You’ll Never Be the Same

It happened to me again. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

When the subject came up, I felt a familiar passion rising in me, seemingly out of nowhere.

And it wasn’t like I had instigated it.

The incident happened  last weekend.

I was at a gathering of people from my church community when a woman I hadn’t seen in about two years came up to me. She wanted to know how my “mission” at the border had turned out.

Wow. The border. After just having spent several weeks in Bolivia and being back home in Virginia for a year, that experience seemed so far away. And yet it didn’t. Because as soon as I started to talk about the border, I was right there again.

I didn’t know where to begin. How to tell her everything I had witnessed. How to share the stories of the people. How to explain the misinformation and downright lies that have been spreading across this country about immigrants.

But her friend cut in. “I don’t have anything against immigrants, as long as they come here legally.”

And I could tell by looking at her face that this woman had no interest in what I had to say on the subject.

Our mutual friend — the woman who’d engaged me in this conversation — looked sympathetic. But then she admitted that she agreed with her friend.

I felt myself reacting to such a blanket statement that puts the problem in a neat little box. “If they want to come here, they should follow the rules.”

I started to argue that, yes, we need rules and regulations but do you know what it takes to get here legally? And how impossible it is for many people who are desperate? That what we really need is immigration reform to fix our broken system. But I’d lost her, too.

So, I stopped talking.

But inside, I felt the fire again. I experienced again the injustices of what’s happening.

And how ignorant we are of our role and responsibility.

And how American companies — privately-run detention facilities are just one example — benefit off the backs of immigrants.

And how the migrant poor, who have clearly suffered a lot, have more faith and generosity than I’ve ever had. I remembered their stories and their faces.

And I remembered again why I say that I can’t be at peace with a completely comfortable lifestyle anymore.

And why I can never not listen to my heart again. I’ve experienced too much to go back.

Recently, when I was on the plane heading from Bolivia to Miami, I discovered one of the Maryknoll priests I knew from Cochabamba was on the same flight. We chatted for a while about Bolivia, the people, the culture, the poverty.

“You will never be the same,” he said.

Little did he know. God had already awakened my heart. Three years ago. In the border town of El Paso.

I haven’t been the same since.