The God Who Sees by Karen Gonzales

It’s uncomfortable, and maybe even frightening, for many of us to consider having porous borders, especially in a time when terrorism abounds around the globe. Yet Christians are not called to value the false sense of security created by closed borders and walls. We are called to trust in God and to love our neighbors, particularly our neighbors in need. Closed borders in North America are not directed toward an existing threat of invasion by a foreign army but toward poor economic immigrants seeking opportunities and toward refugees fleeing for their very lives. Hardened borders are designed to prevent the movement of the world’s poor—a people whom God says Christians should care for and not harm.

I grew up in a small town in Indiana that was approximately half Mexican by the time I was a teenager. Many, maybe most, of the immigrants were undocumented, and talking to my friends in that group, it was always surprising, almost unbelievable, how much difference their nationality (and legal status) made in day to day life. Everything from attending school, to getting a job, to getting a driver's license was a minefield, full of mistakes waiting to explode lives if they were made.

One night, an officer followed a friend of mine, brought into the US covertly when he was only six, as he drove home from work, finally pulling him over for going too slowly. When the officer discovered he was undocumented, it set into motion a sequence of events that led to an awful choice: either go to jail, or agree to deportation with no possibility of re-entry for at least 8 years. He chose the latter, leaving behind his family, his friends, and the country he'd spent most of his life in. He was 21.

The God Who Sees is full of stories like this, both explicitly narrated and present in the statistics about deportation, immigration, racism, numbers that represent lives that all too often jerked around like marionettes because they lack a green card, or have a parent who crossed the border illegally. And, because this is a work of Christian theology and memoir, Jesus-followers, the vast majority in the US, loom large behind the facts and figures--who's making these laws, wrecking these lives, ignoring these people in favor of nationalism and fear?

I loved the structure, which alternates between theological ruminations on the stories of immigrants and outsiders in the biblical narratives--Hagar, Abraham, Ruth, Joseph-and memoir, structured around the sacraments of the Catholic church--baptism, communion, confirmation, anointing, and reconciliation. Though not Catholic herself, the sacramental structure serves a dual purpose, illustrating both the integration of the sacred into her life and providing signposts as her story of immigration--hers and her family's--unfolds. Personal growth is entwined with the complexity mutating relationships with her mother, her abuela, and God. Gonzales refuses to give easy answers or to separate the systemic oppression her family experiences from her own spiritual journey, and the result is a story of faith and change that moves holistically from numbers to names and back again. I love the title--the God who sees is the name given by Hagar, the first person in the Torah to name God--and I finished the book thinking of all the people we fail to see every day, the people we leave behind, who are not left by God.

The last 30 or so pages are something I've never seen before, a series of short vignettes enumerating ways people, Christian and not, can be involved in ending unjust treatment of immigrants, ranging from scripts for calling your reps to how-tos for getting involved with volunteering and visiting imprisoned refugees. It's a practical step I'd like to see become more commonplace in books intended to provoke a response.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

The oughts, the 2000s, the O-Os. Call this decade what you will, but Dave Eggers has to be one of the best writers from it. This is somewhere between his 5th and 10th book depending on how you count them. It's the "autobiography" of a Sudanese lost boy. It's a truish story. A novelized memoir, written by a third party. It's hard to put Eggers' works into categories.

The story follows Valentino Achak Deng from his childhood in southern Sudan, along his march to refugee camps during the Sudanese Civil War, and through his adjustments to life in the US. The book opens with a robbery in his apartment in Atlanta. Bound and gagged, he tells his story silently to his assailants. Jumping back and forth from the present, he explains the conflict and how a whole population of Sudanese boys wound up in the States.

It's a personal story. People all around him die. He's separated from his family, forced to join a rebel army. He finds love. He struggles to adapt to a new culture, contemplates murder and suicide. And nowadays he travels the country recounting all of this, in short and long versions, to churches, schools, crowded bookstores, and youtube-ees. All Eggers did was come up with a way to get all that down in book form.

If you like audio books, definitely go that route with this one. It's narrated by Dion Graham (of The Wire) who does an excellent job with the voices. I listened to it on two consecutive 8 hour drives and never got road weary. A+ to everyone involved.