Welcoming the Stranger

Immigration proves a sticky and contentious issue, burrowing down to the core of how we understand ourselves and our neighbors. What defines us as Americans? What is the relationship between our immigrant heritages – having, as a species, wandered the globe in evolutionary quest for habitability – and our intuitive sense of being ‘home’?

The three lay worship leaders this morning did a beautiful job of caringly and expansively adding personal and spiritual context to these challenging questions. They called us to recognize our underlying human unity; to trace a thread of neighborly compassion directly through the Abrahamic religious patchwork into which we Unitarian Universalists are woven; and to reverently register the courageous decision in 2004 to call an Iranian-American woman as the minister of First Parish. The spiritual work of living in right relationship to those who seem ‘foreign’ is ongoing, and challenging at that. But as Unitarian Universalist minister Amanda Aikman reminds us, “ours is a faith of radical hospitality, a radically inclusive witness in an exclusionary world.” Amidst the cacophony of vitriolic ethnocentrism that strips ‘aliens’ of their very humanity, we can choose to do better – in smiles and with handshakes, in the ballot box and with our patronage, in open-mindedness and with appreciation.

Having grown up as an American overseas, I know well the tenuous act of balancing multiple identities. At times, I felt like an outsider in both worlds. I struggled to reconcile the bounded ‘me’ of my passport with the untidy, often self-contradictory, inner ‘me’ that seeped through national labels. Neighbors didn’t hesitate to bring to my attention to the American-ness of my hobbies or the German-ness of dress. Some embraced me warmheartedly for the cultural mélange I was living; others dismissed me as confusing, or mysterious. While I certainly didn’t suffer from the degree of xenophobia that other immigrant groups experience even today, I came to understand the precarious nature of liminality – of ‘in-between-ness’ – of moving among societies and between peoples.

Etymologically, the term immigrant derives from this experience of ‘moving’ and ‘going.’ I encourage you to take a moment to consider: when did you, or a member of your family, move across this bridge of in-between-ness? What was it like to immigrate? What was gained, what was lost, along the journey? If answers to these questions are not immediately forthcoming, you might try reaching out to other family members to piece your story together. Knowing ourselves, learning about our own immigrant past, opens our hearts to empathically hearing the stories of others.

This rationale undergirds the Jewish exhortation in Exodus: ‘You must not mistreat or oppress foreigners in any way. Remember, you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.’ Welcome others as you would have wanted to be welcomed. In the process, you may get to know someone else more intimately and, by extension, learn something new about yourself. Inviting difference into our lives holds the promise of self-transformation.

Reflection for the week: Hospitality changes our relationship to others and with ourselves. 

Our Neighbor's Fence

During worship this past Sunday, Rev. Parsa extended the theme of wholeness to a consideration of our attitudes and behaviors towards human difference. Despite the valiant banners of global peace and inter-cultural understanding that we may carry, living in right relationship with our neighbors is rarely comfortable or easy. Too often we succumb to the specter of fear and suspicion that haunts the horizon of beloved community. We take refuge in excuses instead of trusting that love will guide our way.

Somewhere in the rocky sea of daily living, you have likely sailed upon the proverb ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ In common parlance, of course, the aphorism functions as a caution against excessive intimacy and prescribes a ‘healthy dose’ of distrust. You keep to your side, I’ll keep to mine. By extension, then, peace amounts to little more than the absence of conflict: so long as we don’t fight, we’re golden.

A cursory glance at the source of that saying reveals a rather different outlook, however. In his poem, Mending Wall, Robert Frost playfully describes the exchange between two neighbors as they discuss the rebuilding of a stone barrier separating their respective properties. The speaker repeatedly chides his interlocutor for resorting to his father’s suspicious rationale: “He will not go behind his father’s saying,/
And he likes having thought of it so well/
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” Frost’s speaker is not convinced by this logic – he adds in jest: “He is all pine and I am apple orchard./
My apple trees will never get across/
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.” Fences cut off, dissect, block out. “Why do they make good neighbors?” Frost wonders.

I would imagine that we all have encountered individuals in our lives whom we initially would prefer to fence out. But wholeness, and peace, demand of us something greater, something deeper, than distant tolerance. I am reminded of a Turkish proverb, which reads: She who builds a fence, fences out more than she fences in.

Take a moment to reflect: what might I be missing when I hold back from human relationships? Who am I really fencing out – or fencing in?

The French mystic Simone Weil takes us deeper: "To love our neighbor as ourselves ... [means that] we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe."  

So often, neighbors trouble and surprise our premature judgments once we greet them face-to-face, in their beautifully fractured totality, instead of merely glaring at their shadowy forms through the narrow slits of our fences.

Reflection for the week: Fences prevent us from seeing ourselves and others as wholes.

Ends and Beginnings

This past Sunday, Rev. Parsa introduced the theme of wholeness as a lens through which to understand the mission of church life. As fragments of divine light – fragile people thrown into a hurting world – we gather together in fellowship to repair ourselves and the world: tikkun olam.

If you were listening carefully to Rachel Naomi Remen’s rendition of the Kabalistic story of creation, you likely heard the cosmology’s underlying paradox: the end is nothing more than a return to the beginning. In effect, humanity’s task of restitution – of bringing the world back to its original state of divine omni-presence – represents the highest end, the greatest possible achievement. To reach the end of time is to arrive at its beginning.

This cyclical framework of human progress is not foreign to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. In fact, you need not look much farther than our trusty grey hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition:

What we call a beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

- T.S. Eliot (#685)

Ask yourself: what is closing in my life to make room for a new opening? What beginning must end so that I can embark on a new beginning?

I know for me, the road to First Parish was paved with endings. I had to say goodbye to the familiarity of the classroom, to the church community with which I worshipped on Sunday, to the luxury of not using a car – and to my academic scholarship! These are but a sampling of the many closings, large and small, that opened my path to ministry in Milton.

I have repeated on multiple occasions how good it is to be at First Parish. I would not change a thing. But it is important, I believe, to notice and to name the ends. Some we welcome, some we lament. Either way, we carry all of them with us. Living in awareness of and appreciation for the shadows of the past brings the light of the future into sharper relief.

Reflection for the week: The end clears space for new beginnings.