In South Texas’ Hidalgo County, about half a mile due north of the Rio Grande, there’s a one-room United Methodist Church next to an old family cemetery. The church is white with wooden board and batten siding and a small red steeple. It’s a quintessential country church if there ever was one.
The chapel was built in 1884 by Martin Jackson, son of Nathaniel Jackson and Matilda Hicks, an interracial couple who fled discrimination in Alabama in the 1850s and whose ranch land (on which the church now stands) was a refuge for runaway enslaved people from the deep south.
Arriving from all over the country, four of my colleagues and I had flown into Hidalgo County to visit rural organizing partners in several small towns of the Rio Grande Valley, the southern point of Texas that makes up the floodplain of the Rio Grande.
We passed border patrol officers and surveillance balloons on our way to the Jackson Family Ranch, where Nathaniel Jackson descendent and keeper of the property, Ramiro Ramirez, invited us to spend the afternoon. Ramiro parked his truck in the dirt driveway in front of the church, opened the chain-link fence, and welcomed us onto his family’s property.
If you face the front of the church and squint your eyes, you’ll see what looks like rust-colored toothpicks sticking up out of the dusty Texas soil. We crossed the border wall through a gate to get to the Jackson family property. The gate stays open all the time because the Rio Grande, which forms the border between the United States and Mexico, is actually half a mile to the south.
It was never more apparent to me that the wall serves more of an imaginary function than a physical one than when we drove straight through that wide-open gate. If the wall is necessary to keep dangerous criminals out of the United States, as some politicians would have you believe, then why are there portions of it indiscriminately open to anyone who might pass by, half a mile away from the official border?
Homes and farms are scattered around that half-mile-wide strip of land in between the border wall and the actual border, and it’s land that belongs to American citizens. Although I can’t speak for the residents, it would come as no surprise to me if the people living in between the border and the border wall felt like they existed in between two different worlds. That theme of in-betweenness is something that kept coming up throughout our visit.
On our first day, we spent the morning with employees of the South Texas Museum of History conducting a story circle, an exercise in which individuals sitting in a circle take turns telling personal tales based on a prompt. Ben Fink, my colleague who facilitated the story circle, started with the prompt, “share a moment that complicates where you come from.”
Two Mexican-American participants shared that they experienced anxiety over feeling neither Mexican nor American enough to fit neatly into one of the categories.
The feeling of being pulled between two conflicting labels is one that I can empathize with. I dedicated my life to Christ at a youth retreat when I was fourteen years old and I took my faith very seriously throughout my teens and early twenties. But when I came out of the closet as a lesbian in my mid-twenties, I felt too gay for church and too out of the loop to be at home in a gay bar.
It would be easy for me to rattle off the ways bad theology hurt me (and people close to me know I like to fume about it). But the truth is more complex than that. When I think back on my time in the church, what comes to mind first aren’t the sermons that made me sweat through my Sunday best.
I think about the earthy smell of the wooden pews and the cookies I stole out of the parish hall in the first church my family attended. I think of crawdad boils and the soft yellow paper in my grandmother’s prayer book. I hum in my head the opening verse of my favorite hymn, “All Creatures of Our God and King.”
Stale pizza, laughter, the soft pink of sunset when I walked out of youth group on Sunday night, those things often come to mind before sermons about sin and death and the gnashing of teeth.
Even though I look back with fond memories, practicing my faith in the way I used to doesn’t feel tenable for me anymore. As a gay woman, I feel like I’m not allowed to love hymns, scripture, or liturgy. But as a Christian, I feel like I’m not allowed to love my girlfriend.
Ramiro stepped out of the chapel to get something from his truck. And when he came back in, he handed a red hymnal to two of my colleagues, who I’ll refer to as friends here, since that feels more accurate. Both of them are vocalists and hymn fans (one of them is even a self-avowed historical hymnal nerd). Without missing a literal beat, my friends opened the book and sang, in harmony, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”
They didn’t realize it at the time, but their singing gave me a kind of permission I didn’t know I needed. My friends have their own complex personal relationships with religious communities, but listening to them sing with their whole hearts, despite their backgrounds, reminded me that it was okay to embrace things I felt like I wasn’t allowed to. And I like to think it couldn’t have happened anywhere else but that tiny borderland church, the perfect embodiment of uncomfortable in-betweenness.
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