Showing Love to Those Living in Fear

At the end of August, I relocated to Washington, D.C., to participate in a year-long internship program. Since that time, I’ve been living with five colleagues in a community house.

I’ve learned a lot being here, but it’s been a tense time to live in D.C. Like many times throughout U.S. history, the city is at the center of national political turmoil, but this time feels uniquely intense. I walk past groups of National Guard soldiers multiple times a week when I work from my office, some of them heavily armed.

However, I don’t live on Capitol Hill, so I don’t see the National Guard often. I live in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood with many Latino residents and a significant number of immigrants from around the world. Under normal circumstances, living in such a multicultural place would be a straightforward source of joy for me. I’m very extroverted, and I love hearing and telling stories, so meeting people from many backgrounds promises lots of good ones. Now, however, my happiness is tainted by fear for my neighbors. Speaking Spanish, having brown skin, or having been born outside of the U.S. are not illegal, but people from my neighborhood and throughout the city have been consistently and violently targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement without their immigration status being known.

I'm grateful that The Banner provides a vehicle through which church members can express their views and opinions on pertinent issues to Christian living. I’ve never had a clearer occasion to think through what Christian love of neighbor means than when some of my actual neighbors are too afraid of going outside to go grocery shopping. While grappling with how to best live out the commitments of my Christian faith in this new context, I’ve repeatedly come back to an idea from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. The book is written from the perspective of a senior demon, Screwtape, coaching another in how to best tempt their assigned “patient” toward hell. In Chapter 6, Screwtape muses about the sort of interpersonal relations that would be most likely to keep the “patient” away from Christian life. He says:

“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”

Seen through this frame, my move to Washington during this time gives me the chance to practice directing my benevolence toward my immediate neighbors, where I can make a concrete difference. I speak Spanish thanks to years in bilingual schooling, and lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to speak as much Spanish in public as I can, hoping the prominence of this commonly spoken language will call out the inappropriateness of language-based profiling. Walking around the city, I’ve been thanking landscaping crews for their willingness to work in such conditions. When I hear someone playing reggaeton from a portable speaker, I go out of my way to compliment their taste. On the weekends, I buy mango y chamoy from the people running the outdoor market on the corner. I hope these small acts of kindness send my neighbors the message that even now, they are loved and welcome.

I recently heard a sermon that has inspired me to keep practicing small, local acts of welcome. Rev. Nate Hosler, director of the Church of the Brethren’s office of peacebuilding and policy, preached on the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. Rev. Hosler noted that we don’t know very much about the rich man in the story. He might have been self-absorbed, or he might have been a generous philanthropist. In the story, the rich man ends up in torment because of his disdain for Lazarus, the beggar who sat at his very gate. At the same time Lazarus, the societal cast-off, is elevated to Abraham’s side.

While the immigrants in my new neighborhood might not be so desperate as the beggar in Luke 16, they are living through an unprecedented time of fear nonetheless. It is my prayer that none of us who are close enough to help and yet shielded from the worst of that fear allow our comfort to blind us.