In the Name of Heaven

December 16th—nine days until the celebration of Christmas.

In south Texas, it is the time for the celebration de las Posadas. The neighbors gather together, children are dressed up as Joseph and a pregnant Mary and the crowd walks through the streets, praying and singing, until they arrive at a designated home.

And then there is silence.

Which is broken by a sharp rapping at the door with Joseph’s walking stick.

The crowd breaks into a mournful tune that has words that are centuries old, marked by that bitter and desperate sentiment especially familiar to anyone who has ever been without a place to pass the night.

The people in the street sing in Joseph’s name, “In the name of heaven, I ask you for shelter; my beloved wife is exhausted.”

The family, behind a locked door, respond, “Does this look like a hotel to you? I am not opening up, you might be a thief!”

Joseph insists, as the crowd outside sings, “Please, just for tonight! After all, she is the Queen of Heaven!”

To which the family chants, “Yeah, right, if she is a queen, what is she doing looking for shelter at this hour?”

In the end, of course, the family recognizes Mary and Joseph for who they are and open up their home to these pilgrims, and to their neighbors.

There is hot chocolate, and a special bread that has been fried and coated in sugar, and, if we are lucky, tamales.

The smaller kids line up for a piñata; the older ones slouch against the wall and text each other, acting bored, although only after they have had their hot chocolate and tamales.

In time, people drift off—there is still school tomorrow and, of course, work, there is always work.

But tomorrow night—we will gather again, this time to walk to someone else’s home, and once again, retracing the steps of those pilgrims from millennia ago.

Many in the crowd would have made the same sort of journey, would have likewise knocked on a stranger’s door, and many of them would know the humiliation of being refused shelter.

A surprising number, though, would have known the blessing to have been offered a warm place to sleep, to have been served tamales and chocolate, in the middle of the night, in a strange land.

As if they were in the company of the Queen of Heaven.

Refuge

His mother abandoned him at birth.

His father was murdered when he was five years old.

His grandparents beat him with electric cables and made him sleep on the curb in front of their house. He speaks an Indian language only known in the highlands of southern Mexico, and only has the most rudimentary Spanish.

When he was fourteen, an aunt sent for him. It took him five days to cross the Arizona desert.

He moved in with his aunt, and went to work washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant in a Midwestern city. He did this for three years, six days a week, ten hours a day.

No one spoke Spanish in the restaurant and no one spoke English.

The system finally caught up with him, and today, he was sitting in an immigration processing center waiting room, hoping that the same system would find a place amongst the many rules and regulations and offer him safety.

I had been visiting with him once a week during the past couple of months at a detention facility, and it seemed like a good idea to be with him when he appeared before the authorities.

The young man was sitting across from me, between his attorney and the guard from the detention facility. We all chat for a while, but he soon runs out of Spanish vocabulary and lapses into silence. I worry that he is going to have a hard time in life, if he can’t even speak Spanish.

But a Chinese family comes into the waiting room, and they begin an animated conversation. The young man, seemingly trapped by a lack of language into a life of loneliness, sits up and smiles. The attorney looks at him and says, “Entiendes el chino, verdad?” and he says, Yeah, I understand some of it. And he smiles, not as nervous now, not so alone.
 

Separated at Birth

The woman is led into the hospital's birthing room by an armed guard. Another guard, a male, takes up his post outside the door.

The woman is dressed in a green prison issue jumpsuit that marks her as an "illegal alien." Her  handcuffs rest on her considerable belly, made large by the child waiting within to be born.

The midwife asks the guard to remove the fetters, so as to get on with the business of bringing a new life into the world.

The guard, another woman, refuses. “My orders are to keep her restrained.”

The midwife, a woman short in stature but bearing a powerful presence, stares the guard down.  “I give the orders in here. Remove the handcuffs. Now.”

The guard unlocks the shackles, but then stands against the wall. The right to privacy in this most intimate of all things human is refused this prisoner.

Moments later, amidst tears and pain and blood, the new mother has released the baby from the safety of her womb.

After a bit, a nurse comes into the room. She has been told by the male guard to remove the baby from the mother's arms and to take the baby to the nursery. The midwife intervenes, again, insisting that mother and child spend these first moments of this new life together.

These first moments past quickly; the mother and child bond, and then, the baby is taken from the mother, given to an aunt, and they are both deported.

The mother is returned to the immigration detention center, where her milk will dry up, although perhaps not her tears.

The midwife tells us this story over dessert. She's made flan. It is an extraordinary dish, as textured and substantial as this woman’s outrage.

There are six of us sitting around the table. We drink coffee and eat our flan. We are silent.

The woman recounting this tale is a certified nurse midwife, practicing in the two largest hospitals in the region. She has delivered thousands of children, some born into wealth, and others, into poverty. She seemed to believe that there was nothing that she had not seen. Until this.

“We can do better than this,” someone remarks, referring to the way that our nation has decided to deal with immigrants and prisoners—and new born babies.

The midwife nods, sips her coffee and remains silent. Perhaps she thinks of other ways that she can make her workplace an even better sanctuary. Removing chains, is of course, an obvious beginning.