A visit

When I was in youth group, we did this pantomime to a song about Matthew 25; the sheep and the goats. I remember the line “for I was in prison and you visited me,” hitting me with a thud of conviction. I felt uncomfortable that although we Christians do an ok job sometimes of clothing the naked or feeding the hungry, we are real goats when it comes to visiting prisoners. I must’ve put some kind of mental bookmark in this experience, because it came back to me the minute I heard that a local church group has started visiting detainees in the York County Prison. I felt a calling to join them, and it immediately connected me back to this moment of conviction as a teenager.

The church group’s story is one that needs told (and I’m sure it will be eventually). But the story I want to tell today is that of Esther (not her real name). She is the person I have been visiting. All the while, she has been visiting us in this beautiful country, but you might not otherwise get to know her, since she is being held in prison.

She is a mother and a deacon in her church in El Salvador. She has a smile that shines and shows off the bright gold outlines of her front teeth, a classic mark of Latin American beauty. Our first visit got off to a rough start. Esther didn’t know exactly what she was getting into when she requested a visit. By the time we sat down she was crying (and we hadn’t even gotten over the hurdle of making the phone system work). Thanks to the help of each of the other detainees helping her type in all the right codes, we eventually got the phone to work. She told me about her feelings of discouragement, her depression, the pills they had given her to manage it, the claustrophobic feeling of the confines of the same eternal four walls. Then she asked me if I was a Christian, and her mood shifted dramatically. She began singing praise songs, and we recited our favorite bible verses (I am secretly ashamed at how much more of the Bible she has memorized, even though I’ve been to seminary!)

This last time together she told me a beautiful story about this one corner of the detention center where there are windows and you can see out. She said she stopped by and looked out one day and was delighted to hear birds singing. She only wished she could see them. So I told her all about the bird excitement I’ve had in my life this past week (tons of robins, the harbingers of spring! Also a neighborhood woodpecker sometimes outside of my window, sometimes at the end of the block by the bus stop, and the constant stream of geese overhead).  She said the birds she heard may have been ducks, and we talked a little about the difference between geese and ducks (geese migrate, just like people).

We don’t talk about how she got to the detention center. Apparently some folks are sent directly from the boarder to the York county prison; others are apprehended by ICE at some point during the course of their daily lives (one man we visit has lived here in the US for 23 years). She did share that she had a hard day on Tuesday, because she had a hearing where her sister showed up hoping to post bail. While some inmates have had their bail set low ($800-$1500), the judge decided to set hers at $15,000 (a random thing completely up to the judge’s discretion).

The first day we met I told her a little about living in Bolivia and Mexico for several years. I raved about the incredible way I had been received in people’s homes and towns and villages. I told her about the countless times I was given the best the family could offer (and often the last tortilla in the kitchen). I told her about how much I had learned in Latin America; how grateful I was to be hosted.

That’s another reason I’m choosing to make a prison visit (even though it takes 3.5 hours of my day to do this half hour visit), because I’m so saddened by the fact that in my country we have a lot to learn about how to host. I heard a quote yesterday on NPR that over 100,000 people have crossed the boarder this month alone; escaping one broken system and entering into another.

In the prison, I feel like I’m playing the role of both host and hosted. On the one hand, I am a visitor in a completely foreign land. On the other, I am making myself the host to this human being, her joys and her woes; perhaps the only one really listening to her while she treads on our soil (or cement, in this case). I told her I wished we could be in my kitchen drinking coffee. She said I remind her of a neighbor of hers on the hillside of her town in El Salvador.

When our conversation is over, some of the ladies of the church group have started the tradition of putting our hands up on the glass, inviting the ladies on the other side to do the same. When I tried this with Esther, she tried it out, but it wasn’t quite right (I think it was just too disappointing to feel the cold glass instead of the warmth of a human hand). Instead, she blows me a kiss. It has had its clumsy moments, but together, we work to create the liminal space of hosting and hosted in the midst of this impossibly broken and hopeful world we live in.

Chicken

If you try to buy chicken breasts in a Mexican market, you will understand what a ridiculous thing it is. One by one with enormous scissors, a young woman will cut the bird into pieces before your eyes. Half carcasses will pile up beside you, mocking your decision as you wonder, “who will buy the half that’s left??” It won’t help to explain to your friend that you much prefer to buy the chicken that’s wrapped in plastic and styrofoam in a grocery store; the kind whose fluid is even sopped up by a little plastic diaper underneath. “That way,” you explain, “there’s more consistency with the temperature and it’s safer to consume.” The friend will smile gently and say, “but how did it get there? Have you ever seen a refrigerated truck here? Dead chickens ride in the warm sun for days, then they get bleached of their worms and wrapped in bright packaging! On the other hand, room temperature chickens in the market can hide no secrets! If they have worms, you see them crawling, if they are from the day before, they will smell. It is much better to buy it in the market,” they will say.

Somehow, that will all come to make sense to you. So much so that the bright styrofoam packaging with absorbent under-diaper will have no appeal to you even when you are in Pennsylvania. Instead you will seek out one of the last Amish farms still left in the county, one who has not yet sold their land for top dollar to a developer. You will buy from them the chicken whose offspring still populate the hillside. It doesn’t even matter to you what you pay for it, because it is such a holy thing. You will rejoice as you dig your fingers into the sinews and you challenge yourself to use each morsel of meat. The bones will tell you the story of the hillside, the rippling brook, the bright green grass. You will toss in a little epazote to remind you of your Mexican friend who carries it in her pocket so she never finds herself without.

You rejoice in the aroma that comes out of the pot. Deep in your belly, you know your chicken will only taste as good as it smells if you can share it. If you can fill your house with love and joy and laughter as you devour this bird together. The bird that fills your belly and also, somehow, hems you in with the hillside, the brook, the grass, your friends, the Mexican market, and everything that is alive.

Winter

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi,

This is a season I’ve been fairly content to avoid the past three years. There is something about the deep cold that settles into my bones; a physical sensation that connects me deeply with my sorrow. The winter we returned from Bolivia back in 2009 was one of the coldest seasons in my life. One of the hardest parts of saying yes to moving to Mexico in 2015 was the fear of knowing we’d have to re-enter. I had almost convinced myself that the reason it was so hard was because we hadn’t built enough time for grief and processing into our schedule (we gave ourselves 6 days between the goodbye of our Bolivian neighborhood and full-time seminary with part-time jobs). And this time, we knew better.  There were weeks of space built in. Beautiful rituals around goodbye and hello. And yet, here I am, in the midst of the winter season once more, entertaining all kinds of rowdy guests, as the Rumi poem invites me to call them.

The guests come as a result of various life happenings; the loneliness of transition, the complications of my children adjusting to US school, the challenge of finding new community while reconnecting with others. But I see the challenges as simply the clothing the guests wear; their presence is connected to something deeper.

Early in the season, I was talking with my neighbor who has spent much of his life in a warmer place, and does not love the cold. After a little mutual complaining, he pointed to a big tall pine tree at the edge of his yard. He said for years it had a fungus that he couldn’t manage to get rid of. He tried different kinds of remedies to no avail. “Then, last year,” he said, “there was a deep cold spell, and something about the cold froze off the fungus. Look at the tree now, even more beautiful than before.”

As I pass by the tree on my way out of our neighborhood, I look up at it and smile. I ask myself, “What is there in me that really needs the deep cold in order to transform? What are these rowdy guests trying to tell me? What do I need to let go of that only the deepest cold can freeze off?”

Plenty.

And I eagerly await what this time of clearing out will bring….