From “The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border” by Cristina Rathbone
The story that follows traces just one part of this work: four short months spent on a single block of a single street at the foot of a single port of entry into the United States from Mexico. I’d been on the border for close to five months by the time this story start, and the experiences I’d learned about – and, in some small cases, shared in – informed and deepened my time with the people on this street. But the truth is that I still had no real idea what I was doing. And this feeling never left me. I felt it keenly even on my last day there as I walked back across the Paso del Norte bridge into El Paso from Juarez for the very last time.
I mention this now, openly and up front, because I’ve come to believe that this pervasive not knowing – this conscious and unending sense of partial lostness – is essential to any real, on-the-ground work with people whose suffering is both extreme and long-lasting. It is only when we know that we don’t know, after all, that we most genuinely seek. And it is when we genuinely seek that we are most deeply found, by each other and also by God.
And this is the other reason I went to the border – less easy to trace, perhaps, but no less elemental than the way I am made: I needed God palpable in my life again, manifest and visible and sturdy enough to wallop me back into sanity and truth from the meandering paths of self on which I waste so much time.
I did not go to the border as a journalist, though I’d spent most of my adult life working as one before I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church at the age of forty-three. Nor did I go there as a social activist or a political organizer. Big ideas and muscular, courageous policies are essential if we are ever to wrest justice from the maw of horror that is our immigration system today. I pray every day for the leaders and thinkers and organizers who do this work. But I am not one of them. In fact, I am the opposite: give me an ideal and give me an individual and I’ll choose the individual every time – which, in part, is why I stopped being a journalist and started being a priest.
This book offers nothing like an objective or a comprehensive account of the border, then. It is far more personal than that, far more ephemeral. Instead, what follows is a collection of stories about myself, and the border, and 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.