pull up a chair

a little honduran girl whose name, we think, is Yanela, photo by John Moore/Getty Images

i woke to the sound of heavens weeping. the percussive ping of rain against the windowpanes. rain that will not stop. tears that won’t be quelled. the skies have wept, it seems, all week. fitting soundtrack to this stretch of time, this dark moment in our history, when all our hearts are cried out, our spirits flagged, the air all but sucked from our lungs.

how did we get here? how did we become a nation where children — children and toddlers and babies, suckling babies — are ripped from a mother’s breast, are scooped up and off of dusty paths. a nation where this image of a little girl, whose name we’ve learned in yanela, stood and watched in fear and horror as her mother was frisked — then taken away — by a stranger. the terror on her face is what haunts me. haunts me in the darkness as i sink into sleep. haunts me as i wake, imagining her alone, wondering where in the world her mama went. why she is waking up, perhaps, under a shiny mylar blanket, in a room where the lights never go out. where it’s refrigerator cold on purpose. on purpose.

all week i’ve wanted nothing more than to leap on a plane, get to the border, and cradle babies, toddlers, children, teens. i wanted my nursing license to not be long expired. i wanted to exercise that whole soul of me that cannot bear to sit and watch one more minute. i clicked on donations, at a legal defense fund in south texas, intent on helping parents find their children.

none of it, none of it, feels like i am doing one iota to make the hate, the evil, go away. i pray for this chapter in history to end. i pray that we might elect someone whose soul is guided by those fine few things we believe in, certainly all those who gather at this table: decency, gentility, kindness, compassion, love. love as spelled out in the bible, the qur’an, the torah: love as you would be loved.

love as if you could try to imagine the hell of living in a country run by assault-rifle-toting gangs. love as if you knew what it was to have the threat of rape and kidnapping ever trailing you. as if you’d heard screams of terror in the night. as if you’d witnessed the vestiges of awful deaths played out on the sidewalks and the village square, right before your eyes. love as if you knew what it was to perch your toddler on your hip and set out across a desert, unrelenting sun beating down on you, dehydrating every cell of you and the little ones you love.

the little girl in the soul-searing image above, the little girl named yanela, she and her mama crossed the rio grande on a raft. a raft made of what i don’t know. was it chunks of wood strapped together? was it inflatable till it hit the sharp edge of a river rock? does it matter?

call me a cockeyed bleeding-heart kook. i’m no policy wonk, and i’ve no idea how to fix the immigration question. but i do know this: there is nowhere in any bible, any holy text, that says turn away the stranger at the border. rip the child from the mother’s breast — and then handcuff the mother for resisting the taking of her child.

i try mightily to imagine myself when either one of my boys was one or two or three or 12 — or now. if, for one minute, someone reached for them, in a posture of pulling them or me away, i’d kick and scream bloody hell. i’d try to muster superpowers, powers i know full well i do not have. and then, in defeat, i’d collapse. i’d rather never breathe again than be torn from my children.

i am responding as nearly any mother would, because every pore in my body knows what it is to be slipped into that sacred space of living and breathing, being consumed in every waking and slumbering moment by the whole protection and shielding of my child from whatever threat dares to come his way.

we all suffer when one among us suffers the unimaginable. and day after day we are witnessing the unimaginable.

dear holy God, God of mercy, deliver them, deliver us, all of us. deliver us from this evil. amen.

here’s wendell berry’s response to hell on earth. to his grandchildren who walked the holocaust museum on the day yitzhak rabin, who had been assassinated, was buried…