appointment with the Border Patrol Agents
who gave them the first of many documents that might maybe lead to asylum.
Crossing day had come after waiting behind
thick cement walls
for days and months and months
in one of the shelters we had visited the day before.
In the Bienvenido center they got a decent meal and socks
and a blessing from Pastor Ali,
who leads the UCC Rio Grande Valley,
our host angels in this blessed border immersion ministry.
With muy importante instructions to
hold on to all of their documents in a manilla envelope they had just been given,
and after I had asked adonde vas?
to see whether their host lived in a place where they’d need a knit hat and scarf and gloves, they went off to Washington or Utah or Pennsylvania, Houston or Dallas –
someplace yet so far away.
Or they went to the long-term shelter nearby that housed those
who had legally crossed into the US after waiting
for days and months and months
for that appointment
in a shelter run by badass nuns
on the other side of the River-Fence-Bridge complex.
They stayed at the Texan long-term shelter as they waited for asylum hearings.
We had visited that shelter on our first day in the border area.
If this area of the US border becomes militarized,
the shelters that are run by badass nuns
across the Fence-Bridge-Rio Grande demilitarized zone in Mexico
are preparing for mass deportations and wondering
how they will handle the millions of refugees that are promised.
It is unlikely that they will be deported to their country of origin,
but to Mexico,
where the cartel is preparing for a windfall of valuable vulnerable refugees to be
kidnapped and ransomed.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
wrote Frost.
The neighbor mending the wall from the other side gets the last word, though
Good fences make good neighbors.
And I cried because of the Christ of it all,
all the way back home.
Rev. Tony Clark. Sept 18, 2024, BIlling
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