By Jane Carol Redmont
My brother’s grandchildren look at me from the photos I have just received, fresh from the internet. They are at the beach, smiling under their cloth hats, cheeks round and dark eyes sparkling, the five-year-old boy and seven-month-old girl.
I wish I were there with them and their parents, my elder nephew and his wife. But the beach is in Portugal, where they live, thousands of miles away.
I have not yet met the baby. My plans to visit this summer have been scuttled by a combination of work and financial constraints. Family togetherness is expensive. Our immediate kin – my parents, their two children, and two more generations – are spread out over four countries.
We remain close. My brother and I exchange e-mails when he has just awakened in Italy and I am closing down the computer for the night in the U.S. My mother calls from Boston to ask about plans for a visit later in the summer and speaks of an old friend whose health is failing, of the presidential campaign, of her small garden plot, a raised bed which she tends at nearly ninety years of age.
A few days ago I spent the day at a small retreat center here in North Carolina, writing, resting, praying. After the afternoon thunderstorm, I walked the outdoor labyrinth on a path of pine needles bounded by large round stones. The air was full of birdsong. It was still humid, less thick than in the heat of the day but with a muggy texture that makes me miss the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for a decade before moving East three years ago.
At the entrance to the labyrinth is a stone birdbath. Or perhaps it is a holy water font – or both. It holds both soil at the bottom and fresh fallen rain. I am a Christian; I touch the water, make the sign of the cross. Walking the labyrinth, step by step, slowly, with no agenda or question in my mind, I follow the path. Images come to me of my family’s children, of the land where they live. I move back to the present, returning my attention to my steps, watching my feet, noticing thick tarpaulin where the bed of pine needles has thinned, walking. In my steps are the steps of my ancestors who came here as immigrants, mostly poor, some more privileged, all leaving their homes, never seeing their parents again. I walk, feeling this land, carrying other lands inside me.
I walk and remember the migrants and immigrants I met in Oregon eight summers ago, during a week-long walk for justice with labor and religious activists. For some, Spanish is a second language; they speak Mixteca and Zapoteca. In their bodies are layers of exile. I think of today’s migrants in Sudan, displaced by war and stalked by violence and hunger. My life is a palace compared to theirs.
Still, we share displacement and rebuilding, the tug toward and separation from family, the experience of communal bonds, accidental or intentional, that go beyond the kinship of blood. We take steps on foreign land.
On the same July 4 weekend as the children’s photos arrive, I hear from a high school friend from Paris. We have renewed contact after three decades, picking up where we left off, writing short, affectionate notes, celebrating a reunion with two other friends last fall. He writes a few lines from southeast France, where his parents have retired. The mere name of the town fills me with memories: stone houses, cobblestones, the smell of lavender and herbs in the surrounding countryside.
Later in the day, I attend a potluck party at the home of a couple of men who are friends from church and professional colleagues. We often spend holidays together: Easter dinner, Thanksgiving, sometimes our birthdays. We see each other more often than we see our families. We sing together at church, roll our eyes at stories from work, share news of our parents’ health. Today, on the Fourth of July, the house is full. Some of the guests have lived most of their lives here in the southern U.S. Others, like me, are recent transplants.
This land is not my land nor the land my body loves. It is not the place of my birth. In other ways it is becoming home, not least because of the church. These simultaneous truths speak to me as I walk, step by step, on a quiet summer evening in a labyrinth bounded with stone.
In the city of my birth, which will always be home, I am now also a stranger: I always return to visit, but have not lived there, by the Seine, since the year I turned twenty-one. In the city I miss, by the Pacific, where the air is soft and where I spent ten years, I could not live today. There is no work for me there.
Where is my land? Who are my people?
As a citizen of one nation raised in another, these questions used to haunt me, especially during my adolescent and young adult years. Later they mattered less, or mattered differently.
In some ways those of us who have lived astride cultures are a nation of our own. My family has and is its own culture. I have come to accept this.
In other ways my life has schooled me for the church, for broad belonging, for holding many people – and peoples – in my heart at once. It is no accident that theologies of the communion of saints and of the body of Christ are among those I treasure most and find most sustaining.
I still think a great deal about place, and belonging, and what it means to be a people or belong to a land. I think about home and exile.
With formative communities and loved ones in more than one culture, I am at home in several places. I also always miss someone or someplace – even when, adapting to a new location or tending to my present life, I may suppress for weeks on end the feelings of longing.
Paradoxically, it is in the taking of slow, mindful steps on the land where I now live that I can return fully to the memory of the other lands I love and of the people who live there.
My path may not be as unusual as it seems. Even those who have less migration and fewer cultures in their recent past carry the footsteps of their ancestors with them, learn and relearn a sense of place, discover the shape and meaning of kinship and friendship as they walk through life.
Jane Carol Redmont is theologian for the deacon formation program of the Diocese of North Carolina and chairs the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee. She teaches religious studies and women’s studies at Guilford College. Her book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life will be published in a new edition by Ave Maria Press in October.