Migratory Patterns
Migratory Patterns
Karen Crisler
On a Lifetime of Work in Refugee Settlement and Biblical Land Covenants
As a kid, I would float on my back in a friend's pool, gazing up into the sky. Bobbing lightly on the water, I was always hoping to catch sight of the distinct silhouette of the Swallow-tailed Kite soaring above. They dipped and circled, usually in a pair, graceful on the high Florida winds. My mom was the first person to point them out to me—they made their home nestled in the trees along the lake at the end of my street. We always shared excitement over the first one spotted; a symbol that summer was just around the corner.
It wasn't until later in my adult life that I learned about the migration pattern of Swallow-tailed Kite. Every spring they make a 5,000-mile journey, starting in South America, traveling up Central America, across the Yucatan Peninsula and into the southeast United States to nest for the summer. Flying over countries and oceans, fields and cities, poor and rich, right over my suburban home.
I think my childhood fascination with these birds was rooted in the dissonant beauty that all migratory animals possess. They embodied tensions growing in me long before I was aware; the longing to explore and wander, to be wholly untethered from any one place of this world, pulling against my desire for a place on this earth that would meet all my restless longing for Home.
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I spent my first spring working with refugees crying in a counselor's office. My husband and I had moved across the country so I could join the staff of a resettlement agency. We packed up our lives into a 15-foot truck, and though we chose to leave, I cried as we drove down our street and across the country.
Welcoming refugees is a calling I’ve felt since I was a teenager. My heart is soft towards these people with their careers and morning routines, with dreams and favorite meals, with cultural customs and celebrations. Waking up in an unimaginable nightmare, their once normal lives have been plundered, families torn apart, flung from their homes. Few are willing to be their voice, few willing to associate with them.
Jesus was a refugee, and the Bible is laden with the command to care for the foreigner, the sojourner. Though that calling has been complicated in our modern age by politics and foreign policy, God’s command to care for refugees has always been very clear throughout scripture.
I stepped into this work while reconciling my own perspective on home. My husband and I had moved 5 times in 3 years. The longest we had lived anywhere was 10 months; the moving boxes a lingering decoration in the corner of any place we landed. We were young, with few
commitments, and like many in our twenties we were looking for our place in the world. But over time the sheen of freedom was tarnishing, the longing for a place to plant our feet growing stronger. This was something I denied for a long time—I prided myself on my desire to travel and explore, my independence—but no one told me it came with a cost. So when we arrived in our new Midwest town, tentative and tired, it beckoned us to settle in, like a big, comfy armchair.
As I traveled further into my work with refugees, I was caught off guard by my own fragility. I was confronted by my own inability to handle an unnamed grief pounding on the door of my heart. The compassion I felt towards a previously abstract group of people was now my neighbor down the street with a face and a name. Stories I could disengage myself from when I had no personal connection were now hitting closer to home than I was prepared.
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One of my primary responsibilities was preparing apartments for new families prior to their arrival. I would load up a 15-foot truck with donated, mismatching furniture and trek across town. I unpacked plates and silverware, sheets and pillows, shampoo and bars of soap. Snapping each metal bed frame into place, I would think about the people who would live there. The losses and joys, what they left behind and what lay ahead. I would pray over the apartment before leaving with a group of volunteers who labored alongside me. I was never brave enough to say it out loud, but my honest prayers were really my doubts, “Can goodness really grow here? Can this be a place of rest?”
I would drive away every time, misty-eyed, a swirl of contradictions. I was no fool—how on earth was this stale little apartment ever going to be home to them? This wasn’t their home. But wasn’t this better than the alternative—the limbo of a refugee camp or the instability of war? The questions would swirl around and around as I stirred the stock pot in my home, as I ate dinner with my husband, knowing that others hadn’t seen theirs for years, separated by thousands of miles, their hands tied by the lengthy processes of our legal immigration system.
Questions flooded my mouth, slipping onto my counselor’s floor, a pool reflecting back at me with what felt like no answers. I knew the world was broken, that pain and atrocities existed, but this was different, it felt personal. My whole heart was a blister, ripped open, scraped raw again and again at the smallest glimpse of pain. I felt trapped between two worlds, the poverty and pain of the families we served, and my normal, comfortable life outside of work.
My grief and questions followed me from the office each night and I made my home in the tensions I saw all around me. Grief and hope; settled and homesick; responsibility and lack of control; citizens of heaven yet stewards of this physical world. Holding these tensions, I experienced my first Midwest spring—the world awakening around me in bombs of bud and color.
I needed a place and time to wrestle with these things, and the Midwest wrapped me in its arms and gave me just that. It gave me big skies to hold the grief, and buds springing from frost to find hope again, to see the gardener God weeping next to me. It might seem odd that one can grieve for things that are not wholly your own but I believe it is Holy work. It was in this place that Christ, the “gentle and lowly” traveler, began to make a new home in me.
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As far back as the Old Testament, the Bible is teeming with promises of land—a symbol of wealth, status, security, stability. I like to believe that Abraham shared some of my same questions about living faithfully in the midst of these tensions of home, belonging, grief, and our physical place in the world. He followed God on an insane journey across the ancient world, uprooting his family, encountering cross-cultural experiences, all for the sake of this so-called “promised land”. I wonder if he felt homesick the night that God took him outside and pointed towards the stars, the promise of his descendants lingering on the air. In one breath he both believed God (Gen 15:6) and named his doubt (Gen 15:8).
It’s incredible: in forging the most famous covenant of the Old Testament, Abraham spoke an honest, tension-filled question back to God: “how can I be sure that I will actually possess it (the land)?” (Gen 15:8) He named his homesickness, his doubt, his inability to reconcile what God was telling him and what he saw before him, to God’s very face. It's in these places in the Bible God speaks to me the most—in the human questions that I see myself asking every day. I wonder if Abraham, like me, felt trapped between two worlds: his wandering, question-filled journey and God’s abundant promises of his future.
But in promising Abraham a specific place, a plot of soil on this very earth in which He would blossom and grow him, God showed that He speaks to His people through physical places, through soil and sand, through the places we make our homes on this earth. Though scripture is clear that this world is not our ultimate home, Abraham’s story reveals that the physical places we live, eat, and weep matter to God. Why else would God have promised Abraham and his people a specific place on this very earth?
I like to think that Jesus also knew what it felt like to sit in these human tensions. In the greatest act of incarnational empathy, He left his home, journeyed on our earth, and made His home among us (John 1:14). I wonder if He was homesick at times? He perfectly held so many tensions: meek and bold; mercy and justice; faith and works.
As God makes His home in each of us (1 Cor 6:19) He uses all kinds of things—people, birds, stars and soil—to ground us to the physical place He has brought us, to speak to us, and meet us in our journey through the unanswered tensions wherever we find ourselves. I cling to the promise that He will one day sweep His people up into His arms, weeping with us for all that was lost and unanswered in this life. We will enter the ultimate promised land, and it will be in this God that we will finally make our truest home. (Rev 3:4)
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The idea of home can mean a lot of different things to a person. For me it means big windows with sunlight cascading in; soil and space for a backyard garden; a table big enough to break bread with friends gathered ‘round. I’ve also been thinking of what a home is, in less tangible terms: an offering, an open door, a seat at the table, strong beams of shelter, a beacon in the night.
Last summer we bought our own home, a small slice of Midwest soil to call our own. It’s a humble place to settle my restless hands for whatever time that may be. I planted tulip bulbs just before the first frost, so I could witness the ordinary miracle of their green heads peeping out of the spring-time dirt. Those small swallows don’t fly overhead here and I miss their consistent marker of time and place.
I still hold the tension of breaking bread in my home when I live in a world where many can never go back to theirs. I don’t think we will ever have a clean-cut answer for the grief and tensions we carry with us on this side of heaven. In the meantime, I journey on like Abraham—in between two worlds, believing, doubting, hoping and following a home-making God. I pray that Beauty Himself holds us in place and time, in the tension of this home and the next.
Karen Crisler
Writer & Potter
Karen works for a resettlement agency, welcoming new refugee neighbors into Northeast Wisconsin. She studied Fine Arts at Florida State University, and spends her free time throwing pottery. She is just beginning her journey as a writer. Find her here: https://www.swallowtailceramics.com/
Photography by Ekrulila