* Names have been changed for privacy purposes.

Throughout my writing, I have reflected extensively about the insights gleaned from my time spent in the fields. However, my experience as a worker at The Abundant Table (TAT) has been far more dynamic and multifaceted than I can adequately convey. One of the most challenging and rewarding pieces of my internship was creating a summer camp for children of farmworkers in the community. The connections and trust TAT has established throughout the farmworker communities is undoubtedly a testament to the organization’s prophetic witness. I was thrilled—and daunted—by the prospect of facilitating a summer camp experience with the hope of uplifting and celebrating this particular population, especially given the immense persecution farmworkers and their families are facing in the current moment. Needless to say, all of the pieces surrounding camp—from laying the groundwork to experiencing its fruition—were ripe with teachable moments and unexpected insights about myself, others, and faith. One such moment occurred during the first day of camp as the children and I crowded around picnic tables for lunch beneath an enormous tree in the center of the garden.

It was sticky outside. The atmosphere was uncharacteristically humid and the conditions were only aggravated by the strawberry jam adhering to my palms. I had just finished preparing fifteen PB&J sandwiches along with freshly squeezed lemonade. Between the lunch items and the remnants of the morning’s painting activity which lingered on forearms and fingers, I think we had all resigned ourselves to the stickiness. As I settled into the wooden bench of the picnic table, one of the older boys named Ismeal asked me if I’d heard the story about his abuelo.

I asked him, “What story?”

“The story,” He responded with wriggling eyebrows telegraphing some secret meaning.

The other children’s chatter quieted, suddenly interested in Ismeal’s words. Most of the children who attended the camp were cousins, and if they were not cousins by blood, they were cousins in the closeness between their families. Thus, this abuelo was something of a larger-than-life figure all the children knew and admired. They urged Ismeal to tell the story with excitement and anticipation that made me wonder how many times they had played out this scene. Ismeal waited for the group’s full attention and started recounting how his grandfather was wrongfully imprisoned by the authorities when he was recently detained. Abuelo was a man of God, Ismeal provided, and during his detainment he had prayed fiercely. Suddenly, Abuelo realized his cell door was unlocked. Tentatively, he walked out of his cell, all the way out of the detainment center, and into the horizon. Ismeal described the tale with a myriad of stray details, like how the security cameras had miraculously malfunctioned during his abuelo’s escape. The other children chimed in, supplementing information Ismeal had neglected and demonstrating their own familiarity with the story.

As I contemplated the story in an astonished silence, skepticism arose like a powerful knee-jerk. I wanted to ask all sorts of questions or to dismiss the story entirely, even as I outwardly nodded my head and offered a neutral, “Wow.” Meanwhile, my inner critic persisted, “They’re only children. I’m sure that’s not how it went.” I was shocked at my own unwillingness to believe in such an unexplainable event. I was more comfortable deferring to my unimaginative, adult cynicism—perhaps the “hardness of heart” described in the scriptures. However, I thought about the photos I’d seen of small children locked behind chain-link fences in immigration detention centers or the report I’d recently heard about a woman who extorted nearly one million dollars from countless undocumented families with false promises of visas and green cards. Were these stories not also unbelievable, astonishing, and yet totally real?

My gaze met a family of eyes that waited patiently for a reaction. I told them I’d heard a similar story once in the Bible and asked the children if it was familiar to them. When they told me no, they’d never heard such a story, I pulled up the text from Acts 16 and read aloud the story of Paul and Silas sitting in jail. The text describes how the men were praying and singing hymns to God when “Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken. Immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.” The account recorded in Acts is, like many stories in the Bible, utterly baffling and outlandish. It’s also beautiful, dramatic, and positively profound. It’s funny how I can affirm such an event found in scripture but dismiss the remarkably similar story told by Ismeal. Perhaps because Ismeal’s story unsettles so many of my assumptions about the world I know–its operations and governing rules.

I recall a sermon I once heard on the Acts 16 passage, written and delivered by Nadia Bolz-Weber. She underscores Paul and Silas’ singing and prayers, offering the reminder that, “Just because we don’t get to decide the effect prayer has in the world does not mean that prayer has no effect in the world.” If I truly believed this, I think I’d pray more. In this world of heartbreak, it’s all too easy to forfeit that practice of prayer, to discontinue hoping for things not seen. To allow the heart, the mind, and the spirit to become calloused and hard. However, Pastor Bolz-Weber also highlights the way in which “All the doors were open and everyone’s chains were unfastened.” Paul’s and Silas’ faith was enough to free not only themselves, but others. She says,

So many of us have felt tortured by not knowing if we have enough faith or the right kind of faith. I’ve said this before, but perhaps it bears repeating: faith is never given in sufficient quantities to individuals…it’s given in sufficient quantities to communities. Because this thing isn’t an individual competition, it’s a team sport. God has provided in us all the faith sufficient for our freedom.

Even if my own faith is lacking such that I cannot believe Ismeal’s story by my own sheer will. Even if I am liable to become disheartened and hopeless when facing the grave conditions of our communities, the perversion of our justice systems, and the commodification of the land and people—perhaps the faith of these little children is enough to unfasten my chains and, in the process, set me free.

“Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). I’ve heard this verse cited in Christian circles when things are falling apart and everything seems to be spiraling out of control. It’s generally used in a comforting tone to imply that despite how bad it seems right now, there will be a day when God restores everything, and we must hold out hope until then. This has always puzzled me. I wonder how comforting this phrase actually is to a person in need. I have heard this verse preached recursively in sermons about the world’s brokenness. I’ve even heard it recently in reference to our political system. I can imagine people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and James Cone laughing at this verse amidst unimaginable persecution and oppression. My initial response to this well-meaning scriptural reference is to scoff at it and push back with, “Well that’s great, but what does that mean for things in the meantime?”

I think what has too often resulted from this verse is an affirmation of patient passivity. I don’t think that this verse is contending that in the meantime we should do nothing more than sit on our hands. What I’ve seen more than ever this summer is that if the author of Revelation is right to proclaim that God is making all things new, it means that we, as creations of the Divine, must become co-creators with the Divine in order to expedite the coming of the Kingdom and the making new of all things. Additionally, if we are to be active agents in bringing about this divinely decreed change, we must be fully engaged in the world and in the political atmosphere of the present day.

Political engagement means leaning into the news even when we see extreme bias—whether in our favor or against us. It means patiently listening when we hear constituents of the opposing party explain their beliefs and why they find ours abhorrent. It means calling and writing and visiting our representatives to share our thoughts on a given issue. It means being aware of the political climate and fighting to change the narrative of anger to a narrative of inclusivity. It means educating ourselves on upcoming legislation and making sure that we agree with what is being proposed and passed. It means speaking out against anything that we don’t believe in, knowing the consequences may be losing Facebook friends or Twitter followers or even the approval of those we love. Most of all, however, political engagement means ensuring that we have theological grounding for our political stances. Relying on partisan arguments supported by cherry-picked Bible verses is insufficient, especially if we believe that we play a crucial role in the process of making all things new.

For Bonhoeffer, it meant making a choice between personal purity and the greater good. When faced with the invitation to join a secret resistance group planning to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer was morally torn. On one hand, killing a human being, even Adolf Hitler, was not only extreme, but against biblical law. On the other, however, if someone didn’t do something drastic, Hitler’s path of terror would continue and millions more could suffer. Bonhoeffer, in valiant courage, decided that it was more important that evil be stopped than that his own personal good be saved.

This week at Bread for the World, I found myself knee-deep in policy briefs and long legislative summaries. This was completely foreign territory to me. While I was consistently having to look things up and ask questions, I found this process very rewarding, and I began to realize the power that policy can have. One small policy change has the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of individuals. I did not realize how important every inch and every amendment in a policy fight really is until this week. In a presentation for the Government Relations Department at Bread for the World, my boss—Jane Adams, Domestic Policy Analyst at Bread for the World—cited the impact that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) can have on low-income working families. After the meeting, I pulled her aside and asked her if she could tell me more about this. Her explanation was remarkably eye-opening for me and I began to realize the power of policy in action.

She explained to me that there was a bill on the table last year that proposed amending the EITC and the CTC regulations to make both refundable from the first dollar rather than waiting until a certain threshold is met. The EITC and the CTC are important for low-income working families because these two credits singlehandedly lift 10 million people out of poverty each year. If both were amended to make them refundable from the first dollar, it would lift an additional 20+ million people out of poverty and would significantly impact the poorest communities in the country. This proposal would have cost $300 billion to alter, but rather than allocating the money towards helping extremely low-income families, President Trump decided to cut the corporate tax rate from 30% to 15%. For every 1% that the corporate tax is cut, it costs roughly $100 billion. This basically means that if Congress had given a slightly smaller cutback to big corporations and only reduced the corporate tax to 18% instead of 15%, over 30 million people could have been lifted out of poverty as a result.

After explaining all of this, Jane said “You know, a budget is a reflection of morals; what you spend your money on is reflective of what you care about, and that’s the same for individuals, corporations, and countries. According to their actions last year, Congress and the president don’t think that drastically changing the lives of the poorest is worth a 3% smaller tax cut to the richest.”

What does this say about who we care about? It’s not the tired, the poor, or the huddled masses. While I recognize it’s probably not shocking news that our country hasn’t ever really done a great job of caring for the marginalized, my conversation with Jane revealed just how capable yet unwilling we are to do so. Things like this can be changed if we become politically engaged members of our communities. God may be making all things new, but are we helping or hindering this process? Are we passively watching or actively participating? Are we choosing to be a bystander with personal purity or a Bonhoeffer with sacrificial servanthood? We must stop hiding behind the pretense of faith-based passivity and use our theological foundations to inform our political engagement. Policy is powerful, but political engagement is a precursor for effective and meaningful policy. With diligence and dedication, I believe that policy can play an integral role in the process of making all things new.

Main Street is at once otherworldly and absolutely mundane. Its arteries are lined with blockish, sky-scraping superstructures and sprinkled with neon golden arches which glow like beacons for the hungry, the poor, and the destitute. Main Street’s soundtrack senselessly echoes in a polyphony of dissonant voices, traffic tunes, and melodic advertisements. They call to one another, to no one, and beyond—sending signals without the hope of a response. Main Street is like a stressed nervous system, secreting chemical solutions and flexing automatic muscles, outstretched hands attached to observers collect infinite quantities of information, nearly all of which is sifted, sorted, and deleted in a split second. You couldn’t take it all in, even if you wanted to, and you wouldn’t want to. There are no visible features to betray Main Street’s identity, its uniqueness, if it possesses any at all. Main Street could be anywhere. Main Street is almost everywhere. Luxurious displays strategically arranged, sealed behind glass, contrasted against the dirty body of the street dweller who obscures the charming contents. The narrative is disrupted when a woman emerges, crisp and colorful paper protruding from her shopping bag. She greets the stooped man with shamefully averted eyes. She senses something amiss. He senses resignation to the assigned roles.

I am carried by the current like a tumbleweed, politely swatting away, “May I help you? Are you looking for something?” Actually, I am. I don’t know what, but surely I’ll know it when I find it. The search takes me to vendors, shops, eateries. There are entry fees which I pay by way of purchases I don’t need. Here, I am minding my own role in the social drama, though I have a niggling sensation I’ve forgotten some important line. I’m unsure who I am meant to be portraying, and I worry that I’m doing it incorrectly. When I try to speak, my words come out backwards. I stutter and hum until I’m sweating from the strain of my searching. A formidable force of disconcertion arises, and I have no name for the thing, no knowledge of its source.

“Consumption,” surmises the old man in the park, bent over a chess board, a fuming cigar in hand. I take his answer and turn it over in my mind’s eye, trying on its fit. Consumption seems an apt description. It’s as though naming the thing has given me some sort of power to resist it, but I quickly find as I drift down monotonous concrete slabs that I’m consuming all sorts of things, even as my mouth and wallet remain shut.

A soundless whisper skids across my mind like a glass marble traversing tile. It forms words without sound as if I were reading text from a page. It offers direction, promises safe passage, and leads me to the mouth of an alleyway between two buildings so tall the sunlight above is completely crowded out. The seemingly tranquil stillness before me is disrupted by movement, differentiated shades of darkness which invite me forward into the fold. I have stumbled into a colony. There are parentless children, childless women and fatherless men dwelling together in a makeshift family. Dread chills my innards, pity produces a fearsome headache, and helplessness stiffens my knees. Then the sensations leave me and understanding threatens to set in. I attempt to envision the daily regimens of these outcasts and vagrants but the structure of their days evades me, existing just beyond the bounds of my imagination. Their lives assume templates so dissimilar from my own I cannot even recognize them. These beings defy convention so thoroughly their beauty is rendered invisible in my purview.

I don’t know why I was brought here, but the kinship I feel with these folks is unmistakable. Knowing hands tug at my clothing and frame, pushing me toward an industrial sized dumpster so revolting even the paint on its exterior is wilting away. The invitation is bewildering, and somehow sacramental, so through the looking glass I go. In the rubbish bin, there are 25 nameless birthday cakes topped with unlit candles. There’s all the plastic that has ever been produced, which will not decompose for another 500 years. Designer kitchen salts extracted from melting arctic glaciers. The waterlogged remains of the Great Barrier Reef. The pelt of the last grizzly bear that lived in California. Seventy-two billion pounds of food waste—the annual total in the United States. Fifteen million US households who are hungry. Subsidies which pay farmers to work fallow land. Logic that resists reason. I find other things too—Charles Baudelaire’s “The Eyes of the Poor” and Joan Didion’s iconic line, “The center will not hold.” I discover the answers to Fermat’s riddle and Da Vinci’s code. However, I don’t find the equation to recalibrate distribution, to eliminate waste, to remedy greed. I don’t find the salve to heal a broken humanity. Instead I find a cosmic loom which knits every thread together. Hope and despair in equal measure. Life and death all bound up together. Irresolution and no conclusions.

Every remembered place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened only toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

— excerpt from A Timbered Choir (Prologue) by Wendell Berry

There a few writers who capture the “placelessness” of contemporary society as well as poet, author, and farmer Wendell Berry. As a millennial formed in the crucible of technology and transiency, I feel haunted by Berry’s descriptions of the pervading monoculture in the United States, a culture defined by consumption and disconnection from geographic location. Indeed, our historical moment is one in which travel-for-the-sake-of-travel is a prevalent past-time, social media has rendered space and time basically irrelevant in the spread of information, and the majority of the World’s population lives in urban areas with limited interaction with their terrestrial environments. I think I am unsettled by Berry’s words because, admittedly, I recognize within myself a propensity toward these lifestyles and so I feel a sense of complicity in their problematic byproducts—American imperialism, desensitization to reports or images of violence and suffering, urban colonialism, just to name a few. However, despite the strange ways globalization has impacted my development, I feel a kindred attraction to alternative modes of existence, ones that value place and people, soil and thrift. I wonder, what does Wendell Berry’s deeply rooted witness have to teach me, the placeless?

As I was reading “Covenantal Economics” a marvelous chapter by Ellen Davis, I was captivated by the notion of “kindly use” a term which arises from none other than Berry himself. Davis explains that “kindly use” is, according to Berry, the spiritual discipline of “caring for land in its particularity” which demands a kind of “local knowledge.”[1] This sentiment is indisputably wise, intensely practical, and very lovely…but what wisdom does it hold for those of us who are not interacting with the earth in our daily work, let alone “caring for land”? Perhaps Davis and Berry are speaking to something deeper, something having to do with stewardship and paying attention. Davis clarifies, “Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility.”[2] Which leads me to believe kindly use points toward a larger ethic, an ethic which insists that humanity and creation are designed to live in mutually constitutive relationship, and that humanity ought to reverently “tend and keep” the lands we only temporarily inhabit (Genesis 2:15).

This introduces another countercultural characteristic of kindly use—an “economics of permanence.”[3] When I first considered an economics of permanence, I wondered if Davis and Berry were speaking in contrast to the placelessness and transiency I described above. However, the more I contemplate an economics of permanence, the more it seems to be something else, something any individual can and ought to practice regardless of the measure of stability in one’s life (lest we forget stability itself a great privilege). Perhaps an economics of permanence necessitates that we would treat our land and our resources with a boarder vision in mind, one that extends beyond ourselves into both past and future. Consider that land you which sustains you, your loved ones, your livelihood. Who and what inhabited the same land previously? What are the stories of the land, the people who did or did not practice kindly use? Did they leave in their wake a generous coverlet of nutrient rich topsoil and a vibrant watershed? Or did they prioritize extraction and profit making, perhaps stripping mountains of their covers and protective skins? An economics of permanence demands acknowledging, addressing, and responding to such histories. It also necessitates looking forward and implementing practices which will benefit the generations to come, generations that will live under the approaching shadow of Climate devastation and its fatalistic effects. An economics of permanence challenges us frail and finite creatures to ponder and live into a world bigger and beyond us—the Great economy of the Kingdom of God, where all living things exist in symbiotic relationship with one another.

[1] Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: an Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge University Press: 2009), 108.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

“What a time to be alive.” These are the words that I’ve heard probably most frequently during my time here in DC. It’s a complex time of disappointing politics and incredible community organizing. I’m consistently torn between feelings of deep grief and lament for the injustices that are unfolding before my eyes in this country and in this world, and feelings of inspirational hope from the community organizing that demands accountability and responsibility from our political leaders. I’ve seen our Attorney General use scripture as a weapon to defend unjust policies. I’ve seen our president use and encourage a rhetoric of egregiously hateful and derogatory language towards a group of people who are fleeing for their lives. However, I’ve also seen resilient community organizers call people to action and rally thousands of people to protest and speak out against these political failures. I’ve seen the Church, although admittedly somewhat waveringly, stand in opposition, condemn these injustices, and defend the actuality of scripture’s contents. What a time to be alive.

This past week, I caught myself repeating this phrase almost daily. My week was full of events that I could talk about individually for hours. I could tell you about a gathering of public theologians I attended for the official publication of a statement signed by over 300 religious scholars condemning the actions of President Trump’s border policies. I could tell you about hearing widely respected religious leaders like Sister Simone, from Nuns on the Bus, or Rev. Adam Taylor, the new executive director of Sojourners, denounce this administration’s recent actions. I could tell you about being speechless as I witnessed one of the most impressive demonstrations I have seen in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building by the Women’s March where almost 600 women acted boldly in solidarity with the detained immigrants by performing acts of civil disobedience and being arrested. I could tell you about the pure excitement my office felt when the Farm Bill, which we have been exhaustively lobbying for, passed the Senate on Thursday. I could tell you about thousands of people who marched down Pennsylvania Ave. in 100-degree DC heat to make sure their voices were heard.

In a conversation that I had with my site mentor—Jane Adams, Domestic Policy Analyst at Bread for the World—on my first day there, she said something very intriguing to me about lobbying and activism. She said “MLK is always remembered for his speeches and marches on Selma or Birmingham, but what was most important and what changed history was not the marches or the speeches; it was when he sat down and wrote the Civil Rights Act and put all of the protest’s energy into concrete law.” I was caught off guard when I first heard her say this. My default reaction was to defend the civil rights movement’s organizing skills; however, after thinking about this a while, I realized the point that she was making. The reality of our political world means that if we want to see real, lasting, sustainable change in society, it has to be drafted into law. After being wrapped up in a week of protests, marches, and letters, I realized that while all are necessary aspects of positive change, none are sufficient on their own.

After some more reflection on this conversation, I was posed with the question, “What does all of this actually do?” I found myself unable to answer the question. I was looking for the direct, real impact that each letter or march or petition brought about. I had to get myself to step back from the energy of the movements that I had been wrapped up in this week and ask myself this very challenging question. These groups are writing letters and petitions and organizing thousands for marches and protests, and hundreds are putting their bodies on the line in acts of civil disobedience to protest, but what do each of the acts bring about? Are they effective in catalyzing the desired change? Are they enough, or should we be taking more drastic measures? Are they a privileged response that protects our own self-purity, or are they actions of solidarity and calls to action? What does all of this actually do?

I decided these questions were probably out of my very limited scope of understanding, so I decided to ask my theological mentor, the Rev. Dr. Kris Norris. On our walk back from the release of the letter signed by over 300 religious scholars, I asked him what his thoughts were on all of this. He responded by saying that things like letters and petitions are always necessary as the initial steps for building a movement. While they might not seem to do anything drastic in the immediate, they provide a source of guidance and tethered direction that people can always refer back to and see exactly why the movement matters or what the foundational principles of the movement are. They serve as cornerstones for bigger things. It’s not that they aren’t effective, but as Jane said, they don’t independently cause systemic change. This means that letters and petitions serve as a necessary initial mode of action in order that other forms of protest can be successful after the fact. It also means that they are not enough on their own to cause change.

After working with Jane for a couple days and seeing that the realms of policy and protest seemed to be a bit disconnected, I asked her about how policy answers the demands of protests and how protests influence policy. Her response was quite inspirational. She talked about how policy must take a more realistic approach than protests do, but protests are necessary in deciding how much compromise has to be achieved. For example, if literally everyone in the US decided they were going to protest  for something to change, very minimal compromise would be necessary. The amount of compromise is usually inversely related to the support of the protest; as support decreases, necessity to compromise increases. Policy has real impacts and has the potential to change lives, but it can only be effective if citizens are politically aware individuals making sure not only that their voices are being heard, but the voices of the marginalized are also being heard.