John Earle
The Rev. Cristina Rathbone
In 2019, the Rev. Cristina Rathbone decided to leave MANNA, her Cathedral Church of St. Paul-based ministry among unhoused people in Boston, in order to spend a season on the U.S.-Mexico border at a time when migrant families, including asylum seekers, were being apprehended and separated under the first Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy. The Asylum Seekers: A Chronicle of Life, Death, and Community at the Border, her new book about that experience and the people she encountered, is just out from Broadleaf Books, along with a reader's guide from Episcopal Migration Ministries, available here.
After returning to Massachusetts in 2020, Rathbone has worked with Episcopal Migration Ministries to create Neighbor to Neighbor, a national network to train and support congregations working with asylum seekers in their local contexts. She served for three-and-a-half years as the rector of Grace Church: An Episcopal Community in the Southern Berkshires, which sold its building to focus on mission. She's now working in a new role, as congregational coordinator for the Massachusetts Council of Churches.
In a recent interview on Zoom, Rathbone talked about how a tent encampment's story intersected with her story to become The Asylum Seekers, her ongoing quest to figure out what it means to be a person of faith in a broken world, and a hope or two for how accompaniment might lead to transformation, even in turbulent times.
The interview has been gently edited for length.
How is it that you came to be among the asylum seekers that you write about?
I left MANNA to go to the border in 2019. It was when families were being separated. I'm half Cuban--my mother's family all came here with one suitcase each and were given a chance--and I saw that people who were just like my family were not being given a chance. So I raised enough money to give me six months of exploring on the border, because I really believe it's good to go and listen to the people who are primarily affected and learn from them about what they need. I ended up in Juárez-El Paso and created, with the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, something that came to be called The Bridge Chaplaincy, which was a way of offering incarnate, pastoral care for asylum seekers on both sides of the border. I worked largely with a community of Mexican asylum seekers who were living in a tent encampment at the foot of a port of entry in downtown Juárez. I stayed there until the last of those families were able to request asylum, which was the beginning of COVID. The book that I wrote is about my work with that community over a period of four months.
Did you have a book in mind from the start?
Absolutely not. I had no thought of writing anything. I was very much there as a priest and a person. That was really more than enough. It was later that I started to write in order to find words for the experience, for myself, and to knit myself together again--not that my suffering was anything like the suffering of asylum seekers, but it was a pretty hard period of time there. In the end, I did think, yes, other people need to get to know how extraordinary these asylum seekers on the border were, and really to counter the grotesque "othering" that's going on. I was not there as a journalist and this is not a journalist's account of the border. It's the story of a priest and a chaplain on the border.
What's the story that you ended up telling?
It is a collection of stories. It's one narrative but the arc that holds the narrative together is this incredible community of people who were in extreme crisis and who nonetheless created a community through which they would be able to survive and have moments, even, of thriving against the worst odds imaginable. It's also the story of me trying to figure out what it means to be a person of faith in a place of such brokenness. It's one thing to be a priest in a church. It's another thing to be a priest in a tent community on the street of the fifth most dangerous city on Earth pressed up against a border where the U.S. government, my government, is denying these asylum seekers their rights every day, where it's boiling hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, and every single one of the people on that street has been multiply traumatized by violence past, plenty of violence present and complete uncertainty about the future. So there's lots of talk in the book about faith, about Jesus, about weakness, about strength, about action, about non-action, about accompaniment, about what it means to be a priest, about what it means to be someone who says they believe in Jesus.
You seem to be very much about accompaniment, being in the midst of people as Jesus was, rather than going in as someone trying to fix things. True?
That is the kind of thing that Jesus did, but it is also, in a much humbler way, the way the people of MANNA taught me to be a priest, which is to sit with them and listen and learn from them and to reflect back to them the wonder of who they are in this world. And so that was the work that I did [at the border]. That doesn't mean, of course, that I wasn't doing all I could to improve their physical well being, but I did spend most of my time sitting on the curb listening and witnessing and doing what I could to reflect back to them their incredible courage and dignity and beauty. I think, in times of extended crisis and extended suffering, that is something that we as members of the church are equipped to offer. My work is very much to accompany, to accompany as a priest, to bring with me the community of the church. Jesus is there with them, and that's why I'm there, to encounter Jesus in them. And that is really hard work to do when there is so much suffering because it brings you up against your own deep tiny-ness, powerlessness, finitude.
Your book is landing in this very particular moment in our national life. What light does that shed on the book, or maybe, what's the light that the book sheds on this moment?
Time has pressed in on itself like an accordion closing. I thought that the book, being about 2019-2020, was going to be very out of date when it was finally published. And then, here we are. We have the same people in office now as were in office then, only even more emboldened and empowered. We have policies that are just ramping up to do far worse, I believe, than they did back then. And we have a national conversation whose ground is one of profound disrespect, fear mongering, lies and misrepresentations, othering and demonizing, of newly arrived immigrants. What this book seeks to do in a little way is to reveal the incredible beauty of the men, women and children that I was so honored to spend time with, like so many people coming into this country.
That's my first hope. My second hope is to encourage people of faith to engage with and meet and listen to and learn from and assist newly arrived neighbors, that people who read the book, and particularly people of faith, will be yet further galvanized into action, local action, accompaniment action, because it leads to transformation for everybody. We all are desperately in need of it.
--Tracy J. Sukraw