A Church Anew Book Series: Interview with Cristina Rathbone, Author of “The Asylum Seekers”
Photo by Alyssa Kibiloski on Unsplash
Church Anew is delighted to continue a series that celebrates the books and contributions of leaders in our community. While we can’t share every book or article or milestone, feel free to nominate someone or some piece that you know by emailing support@churchanew.org. Pastor Eric Shafer has led a storied career across the church and is interviewing authors in this recurring feature. This week, we are happy to present Eric’s interview with Cristina Rathbone about her new book, The Asylum Seekers.
Please share a brief summary of your book
The book tells the story of a community of asylum-seekers living in a makeshift tent camp at the foot of the U.S border in Juarez, Mexico. Life in the encampment was often hectic and harrowing of course: women wept, children squabbled, and grown men sobbed over photographs of their murdered sons' mutilated bodies. But there was more than horror and fear in the encampment -- there was also beauty and courage and generosity and laughter and hope. The Asylum Seekers is as concerned with sharing these aspects of people’s day-to-day lives, as it is about the very real peril our country’s immigration policies placed them in. Weaving intimate portraits of individuals with broader stories about the community, reporting from the border as a whole, and reflections on the meaning of faith in a place of real struggle,
Who should read this book?
My hope is that anyone interested in immigration might pick up this book in order to learn a little about some of the people who are primarily affected by our nation’s broken asylum system. This book tells the story of a community of asylum-seeking families who attempt, day after day, week after week, month after month, to enter the U.S both openly and legally -- and who are often turned away nonetheless. I worked with this extraordinary community from the day they first gathered, to the day their encampment was flattened by bulldozers just four months later. Because I was there as a priest and a chaplain, the book is also very much about faith – mine, which often wavered in the face of so much danger and grief, and the asylum seekers’, which taught me more than I can possibly say in a short paragraph like this. I hope the book will be helpful especially to anyone who is interested in the places where their faith and the struggles of the world overlap.
What would you like the reader to take away from your book?
First: that those of us fortunate enough not to have flee our homes have a lot to learn about life, love and joy from those who have had to do just that. Second: that forging lives of meaning necessarily involves being open to suffering as well as to joy. And third (and this last is for people who claim a traditional faith as well as for those whose faith is non-traditional and non-institutional): that our faith is every bit as relevant – and essential - in the broken, dark and dangerous places of our world, as it is in the ordered beauty of houses of worship, or retreat centers. What we say we believe when we are safe and peaceful changes everything when we try – even shakily - to apply it also when we are challenged, vulnerable, or afraid.
You share many stories of people you met at the border. Please share one here.
I’m thinking right now of one my heroes from the community – a man I call Victor – who was forced to flee his home after organizing neighbors to stand up against the local cartel’s decimating tariffs. Victor had already risked his life once. Now, sleeping out on the street in a homemade tent with his wife and two girls, he was willing to risk it again. As a leader of the community, Victor was responsible for maintaining the list that governed people’s access to the US border. The list was all important as it ensured fairness and so maintained both order and calm under very difficult circumstances. Despite widespread corruption and regular offers to sell places on the list for huge sums of money, Victor rigorously maintained the integrity of the list. One night three angry, armed men came to the camp looking for him, clearly meaning to do him harm. Victor’s courage was astonishing, especially given his already perilous circumstances. Even more astonishing though is the fact that the rest of the community then risked their own safety to protect him. Under threat of gun point, numerous people misdirected the armed men that night, eventually convincing them that Victor had taken his family to a local hotel. Later, these same men and women again risked their lives by quietly ushering Victor, his wife and his two young girls, up to the top of the bridge separating the U.S from Mexico, and then enabled them to stay there by ferrying up food, diapers and blankets until he was finally allowed to request asylum from the US authorities. This combination of selflessness and courage was astonishingly common among the impoverished and largely powerless community I spent so much time with. It fills me with awe to this day.
Your emotions are very "raw" in this book - why is this such an emotional issue for you?
I felt it was important to be real. Life on a single city block where hundreds of asylum-seeking families were crammed into makeshift tents was pretty extreme. Chaos, fear, and very real dangers were everywhere present, and while these primarily affected the asylum-seekers themselves, of course, they also affected me. I wish I could say that I took it all in stride, but the truth is that I often felt overwhelmed and occasionally even scared. It felt important to include this in the book because anything else would be a lie. Too often, people who write skip over their own weak moments, or wavering moments, or plain old dumb moments – leaving the text cleaner, perhaps, but also a little unreal. I wanted to do the opposite. To reveal myself as a priest who – without any of the supports of a more usual call - struggled most every day to both give and receive the solace of Love. I hope that my presence on the street was helpful in some small ways, but I know for sure that I was helped every day by the courage, the humor, the resilience, and the faith of the men, women and children who were camping out there.
Rev. Eric Shafer
The Rev. Eric C. Shafer is a regular contributor to Church Anew and serves as “Pastor in Residence” for Global Refuge - www.globalrefuge.org - which is now in its 85th year serving immigrants and refugees. He has served ELCA congregations in Pennsylvania and California and was the ELCA’s Communication Director, a synod bishop’s assistant, and an interfaith communication executive. He and his wife, Kris, live at Pilgrim Place in Claremont, California.
