Catherine de Hueck Doherty

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Carried along by the speed, we become prone to movement
and resistant to stillness. Grant that we may be still in
Your presence and know that You are with us always, and that
the stillness of Your healing presence goes with us into the
fray.

Bless us with the subversive capacity to be still and to face all of
the fearful things that come running to our minds when we
stop moving. Make us at home in our own skins and in our
own world, and remind us that these skins and this world are
Yours and sing Your glory if only we are still enough to hear it.

Amen

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“It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause him simply by suffering ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.”

Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

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Full of white space, still shots, and silence, the Dodge commercial features Paul Harvey’s iconic voice waxing eloquent about why “God made a Farmer.” The visual and auditory effect of the commercial are extremely captivating. When it’s over, you want to be a farmer. Audi’s prom commercial follows a forlorn boy about to go to prom alone. Suddenly his father tosses him the keys to the Audi S6. Once at the prom, he walks straight up to the prom queen and grabs her and kisses her. She is clearly impressed. The prom king is not. The final scene shows of the boy driving home in the Audi with a big grin and black eye followed by the phrase “Bravery: It’s what defines us.”

Both commercials are for cars, but what they’re really selling is an identity.

That’s the message of advertisement after advertisement. You aren’t enough. You don’t have enough. You aren’t whole. You’re life isn’t what it should be, but if you buy this it can be. My friend Shane Hipps left the advertising industry because he realized that “the measure of his success in advertising was his ability to promote a counterfeit gospel.” With that message constantly ringing in our ears, it’s no wonder that in a culture of abundance, many of us are driven by scarcity and anxiety.

Years ago I heard an adoptive parent speak of the crippling effect of scarcity. This family had just welcomed their adopted child home, and on this particular day, the mother had made muffins for everyone. She had made one muffin for everyone, and, as mothers do, got busy making plates. When she finally turned around for her own muffin, it was gone. So was their adopted child. After several minutes of searching, they found him inside a closet with both muffins stuffed in his mouth and tears streaming down his face. When scarcity is how you see the world, it shapes you into the kind of person who takes what’s there because you don’t actually trust that it will ever be there again. So, driven by anxiety, we grasp, snatch, take, hoard, and compete for everything we can get our hands on. Nelson Rockafeller was once asked by a reporter how much he thought he needed to live comfortably. His response? “A little more than I get.” And so we seem to live in a world that has no concept for the word enough.

As I think about the economic displacement I saw in Mexico and how it’s fueling the immigration issue, it seems clear that no matter what kind of immigration reform happens, if that reform doesn’t address economic development in Mexico, then it will fail to address the root cause of the problem. While in Agua Prieta, Mexico, I saw traces of what can happen when this root cause is addressed. Cafe Justo is a small coffee cooperative that aims to help farmers and their families create sustainable, small-scale international businesses in which the families are the shareholders.

And yet I don’t think creating economic opportunity in Mexico is the only way to address the root causes of the current immigration situation. If, “in a consumer culture whose civic religion prizes consumption as the height of human flourishing” (James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom), we could develop an imagination for the word enough, it might make a world of difference.

Is it possible that something as simple as the practice of gratitude could begin to free us from the anxiety of scarcity? In his book Yearnings, Rabbi Irwin Kula tells of a song sung after the Jewish seder meal called dayenu, which literally means “it’s enough for us.” The song remembers the many events through which God had rescued, provided for, and brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. After each retelling, that word, dayenu, is sung. Gratitude is not simply a feeling that wells up in us. It’s also a spiritual practice that can grow us into the kind of people who believe, “It’s enough for us.” It might just be that grace begets grace. Practice gratitude.

“You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and the pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

G.K. Chesterton

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What troubled me while on the border was the constant narrative of economic displacement. As I spoke with people, I kept hearing about NAFTA. I haven’t heard that phrase since I was in high school, but the stories were the same. When NAFTA took effect, the Mexican government stopped subsidizing corn which was a major cash crop. When this happened, heavily subsidized US agri-business was able to begin selling corn to Mexico for less than Mexican farmers could. Many subsistence farmers were put out of business. While US and Canadian companies have put factories all along the US/Mexico border, the “maquilas” as they are called, aren’t exactly a dream come true. The factories are there because of cheap labor, and workers don’t make enough money to put food on the table and pay their bills. To drive through the factory district and then round a corner and see where workers actually live is startling.

The vast majority of undocumented migrants are simply people who can’t make ends meet and cross out of desperation. What disturbed me was the feeling that there is a lot of money to be made by keeping the immigration situation exactly as it is. Last September, a Huffington Post story reported the ways in which immigration convictions are fueling profits of private prisons which are contracted with the US government. The notion that economically displaced people are acting out of desperation and that US companies profit off of their criminalization is deeply troubling.

I’m no economist, and I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of economic systems. Clearly in a capitalistic system, there are always going to be winners and losers, but I struggle with an economic system in which the losers pay with their lives and the winners continue to profit by preying upon their desperation.

As a pastor, I came to the realization that we live in a moment in time when the dominant story ordering our world, and how we see ourselves in it, is economic. It’s a story that says that profit is more important than human wholeness. And amidst such a culture, one of my most pressing obligations is to help people explore a biblical imagination for the word “enough.”

In her book The Soul of Money Lynne Twist says, “This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, and our arguments with life.”

Walter Brueggemann points to Pharaoh as the quintessential embodiment of the anxiety that comes with the culture of scarcity. In Genesis 41, Pharaoh has a dream about a famine. As Brueggemann says, “The guy who owns everything has a dream that leaves him anxious about not having enough.” So he begins a food monopoly, collecting grain so that by the end of Genesis people have willingly sold themselves into slavery in exchange for food. Brueggemann suggests that “people who are anxious about scarcity have no time for the common good.”

I heard an adoptive parent once tell a story about making muffins for her family. They were a family of five, and so she made five muffins. She set the muffins out and then turned around and got busy. A few minutes later she turned to take her muffin, but it was gone. So was her adopted child. Several minutes later, they found the child hiding in a closet with both muffins stuffed in his mouth and tears streaming down his face. Because when your reality is scarcity, you take whatever you can get your hands on because you don’t know when it will be there again. So our culture of scarcity shapes us to be graspers, takers, hoarders, and monopolizers because of fear. I think Brueggemann is right. If we could get our mind off the fear that there’s not enough, we might actually have some time for the common good.

In Part 2 of this post, I want to begin unpacking how our culture reinforces this sense of scarcity and what me might do in order to be liberated from it.

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We spoke with Border Patrol agents, migrants, border ranchers, aid workers, social workers, and a public defender. Each conversation functioned as another step into the complexity of what is happening there, and very little of that complexity is captured in the sound bytes one hears on immigration. Which is understandable. I can’t hope to capture the fullness of what is happening in the span of a blog post. Still, when it comes to immigration—and I suspect to life in general—if you are not willing to engage complexity, you will diminish human life in some way, shape or form.

And it was the toll on human life that took me by surprise. I shared a meal one evening with a migrant who had traveled to the border in hopes of hiring a coyote (a guide) and crossing through the desert. He’d recently been robbed and beaten in Juarez. The bloody gash across the back of his head was still oozing. For more than ten years he lived and worked in the US as a dry-waller and was proud of his work. “No lines. No cracks.” he said with a grin. An undercover officer arrested him while grocery shopping one day, and he was deported leaving behind his wife, child, and grandchildren. As we ate, he continued cracking jokes, but he was still noticeably nervous about the journey ahead. And with good reason.

Most guides work for Mexican drug cartels, and they have a reputation for lacking compassion. They mislead. They abandon. They rape. In fact, I met a Palestinian researcher who was writing a study on transitional justice and women. She’d interviewed many women who fled Baghdad during the invasion, and was on the border interviewing migrant women trying to cross the border. When crossing the border, migrants are especially vulnerable. One aid worker estimated that nine out of ten women are sexually assaulted when crossing and that many of them begin taking birth control as they near the border. Because they expect it. Everyone we talked to had a story to tell of finding a body in the desert. Immigration is a controversial issue, but as long as it remains an issue separated from human faces, it will miss the point. We are not talking about “illegals.” We’re talking about a man or a woman or a child who has a name and a story. Yes, there’s a drug problem on the border. Yes, there are criminals entering the U.S. illegally, but the vast majority are people looking for sanctuary from economic displacement. And if you go to the border, you will hear that even from border patrol agents or farmers along the wall.

It looks like some kind of immigration reform is on the horizon, but even when it does come the fact remains that we live in a world in need of restoration, and if we think for a moment that restoration is going to come about because some government somewhere came up with a new policy we’re fooling ourselves. Restoration begins with each of us.

Shura Wallin, a retiree turned activist, put it well as she showed us articles she’d found left behind by migrants in the desert. “Is this basura (trash), or are these items the composite sketch of a human life?” This isn’t a question about immigration. It’s a question about how we see the world, and our answer matters because how we see the world will determine how we are in the world. It’s amazing the kinds of things you’ll see when you’re willing to cross a border, and I think that part of what it means to have eyes that see is to become the kind of person who practices what Mark Adams calls, “the spiritual discipline of border crossing.”

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