Sabbath Devotional :: Great, Spacious, Empty and Airborne

Recently, on an early spring evening, I found myself in the back of a van, craning my neck toward the dusty window to catch a final glimpse of a sprawling, hilly, mottled landscape. As the van spluttered and climbed the winding dirt road out of Cox’s Bazaar, the largest refugee camp in the world sheltering well over one million Rohingya, I glimpsed what our Bangladeshi humanitarian aid worker friends called the Tree of Hope. It stood alone on a knoll, a boney silhouette stretching its knobby arms over this hopeless panorama, this landscape of utter despair.

REPURPOSING LEHI’S DREAM

Lehi’s dream with its Tree of Life hovered close. (If you are unfamiliar with Lehi’s Dream, the link is at the end.) And as we headed out of this camp, as we left that abysmal reality behind us in our rear view, as we trundled past our sisters and brothers stuck in huts made of bamboo shafts and dirty tarps held together with no more than spit and string, as we looked ahead to air conditioning, showers, and dinner served in our great and spacious hotel, I saw Lehi’s ancient dream world — and in turn our current real world — with new eyes.

Lehi’s dream is one of the few visions in our canon that has a built-in answer sheet for all its symbols. We’ve been given, through Nephi’s exchange with the Spirit, an interpretation of every element in that vision. But dreams and visions, like allegories and metaphors, are by their very nature open texts. Their meanings are fluid and can be recycled in infinite ways.

So, what I am suggesting here is in no way a *correction* of the conventional way any of us may have read this text. Rather, mine is a repurposing of just a few of its symbols. It is my hope to address modernity’s greatest social challenge — forced migration — by reapplying Lehi’s dream to today while determining where and how I figure into it tomorrow.

Until recently, my default reading of Lehi’s dream put me squarely among the throng clinging to the iron rod, inching its way through mists and past mockery toward the Tree of Life. The mockery, I’d always thought, came from worldly — and therefore anti-religious, anti-iron-rod — types who were dressed to the hilt and lived in a Vegas McMansion. That “great and spacious building” was over on the far side of a coursing river because it opposed those holding to the rod. And lastly, it floated “high above the earth” because it had no foundation. Specifically, it lacked a foundation of apostles and prophets.

That reading stuck with me for decades. Until I began working with refugees. Now I’ve found additional meaning.

THE GLOBAL REFUGEE CRISIS

There are 70 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, the highest number ever recorded. That means 44,500 displaced daily, 31 every minute, meaning more than one person every two seconds, or one of every 100 people. Over 26 million of these destitute children of God are refugees, or people forced to cross outside their country’s borders for safety, and over 40 million are internally displaced, or are fleeing from region to region within their own countries. Over 10 million are stateless, nearly all refugees live well below the poverty line, over half of all refugees are women and children, most are under the age of 35, and over half of those are minors, a full one-fourth of whom are unaccompanied. By 2030, experts anticipate the total number of forcibly displaced people will equal the current population of the USA.

So, this is not a trend or fake news. This is the future, our future. And unlike my reading of the faceless influx pressing forward in Lehi’s dream, these masses have faces, names, and individual stories.

I’ve crouched knee-to-knee with Rohingya in their huts in Cox’s Bazaar. I’ve sat right behind Syrians in European courtrooms while listening to their asylum cases. I’ve sat side-by-side with Muslim refugees in LDS pews when we’ve invited them to our church meetings. I’ve sat cross-legged in the tents of Afghan refugees. I’ve listened to and recorded as many stories as possible while other voices argue that refugees are drawn by “pull factors” like our jobs, our welfare, our space. I shake my head, because I’ve only heard about “push factors”:

FIRSTHAND REFUGEE STORIES

The 16-year-old Rohingya girl held a baby in her arms, the product of gang rape by soldiers. She had no choice but to flee from her home country to Cox’s Bazaar, the poorest district of Bangladesh, which is the 15th poorest country on earth. Myanmar’s army had launched a scorch and burn genocidal rampage against the Muslim minority of which she is part, perpetrating atrocities she whispered to me while I gulped back then broke into tears.

The Eritrean mother of four was targeted by local military extremists, who broke into her home in the middle of the night, held a machine gun to her face, and threatened to kill the newborn in her arms if she didn’t hand over all of the cash and valuables in her household. They ripped the infant from her grasp, put it in the refrigerator, and ransacked the home. The mother saved that child and her three others by fleeing by foot, across Libya, across the Mediterranean, through Italy, eventually inching her way to central Europe.

The young Honduran father refused to sell drugs at his family’s fruit stand, so eight gang members ambushed him with their machetes. He was left for dead but made it home to his wife and two small children with whom he then crossed Mexico, reached the US border only to be separated from his family while in detention, where they were given only one cup of water a day.

“Allah saved us,” the grandmother, the uncle, the shy teenager, and the youngest daughter testified. “We had nothing to hold to but Allah”, they told me, as they recounted being driven by Taliban threats and lethal bombings from their home across deadly borders, across the Aegean Sea, to a camp in Greece, then up the Balkan route, through months of cruel Serbian detention, and finally to four successive camps in Germany.

NUMBERLESS CONCOURSES OF PEOPLE AND THAT GREAT AND SPACIOUS BUILDING

These are representative stories of multitudes of unprotected, unclaimed, unhoused, and unheard people. Their largely unacknowledged narratives lend a new take to Lehi’s dream. These are my hero friends who have been forced to take perilous routes while clinging to a thing called hope, whatever and wherever it is, who push through “exceedingly great” literal and figurative “mists of darkness” carrying little on their backs but the weight of trauma, and no more in their packs than prayer rugs or rosary beads. Each of them deserves refuge under that gleaming Tree of Life.

That tree is a natural shelter that stands in contrast to the manmade shelter of the great and spacious building. How is most of the world responding to those seeking refuge, either physical or spiritual? How are the wealthiest, (and incidentally, predominantly Christian), countries engaging in this phenomenon that is defining humanity’s future? The Norwegian Refugee Council tells us:

“One major problem is rich countries’ lack of will to stand up for the world’s vulnerable, displaced people. The great gap between humanitarian needs and funds made available by the international community continues to increase.”

In Lehi’s dream, we read of a great gap — “a great and terrible gulf” — between those fleeing danger in caravans and concourses, busloads and trainloads and those who live under roofs of opportunity and relative opulence. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of all such displaced people are being taken in, not by the wealthy first world, but by precarious third world countries. All this, while wealth increases in the west and the numbers of displaced skyrocket.

MOCKING AND FLOATING

Astonishingly, there are people today who mock refugees. They literally harass, threaten, exploit, and even take the lives of these, the most vulnerable from among us. There are still others, who claim that the displaced have brought this misfortune upon themselves. Others want to wall them out. And others want them simply to disappear — from their view, from their streets, from their country, from this world. I would venture to say, that no one reading this falls into any of those categories.

But I have wondered if my own lifestyle with all its self-focus and hunger for hunkering is maybe a subtle form a mockery. I have wondered, when I sequester myself inside my spacious home, under my spacious and war-free skies, detached in thought and in action from the harsh reality my sisters and brothers are suffering, if I am not in essence mocking or failing this part of my Father’s earthly family.

Because the feature of Lehi’s vision that has always been spookiest to me but has taken on the gravest personal meaning as of late? It’s the eerie airborne quality of that spacious building. Why does it float? And why so “high above the earth”?

I have come to some conclusions, though they are not exhaustive:

It lacks substance, is hollow or probably full of a lot of hot air; a bubble

It is passive, preferring spectator seats to the real battle on the ground

It loathes dirt, especially the common dirt of our shared mortal experience

It is an amusement house, packed with menial, time-consuming distractions and therefore remains ungrounded, blithely untethered from reality

WHAT CAN WE DO?

If you, like me, ever find yourself hunkering for whatever reason in the comfort, detachment, distraction or the floating bubble of the great and spacious building, there are things we can do to change that. And many of you are inspirations in this respect.

You have long since gone from being spectators to engaging right on the ground. You’ve left your comfort and have walked straight to the throngs. There, you have stood next to them. You’ve walked with them. You’ve held them. You’ve listened to them, cried with them, protected them, brought them into your home, even furnished their homes. You’ve fed them, clothed them, cleaned and healed them. You’ve taught them your language, learned theirs, given them legal advice, prepped them for jobs, held their babies in your arms, been recipients of their wisdom and grace, made them your friends. Made them your family.

You have stood as witnesses, mourned and comforted, given your hand, your time, your space and your heart.And you have received untold satisfaction in return. In all, you have been where good people are to be found: not waiting at home to be called to a cause, but out there anxiously engaged in one. By so doing, you have not so much pointed others to the Tree of Hope, to the Tree of Life, and to the Tree of God’s eternal Love. But you have discovered that it was they who brought you there.

And so it is.

LIVING MINDFULLY AND MINDING LOVINGLY

Let me finish with the unsparing but inspiring words of Brendan Woodhouse, a fireman-turned-humanitarian who tweeted from aboard the SeaWatch2, the refugee-carrying vessel that was famously forbidden to dock on European shores because no one wanted to claim these children of God:

“We are the creators of migration, the benefactors and the blind. We close our eyes and turn our heads from their suffering yet expect them to take all that comes. We buy into the brands that exploit, the governments that extort, and the media that manipulates, and we want more.

But when a boy, or a man flees this injustice, we expect them to drown silently in their poverty, whilst we book our holidays in the sun. We can almost fly wherever we like, almost work wherever we like, traveling all over the world with the comfort and ease that comes with our passport. But when the man who suffers for our opulence wants to do the same, we say no, don’t come, you are not welcome. . . .

You say that they come for our welfare state, yet I’ve met thousands of people crossing this sea, and every single one of them is desperate for the opportunity to work.

You talk of losing our culture, but if it’s a culture where we turn our backs to those that need us, it’s one I think we can afford to lose.

You say that we should help our homeless first, yet when we see the man on the streets, we walk by.

We each live in a bubble of self-righteousness, myself included, stating that others should do something to create change. Be it for the homeless, the lonely or the displaced, we form our opinions from the warmth and comfort of our homes.

But unless you have walked a mile in their shoes, how can you truly judge where they should go or what they should do.

We were all made the same. It is by chance that we were born with opportunity, as it is by chance that others are not. And it could be by chance that our choices are taken away at any moment.

Their struggle is our struggle, for if it was not them, it would be us. And what would you do?

You think that leaving all that you have known is easy? You think that crossing that sea is a choice? Then you don’t know how many are lost to this journey. You don’t know the pain and strength that it takes.

We have one life. Let’s not waste it on hate.

Only love!”

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Lehi’s Dream from the Book of Mormon: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/…/bofm/1-ne/8…