{"id":3740,"date":"2018-08-27T17:47:30","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T21:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=3740"},"modified":"2018-09-12T16:44:05","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T20:44:05","slug":"we-are-all-immigrants-imago-dei-citizenship-and-the-im-possibility-of-hospitality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2018\/08\/27\/we-are-all-immigrants-imago-dei-citizenship-and-the-im-possibility-of-hospitality\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are All Immigrants! Imago Dei, Citizenship, and The Im\/Possibility of Hospitality"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF: Carvahaes, We are all Immigrants<\/a><\/h5>\n
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Abstract<\/h3>\n

We are all immigrants! Some of us are more recent immigrants than others. In this time of nation-states, we forget that our true country, our true home, is in heaven and we are all moving around as migrants until we cross the Jordan River. While we live here among the nations, on this good earth, the oikos of God, we are all full-fledged members of God\u2019s realm, under the grace of God who makes us all equal. By this grace of God, we all carry God\u2019s image, like a passport, whatever our status as citizens or as stateless persons. Passports and legal documents speak to nations, but cannot be the final document within the Christian faith. Our Christian baptism attests to the fact that we are baptized back into the earth, God\u2019s body, and committed to careof each other. We too readily forget who we are and how we belong to each other. Indeed, , the colonization of the American land, the formation of U.S. exceptionalism and the consequential normativity of land possession by force and law have made us think that we have the final ownership of places and status by putting borders around others and impeding people\u2019s movement. The killing of the indigenous people continues to exist as ongoing forms of coloniality used by the state as we see it repeated in the history of black folks, and the ways of treating new immigrants now. National documents have taken the place of God\u2019s image so much so that we ignore the dignity of migrants and refugees and exiles \u2013 the stateless ones are rendered invisible by those of us who are claimed and protected by a nation. We are living in a daring situation where immigrants and refugees are moving around the globe due to so many drastic global conditions. Our task now is to learn how to regain a theology, a form of thinking, feeling, believing and relating to immigrants and immigration that will help us recognize them and respond appropriately to this current global crisis. This article challenges us to see all human beings as immigrant carriers of the Imago Dei, a truth more important than any passport. We must acknowledge that many Christian churches have become class identity holders and complacent with state xenophobic discourses and private possessions. Most importantly, when our national identity is more important than our common humanity, we lose sight of the demand ofhospitality shown in the gospels. We must continually struggle to recognize the breadth of the challenges we have today and reclaim a radical hospitality rooted in the gospel. All bear the Imago Dei. We are all immigrants!<\/em>  <\/em>[1]<\/a>   <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Introduction<\/h3>\n

The haunting presence, body, figure and symbol of \u201cimmigrants\/migrants\u201d will continue to be a constant issue, and a fundamental companion of our times. Like drugs, poverty, violence and climate change, the problem or blessing of the immigrant\/migrant in the world will only grow. Walls are being built in more than 70 places across the globe showing how difficult it is to deal with a figure who holds in itself much larger issues.[2]<\/a> Immigration is a result not only of tourism, but also fundamentally of global concerns including economic disparity, droughts and floods, famine, slavery, and sexual trafficking; various forms of state, militia, and gang violence; and many other difficulties that emerge from the geo-political-economic processes of uneven globalization and new forms of colonialism.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Immigration also shows that movement is what keeps us alive, and the way we relate to it is significant not only to our own communities, but also to the very survival of the world.  These movements and displacements create a complex system that challenges the ways countries and local communities form and offer their responses: some see immigrants and refugees as human beings and offer them hospitality, while others feel threatened, feeding xenophobic discourses and practices to keep them away.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

In this article, I want to suggest a theological framework that will empower us to respond to the challenges of the immigrant\/immigration and help us create feelings of proximity with the immigrant. This framework also exposes a moral that is expansive enough to offer a radical welcoming, feeds a social perspective that takes away the fear, and begins to envision a country with a political awareness that opens wide spaces for those in need. I will do this by reclaiming the Christian theological notion of the imago Dei<\/em>, the image of God in all creatures so powerfully expressed in the Bible, which provides the background for a consideration of boundaries, practices, im\/possibilities, and promises of hospitality.<\/p>\n

I start from the ethical assertion and religious belief that all of us are immigrants. How? All of us begin elsewhere, not from states and nationalities but rather from a ground zero where we were all made with the same DNA, the same dust material of the stars, the same matter, the same earthly organic substance called humus. In that way, we are all animals[5]<\/a> if we do not think of animals or the earth as something below us, but rather animals as another form of humanity and the earth as a full living being just made of the same substances. Thus, we are all equal in deserve the same form of consideration and treatment. Thus, our common beginning is elsewhere from passports, identities and places. We are all immigrants wandering and wondering around the earth, inhabiting our common oikos<\/em>, a common house for all forms of living and non-living things, be they rocks, mountains, the waters, the flora, the fauna and all humanities, including what indigenous communities call two-legged, four-legged, and winged forms of human beings.[6]<\/a> In this common oikos<\/em>, the earth, that some indigenous people from the Andes call Pachamama, and the Kuna people Abya Yala, we all have the same rights and responsibilities. No one is better than other, and no paper makes anyone legal or the lack of documents thereof illegal. No one is illegal on earth: it doesn\u2019t matter what one\u2019s civil, religious, or ethnic identity is! All these things come with our birth, but doesn\u2019t give more or less humanity to us or anything else. Thus, no particular form of social structure makes any group better than another.<\/p>\n

But then we are related to the land through social groups and locations. These unsurmountable differences are also what we need to consider. While we inhabit this earth as soil, peoples, animals and spirits, we are marked by our social locations. Thus, our differences must be engaged based on this common sense of collectivity, of being together and sustaining both our strange commonalities and our irreducible differences.<\/p>\n

As a Christian, I know that I can read the gospel in various ways: I grew up thinking that only those who were like me could participate in God\u2019s embracing love. Unless people believed as I did, I could not make them receive or have the full rights that I had as a Christian believer. Growing up in this particular faith community, I then came to realize that my life of faith was to make sure that everyone would be seen as a full human: it doesn\u2019t matter what religion one professes or from what part of the world one comes. Thus, baptism is not only a way to belong to a community but a commitment to care for the earth and every single human being. Daily, I was reminded, guided, challenged, chastened, enthused and blessed by these sacred texts:[7]<\/a><\/p>\n