the undocumented, the refugee and Christian mystery

This past weekend, a Latinx waitress at a Japanese restaurant bid my mother and myself goodbye.? My mother and I had dined here for seven years since the death of my father,? and the waitress would always hug my mother in greeting, and show her the greatest care.? This time, the waitress said, she would no longer see us, because she was moving to Las Vegas to start a new job there.? Judging from the shocked and distant expression of her face, I hazard a guess that this was a?courteous euphemism.

For many decades, American political rhetoric has endeavored to separate the good migrant from the bad. There is a real factual and policy debate to be had.? Competition for jobs and wages, as well as a proportionate concern for public safety, should inform a just immigration policy.?

But in? the emerging political environment,? migrants and refugees at the border are presumptively and criminally guilty. The? act of trying to cross the border. to escape violent persecution or to support a family. is itself being characterized as tantamount to a felony . Their moral status is more and more being put beyond the reach of legal debate, due process, adjudication, and remedy.

The new administration has said it will prioritize the deportation of those undocumented immigrants with a criminal record.? This is not new policy. In the Morton memo of 2011, ICE Director John Morton had asserted prosecutorial discretion to focus on those immigrants who are dangerous: gang members, serious felons, repeat offenders, and those who pose a threat to national security.

But the administration has vocalized a new spirit to the enforcement:? On inauguration day, President Trump pounded the podium, tarring all migrants with a very wide brush: “All over the world they’re emptying their prisons into our country; they’re emptying their mental institutions into our country.”?

The administration has also suspended refugee resettlement.? Moreover, the right of religious conscience — for churches to give sanctuary to the undocumented — is being attacked.? As reported in the Wall Street Journal on January 24, a new Trump directive "tossed out longstanding rules that restricted federal immigration authorities from making arrests at churches and other so-called sensitive locations such as schools and hospitals".??

It is deeply ironic that a new evangelically backed administration is attacking the right of Christian churches to religious conscience, as well as the larger human rights foundation of refugee law, and perhaps the very religious notion of refuge altogether.

Distrust of foreigners is nothing new.? It may indeed by quite politically natural.?? Yet in our ancient Christian heritage, it was often religion itself that checked nativist political instincts and imposed a sacred ethic of hospitality.? I trace just two historical threads from classical Greek religion to Pauline Christianity.

In classical Greek times, foreigners were naturally resented. They brought strange languages, strange ideas, and military danger.? In Aesychlus' drama The Suppliants, when the persecuted Danaides come to the Argives, the Argive king voices the city's political animus: "Without a herald, without a guide, without a patron, You have yet dared to come".??

Yet the king of the Danaides advises his daughters to lay a wreath at the altar of Zeus, "Remember to yield: You are an exile, a needy stranger."?? Ultimately, the Argives permit them to stay. It is an intuitive fear of religious wrath? that checks their nativist political instincts. "But yet the wrath of Zeus … The height of mortal fear -- must be respected."?

Hospitality was related to the religious fear that the? stranger in need may indeed be an emissary of a? god, or even a god himself. And to turn away the stranger in need may be to turn away the god.? Indeed, the mystery of Christ was closely linked to the stranger.

For I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty and you gave Me noting to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not involye Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me… Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me." (Matthew 25: 42-45)

In Euripedes' The Bacchae, hospitality also related the stranger to a divine mystery of resurrection, which anticipated the Christian mystery.

A stranger comes to the city of Thebes, claiming to be the god Dionysos. King Pentheus refuses to recognize this foreigner who corrupts the women and subverts the mores of the city. But Dionysos is not just any god. He is the mortal god, the god of dying and resurrection. In him, the stranger and the mystery of resurrection is is joined.

All men resemble the first enemies of the [strange] god, because all are of the same substance; but all have within them something of the selfsame god, to wit, divine indestructible life.? (Karl Kerenyi, Dionysos)

The shudder of that great tragedy is that Pentheus, in refusing to see the stranger's divinity, fails to see the stranger in himself, as well as his own immortal life.

Along similar lines, in Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Julia Kristeva argued that the genius of the Pauline Church was to relate the figure of the foreigner to Christ's most intimate mystery of resurrection.

Paul evangelized across Asia Minor, with his home base at Ephesus, a land of many tongues.? Instead of evangelizing to a single nation or a single people, Paul spoke to "a journey between two dissociated but unified spheres that [anyone[ can travel for themselves, between 'body' and 'soul', if you like — a 'transubstantiation'."??

The early followers of Christianity thus began as a community of believers who were peripheral to the nations they lved in - the poor, the women, the orphaned, the slave and the foreigner.? The ecclesias of the Pauline Church emerged within the Roman Empire as a community of foreigners in their own nations.

Paul's genius was to transform the foreigner's distress at being torn apart between two worlds? "to be a split less between two countries than between two psychic domains within his own impossible unity", a journey from mortal body to spiritual resurrection in Christ that is sealed with the Eucharist.

At the heart of the original Christian mystery is that we are all foreigners in the pilgrimage to the resurrection.

To reject the foreigner in need may be to reject the soul's mystery of resurrection.

It is impossible to frame a just debate on immigration if, if in our political reasoning, we forget the religious sanction of the stranger. This makes the evangelical Christian advocacy for the new administration's punitive policies all the more ironic.?

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