Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

What if our borders weren’t physical? What if migrants could just suddenly show up in your living room or city park or backyard? Or in the church hall? No long lines, no showing papers, just displaced people popping up in your life after their own lives had disintegrated where they were?

In this intriguing book, Mohsin Hamid explores this question and, along the way, demonstrates what it looks like to become a refugee, to have your own world slowly fall apart as you try to live a normal life that becomes less possible every day.   

Two sweethearts, Nadia and Saeed, are young professionals in an unnamed Middle-Eastern country, typical middle-class citizens—she’s in insurance and he’s in marketing and they met at a seminar. But terrorists have taken over the city and it becomes increasingly unsafe. Hamid shows us the day-to-day changes, how the couple’s world gets smaller and smaller as terrorists gain strength. After Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet, the couple decides to leave.

Their unique method of escape is through magical horizontal doors that take people from one country to another. It’s a difficult process—getting access to the doors is mysterious and entails knowing the right people and being able to pay the right fee. Going through them is turbulent and painful, looking a bit like being born, and in a way it is: Those who go through the doors become new people in lands new to them.

The idea for the doors, Hamid said in an interview with the PBS News Hour, was inspired by smart phone screens.

[R]ight now, most of us have a little black rectangle in our pocket or our backpack or our purse. And when we look at it, our consciousness goes far, far away from our bodies, like magically appearing somewhere else, looking at your phone, and suddenly you’re reading about the moon or Mars or Antarctica. And I thought, what would happen if your body could move as easily as your mind can move? I think technology is obliterating geographic distance. And so the doors in a way give life to that. 

 Hamid considers himself a lifelong migrant—from Pakistan to California, then back, then to London and back. He knows the migrant experience can be terrifying and, at times, deadly, because we do not focus on the fact that people who want to enter our countries are just that: people. But when migrants literally show up on our doorsteps we have to stop dealing with them as abstractions, as legal arguments and look them in the eye instead. Again, talking to the News Hour he says:

[W]e have become so focused on the story of how somebody crosses the border, how did you cross the Mediterranean in a small boat, or how did you cross the U.S.-Mexico border, crawl underneath the barbed wire? And we think that people who have done that are different from us. It makes us imagine that that’s all their life consisted of, and that’s very different from us.  

But once you take away that part of their story, you’re left with people who are just like us, actually, that any of us can have this experience. And so hopefully taking away that part of the story doesn’t minimize the importance in the real world that that happens, but reminds us that that is not what makes these people who they are. They are people just like us. 

Hamid also shows that we are all migrants in one way or another. In one of the many vignettes that pop up throughout the book he introduces us to a woman who has stayed in the San Francisco area her entire life, while the world has radically changed around her. His conclusion:

“We are all migrants through time.”  

Nadia and Saeed migrate through time and through space, facing anti-migrant attitudes in the Greek Island of Mykonos, London, and Marin County, California. Ultimately, the refugees are accepted, if not always welcomed, sometimes after riots, usually after chaos. Eventually the different cultures learn to live alongside one another, creating a new culture, which is a mash of the old. The initial acceptance comes, as usual, through foods.  

The book is not for those who want a literal and linear progression of plot and a clear sense of time and place. Hamid’s writing style can take a while to get accustomed to—most paragraphs are one sentence long, and the sentences can be a bit rambling. Yet this style matches the storytelling sense of the book and makes it more real. And the doors are shown before they are actually explained, so there are a few moments early in the book when the reader is not entirely sure what is going on. And the vignettes of unrelated people can be confusing.   

Hamid creates characters whose struggle is believable, relatable, and scary as hell. Every person who says migrants should go back to where they came from should have to read this book.

— Pat Prijatel

On Trails, by Robert Moor

Deacon Jeanie Smith used On Trails as inspiration for her sermon on the Second Sunday After Pentecost, June 23, 2019.

Our St. Timothy’s book club is currently reading a book entitled On Trails by Robert Moor.  I have to confess, as a person who isn’t truly drawn to nature, to hiking, to the outdoors generally, that I am amazingly enchanted by this book.  Here is this guy who has grown up only truly feeling at home walking in the wilderness, who has, for heaven’s sake, hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, who writes a book that enchants even me!  So, the first thing I’ll say is that I highly recommend this book to you!

One of the things Moor says about trails is that they are constantly evolving, streamlining is the word he uses. It’s not just the trailblazer that we have to admire, who forges a path through the wilderness. It’s the trail followers who not only reinforce the trail but who move it to cut corners, to avoid pitfalls, to straighten the way forward.

Moor talks in the introduction to his book about the metaphor of path in virtually all major religious.  Buddha’s eight-fold path to enlightenment, Zoroaster’s paths of enhancement, the Hebrew word for law, halakhah, which means “the walking,” the Arabic word for Islamic law, shariah, which translates to “the path to the watering hole.”  This is true for Christianity as well for the earliest followers of Jesus were not called Christians but “people of the way.”

Moor says, “[P]aths, like religions, are seldom fixed.  They continually change – widen or narrow, schism or merge – depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them.  Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking.”

I like to think that we here in the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement are right in step with that notion of constantly evolving our understanding of the path.  Our church is said to rest on three legs, like a stool. Those three legs are scripture, tradition and reason.  We use our experience and our reason to enhance and grapple with our reading of Scripture and to mold our traditions to make the path meaningful to us in our own time and place.

When we read Scripture, particularly a passage like the gospel reading we have before us today, we usually come at it with some lack of knowledge — such as who the Gerasenes were or where Jesus was at the time and who he was interacting with – but also with our own cultural assumptions.  In this case, we know that this story appears in all three synoptic Gospels, but in Luke’s and Mark’s case, it is in the country of the Gerasenes and in Matthew’s Gospel the same story is said to have taken place in the country of the Gadarenes. The two places aren’t far apart. What’s important to know here is that Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee and is in territory of non-Jewish people, Gentiles.  So we are beyond Jesus’ own understanding of his work as being only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

As to our own cultural assumptions, I’d say most of us are at least skeptical about the entire notion of demon possession.  I don’t know many of you who would acknowledge actual possession by demons as being something that forms the basis of our understanding of human beings.  We certainly might use a metaphor of demon possession to talk about something like addiction, say, but most of us would probably say that being possessed by a demon or an unclean spirit is a very old-fashioned and uneducated understanding.  Today we might describe this man that Jesus encounters as a person who has a serious mental illness.

Certainly if we were confronted today with the man in our story, we might well steer clear of him.  We’d surely keep our children as far away as we could.  He is described as wearing no clothes, living in the tombs, being kept under guard, bound with chains and shackles from which he would break free and escape into the wilds. And here is Jesus, not shrinking back from meeting this man, but actually holding a conversation with the demons that possess him.

One of the first things we notice is that Jesus sees the man distinct and apart from the demons that possess him. In modern terms, we might, if we were brave enough to interact with such a person, see a crazy man or an insane person – not necessarily as a man who has a mental illness.  And the wording is important here for it either validates or denies this person’s identity as a human being, a person not totally defined by his illness but distinct from it. A person like me, as worthy as I am.

For Jesus, we are all individual human beings made in the image and likeness of God. Some of us have illnesses or conditions that circumscribe our lives in ways that are entirely visible to the rest of us.  My guess is that all of us have some conditions that circumscribe our lives in ways that are not visible to others.  But those conditions, visible to others or not, are not the definition of who we are in God’s eyes.  We would all do well to remember that.

The next thing that I notice is that Jesus converses directly with the demons. They seem not only to respect his authority, but to be pretty convinced that they have to do whatever Jesus tells them to do.  Our text says, “They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.” And that the demons begged Jesus to let them enter the herd of swine.

What on earth are we to make of this? Well, probably that God has power over even the worst of the demons that plague our lives, just as Jesus had power over the demons in this story.  But that seems to me a bit simplistic.  It smacks, to me, of the form of Christianity that says just pray to Jesus and whatever ails you will be fixed.  And, if it isn’t fixed, well, you just didn’t pray hard enough.

That just doesn’t seem to me to be the way God works in the world that I know.  Some people have cancer or schizophrenia and they pray really, really hard and their cancer goes into remission or the schizophrenia symptoms seem to go away.  Others pray equally hard without those same results.

For me, the power of this story comes in the fact of this man’s, this non-Jew’s, coming to Jesus and laying his whole self, ailment and all, at Jesus’ feet, asking for help.  When we come to this altar, to God, with what ails us, physical, mental, circumstantial or whatever, and we open ourselves to God’s healing, healing comes.

That is not to say that curing comes. As Mary has often reminded me, healing and curing are not the same things.  We may desperately want curing that doesn’t come at all.  Healing sometimes comes in the form of peace in the face of continued, advancing illness, of a new normal, even of death.

It’s hard work to get to the place where we can fully lay ourselves and what troubles us before God.  For me, that’s a lifelong process full of my stumbling and grasping and desire for control over my own life and destiny.  When we truly let go and let God, as the saying goes, we not only give up control, but we give up our idea of what the “right” answer is.  When we pray for peace, for that deep inner peace we so often refer to in our prayers, that’s what we’re asking for.  We’re asking to lay it all before God, giving up our own control and listening for God’s work in our lives.

— Jeanie Smith

I Shall Not Hate, by Izzeldin Abuelaish

“Let my daughters be the last to die. Let this tragedy open the eyes of the world.  Let us ask each other, ‘Where are we going?  What are we doing?’  It’s time we sat down and talked to each other.”

Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian physician who lives in Gaza and who works in an Israeli hospital.  In this magnificent book, he chronicles the difficulties of those who live in Gaza, from lack of water and civic works to massive restrictions on movement to the physical dangers of the violence that is perpetrated on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

As the above quote implies, Abuelaish’s three daughters and his niece all perished when his home was struck by shells from an Israeli tank. He says, “Anger is fine, but we must all find the inner strength not to hate.” This remarkable man is not blind to the violence that is committed and sustained by his own people and how that violence affects those in Israel.  But he also clearly and careful documents that there is hatred and violence on the other side as well.  And that the violence and the hatred that is engendered by this violence must cease.

In his Epilogue, Abuelaish states, “This book is also about freedom. We all must work toward freedom from disease, poverty, ignorance, oppression, and hatred.  In one horrifying year, my family and I faced tragedies that mountains cannot bear.  But as a Muslim with deep faith, I fully believe that what is from God is for good and what is bad is man-made and can be prevented or changed.”

May all of us, Muslim, Christian and Jew, come to this same understanding, and with that understanding become committed to work for freedom.

—Jeanie Smith