After my former husband had accompanied me to Texas to meet my family of origin, he observed, “You’re a fine argument for the theory that the stork brings babies, because you must have been simply dropped into that family. You have nothing in common with them.” While amusing and accurate, his observation was also comforting to me as verification that the conviction I had long held, namely that I was an outsider in my family, had a basis in reality that another person could plainly see. Though I presently enjoy a life in which I am more often an insider than an outsider, I will always carry clear memories of the struggles and shame that come when I am the one standing outside the circle, hoping to be invited to enter.
Many spiritual traditions urge us to welcome the stranger, as a compassionate action, as a way to open ourselves to differences and widen the circle of belonging. But I wonder if the basic and perhaps most powerful motivation for welcoming the stranger might be the memories we carry of times when we were the ones needing to be welcomed. The Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, often accompanies the command to welcome the stranger with the comment, “for you once were strangers in a foreign land.”
As I listen to political rhetoric calling for mass deportations and spreading xenophobic stories of pets being eaten, I wonder whether those trafficking in such rhetoric have succeeded in repressing all memories they might hold of times they were the outsider, the uncool kid, the partner nobody wanted. Because if they could remember, would they so avidly now call for exclusion of people who do not nicely fit into a narrow definition of insider? Or do we all remember too well when we were “strangers in a foreign land,” because the present climate seems filled with fear on all sides of waking up the morning after election day and finding oneself an outsider no longer having access to power and freedom? And if that is the case, how can the memories of being an outsider be turned towards compassion rather than fear and a resolve to make somebody else be the outsider?
When I was the one who was unfamiliar, I remember how grateful I felt when someone extended even the smallest gesture of recognition and welcome to me. Those memories can return sometimes when I see another who is likely the stranger, waiting to be seen, waiting to be invited in, waiting to become part of the inner circle. May my efforts to forget or cover over those memories fail. And may I remember, and in my remembering more readily open the door. Because whether I recognize it or not, there really is room enough inside for everybody.