Saturday of Week 19 in Ordinary Time
Eze 18:1-10,13,30-32
Mt 19:13-15
…in future, I mean to judge each of you but what he does — it is the Lord who speaks.
Sometime in July 2022, the milestone passed where I’d lived more years abroad than I had spent in the city where I grew up. Going back to South East Asia has become a bittersweet experience. I still feel ‘of the place’, but I am self-aware enough to know that I don’t belong. I also know that when I am back, I am judged by values that I may not necessarily live by anymore. Their ways are not my ways now. And though few have been rude enough to say it to my face, I know the things that are said behind my back.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion of the foreigner, to be sceptical of what is alien to them. I am an even easier target for being American; it is such a cliché to be critical of us. I usually let most of it slide. I hate confrontation, even when those doing the judging are people I thought would have my back. It’s disappointing, but I have accepted that as my lot, the lot of the foreigner and the immigrant.
“Make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit”. For the immigrant, these words have a much deeper meaning than most. The immigrant is a foreigner twice over – a stranger in her adopted homeland, an outsider in the place of her birth. The immigrant makes her ‘home’ in the liminal space, a place she stakes for herself, a place between her past and her present. All these years I have moved from city to city, making each one my ‘home’ but never truly belonging anywhere. That is the life of the immigrant. Some people hold on to the old ways through traditions, through food, through networks of family and friends, but the reality is… you don’t really belong.
The one constant in all of this flux has been my Catholic faith. I can trace a line to it, long before I even became Catholic. People who live their whole lives in one place can trade stories of their childhood, in such and such an old neighbourhood that perhaps now, has gentrified. I can remember the time when I knew I was being called to the faith, the exact moment when the light first flickered. I guess those are my stories of ‘home’, and my faith is my way of ‘belonging’. Even when I am in one of my periods of delinquency, when I am absent from Sunday mass for some reason or other, I still view going to church as ‘going home’, as ‘returning’.
I’ve often talked wistfully of finally putting down roots somewhere, that I’m tired of moving, and tired of running. But perhaps, the reality is, that I am already home. That I have always been home. And that in God’s eyes… I never left.
“Even them I will bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on My altar; for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations” – Isaiah 56:7
(Today’s OXYGEN by Sharon Soo)
Prayer: We pray for those who are seeking a place to call their home; may they find comfort and solace in God’s house.
Thanksgiving: We give thanks for all the spiritual directors who commit their time and energy to helping those new to the faith, stake a home in God’s church.
OXYGEN 
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