The Time I Was an Illegal Immigrant

More than ten years ago, with the prayers and assistance of a great many friends and family, I was ready to set out on one of the great early adventures of my life. Because I was taking a summer semester in Tanzania, I had the spring months free, and I had decided to sign on with an international service agency and spend those months doing linguistics work in Sudan. That country had a special place in my heart; I had adopted it as a "prayer project" and had faithfully prayed for it for four straight years. So with great anticipation, I sent my passport off to the Sudanese embassy for a visa, well in advance of the recommended timetable.

But as it turns out, the folks at the Sudanese embassy run their bureaucracy rather as they do in Sudan itself—without much care for timetables. My application sat there at their embassy, apparently untouched, for nearly double the time usually taken to process a visa. I was sitting at home, waiting. Because of the delay, my departure date had already been pushed back and my plane tickets rescheduled. My fellow classmates were all back at school, plugging away at the spring semester, while I was whiling my time away in snow-locked northern Maine. Week after week went by, and already I had lost a quarter of my planned service time.

Eventually, my team leader in Sudan decided to set up a different way for me to get a visa. He had me recall my passport from the embassy and book my plane tickets for early February. On his end, he would push through all the paperwork on my behalf, pay all the necessary fees to have a visa processed, and have it ready to be stamped into my passport on my arrival at the Khartoum airport. So, in an act of faith, I strapped on $2000 worth of cash (as I had been advised to do because of bank conditions there), packed my suitcases, and went on my way. 

After long layovers in London and Nairobi, I was finally about to check in for the last leg of the journey. It would turn out to be one of the most unsettling flights of my life. At the Nairobi counter, the British Airways clerk noticed that I didn’t have a visa for Sudan, and she warned me rather sternly: “We don’t have to let you on this flight. As soon as you set foot in Sudan, you’ll be an illegal immigrant, and they’ll have authority to do anything they want to you. Do you still want to go?” I said yes, explaining that my team's Sudanese travel agent would have the visa waiting for me at the airport. So, with evident trepidation, they let me on the plane. The flight made a stop first in Asmara (Eritrea), and all the other Westerners disembarked. The ride to Khartoum was a lonely one.

It was just about midnight when we touched down in Khartoum. The handful of us from the plane walked into the terminal over a dusty tarmac, and the rest of them immediately got into line at the customs check. It wasn’t a big airport—only about the size of the one I knew in northern Maine (and for a city of several million people!)—so it was apparent at the very first glance that the promised travel agent was not there. No one was waiting for me, papers in hand, and I had no phone with which to call my team leader. 

So, my heart sinking, I stepped into line with the others, hoping desperately that the customs official would have been notified of my arrangements beforehand. When it was my turn, he looked at my passport and immediately said, “You have no visa.” I tried to explain my situation, and he motioned me into a little corner room off the terminal, where an official and two muscled, machine-gun-toting guards were idly watching an Arabic-dubbed version of the movie Titanic. The official looked at me and shook his head. “This is big problem,” he said. It turned out that that was about the sum of all the English he could muster, and I had no fluency in Arabic to speak of, but I had my team leader's cell phone number written down, and by gestures was able to convince the official to call it. I spoke to my leader for a brief minute, and then the official argued with him on the phone for another ten. A hasty arrangement was made: the team leader would call the travel agent and make sure he got there to the airport as fast as he could. (I was later told that the agent's excuse as to why he was not at the airport at the appointed time was that he was stuck in a traffic jam; but that was clearly an answer meant to save face--there are very few traffic jams in Khartoum at midnight.)

The customs official was satisfied to let me wait for now, and to keep watching his movie, so he made me sit down in a plastic chair in the main terminal, with one of the machine-gun-wielding soldiers standing beside me (in case I tried to make a break for it, I guess). Oddly enough, I didn’t feel at all worried. There was a deep sense of peace that had rested on me from the moment I was waved over into the official’s office; I can only attribute it to the many prayers that were said in my behalf from friends back home. 

It was about half an hour later that a tall, big-bellied man with a broad smile sauntered into the airport, money and papers at the ready. He was gregarious and self-possessed, and the customs officials all seemed to know him and to be on quite friendly terms with him. We breezed through the applications, with my travel agent cracking jokes in Arabic the whole way through. He so changed the temperament of all the officials there that I wanted to break out into a shout of laughter: "I don't know where you've been all this time, but I'm sure glad I'm with you now!" (Incidentally, sometimes I feel like saying the same thing about God.) 

Within just a few minutes, my passport was festooned with brightly-colored Arabic stickers, and I was waved through without even the compulsory check to see what was in my one piece of luggage—a carry-on suitcase that would hold the sum of my worldly possessions for the next six months, but which on that night was filled with (among other things) Arabic Christian literature.

This was one of my first introductions to getting by in Africa—have money ready, keep smiling, and, above all, know the people who can help you. So, with many prayers answered, I stepped out as a legal foreign worker into the hot, dry, midnight air of Khartoum. My team leader was outside the airport, waiting for me beside his car. He welcomed me warmly, but the tenor of his voice betrayed the fact that he had experienced more than a bit of worry while pacing around out there. For my part, I was just glad to be in Sudan. I was driven to the house I would be staying at and was shown to a bed, exhausted but safe. That night had been my first experience as an illegal immigrant, and my first experience of being the potential recipient of something from the barrel of a machine gun, but, all in all, I felt about as much at peace as I've ever felt.

The Blessing of My Wife

Thy grace, O Lord, is multiplied
In daily things of life,
But nowhere more abundantly
Than in my precious wife.

Some men are strong enough to live
In single-minded grace,
At home in crowd or hermit's cell,
Without a helpmeet's strength.

But I, oh I, am no such one,
So failing and so frail,
I need the presence of a friend
To walk this lonely trail.

A list'ning ear when I must speak,
A voice to answer me,
Telling truths that I must know,
But, alone, cannot see.

She laughs with all my silly thoughts,
Attends those worthy, all,
And even feigns an interest in
My birds and basketball.

She raises up our little ones,
Barbarians though they be,
And she, though tried and tested fierce,
Loves perseveringly.

If I alone were raising them,
Then they'd have missed so much:
Easter eggs and finger paints,
A mother's gentle touch.

Apart from her I too would be
Much less than I am now;
Less ready to trust a beaming smile;
With many doubts endowed.

And with her love I'm more inclined
Not just to think things through;
But dare to dance with faith again,
To sing, to run, to do.

For endless grace I give Thee praise,
Thou Lord of all my life,
And every day I thank you for
The blessing of my wife. 

 (Me and my wife, back when we were young and awesome)

Photo of the Week: Cardinal in the Snow

God thunders with His voice wondrously,
Doing great things which we cannot comprehend.
For to the snow He says, "Fall on the earth,"
And to the downpour and the rain, "Be strong."
        - Job 37:5-6 (NASB)

Quote of the Week: Boethius

"The good always have power and the wicked do not....Only the wise can do what they want to do; the wicked can follow their desires, but they cannot...find among their pleasures the good they are really looking for."

- Boethius, early 6th-century Christian philosopher, author of The Consolation of Philosophy

(Picture: Initial showing Boethius teaching, from an illuminated manuscript of The Consolation of Philosophy, c.1385; image is in the public domain)

Old Books Are the Best Books: The Cloud of Unknowing

I had this book on my shelf for a long time before picking it up. Even though I knew that it was regarded as one of the classics of Christian mysticism, particularly in the English-speaking tradition, it still took me awhile to muster up the courage to dive in. Part of it was that the title sounded foreboding: The Cloud of Unknowing--I was expecting a fair deal of dense, impenetrable reflections on mysticism and metaphysics. The other part was that this was an anonymous work, so it didn't have quite the appeal to intellectual pride, of being able to cross a big-name writer in the history of Christian theology off my list. But eventually I did pick it up, and I was won over within the first few pages. Like most classics, this book is probably more worth reading than 99% of the contemporary books available right now. Old books take a little more work to read, but the reward is usually tremendous. Not only are they classics for good reason--they have survived the centuries because their content and message is exemplary--but they also speak to us from another age, a culture that is not beset with the same pitfalls and blindspots that our own culture has, and thus they can be uniquely insightful, and sometimes transformative, in a way that contemporary works cannot. So my task today is to encourage you to read the Christian classics, and a good one to start with is this one.  

Background: The Cloud of Unknowing was written in the 1300s in England, part of a golden age of Christian mystical literature that coincided with the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War. The author is anonymous, but his work stands on the same level as the great works of his contemporaries: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and (my personal favorite) Julian of Norwich. Though his instructions are written primarily for the monk or Christian cleric, their application is to all believers, and his method of prayer is the main inspiration for the contemporary Christian practice of "centering prayer."

Why You Should Read This Book: It's actually remarkably accessible, and often simply winsome. The author writes with a spirit of tremendous humility and gentleness, and with a deep understanding of the human condition. Though he's recommending a method of prayer that is probably foreign to most of us in the evangelical tradition, his explanations are patient and remarkably simple. Beyond any attractions of the writer's style, however, the main point to consider is that the practices he encourages could be a turning point in your spiritual life. It will dare you to enter into a lifestyle of contemplative prayer, which, if God is gracious, can bring you into deeper experiential communion with God. 

Further, this book avoids some of the pitfalls of current practice. In attempts to be "relevant" to our culture of personal fulfillment, "centering prayer" is sometimes hyped as a practice whose main purpose is to help you find peace and inner harmony. As such, many in my evangelical tradition regard the practice somewhat askance, in the same way they might regard the pseudo-spiritual practices we've cherrypicked from eastern religions (like yoga, breathing exercises, etc.). But The Cloud of Unknowing doesn't care much for your internal harmony. It is wiser than our age in that it recognizes that "personal fulfillment" is not the point. No, the point is that God has showered his love on us, and it is our privilege to learn to love him in return. The method of prayer that the book advises is simply that: a way to love God, and to love him as unselfishly as the human person is capable of. 

But to love God, we have to know him in some way. And we can know him in an intellectual sense--we can know what he has revealed of himself through Christ and the witness of Scripture. But to know him, to know him in his person, in his essence, is something beyond that. The journey is not entirely up to us to make, because God has deigned to make himself known to us, and to us who are Christians, he is mystically present with us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit and our incorporation into the Body of Christ. Even so, if our goal is "a personal relationship with God," we need to remember that he is God, and we are mere creatures, and good theology has always taught us that he is "wholly other." He is so transcendent, so very different from any other thing that we've ever known, that our intellects are simply unable to know him in the deepest way possible. This separation, where the limits of our knowledge fail to actually reach the essence of God himself, is what the author means by "the cloud of unknowing." But, the author tells us, where knowledge fails, love can break through that dark cloud. Thus the point of this kind of prayer is simply to direct our loving attention toward God--not to think too much, not speak too much, but simply to rest in God, to be with him, and to love him. If this kind of wordless prayer sounds a bit strange to you, rest assured that it is well rooted in both Scripture and the earliest Christian tradition. This is the kind of prayer that David seems to be referring to when he says in Psalm 131: "I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child with its mother." It is this prayer of wordless contemplation that the early church fathers (particularly those champions of prayer, the desert fathers), regarded as the highest form of prayer there is.

There's another cloud, too--not just the cloud of unknowing above, showing the limitations of our intellectual capacities where God is concerned, but a "cloud of forgetting" beneath us. This method of prayer is built on a sound theology of the human person, a vital understanding the way our minds work. (The early church fathers were generally much more in tune with the composition of the human psyche, and what that meant for our prayer lives, than are most modern evangelicals.) Other kinds of prayer have their place, of course, but most of the spoken prayers we use are inextricably wrapped up in our own hangups, our desires, our passions, our wandering thoughts. So, this method of contemplative prayer encourages us not to speak, not really even to think--and thus not to let the jostling pieces of our own ego get in the way of our singular intent to simply direct our love toward God. As the author of Ecclesiastes advises us: "Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few" (5:2). So we hold on to one idea alone--loving God--and use this idea to banish all other thoughts and impulses into our cloud of forgetting. This way of prayer is not easy to learn. Once you try it, you'll be amazed at how undisciplined and forceful your wandering thoughts and desires are. But the promise of spiritual growth from the consistent practice of this kind of prayer is attested to over and over again throughout the Christian tradition. It is worth taking some time to learn this way of prayer, and you couldn't ask for a better teacher than The Cloud of Unknowing.

(Painting, inset: "St Francis of Assisi at Prayer," by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, c.1645, oil on canvas; image is in the public domain)