I have been thinking a lot about what the newest pastor at my home church said on Easter--what does it look like to live with Easter faith in a Good Friday world? I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know that in striving to follow and obey Jesus, we are often led to the hard places.
I am writing to you from one of the hard places, a Good Friday place, where darkness is thick and covers everything. I am telling you this to ask for your prayers--not for me, but for the newcomers I’ve befriended recently in Harrisburg.
Yesterday I received a phone call from my closest refugee friend who speaks English. She told me that her husband’s best friend, O, was attacked and badly beaten at the Asian market down the street from his apartment. Nine people beat him. His face was shoved into the ground and he was repeatedly kicked and slammed until he lost consciousness and woke up in a hospital a few hours later. O is an innocent refugee who barely speaks the language and has never been seen without a smile on his face. “I have no enemy,” he said to me this evening, smiling through a swollen face. “I don’t understand,” he confessed. Me neither.
I have been looking carefully at poverty lately because of my new friends. I have stared it in the face when MM cried with me over her overwhelming bills and her husband’s lost job. I watched it every time I went to welfare with her and others. I see it when I work at the food pantry and I let it sink in when I am walking down Derry Street. It reaches down deep into people and seriously brings into question dignity, humanity, and justice.
I have yet to witness and understand violence that comes out of poverty and produces more poverty and more violence. Tonight, looking at O describe his horrifying attack and his wife sitting quietly in the corner hugging her knees, I stared at violence in the face. Violence against the most innocent, vulnerable members of any society is outrage enough. Violence against O extends beyond outrage. He is happy, hard-working, eager to learn, and 18 years old. His wife is 17. They have a baby together and live in the worst neighborhood in Harrisburg. “I am afraid to go outside,” he explains. I know.
Fear and poverty and violence and heartbreaking injustice are not just problems in Harrisburg or for these newcomers; they are everywhere and they are so intricately woven together that the darkness sometimes feels impenetrable. As victims of all these things, Burmese refugees in Harrisburg already have learned and used “us-them” language and developed prejudices against certain groups of people. Darkness wins? Violence continues?
This darkness was especially evident driving down Derry Street tonight. The rain beat against the window pane and reminded me of how miserable it would be to be homeless on a night like this. I know Jesus lurks in the shadows where the homeless men sleep. I know Jesus is wandering around the slums and he is watching the people who throw rocks at Soe Win and he is in the Asian Market where O was beaten. He is on the sidewalks and he is in the trees. Maybe he’s going through the trash.
How can we be advocates for God's abundance and freedom and have a presence of peace and a hope for justice in the face of so much darkness? I need new ways and new eyes.
I need Easter faith and I need your prayers--especially for O and all of the other Burmese refugees who are terrified and traumatized by this incident.
