Reflections on a Summer in the Sonoran Desert, Part Seven

Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez speaks at length about the importance of hope in the midst of human suffering. He says that “theology must remain committed to hope by having the capacity, freedom, and commitment to pay attention to the smallest of things… True theology must interpret the reasons for hope in whatever way possible.” So many of the people I have come to know and love who are doing this work are largely cynical people. It is so difficult not to be cynical caught in the middle of this tragedy, confronted daily with individuals whose experiences are unthinkable. Sometimes the phrase “saturated with suffering” runs through my head when I think about these borderlands. Sometimes I can’t find any hope. I don’t know if things will ever change. Sometimes it seems unlikely. Yet I imagine people saying the same thing about other overwhelming and systematic structures of power and injustice throughout history. Not that these things have disappeared, certainly, but the lives of many are better today because of very real social changes that have occurred. Apart from these questions of changing structures and systems of injustice, I find myself more and more pulled to the level of individual human interactions. I find hope in the fact that a man I came to know named Miguel refused to leave a woman in his group, Beatriz, alone when she fell down, even though they had never met before in their lives, and even though it meant that he risked death, alone and lost with her in the harshness of the desert. I find hope in the tears of my friends and fellow volunteers, in their willingness to suffer with others, to allow their hearts to be broken open with compassion. I find hope in my own tears and anger as they occur over and over again, never becoming easier, never reaching a level of desensitization to the pain of others, and the strength and courage this gives me to keep doing this work. I find hope in the act of love and sacrifice that migration is for so many men and women, the giving up of ones personal safety and comfort for the sustenance of others. In all of these things, and in many more, I find hope, and even though they are perhaps “the smallest of things,” together they make a mighty force of love and compassion and hope for another world that is, I believe, possible.