Fuzzy Identity

I always wiggle into communities that I do not match.  Befriending the football team I never played on. Laughing with the high school drug dealer I never bought from.  I even found an honorary membership in a community of traumatized women.  So I continued the pattern of unusual belonging when I entered a church family abroad.  My church family is a group of loved ones who immigrated to Spain from Latin America.  I am white - both in the government paperwork sense and in the my family cooks with no spices sense.  So it does not take much to see I was not born into my new community.  My habit of mismatching keeps my life interesting and it keeps the borders of my identity fuzzy.   

This week shocked me into reflection.  I showed up to my weekly get together with loved ones in the church and I shook the hand of my strong, tan, Honduran mentor.  He is leading me in a spiritual journey of looking for God and sharing God’s power with others.  As soon as I reached for his hand I felt a sense of relief from whatever I had been processing in my mind that morning.  I was home, well, as home as things get for me here.  My girlfriend was getting ready to sing up front, my suegra was greeting some friends in the gathering room, and I was ready to sing and pray with the people I love.  

My mentor motioned to a white couple in the back row.  “K. has friends here, from Pennsylvania.  Your neighbors are in church today”.  And for a moment, I didn’t really want to be white.  I wanted to be a part of my church family that I meet with every Sunday.  I wanted to be a regular in a room full of people who are very different from me.  I wished that this automatic connection with a couple of strangers was not a part of who I was.

I sat with the white folk.  My girlfriend had saved us two seats next to them so I could help them feel welcome.  And, to be honest, it was the right way to live.  God teaches us to welcome the stranger and that day the strangers were my own cultural/racial kin. After feeling the unpleasant side of undesired association, I also noticed the positive feelings of connection.  It felt exciting to be next to a symbol of home.  And it felt empowering to share snippets of translation about how our church family was worshiping together.  I started to wonder if the couple would invite me out to see the town based on our unintentional cultural bond.

When I left the church building that day I walked home with my girlfriend.  We ate lunch with our neighbor from Chile.  At a table in Madrid, in a piso in Madrid, our home in Madrid.  The close encounter with Pennsylvania drifted from  my consciousness and I returned to my daily patterns in Spain.  My cultural identity is extremely fuzzy.  And it has been for years.  You don’t have to pressure me if you want to know my opinion on the subject.  I am thrilled to be confused about where I belong!