Recent spring, in Tucson. You were driving to a meeting when you saw crashed cars and flashing lights ahead. You stayed in the clear left lane, eased up on the gas, sipped coffee as you approached. A black pickup truck jerked up onto the righthand curb behind the firetruck. A man jumped out and hurtled toward the accident – an EMT, you thought, stopping to help on his day off. Mr. Rogers told you to look for the helpers.

This next part happened quickly, a flip-book you saw out of the corner of your eye, through the rolled-down car window. The man ran toward the crash. A paramedic stopped him, hand on his shoulder, asked, “Are you the father?”

You were past the accident, nearing your turn, coffee still in your throat, when you realized: that wasn’t heroism, but horror.

He was there to rush to the crash because someone had been looking for the father. Someone made a phone call, two phone calls, many phones calls. Someone broke the news. Someone was trained to find the father, trained to break the news.

You thought about this for weeks.
                                                                                               -------

Years ago spring, in Blacksburg. You are a sophomore, in the marching band. You are watching the news in someone else’s dorm room. There is afternoon sunshine. If there was any moment of denial, it was in the blink of your eyes when the numbers changed. From 3 to 32 dead in the chyron, laughing girls climbing down from their lofted beds in the middle of jokes about blocking the windows in the cinderblock wall, dark humor trailing away in the reflection of this math.

You remember this vaguely. You still didn’t know, then, what it would mean.
                                                                                               -
Late at night, you are sitting on the edge of a bathtub, talking on a cell phone. On the other end of the line, somehow, a producer from “The Today Show” asks you questions about a particular friend. You answer dully, looking at the sink. You feel, below the fog, a tearing urgency to make sure everyone knows about this particular, wonderful friend.

In the living room, your dad plays video games with your marching bandmates and a college professor. You leave the bathroom, catch your father’s attention. You say, they’ll send a car at six a.m.

You don’t live in reality anymore.
                                                                                               -
There is a sea of satellite dishes in a parking lot. You stand next to a news anchor and speak toward a camera, a mic clipped onto the front of your hoodie. You are trying to do a good job. This is very important, talking about your friend, and you must do it well. You are operating through a fog. You listen to the person standing next to you answering questions about your friend. You think he is brave.

When the interview is over, you don’t wait for the sound people before you turn away from the camera, sobbing. You cling to the person standing next to you, or he clings to you, planting yourselves against a strong wave. The wave gets you anyway. Through your stranglehold on each other you can hear the impersonal clicking of dozens of cameras. They’re pointed at you.

Ten minutes later, the person standing next to you gets a text. Someone he knows in Indiana has just seen a picture of him on television, hugging a woman. He is asked if you are his girlfriend. You laugh for the first time since you left reality.

Ten minutes after that, you and the person standing next to you are walking together on the grass between a blocked-off road and a closed parking lot. The cameraman is recording b-roll. You learn the word “b-roll.” You tell the person standing next to you that you should hold hands while you walk, since you’re his girlfriend now. This is desperately funny. You both laugh again, walking on the grass next to the empty road. You are asked to stop smiling. You should know they can’t use b-roll of a smiling couple under the description of this massacre.
                                                                                              -
They call it a massacre, on television. You hate this. The word is salacious, and shocking. It is too weak and too strong, both at once. It is dislocated: massacres happen somewhere else.

This is happening to you.

You try to think of a better word. For years, you resort to calling it, the thing that happened. At first, it’s because you can’t say any other words. Your therapists don’t realize you mean the shots, and everything that came after. Later, it’s because when your spiritual director finds out where you went to college, she asks, “Were you there when that guy did that thing?”

You think this is desperately funny.

You were there when that guy did that thing.

You don’t see that spiritual director again. You practice saying, yes, I was there when the shooting happened. Yes, my friend died. Yes.
                                                                                              -
You are doing research, nine years later, on the construction of informal memorials as a tool for public grieving after mass tragedy. You know the title is too long. You don’t know how to say, the representation, it becomes the window to the thing itself. Your university is mentioned in peer-reviewed journals. You leave those articles out (you can’t bear the citations). You wonder bleakly if you could cite yourself, reflecting on how the thing unfolded. First-hand witness to what memorials mean. Primary accounts of where they bought the candles.
                                                                                              -
On the day you leave reality, you wake up to an email from the university. “A shooting happened in your friend’s dormitory. Proceed about your day, police have suspect in custody.” They really thought they did.
You are eating apple chips. You send an instant message to your friend, checking in. No reply is normal. You are late for class. You proceed about your day.
                                                                                        -
You don’t know who taped it, but you have a copy of that “Today Show” on VHS. You have never watched it. It’s in a file cabinet in your parents’ house, stuffed in with newspaper clippings and gifts and magazine articles. Ten years after, you go through the drawer. You let some things go.

People stop asking you about the massacre, mostly.
                                                                                          -
That day, after the hospital, you learn that if you are sobbing when you park in a No Parking zone, the security guard will walk the other way. You are picking up the people who have gathered. You are all crying.

You are not allowed, yet, to share the news with anyone who doesn’t already know. No one has found his mother. No one has shared the news. You pace a living room full of people who learned before they were meant to. You bake chocolate chip cookies. It’s a thing you can do.
                                                                                          -
You practice saying, When I was 19, a young man with a gun killed my friend and 31 other people. When you can say it without crying, it becomes a victory.
                                                                                          -
The young man with a gun recorded a videotape before he opened fire, and planned ahead enough to mail it between the beginning of the shooting and the end. It plays on television constantly, for a while. News anchors analyze it for reasons why.

You never watch it. You never say his name. It takes you three years to say the young man with a gun instead of the shooter.

You want to give him his humanity back. You want your humanity back.
                                                                                             -
On the day you leave reality, after the numbers on the television change, you call every hospital in the area. You ask for your friend by name. No one can give you any information. You don’t know if that’s because they don’t know anything, or because they’re not allowed.
                                                                                              -
You walk back to your own dormitory. Nearly there, you walk toward a young man wearing a hoodie  who is walking toward you. He is pulling something out of his pocket. You wonder, for a moment, if he has a gun too.
                                                                                               -
There is police tape blocking access to your friend’s floor in your dormitory building. You make this mean nothing.
                                                                                               -
With the others who have gathered, you make a plan. You print pictures of your particular friend, you write his personal information below his smile. You drive to the hospital with the other person who volunteered in the passenger seat. You show your friend’s picture to the nurse at the front door. (You are sure she takes the print-out – but years later, you find that paper in a box. You add it to the file cabinet.)

You are directed to wait. You are pointed to an exterior door. You and the other person who volunteered walk into a space under construction, big and empty and echoing as a warehouse. There are many other people in the room. You do not think about why they are there. You and the other person who volunteered take two chairs next to a table covered in pizza and soda. You trade off calling the hotline. You check in with the others who had gathered. They still don’t know anything. There is no procedure for this. You close your eyes.

The other person who volunteered is talking to someone from one of his classes. The classmate asks who you are looking for. You say your friend’s name out loud. “Him?” she says, “Oh, he’s dead.”
 

Before the preacher started, she said, “Jesus tells us the moral to this story right up front. But I want you, as you’re listening, to write your own moral.”

The story goes like this:

One moral jumps out at me immediately: those in power will never do the right thing unless we make their lives too uncomfortable for them to let the status quo continue.

At a meeting I was at recently, an activist described the tactic of “birddogging” like this: When a person in power (elected official, judge, whoever) refuses to talk with you, you just show up wherever they are and ask your questions. You disrupt business as usual in order to pursue the justice you require.

During that meeting, it seemed like some folks were uncomfortable with this practice.

So, a second moral to this story, particularly for well-behaved white folks: If you ever think that a tactic that an impacted community, minoritized group, or vulnerable person is using is too disruptive, remember the widow and the unjust judge – and that Jesus approved of the widow’s tactics. (v 7)

This story is also about accompaniment, through its absence. How would it have been for the widow if someone with more power – in today’s terms, maybe a straight, cis, white man – had gone with her each time she petitioned the judge? Not to speak for her, her voice was strong. Not to impose, but at her request.

If the widow had been accompanied, she wouldn’t have had to face this struggle alone. More, the judge would have seen that she wasn’t alone, that she had friends with more power. Even more, the judge would have known that someone with power was seeing his injustice every time he turned down the widow’s request.

To be present, to be seen, to be a witness: the three essential tasks of accompaniment.  

This gets to a third moral: look for the people who are fighting fights for survival in the face of injustice and ask if they want you to go along with them.

Because nothing will change if we all stay comfortable, and tactics that seem “disruptive” to you might mean survival to someone else. We’re all in this together.

From time to time, when meeting with my volunteers, we write flash blogs together: 10 minutes to get down our thoughts on a common prompt. We're practicing expressing ourselves and being less scared of blogging. ​I'm not going to exactly write to this prompt because I'm in a little bit different place than my YAVs in "mission service"

Here's what I think: Saying "mission service" is just a softer way to say "mission." It's what church progressives say instead of "mission," when we want not to associate ourselves with colonization and the extractive, destructive, imperialist history (and present) of church mission. We say "mission service" to maybe indicate that we recognize the power dynamics and that we're here to serve, not to impose, the word mission is in there because we're from a church but it's just, like, mission-adjacent.

Is mission service really a different thing? (Not unless we make it so?)

It's more important, I think, to wrestle with what mission has meant and what we want it to mean now. "Mission" has meant force, displacement, violence, erasure, charity, assimilation,  empire, going-out-to-civilize. (Has there ever been a good mission?) To me, anyway, mission means well-intentioned (mostly white) people perpetuating global colonialist power dynamics. It's always "mission to."

In the best light, I'd like to think that mission service can at least point us at shifting into a "with" framing. "Service" to say being with people, working alongside (still problematic), entering with humility.

When I was "in mission service" myself, as a YAV, I told a group of mostly-white seminarians that they were my mission field, and that I was with them to proselytize a gospel of demilitarization and open borders. They didn't appreciate being the recipients (subjects) of my "mission service." I hope that discomfort stays with all of us, and we don't practice what we don't want practiced on us.

From time to time, when meeting with my volunteers, we write flash blogs together: 10 minutes to get down our thoughts on a common prompt. We're practicing expressing ourselves and being less scared of blogging. ​

Forget the borderlands. Think about liminal space. 

Liminality, the quality of being on the edge of something. At the threshold. 

The borderlands are two thresholds embracing, that space in the middle where you're not quite in one place and not quite the other. When the line between two things is wide enough, where are you when you stand on the line? Imaginary lines, intangible boundaries that fear makes tangible. The wall that hate built. 

Gloria Anzaldua called the border "una herida abierta," an open wound. But it's not just about the border itself, the wound itself -- the borderlands are the tender place on either side. 

The U.S./Mexico borderlands, a place I love. A place that is neither place. Here, in the Sonoran desert, partially in Mexico and partially in the U.S. Here, on colonized O'odham lands, which stretch across the border on either side, enduring past layers of forced separation. Here, in territory populated by javelina, chiltepin peppers, saguaro cactus, ocotillo, hummingbirds who migrate north and south above the border wall. 

The Constitution-free zone, where the 4th Amendment doesn't protect you if Border Patrol decide to search you or your car at a check-point. 

A low-intensity conflict zone, where helicopters, drones, ATVs, armed agents, surveillance towers, underground sensors, are all common. 

Place of oversaturated sunsets. Of imposing geological formations. Of thorny plants that appear dead, until they leaf out suddenly in the rains. 

​Come and see. 

We are calling to tell you we are free.

I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about this:

At my church I sit on one side of the long white plastic tables; our guests sit on the other. I ask their names and if they’re traveling with anyone, how old their kids are. I write down their contact’s name and city and then dial their phone number and pass the phone across the table. “If you want to say hello to your relative, tell them how you are, then I can explain how they can buy the tickets for you to arrive to their place.”

People mostly nod, take the phone, and talk with their cousins or brothers-in-law or family friends or whoever it is who will offer them a safe place to stay while they fight for asylum. I try not to listen. Our guests have very little privacy, and it feels like the least I can do is try to give the impression their conversations are their own.

On Wednesday there were three people doing this intake work, while I managed paperwork and made connections. I wasn’t working so hard not to listen. Maybe that’s why I heard it, over and over - we are calling to tell you we are free.

“Hola, tía! Estamos llamando a decir que estamos libre.”

“Cuñado, habla María. Estamos libre.”

“Oye, hermano - estamos en Tucson, Arizona, estamos libre.”

We’re free. We’re free. We’re free.

I’ve been free my whole life and I’ve never once called someone to tell them I’m free. ​

Today was my third guitar lesson. My teacher, generous human being that she is, greets me each time with a print out of a song she has selected just for me and the YAV sing-alongs I will someday lead. This week it was Woody Guthrie. You know, “this land is your land, this land is my land,” and “this land was made for you and me.” I immediately thought of Colombia.

The Colombian conflict is all about land.

.

That’s it, that’s the whole message. If you understand that, you understand the whole thing.

.

Of course, there’s a chance you don’t understand it, not fully. I certainly didn’t. Not until I sat in a circle with a whole community driven off their land, not until I heard ex-combatant members of the FARC talk about land with their own voices, did I understand a fraction of what it really means. It’s possible I still don’t.

I have a theory that it’s nearly impossible for someone brought up in my circumstances to really understand what land means to a campesino. I’ll go through the identity markers again - white, U.S. passport, middle class, highly educated - and throw in a few more: raised in the suburbs, only distantly related to farmers (I don’t think my grandpa’s dog breeding place counts), nearly always have bought my groceries from a supermarket, lived in four different states.

If you share some or all of those labels, my theory is that you can’t understand the deep relationship a person has with land that they rely on to sustain their life, either. Or the deep trauma of displacement and loss of that land. Maybe it’s a U.S./Majority World disconnect. 

Issues of land reform motivated the campesinos who would become the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to take up arms in the 60s. Land reform is one of the six major pillars of the Peace Accords. Issues of land reform motivate ex-combatant members of the FARC into active political life today. Issues of land reform impact the daily life and plans for the future of thousands of Colombians.

One woman in Currulao estimates that 60% of all Colombia has been displaced. Documented percentages vary - the UNHCR counts 7.7 million people displaced within Colombia, about 21% of Colombia’s total population - but 60% rings true to her, from her experience. In 1991, three of her brothers-in-law were killed by armed groups. When the armed groups came back, her family was forced to leave their land. In 2000 or 2002, her family was forced to sign a paper that said they voluntarily sold their land.

Her pastor interjects - “The government says land will go back to those who lost it, but that’s mostly not true. A few have returned to their lands, but most won’t.” He adds, “Recently, maybe last year, they killed two campesino leaders who were working to get land back.”

Unpicking the complex violations of land ownership in Colombia is a nightmare, one that millions of people are living out. Some people have been displaced off their land and forced to sign false sale documents, making it extremely difficult to prove they were forcibly displaced and difficult to have their land restituted. Some people have been displaced off of land that was subsequently planted with African oil palm, which eats up the soil and leaves it dead. Some people have been displaced off of land that was then sold to multinational corporations for palm oil or bananas or other export crops -- good luck getting the land back from a powerful MNC with governmental pull. Some people were displaced from land that is still occupied by armed groups. Some people were displaced from land where they had lived for generations without formal deeds, so they can’t prove the lands were theirs to begin with.

And land is everything. Land is food, land is a dignified living, land is heritage, land is self-sufficiency, land is life, land is the essence of being a campesino. ​

What are you thankful for that you didn't think you would be? What are you thankful for that you didn't used to be thankful for? What has surprised you with an upwelling of gratitude, something you were dreading, something you didn't look for but were thankful arrived? 

It's not an easy question. Not a simple prompt for a ten-minute exercise (sorry, YAVs). In this time approaching Thanksgiving, it's easier to list the things that I've gotten used to being thankful for: the beauty of the desert. The work of my volunteers. Snuggles from my dog. Good food. Good weather. I am thankful that my life is full of such good things, and I recognize how easy it is to get used to the goodness. I don't feel thankful for good food, I just know I am. 

Vidalia (not her real name) was the first woman off the ICE van in the Inn Project parking lot, the first of 16 new arrivals. She started asking questions right away, as I led the group down basement stairs to where they could rest. I listed what we could offer: bathrooms, laundry, food-- "Burritos? No mas burritos, por favor!" Vidalia called down the stairs, "no more burritos, please!" before erupting with laughter. The rest of the group chuckled, and I assured them that we don't have any burritos here, no, not like ICE with a scoop of refried beans in a a tortilla, we have other food, good food. 

At the table where I filled out paperwork for each family, Vidalia laughed with me at my fumbling with phone numbers and phone calls (both harder in Spanish). She passed her phone across the table to me and I entered the WiFi password, so she could call her family member from her own phone. I continued with other families, seeing Vidalia on the phone out of the corner of my eye - sitting on her cot and crying. 

Laughter is all that's left, sometimes, when you're trapped in a system you don't understand and that doesn't care for you. 

Later on, I answered a call on the site phone. I thought the person asked for Vidalia , so I passed the phone to her. After a brief exchange, she looked up at me before getting up and taking the phone to another woman. It's for her, she said, not me.  

I hit my head theatrically and laughed at myself, apologized, said something about how phones are hard. Vidalia smiled and pulled me down in a hug, arms wrapped around me very tightly. It's okay, she said, thank you so much. 

Feeling strange, I realized it was the first time I had been hugged in days. I was flooded with gratitude. I don't know how to receive this grace. 
​
Later, Vidalia showed me a cut on her scalp. What happened? I asked.
It's from when I crossed, she said, from jumping off the wall. 

Tucson is a small town inhabiting big city sprawl. It's a city of 1,000,000, in the metro area, but feels like much less. I yell in my car when I have to circle the block once for a parking spot in downtown Tucson, and white-knuckle the wheel feeling overwhelmed when I visit my sister in Seattle. I crane my neck in bars and coffee shops, sure that I'll see someone I know. I'm usually right. 

Tucson is brown and flat and covered in harsh sunshine. Front yards are gravel, unless you're planning to waste money and precious water on irrigating grass year-round. Front yards are dirt brown. The mountains are rock brown. The buildings are more different adobe-brown, except for where they're blue or purple or green or rose. We live in a valley surrounded by our brown mountains, Catalinas to the north that orient us home. 

Tucson is diverse, and siloed.  Anarchists and activists, defense contractors at Raytheon, Air Force members and families on base, refugees and volunteers, headquarters of the biggest Border Patrol sector in the United States, artists and engineers at the U. Tucson can be whatever you are, if you stick to your part of town. Tucson can be bigger than you imagine, if you cross the mental borders of the biggest roads and your usual haunts. Everybody has dated everybody, because the everybody you know is carefully matched set. 

Tucson is raw and polished. Ferocious fighters who block buses and fill court rooms, boutique hotels and young professionals in urban infill districts. 

Tucson is a hunger for water, for recognition, for justice, for independence and every one's right to their own way.