Editorial Introduction
Andy Singleterry, Servant Partners Press
Photo by Gonard Fluit
The theme of this issue of The Mural is Crossing Borders: migration, movement, boundaries, and how they affect us. For both us Servant Partners staff and the neighbors we live with, this theme names an important experience.
Here in the US, when we hear the phrase “crossing borders” our minds probably picture the southern border with Mexico. We think of Spanish-speakers climbing over a wall and trudging across a desert. The wall is the border—one side is Mexico and the other is the US. The lines and colors on the map reinforce this conclusion.
But the language of those immigrants calls that assumption into question. “Crossing borders” in Spanish is cruzando fronteras; frontera, obviously, can also mean “frontier.” Borders define places exclusively, and crossing them always means stepping across a stark line, leaving one place and entering another. The frontier, on the other hand, is a gradient wilderness. The farther you travel from an occupied place, the deeper you go into the frontier. Crossing frontiers, cruzando fronteras, means going out from the center into the periphery and continuing until you reach a new center.
Crossing a border might name the legal-status change, but crossing a frontier often describes the experience. Migrants leave one center of life—their home—and enter an unfamiliar wilderness. They have to make their way by exploring and experimenting, often facing risks and setbacks, until they settle in a new place and make it a new center of life, a new home. The journey changes everything.
No wonder that it bears spiritual meaning too. Pastor and author Ben Daniel points out that, “for many immigrants, particularly those from Mexico, migration is a physical journey through a spiritual landscape marked with deep faith and peopled, as often as not, with angels, demons, and a crowd of folk saints, and motivated by a sense of divine purpose.” ¹
Like the Hebrews in the desert, we encounter God and build community as we cross the frontier. Please enjoy these reflections on that experience.
¹ Daniel, Ben, Neighbor: Christian Encounters With “Illegal” Immigration, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 4.
Andy Singleterry co-leads the Servant Partners site in San Jose, California and is Editor of SP Press.