Nalin and I lived in Chicago for ten years before we bought a place to live. We could have done it much earlier; we were living the "American dream" — having moved up from Northwest Arkansas (the Ozarks) with humanities degrees in philosophy and comparative literature under our belts and starting out at small, low-paying, jobs — and had quickly moved up the ladder, becoming "DINKs" with growing salaries in the creative and marketing industries. But somehow we still didn't feel home. Even after we bought our first condo in Rogers Park, with a 9-month-old in tow, we would still find ourselves saying, "We'll start out in a condo, so that we could sell after a couple of years if we want to go elsewhere." A few months later came the great recession of 2008, and we were, in a word, "stuck." We just had our 20th anniversary living in Chicago this past December 31st. Are we home yet?
My kids are obsessed with this song on the radio, "No Roots" by Alice Merton. Here are a couple of the stanzas and the start of the chorus:
“I like digging holes and hiding things inside them | When I’ll grow old I hope I won’t forget to find them
I like standing still, boy that’s just a wishful plan | Ask me where I come from, I’ll say a different land
And a thousand times I’ve seen this road | A thousand times
I’ve got no roots, but my home was never on the ground”
When I first heard this song, I didn't really think of myself. After all, I've spent years in the same places, and ALL of my life in the midwest. You would imagine me as rooted as as a bristlecone pine tree. The first person I thought of was Nalin's cousin, world traveler from the time of her birth in Papua, New Guinea (her parents were docked there at a port-of-call, since they lived on ship at the time). After a childhood of sea-faring, her adolescent and teenage years in many places in India, her graduate years in America, she now has a career traipsing the world as a guidance counselor and recruiter. Certainly I must be more rooted. But what happens when you uproot from everything you've known in your formative years? What if you choose a life that is, on many levels, in conflict with those who formed and tended you?
Nalin uprooted in a major way when he came here for graduate school from India in 1993. He left a devoted family, great friends, and a country he loved to get a bit more education and live abroad for a bit. He met me six months later and the rest, as they say, is history. The vines how they entangle. It was a rough start. It was as if the ship had landed on an alien planet. Many who have been to the Ozarks will remark on its beauty, but if you've had ever been to North Glenstone street in Springfield, Missouri in the early nineties, you wouldn't exactly call it "gorgeous." Rather, this patch was quite industrial with a lot of run down strip malls, barren of grocery stores in walking distance, or decent eating places other than fast food. For most of the students at our residential liberal arts college, these disadvantages were easily overcome, as most of the kids were middle or upper class and had cars with them or friends to drive them around. As an international student who did not drive and came in the middle of the school year, friends and cars were obsolete. The loneliness and the logistics, as he recalls, was overwhelming. And then on top of it to be one of the few people of color or international status. On his first days there, one naive student, upon hearing he was "Indian," asked him, "Oh, what tribe?" The funny thing is, Nalin wasn't from a tribe, rather they all were... He had broken from his tribe. They all stuck to theirs like glue, and it was only the most tenacious and dedicated who could penetrate. So what does one do when locked out of one tribe? Find another... And so we found each other, along with a few others.
I write this post while this sitting on a neighborhood corner I know so well in Andersonville in Chicago. I remember how businesses and restaurants have come in and out over the past thirteen years I've lived on the north side. My kids have been in school in this neighborhood for the last five years. I find comfort here, and yet, I ask... where else can I go? There's no doubt that, most recently, the political and cultural divides in this country have raged to new heights. Like elsewhere in the world, the turning inward, towards a nationalism and tribalism so profound as to feel dangerous to those outside it, threatens to unravel us. Those who feel rooted, dig deeper; those who don't, feel a growing sense of displacement. My uprootedness started, most significantly in high school as my mind soared far beyond my modest midwest origin, paused for a bit in my early years of college, and then started up again in earnest towards my latter college and grad school years. Part of this was an intellectual awakening, and part of this was a religious suppression. How do you live your life, day after day, trying to defend that your choice, so incongruous to those who raised you, is a good and decent one. After you've rejected the very thing that roots them closest to each other and to everything they know and love? I've had a hard time explaining my move away from Evangelicalism and then the whole of Christianity later to most people (especially those I love who don't understand), and I am going to quite blatantly steal an explanation I heard two days ago from Bart Ehrman, one of America's most widely read scholars of early Christianity and the New Testament, when he explained his own leaving:
“It really was the problem of suffering that ended up making me leave the faith because whatever kind of Christianity I had, either a fundamentalist Christianity or a more liberal form of Christianity, I believed that God answered prayer and that God was active in the world and that God in somehow - somehow had revealed himself through Christ. And so this was an act of God in the world. But when I thought more and more and more about the problem of suffering, I came to think, you know, I really just don’t think that God is active in the world.
If God answers my prayers - you know, if I get this job because I prayed for it or, you know, even if I’ve, you know, found this parking space because God has, you know, intervened for me, well, why is it that there’s a child that starves to death every seven seconds in our world? This is a child who also prays to God. I mean, if God can get me a job, why can’t God get this person food? Is it that I’m so much better than this person that God really cares about me but not about this person - and not just this one person but all day every day throughout the entire world. And I simply got to a point where I didn’t believe it anymore. I just didn’t think that there’s a God who’s active in this world. And so at that point, I decide I just don’t believe it.”
And that's how it started for me... little by little, a transition to a more progressive and expansive Christianity, a move away from the precepts of heaven and hell, to a substantial break from my former identity altogether as I struggled to reconcile what it was that was keeping me tethered in the first place. Continued prayers, yet continued suffering. I get it. I understand the desire for roots. I understand the desire for contentment and for stability. I understand the desire to have answers... to have faith. Faith in God, faith in country, faith in heritage, faith in tribe. But I can't get over the fact that with all of this tribalism, there is going to be someone that falls outside of that and suffers from the exteriors. We build our countries and our religions on the backs of those who suffer most, and then expect those very people to stand outside and look in from outside the glass, from beyond walls... beyond THE wall.
It really all comes down to the ability to tell our own stories and hear stories from others. There are so many stories I can't or shouldn't presume to tell from my place or limited experience, but I long to hear more narratives from those at the center of the story. And I long to traverse them. I love the family that raised me, and yet I'm no longer part of their tribe; I love the friends that surround me, but I question my place in their tribe as well. Roots are defining and confining, and I long to break free. I long to hear a new story.
My ten-year-old son, Ettu, got a great book from a close friend on his birthday entitled Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World. At the end of the book, there is a "Parting Thoughts" section, and it opens with the words of Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King, Jr. An agnostic and a believer. A white, German-born Jew; and a black southern American-born Christian. A man of science and a man of faith. In both of their writings, these men talk about rising above the "delusion of his consciousness" (AE) or the "narrow confines of his individualistic concerns" (MLK, Jr.) in order to embrace humanity in all its various forms. Hearkening back to the song lyrics that open this post, there seems to be some real virtues to having a home that's "never on the ground." And perhaps this feeling of rootlessness is a positive notion in the scheme of things. We may travel the same roads over and over again, but if we can see beyond our own interior lands, we may just get there someday.
