Make Straight the Path

by Dan Masterton

A voice cries out:
In the desert prepare the way of the LORD!
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!

-from the First Reading for the Second Sunday of Advent from the book of the prophet Isaiah and echoed in the Gospel reading from Mark

*  *  *

This past October, I traveled to southern Arizona for three days. It was a rare “business trip” for this pastoral minister.

This upcoming April, I will be leading an educational immersion for eleven of my high school students to learn about immigration and migration, based out of ambos Nogales (Spanish for both, referring to the towns of the same name on each side of the Mexico-America border) and Tucson, Arizona. Though I’ve learned about and studied these issues for a while, I had never been to the border. Over the course of this school year, I have been connecting with various people and organizations, and to help lay the groundwork for our immersion, my bosses funded a modest exploratory trip.

After a whole mess of emails, meticulous visits to Kayak.com, and a flight and a drive, I made it to the borderlands. While there, I met with people connected in various ways to humanitarian groups that seek to advocate for people in transit and accompany them in the various stages of their journeys. As my conversations unfolded and the pieces of our immersion week settled into place nicely, I was still left with a missing piece that I wanted badly for my students and me: a desert walk.

Frequently, immersion groups will take a supervised trip into the Sonoran desert with one of these humanitarian groups, trips which often include supply drops as well. People in transit often cross long stretches of this desert on their way toward a family member, pickup meeting point, or some other destination. The goal of a desert walk is to see firsthand the nature of the journey these people make through the desert. However, as I contacted different people, nothing was working out. Schedule conflicts, lack of availability, and messages without replies left me with no opportunity to see the desert and arrange that experience for my students.

As I was talking to one of my new friends, she shared that she often takes guests into the desert nearby. I was a bit surprised. We were talking at her house, where she hosts groups to give talks based on artifacts she and her colleagues find in the desert; as an ignorant midwesterner, I was amazed at how close the legit desert was to her home -- literally just down the street, butting up against the edge of her subdivision.

Here's the view from the edge of the desert, looking back down her street of homes.

So, we walked two blocks, and just like that, paved street gave way to sandy, rocky terrain. Surrounded by low, dry, brown trees, specks of resilient green shrubbery, and a sudden and stark lack of civilization, we were walking in the desert. As I followed my friend, we began to discover leave-behinds from people in transit. On the edge of this desert, still well within sight of a fully developed residential area, these people had passed by, and likely were regularly passing, on their way north.

Here's the jacket, just as we found it.

At first, we found just a dusty, empty water bottle. As we wandered further, we came across a gnarly, twisted tree that looked like it could serve as a bit of a basic shelter or shade. There, hanging from its jagged branches, we found a fleece jacket. Carried and worn to stay warm in the cooler temperatures at night, they’re often discarded when migrants reach meeting points and must cram beyond capacity into crowded vehicles where there is no room for their belongings, their supplies, or their layered clothes. Then a few feet away, in the shadow of that same tree, we came across a slipcover for a shoe. That’s a common way for a person to obscure their footprints in the desert sand while making their way to their hoped-for destination while seeking to evade capture -- perhaps this person had reached the end of their desert wandering? These realities were all sitting in plain sight, within shouting distance of everyday people in their sleepy Arizona neighborhood. The proximity of such extreme realities to everyday living floored me, and thanks to my friend, my students will walk into this desert, too.

*  *  *

This shoe slip-cover was just a few feet away
from the tree and jacket.

At Sunday Mass for the Second Sunday of Advent, our priest preached about his hometown, where he was raised by the outdoors, growing up with the mountains watching over him. He felt nostalgic whenever he drove home from college, traversing the cusp of a ridge to see the valley of his home and the next range of mountains welcoming him back. He admitted that the call of Isaiah, and then John, agitated him -- he loves the mountains, ridges, and valleys and can’t imagine taking this beautiful, dramatic terrain and smoothing it out to clear a straight path. The call of our Advent spirituality may not require such a literal bulldozing of topography, but our work as Kingdom-builders (or Kindom-builders) does call us to prepare a direct path for God’s love to break into our world.

At Mass on Sunday, I couldn’t help but think of this patch of desert that I got to explore. Up to a certain point, society had worked together to pave streets, lay foundations, and build homes, and now in that place, a community lives together. Yet, just beyond the edge of this collaborative effort, the harshness of the desert endures. Customs and Border Patrol (an imperfect but overly demonized agency with some good people that does some good humanitarian work in addition to its policing) executes a strategy focused on deterrence, fortifying high-traffic and urban border areas while leaving the more brutal, remote stretches of land less policed; desperate migrants will often move to the area of least resistance, and, here, in the dry, hot, barren desert, the elements will do much of CBP’s work for them.

As people seek to move north, they are traversing lands where there is no way made for them. There are no paved roads; there are no water fountains or showers or bathrooms; there is nothing forgiving in the land. There literally is no way for them. What little trails exist are the futile efforts of transitory people attempting to pound a superficial trail into land that stubbornly resists. They must simultaneously juggle survival, the logistics of reaching a meetup or safe place, and the need to proceed undetected and unseen. For instance, a migrating man was captured with a cactus spike in his eye because in the dark, cold desert night he could not use a flashlight to evade the patrol and impaled himself on the plant.

This is the bit of trail that is superficially trod in this patch of desert,
just a short distance from a quiet, smalltown neighborhood.

This is where many people of goodwill seek to accompany and advocate. The readings from the Second Sunday of Advent tell us that God’s way must be and will be made “in the wasteland,” and this symbolic prophecy finds a concrete reflection in the dirt of the Sonoran desert. Here, the way of the Lord hopefully will come not only by an increasing number of migrants pounding out a trail out of necessity by their footsteps in the desert; the way of the Lord must come through those who observe courtroom proceedings and assist with legal advocacy, through samaritans who arrange supply stations on migrant trails, through workers who triage the needs of the recently deported and prospective migrants, through communities who offer sanctuary and support to people in transit.

As American society continues to evaluate its treatment of migrants, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the human dignity of those in transit must be upheld. These are people who have neither a literal, physical, topographical way nor a social, cultural, personal way cleared for them. The way of Lord is cleared and secured when we do the will of God in our world. By upholding human dignity and enfleshing our human solidarity, we glimpse the city of God while we work together here on earth. Certainly, the massive movement of people facing political uncertainties, social unrest, drug wars and gang violence, and the desire for social and economic security requires broader reform and more thorough resolution (I support amnesty and a subsequently established reformed, clearer, strict system). In the meantime, the way of the Lord is blazed by opting for those marginalized by these realities -- by encountering these people who have been marginalized, taking stock of their needs and challenges, and walking alongside them as brothers and sisters.