The Alien

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable." - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley 

"You and the alien shall be the same before the LORD." - Numbers 15

I have just hit the halfway mark here in this land called Chile, and the experience mirrors my last ex-pat experience in one very important way: I've done very little noticing of the actual people and more noticing of the immigrant population.  Lately I've been starting to wonder why that actually is.

Just recently, I met a Colombian girl in one of my classes who was studying abroad here in Santiago.  After class, we discussed some of our culture shock and observations of Chileans.  It was pretty similar to what a Peruvian friend of mine said.  I'm no person to lump countries together, but I had always thought I had the monopoly on culture shock for being an American, yet even a next door neighbor doesnt know what to do when he steps on through the threshold  Whether Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, Mexicans in Georgia, Ethiopians in DC, or Peruvians in Chile, the familiar loneliness of migrant living is a pain that's completely universal.  Yet its a pain that many are so willing to jump into out of necessity that it becomes a universal phenomenon at the same time.

In La Paz I did a lot of walking.  Unlike Santiago, La Paz always had something happening you couldnt quite ignore; whether the calling cadences of bus caller leaning out van windows or the seasoned voice of an old Aymara woman singing to flutes and guitars.  All my life I had dreamed about what Bolivia would be like, over time constructing a carefully drawn fantasy cradled in the Andes mountains.  When I arrived, this image was gloriously shattered by a real and very complicated reality of what Bolivia actually is: not a flimsy fantasy, but a real, breathing, living entity of epic proportions with its own tastes, fears, and passions.  Its own rumba de vida that wasnt going to be like anything else in the world.  In the end this is much frightening and complicating than any mental image could construct, but more gloriously overwhelming than any fantasy could ever capture.

Walking through poor neighborhoods turning to rich neighborhoods turning back to poor, the sheer immensity of La Paz always took me by surprise.  My epiphany of being in La Paz was that I remembered what I really cared about in life:

• The very fact that every single one of those small little houses was inhabited by someone, and its possible they need your help. 
• In a world where self help books flood shelves and people linger over the topic of "learning to love myself," I wanted to truly love my neighbor, whether I'm poor or rich, crying or laughing, and maybe even teach people to do the same.  
• To foster connections between communities that would not simply give them a few extra dollars in their pocket, rather to provide a lifetime of support to the "poor and the alien" that would challenge people to realize the love of Christ as a tangible reality, not a fleeting scheme of conquest.  
• To see the Church realize its real potential in this world as the one who cares for the downtrodden and does the work no one else in this world will do, and does it in a way that's helpfully informed by economic thought and development theory.  (Microloaning in churches? Why not?)
• And finally, that I may never be calloused to the reality of suffering on earth.  Summed up, to cry when the world laughs, and to love when the world hates.

The second realization is that immigrants are very much at the center of this for me, precisely because they are such a universal reality in the world; for this reason the Torah talks so specifically about caring for both the poor and the alien.  In all senses of the word, the Israelites were aliens in their land, and were always encouraged to treat the aliens they met with the same fairness.  For this reason they are "the same" before the LORD.

Unfortunately, this is not the reality and being an immigrant is perhaps one of the hardest struggles in our globalized world; immigrating is becoming much easier to do but not any easier to handle.  As the world becomes flatter, often times attitudes become cemented, and whether or not borders are closed, the worst part is that hearts are being closed.  Please dont confuse this for a political statement.  Open border or closed border, loving the poor alien is still a great challenge for most the world, and I think its key we think about this, regardless of your view about illegal aliens.

This is what I'm thinking about lately, though I have the feeling its only sketching the surface of a much bigger issue; one that will not be solved any time soon, but one that requires the thoughts and considerations of everyone taking the title of "Christian" and anyone who claims to practice the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This is a long process, but I think I'll have to find joy in the process of figuring out what this issue is really going to mean.  I know very little now and, as a friend of mine once said, "maybe someday I'll think about the rest."

~Jared