Yesterday afternoon I watched the first week’s lectures of a new online course I am taking on Latin American Culture. Although I have not been to Latin America since a rather disastrous Feast of Tabernacles in 2009, when I spent most of the feast sick with the flu, wrapping myself in layers and constantly thirsty, with most of my voice gone, still responsible for singing, playing the viola, and translating, and dealing with some spectacularly unsuccessful personal business with a young lady while having to be the go-between between her aunt (who did not speak English) and a friendly fellow from the United States (who did not speak Spanish) where they were both interested in each other and unable to communicate because of the language barrier between them. That said, I still have a lot of friends in Latin America and a general interest in its well-being that goes back to my childhood, when some of my earliest friends were migrant farmers in Central Florida who, like me, lived a somewhat nomadic life.

Migrants are a fairly vulnerable population, wherever they are. Usually the sort of long-distance travel that migrants are involved in tends to leave them in areas where the language, culture, and laws are somewhat unfamiliar. Additionally, migrants often travel as small families or even more so as individuals without a great deal of social cohesion, leaving them without a large safety net that they can depend on as they seek to make a new life in a new place. It is therefore not a surprise that such people tend to be often taken advantage of, in part because they are often seen as being in competition with more established groups and because they lack the firm citizenship and deep roots that give their own longings a sense of legitimacy. Worse, because migrants often feel trapped (and it is their desire for improvement or escape that leads them to migrate in the first place) that exploitation in their new realm can often be preferable to what they were leaving in their previous situations.

The Bible has a lot to say about migrants, usually under the term “strangers” [1]. Ephesians 2:19, for example, is at pains to comfort Gentile believers who have left behind their heathen ways and adopted the biblical worldview and a belief in Christ by telling them: “Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” As God told Abraham in Genesis 15:13: “Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.” Likewise, the unfairly maligned law of God contains numerous protections of servants, including the general protection of Exodus 23:9: “Also you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” There is also specific protection for strangers, as is the case of the Sabbath law in Exodus 23:12: “Six days you shall do your work, and on the seventh day you shall rest, that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your female servant and the stranger may be refreshed.” Clearly, God views the plight of the migrant with a great deal of compassion, and expects us to do the same, with the memory that we too are migrants and strangers here, sometimes by His design.

How did I come to identify with the migrants of my youth, who looked differently than I did and spoke Spanish far better than English, most of them coming from Mexico. I suppose, in a way, I had the heart of a stranger myself, and so I could recognize that these people, as differently as they appeared from me, were strangers here too, and I was drawn to the fellow outsiders. For I was born to a family of blue collar farmers and bus drivers in rural Western Pennsylvania, and I grew up in Florida as a migrant brought by my family’s breakup. Once my parents divorced, I became (like my friends and neighbors) a seasonal migrant, traveling to Pennsylvania when school was not in session (once in winter but general summer) and then traveling back just before school started. As a result of having strong ties to both regions, I ended up not feeling at home in either, and so it is not particularly surprising that my adult life should find me as a migrant living in such places as Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Thailand, and now the Pacific Northwest. I too know the heart of a migrant, because I have it within me, along with the intense longing to belong, even if I do not know exactly how I would recognize it.

As it happens, the places where I have lived often have had a reputation for being places for migration. This is probably not a coincidence. Florida, for example, remains to this day an area best known for tourism and the seasonal migration of agricultural workers from Latin America as well as elderly people from the Northern United States and Canada, as well as the home of refugees from Cuba and Haiti and other places, and it was a place famous for migrants long before that, from the scions of slaveholding families seeking virgin land and a better life to escaped slaves looking to find a community and freedom. Los Angeles is famous as the place where migrants have traveled in search of fame. Thailand is a place where migrants from Southeast Asia travel in search of work, some of whom end up being exploited as labor and some in child prostitution, a notorious reputation of mistreatment of strangers. Likewise, the Pacific Northwest was the origin of the term “Shanghaing” for taking people as indentured boat workers, a place of exploitation of strangers, and a place where some strangers (like free blacks) were not welcome in the time before the American Civil War. It is, for all of its faults, a place that is well known nowadays as a place of somewhat odd people from diverse backgrounds, and the place where I find myself as a stranger now.

In one sense, though, the Americas are a place where all are strangers. There are none who are truly native here. Those who are called First Peoples or Native Americans were not in the least native to this land. However many thousands of years ago they came here, they came in boats or over a landbridge in Alaska from their homeland in what is now called Siberia and traveled here as strangers and migrants seeking a better life, exterminating its large animals and pushing into new lands in several waves, some of whom arrived in places like Greenland and the Arctic not long before Europeans started pushing into the land from the other way. We are all migrants here, all strangers, all outsiders seeking to belong and claim this land as our home and claim our legitimate place within this complicated world we have found ourselves in. Whether we walked here through glacial valleys, came here as religious or political refugees, were ambitious commoners seeking a better life, or came here on crowded slave boats or in steerage as indentured servants, we are all strangers, foreigners, and migrants. However different our tongues or appearances or origins, we all have the heart of a stranger within us. Why is it so hard for us to honor that heart in others, and so easy for us to forget that we are strangers too when we see someone who happens to be just a slightly more recent stranger than we ourselves are.

In a larger sense, we are all migrants here on this earth. We are all born in places where we are new, and where everything is strange. Over the course of our lives, we observe how to speak and how to behave, how to express ourselves and understand the intentions and behaviors of others. Young people as well are delightful strangers, whose own thoughts and feelings are alien to them, and who want very hard to fit in and are very observant of how others are behaving in part so that they can successfully mimic those behaviors and no longer be seen as strangers and outsiders anymore. It is not coincidence that among the most notable problems of childhood and adolescence is the desire to fit in and to belong, and that much success in life appears to be related to being able to successfully fit in and blend in even in adult life (where such political behaviors do not vanish, but only intensify). How do we act as migrants here, and how do we recognize the heart of a stranger that lies within us, and within everyone else as well? Maybe if we realized that everyone else was a stranger and migrant themselves, we would cease to be so hard on those who are so much like ourselves, and instead act with understanding and compassion to make others feel at home in the same way we want to feel ourselves. Perhaps our shared longings might bring us together instead of leading us to tear down everyone else in search of the same things that we are. For we are not competition after all, but fellow strangers here brought here for a purpose and plan that is not our own.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/what-to-do-when-youre-a-stranger-in-town/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/book-review-strangers-at-my-door/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/the-kindness-of-a-stranger/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/strangers-in-the-night/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/psalm-39-for-i-am-a-stranger-with-you/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/almost-every-stranger-is-a-potential-friend/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/stranger-in-a-strange-land/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/no-more-a-stranger-or-a-guest/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/you-shall-leave-them-for-the-poor-and-for-the-stranger/