Dining Alone: Loneliness and Immigration

A plaque at the San Xavier Mission on the Tohono O'odham land.

I'm in Green Valley, Arizona, for the 17th Annual Santa Cruz Border Issues Fair. I arrived in Green Valley, Arizona, a day ahead of the others who were headed to the Border Issues Fair. 

The first evening I was here I went out to eat at a local Mexican place, billed as “a family restaurant.”

It’s no big deal for me to go out to eat alone. I often do that for lunch. But I mostly do that at informal Chipotle- or Panera-style places. I can’t remember the last time I went alone to a sit-down, order-from-menu, “family restaurant.”

I took a book and my phone. The host seated me in a corner table. I looked at the tables around me. I was the only solo diner in a crowded, bustling room. Couples, family groups, and ensembles of friends chatted all around me. 

What does it mean to be alone?

I thought about that in regard to immigration. It’s tough to be alone. 

What did it mean for my great-grandmother from Ireland to be the only English-speaking woman in a small town in Mexico when she — an immigrant— buried her first-born child in a rocky graveyard? 

How lonely is Karen, the young woman from Honduras who showed up in DC, pregnant and alone? What did it feel like for her to move into the home of lovely, hospitable church members who took her in, despite language differences?

One speaker at the Border Issues Fair cried as she told talked about the bodies of a mother and ten year-old son being found in the vast dessert. Were they traveling alone? Did their group abandon them?

Another speaker at the Fair told of a young man whom she found wandering alone in the desert. He had arrived in the United States, hundreds of miles from home. He had successfully avoided weather, coyotes, drug cartels, and rough terrain. And he asked her to help him get home. Homesickness won.  

JeanVanier wrote a thoughtful book about a retreat in Kenya with people who had lived through an era of violence and boodshed. The title of the book is, “We Need Each Other.” In it he wrote:

“I am a broken man like all human beings, but I also know that Jesus loves me and that he is calling me to grow. This is the experience of being loved in my brokenness and therein lies the incredible gentleness of our God. We all have to discover the point of our brokenness because that is precisely the place where we are the beloved. Sometimes we hide behind the idea that we are better than others. We have to discover that none of us is better, that we are all children of God…

God has a desire to bring people together in love. There are two fundamental things that Jesus came to reveal to us. First, God is a lover. God loves. Second, this incredible, gentle, and tender God is in love with each one of us. Each person is precious to God and together we are to build a community where we love each other.”

America’s flavor of independence, or rugged individualism, often keeps us apart — which can lead to feelings of superiority and difference, often just the strange fruit of deep loneliness. 

Our immigration system is broken. Politicians from both parties use that word. (The same word that Vanier used to describe himself.) Our current immigration policies (based on xenophobia and mistrust and misplaced senses of superiority) are the product of fear-based loneliness more then they are rational, political, or economical.

The solutions may be found in potluck suppers, shared meals, and communion tables. 

This blog is one of a series of reflections that I am writing while taking part in the Santa Cruz Valley Border Issues Fair and Common Ground on the Border. The Border Issues Fair is one the causes supported by the Briggs Center for Faith and Action, where I serve as the Executive Director.

The picture on this blog post is of a plaque at the San Xavier Mission church. The verse from the Book of Hebrews refers back to another story in the Bible, where Sarah and Abraham welcomed strangers to their tent only to find out later the strangers were messengers from God.