Last year, I read Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. I love Merton, and his work, and have always felt an affinity for the Columbia-grad-turned-Catholic-convert-turned-monk/lifelong-yearner. The book is an autobiography of his youth—a childhood in France and England, the joy of collegiate friendship, a longing for writing, and takes you to the moment he joins the monastery at Gethsemani.

I put Merton in the same category of writer as E.B. White: a kindly, midcentury uncle who loves nature and beauty and is unafraid to look evil in the eye and rebuke it, someone who can appreciate both the absurdity and the solemnity of life. There is something about Merton’s work that feels approachable and kind, rendering these big, thorny ideas in the same way your favorite professor does.

When you’re reading Seven Storey Mountain, the idea of conversion is looming over the first half of the book—it approaches and circles and feels close to landing before flying away. Merton is hungry, is thirsty, yearns, longs, kicks rocks in increasingly dissatisfied circles. It is all a very familiar texture—down to the buildings near Columbia University where I also did my undergrad, the hunger, the thirst, the yearning, the kicking rocks in your early twenties as the world seemingly gets scarier.

When I am reading, I am usually after knowing the texture of a thing. There are all these experiences—having a kid, falling in love, finding God—that have all this rote language that completely glosses over the experience. “You’ll never be the same again,” or “It’s a total transformation of the self” or whatever. I am not after that. I am after language that gives you the texture of it, the fine grit, the language for how your brain is rewired or rewritten, the ways that your life or your selfhood changes, concretely. This is both impossible, and also, it should seem, doable. I trusted in Merton to tell me, this is how it feels.

And you get moments of it. Merton worrying about the eucharistic fast and whether brushing his teeth or smoking a cigarette counted as fastbreaking and so omitting both the morning of his baptism. You get book titles and New York street addresses I am eminently familiar with, churches I have been in as a weird little undergrad. And then, at the critical moment, a veil gets dropped over it, everything gets filmy and flat.

This is how he describes the change wrought in him by his baptism:

In the Temple of God that I had just become, the One Eternal and Pure Sacrifice was offered up to the God dwelling in me: the sacrifice of God to God, and me sacrificed together with God, incorporated in His Incarnation. Christ born in me, a new Bethlehem, and sacrificed in me, His new Calvary, and risen in me: offering me to the Father, in Himself asking the Father, my Father and His, to receive me into His infinite and special love—not the love He has for all things that exist for mere existence is a token of God’s love, but the love of those creatures who are drawn to Him in and with the power of His own love for Himself

Brother. Respectfully and lovingly…what do you mean? Actually and truly what do you mean you have just become a Temple of God? What does it feel like?

I have read more mystical theology than your average bear, I know the tropes and the cadences. For all that I can draw meaning from this passage, for all that I love his image of the conversion of a Christian as a sort of microcosmic retelling of the Christ journey, the birth and death and resurrection all in a moment, this feels like the same kind of rhythm and language used by Catherine of Siena and Benedict of Clairvaux and Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart. I do not mind it when Simone Weil does this, it is what I go to her for. I mind it when the kindly, practical, avuncular Thomas Merton does it, when we, within the space of a page, go from wondering about a cheeky morning ciggy to this. These two forms of expression don’t feel like they belong in the same language, in the same book. How dare he, when I most want clarity, give me language that, in its beauty, in its liturgical reliance, obfuscates rather than clarifies. I am left on the outside of it, peering into a fogged-over window like some kind of pervert for the holy.

I’ve written a lot about this standing-outside-while-longing-to-see inside. Being a regular writer for not one but two and occasionally a third Christian magazine means this is an object I have tested the weight of many times, that I know the scope and the feel of in my hand, in my pocket, I could list out its properties, but it still remains fundamentally unknowable in a lot of ways. My husband, who I have known for ten years and literally sat next to me on the couch for the reading of 98% of said mystical theology, told me recently that he still doesn’t understand my relationship with Christianity. Danny Vazquez, the editor for Rivermouth, who again, read my entire book cover to cover multiple times at one point also gently asked me where I stood on God. It’s an evolving answer, and one I don’t fully understand, but I’ve tried talking about it a lot, in a lot of different ways.

Declaration was a chapbook I published with the now-defunct but extremely beautiful Guillotine Publishing (having sarah mccarry as one of my first grown-up editors remains an unbelievable gift).

I would maybe describe it as a spiritual autobiography, written by an angry, sad 22 year old. There’s a reason that there’s no link to it, which is partially because it’s a print-only object, no longer available, but also that I spent a lot of time cringing while I re-read it in preparation for writing this. In it, I write about my parents’ evangelicalism, my bitter, misogynistic youth pastor in high school, my grandmother’s deep faith, my desire for faith and the enduring silence of God in my life. All of this is couched in the story of Our Lady Queen of Angels, a group of women who spent 10 years having informal services outside their church after the Archdiocese of New York closed it down, and the time I spent with them.1

Here’s a clip from it:

I tried so hard to love Jesus for such a long time. When I was seven, I remember closing my eyes in Sunday school and not knowing how to pray, instead squeezing my knuckles, one by one, until we all said “Amen.”

In middle school, I went to church twice a week—Wednesday night for teen devotionals, Sunday mornings for regular service, and sometimes the second youth service later in the day. I tried reading the whole Bible and made it as far as the begettings of Kings I. I tried St. Augustine’s trick of letting the Bible fall open to what God would ensure was the perfect passage. Nothing worked. I declared my faith over and over, to myself, to my family, to youth leaders and pastors, to anyone that would listen.

I declared my faith even when I could tell the declaration was stretched thin over a lie.

We went to a Vineyard church when I was a kid, white-people-California-hippie pentecostalism, and I could see, visibly manifested in people crying and screaming and laughing, what faith looked like, what it meant for God to talk to you. It was scary, but it was also definitive—no still quiet voice, this was exuberant and triumphal and overwhelmingly powerful.

It never happened to me.

And so between an ongoing silence, and a general disenchantment with what church was to me (see: bitter, misogynistic youth pastor, see: Bible church in Texas, see: baby liberal), I fell off of trying.

And that’s where it stayed for a long time. Not trying, not wanting to try, because trying and failing is embarrassing, because I hate being bad at things, believing in God included.

And yet, also, sort of trying. Sliding myself in sideways, putting myself in places God might show up like I was a middle schooler with a crush, but not, like, in an obvious way. I mean, I went to divinity school. I ended up in the immigration rights movement, which at least in the U.S. is chock-full of some of the most rooted Christians I know. I didn’t go to church though, which, when it comes to middle-school crush behavior is like happening to read a book on the sidelines of the soccer field during practice but stopping yourself short of lurking around outside their house.

You will not be surprised to learn that my time in divinity school was not without emotional/spiritual incident, but I was honestly so happy there that it all took a while to sink in.

In 2023, nearly four years after graduating, I wrote a piece for Christian Century about one of these revelations that felt like I finally was able to explore.

I was probably halfway through divinity school when I turned to my husband and said, “I think I have a very fundamentally Christian mind.”

My husband, raised in an almost completely secular home, looked over at me, eyebrows raised. “What on earth does that mean?”

The piece, delightfully titled “The brine of Christianity” (I came up with the metaphor but not the title) is about feeling like growing up Christian had, in some fundamental way, altered me as a person, even though I no longer believed or practiced. I think this is, in a lot of ways, my threshold-of-the-church manifesto, swinging my legs off the front steps without going into the building. I still stand by a lot of it. In essence, the essay says, “Look, I’m probably Christian, but in a cool way, in an outsider way.” Very Simone Weil.

But then, a few weeks ago, Commonweal magazine asked me to write a reflection for the third Sunday of Lent. The reading I was responding to was Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well, one of the freakiest passages in all of the gospels2. The woman walks away from her encounter with Jesus, saying that he told her “everything she’d ever done.” Frankly—terrifying. Jesus as all-seeing eyeball, Jesus as the kind of daddy/cop I was raised with, an incarnation I could only shy away from.

I have spent much of my life stubbornly at the threshold of faith. Raised in the Church, moved away from it, and yet returning, now and again, like a comet pulled in by some greater gravitational force. There are many things I have loved about the Church and its rhythms and rites, and equally many things that have kept me out—a lot of justified critiques, I think, but also just a personal hesitation. I did not want to undergo the mortifying ordeal of being known in order to be loved, did not want to be changed by this love I have so carefully avoided.

In the weeks leading up to Lent, I had been watching a lot of sermons from Harvard’s Memorial church and crying, sitting at my desk with a wobbly chin. On the day the reflection was due, I couldn’t think of anything to write, I was kicking myself for once again draining my car battery like an idiot, and I had three bond payment requests rejected, one after the other. As I was thinking of what to write, I had this ongoing paranoia that I sometimes get, writing for my beloved lefty religious mags, that the (largely religious) audience for my writing would read my clearly depressed, anxious rambling and my protestations against faith, and would gently and kindly shake their heads and say something along the lines of “oh God, this poor little lamb needs Jesus,” in the same way that sometimes I look at my dog and think, “Oh, God, he’s freaking out over the mailman existing.” It was one of those days where 18 small things happen and you feel stupid and hopeless, and angry at yourself for feeling that way over 18 small stupid things instead of one big real one.

And it struck me. Sitting in the back of an Uber on the way back from the mechanic replacing my car battery, feeling sorry for myself, something clicked. If I could imagine some kindly stranger reading my anxieties and just shaking his head and accurately diagnosing my neuroses and their fix, if I could feel deeply moved by sermons and religious writing, if I longed for it, if I was so unhappy and lost without it, I could just say yes to it.

And so I did.

I think if you’ve been reading me and my work for a little while, this will not be a huge surprise, but I, somehow, managed to be surprised. Not quite struck blind, but surprised nonetheless.

Let me try some texture here, a little grit for you to roll between your fingers. It’s just a little bit, because frankly, it’s hard to discern the texture of an experience when you’re in it, (sorry, Thomas Merton, I was too hard on you) but here’s my best shot.

Accepting Jesus into my heart was a deeply embarrassing experience. I do mean humbling, but I also mean embarrassing. I cried in therapy the next day, when they asked what about this felt significant to me and I had to move my mouth to say “the promise of everlasting life, and the world being bright and shining and fixed, the end of all suffering,” and like, truly honestly mean it. I cried because it was beautiful, and I also cried because it was embarrassing. I felt, for the next few days, like I was walking around with one of those very delicate membrane-only eggs in the middle of my chest, kind of tender and raw and unshielded from the world. Un-cynical, maybe? I was worried this feeling would last forever, but I’m honestly glad that it has faded somewhat. Thinking about God brings the feeling back.

Beyond this, nothing very much has changed. I still feel like myself. Having belief in Jesus has not liberated me from snark or pettiness or made me cuss less. I don’t go to church, I do watch sermons on YouTube and cry. I recognize that this is not perhaps the optimal way to experience the body of Christ, but I’m ok where I am for now. If I had to guess (and I do, I can’t pinpoint it), I think the sermons make me cry because they just keep pointing towards grace and moral beauty, two things I am continually hungry for. I still feel despair, a lot, about the state of the world, and myself, but that despair doesn’t feel like the event horizon beyond which all other things fall away, it feels like a passage through which maybe other things are possible. I know enough to know that things will, inevitably change, that I will.

Where I’ll Be:

• April 16-18: Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids!

• May 1: Broken by Design immigration symposium at DePaul University in Chicago

What I’ve Written

• Most of it is linked above, so just read the newsletter.

• Also, I wrote a book. Rivermouth is about immigration, and language, and what it means to try to reach beyond yourself. Honestly, if you liked this newsletter, you will probably like this book.

What I’m Reading

• I’m reading Gramsci’s Prison Letters, which so far is reminding me of nothing so much as Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, as Such.

• I also just finished One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston which a) not available on bookshop.com and b) is the rare romance novel that was published in the last five years, set in the late medieval period, has Cathars, Beguines, and heresy as a kind of backstory, and is deeply fun and hot. If you read this please slide into my DMs, I wanna yell.

Last April, I wrote a post for Injustice Report on two immigration headlines that seemed to hit at the same time and pointed, directly, at the same idea. ‘

The first was acting ICE director Todd Lyons saying he wanted to build an Amazon Prime for deportations.

The second was the Trump administration moving lists of TPS recipients onto the Social Security “death master file”—the massive database the Social Security Administration uses to track people who have died and whose social security numbers have been deactivated, a move a prior commissioner of the SSA called “financial murder.”

You can read the post, but I’ll also summarize the main point.

The Injustice Report

Immigrants as Prime Deliveries, Immigrants as Financial Ghosts

A few weeks ago, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told the crowd at the Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings…

Read more

a year ago · 12 likes · Alejandra Oliva and Injustice Report

I saw these two events as indicative of the necrocaptialism that underlies our immigration system, our political system as a whole. Necrocapitalism is, in the words of it’s coiner, S.B. Bannerjee, “contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death.” In other words: a form of capitalism where wealth is accumulated due to dehumanization and death, the one feeding into and encouraging the other like a horrible ouroboros.

In both of the cases from last year, we had an accumulation involving dispossession, a capitalist system profiting from death, counting on death to perpetuate itself. If you dedicate yourself to finding the necrocapitalist thread running through things, you will never stop unraveling. This administration literally loves to make money off killing people. To be fair, our country was built on necrocapitalism and continues to thrive on it—but this administration gloats in it, laughs at it, bathes in it.

And so, as this administration has progressed, it has come time once again to take a headline down from the papers and again remind ourselves—this is necrocapitalism, at work.

This time, it’s the warehouses.

ICE has reportedly been buying up warehouses in cities across the U.S. These are the hulking, empty sites of e-commerce, the half-million-square-feet of empty building you see by the highway as you drive out of any major U.S. city.

I don’t know if the warehouses were built in anticipation of future need, or if they were emptied out by the slowly crashing economy or the lack of U.S. based industry or the tariffs or what, but these warehouses are being brought up by ICE not to store trucks or guns or Temu special forces gear and punisher masks but to store people. These sites will be retrofitted to have bathrooms and beds, and be used to jail people in the thousands, as they await deportation.1

People will suffer and die in these warehouses, in these massive caverns meant to be a holding place for goods. To be clear, there is no world in which people were not suffering in these warehouses—ecommerce and Amazon workers have died year after year while laboring under conditions that are often not illegal but usually inhuman.

But there’s something that hits a little different about human beings taking the place of warehoused products, kept not even as deeply exploited labor (although sometimes, yes, also that), but as products themselves. Something that feels like the culmination of these horrible systems of capitalism and racism—and also something we have seen before, something we have built this country on this. What is a slaver ship if not a floating warehouse of people turned into capital?2

There’s another thread I want to tug on today, Ash Wednesday. For months now, clergy here in Chicago have been fighting for the right to enter Broadview, the so-called “processing center” (language and logic of capitalism, again) where folks are briefly held after being arrested by ICE before being shipped off to an out-of-state detention center. They have been asking permission to give communion to folks held in detention, scared and isolated.

After literal months of back and forth on whether people detained by ICE deserve to have the sacrament (the actual argument was more along the lines of operational security, but came down to sacramental access for the people who arguably need it the most), Catholic priests were allowed access to Broadview. Today. To minister and administer ashes to those in immigration detention.

Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent, a season of fasting and penitence. This is the reminder of death before the resurrection, the ashes on the forehead a reminder that life is finite. From dust you came, and to dust you shall return. I think under normal conditions, there is something kind of beautiful about the reminder. An old professor of mine, an episcopal priest, talked about the beauty in giving the ashes both to his youngest and oldest congregants, the span of a life and the end of all of them. But, as with all things, context matters.

I have talked to enough detained people to know that detention is a condition where the fragility of your own body, the fragility of your aliveness is not something that is easy to forget.

I made this video for work about a client I interviewed last fall. This is only a fraction of what she went through.

Why is it that out of the whole liturgical year, it is this sacrament that people in detention are being allowed. The one that reminds them of the finitude of life, of the fragility of the body? Why not the more ordinary comforts of communion, the joy of a Christmas mass? I’m glad that these folks are finally being given access to their religious freedom and rights, but cannot help but read into it.

Here, then is my Ash Wednesday prayer: these systems, these institutions came from nothing. May they return to nothing.

Last week, I went into the Chicago ICE field office to pay a few bonds.

I did it as part of my work with the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund. We can usually pay bonds online, but this time for some reason or another, we had a handful of bonds that needed to be paid in person, and I thought, “oh, I don’t have a lot on at work at the moment, I’ll take the morning off and go take care of this,” despite never having paid an immigration bond in person before.

As it turns out, paying a bond in person is not hard. It involves, yes, carrying your person and your paperwork and probably a book or some knitting into the federal building at 101 W. Ida B. Wells, just south of the Loop. You go through metal detectors, and into some elevators, and you get spit out onto the 4th floor, into this small, kind of gross waiting room, like a doctor’s office but worse. There are only unpadded rolling chairs to sit in, and no windows to the outside, or tables to rest a coffee on or anything.

You take your paperwork over to the people behind the service windows, and they take it and your REAL ID, and they give you some forms to fill out, and you do it, and then they give you your ID back and tell you to sit, and you do that. Paying bonds in person usually takes around 3 hours. I don’t really know what they do behind the window with all the papers that you give them, or why this process takes three hours, it just does.

So I show up at this strange, windowless waiting room a little past 9 a.m., and I fill out the forms, and I sit down and play on my phone for a while, because I’m not very interested in the book I brought. And the whole time, other people are coming in and doing the paperwork and sitting down and waiting, and there’s a fair bit of interesting people watching you can do, sitting on a rolling chair in the ICE Field Office waiting room, so some of that is happening as well.

I was worried that the waiting room of the ICE Field Office would feel emotionally heavy, that these were people waiting for check-ins where they might be detained, or that there would be people in uniforms watching us all day, that the mechanics and horror of immigration enforcement in this country would be visible to me as I waited, but nope, not really. There were maybe little snatches of conversation, half-overheard allusions to deep sadnesses, but the overall feeling was like the DMV but worse, little family units entertaining themselves and chatting, the kind of exhausted waiting of bureaucracy, the blank-faced stares of people trying not to make eye contact, office workers doing stapling and customer service (with the added bonus that a lot of it involves arguing with lawyers who show up with their clients—a deeply deserved kind of customer service hell in my opinion).

At around noon, they said they were having system failures, and to go get lunch, and to come back after, to see what was going on. So I left, and I had a sad little fast food lunch and told my boss I might be out for the rest of the day, and then I went back into the ICE field office and sat back down to wait.

In a weird kind of opsec failure, you could see what was on the screens of the workers quite clearly from many places in the room, and so I spent a good portion of my day squinting at a computer screen some 25 feet away from me. One of the workers, from the moment I came in that morning, had, full screen on one of his two monitors, videos of a woman cleaning.

For hours, one monitor was email or web portals, while his other was an uninterrupted stream of an anonymous, faceless woman, wiping down surfaces. Table tops, electric stoves, phones, decorative bowls, screens, and a soft cloth methodically moving across all of it. Lifting up the phone receiver, wiping it, setting it down. Cut. A hand moving across a table, back and forth. Cut. One drawer pull after another, left shining. There was no visible dirt in the video, just visible cleaning. A thin, white, blond woman in athleisure, doing the endless labor of cleaning clean things.

I don’t know if this was some kind of a kink thing, or ASMR, or comforting, or relaxing or what, but I did find it profoundly sad. There’s a number of things you can read into it, project given the context. A desire for human touch and contact, running down every surface, instead sublimated to the endless touching of consumer goods. A longing for some kind of racial purity, a white woman endlessly wiping away dirt. A Lady-Macbeth-like desire to clean the invisible moral stain permeating the place, the computer, the man’s brain, but instead of hysterical (out, out damned spot!) eerily, methodically calm. Wipe. Wipe. Wipe.

Also, at my back on the wall were an extensive set of pencil drawings, clearly doodled by one of the many bored children that must pass through this waiting room. A big spiral, an attempt at letters. There were a lot of kids in the waiting room while I was there, sitting quietly while their parents bonded out their loved ones. These kids were good at waiting, at being quiet, but I can see (I could feel in my own body) the way that waiting like that has to, eventually, give way to naughtiness. Hence, a little scrawled pencil spiral on the wall, doodled while a parent was distracted. An illustration of how slow time goes, an expression of a very old impulse to say “I was here, I passed a while staring at this white wall, and I wanted it to look more like me.” I have seen the same thing in immigration detention centers, graffiti marking days passed, hometowns, prayers. Marking the human on the inhuman wall.

I was both surprised it was still up, that it had lasted over night and into the next morning, and also not—this is not a room that is cared for, it is just a room that exists. The only woman that exists to clean with the kind of detailed, loving attention required to erase out pencil markings is on a computer screen behind a glass partition, trapped in an endless cycle of performing.

Time ticked along, and I signed two of the three bonds I was there to pay, but the last one got stuck, somewhere in the system, and then it was 3 p.m., and the office closed and I went home. On my way home, I got a call that I had, somehow, managed to leave my wallet at the ICE office, and the final pending bond got approved, but they were closed, could I please come back tomorrow. And so the next day I got out of bed early, and I took myself back to 101 W. Ida B. Wells Drive (deep, awful, American irony, that an anti-lynching advocate gives her name to the street where ICE lives in Chicago) and I went through the metal detectors and took the elevator to the fourth floor, and was greeted, again, by videos of endless clean counters, getting cleaner.

The people behind the service windows are very nice, interpersonally, actually. (Nice is different than good.) They were very concerned about my wallet, and gave it back to me, and we all kind of laughed, and I asked if I could pay the last bond kind of quickish, and they said yes. I spent another hour waiting to sign the final bond agreement and then I went to work, only a little bit late. Here I am in clown shoes, an imperfect person who loses her wallet kind of a lot, trying to do good by people.

I write all this yes, partially to kinkshame the ICE employee—I am but a simple woman, and I personally don’t think you should be consuming weird, sad, vaguely porn-y content extremely visibly at your government job, and that goes double if your government job is evil, actually, even when you get me my wallet back—but also to show that just as much as evil is banal and kind of stupid, fighting it can be too.

I keep waking up to dread, both in the mornings and periodically throughout the day, like I’m walking around only for the sidewalk to open up in front of me into a yawning chasm. I see the news, and I am both scared, and wonder if I should go put myself in the way of things, if I am doing enough. If it is time to put my body on the line. And every day I get up and I check my emails and I look at the news, and I see how bad things are in the world and the chasm opens up, and every day I look at the chasm and I say, I am doing everything that is within my power, everything that feels useful and that I am good at. I am working at my day job at an immigration legal service provider, recording videos and writing reports about the growth of the detention system and translating things. When I am not at work, I am working with the bond fund to pay bonds and answer ten thousand anxious emails from people who need our assistance and make content that makes people say “oh yeah, I should give them some money!” or “oh, man, the immigration detention system is fucked up, let me call my congressperson.” I am someone that, til now, panics in a crowd, but by god I can write a sentence. So, for now, I do. Even so, when I am called to do more, different things, I will do more, different things.

Even when I am doing a thing that feels scary to me (going, in person, to the ICE field office, giving them my government ID) I am still myself (a person who leaves said ID in said scary office, along with all her credit cards and such). You do not have to be good to do good. In the same way that you can be doing a tremendous amount of harm while watching infinite weird videos of a woman cleaning, you can also do a tremendous amount of good while being scattered and a little clumsy. Do the thing that you are good at, but that is real, that puts you in touch not only with your own virtue but with your failings and your neighbors, and honestly probably your neighbors failings too. Keep asking yourself if you are doing enough, make it a muscle you work until what you do seems easy and then do more.

Where I’ll Be:

• CHICAGO (2/27): Book talk with Betsy Rubiner, author of Our Diaries, Our Selves

• GRAND RAPIDS (4/18): Festival of Faith and Writing, various panels etc.

What I’ve Written:

If you liked my last newsletter, Back in the Saddle, I wrote a recap to our campaign to free hundreds of people from ICE detention for Christian Century. Spoiler: the 7th Circuit sucks, community is amazing.

I also wrote a review of The Autobiography of Cotton for America’s Quarterly.

Also, I wrote a book. Rivermouth is about immigration, and language, and what it means to try to reach beyond yourself. Honestly, if you liked this newsletter, you will probably like this book.

What I’m Reading

Ways of Eating by Benjamin Wurgaft and Merry White. This is my second or third book on like Civilization and Cuisine and I don’t know that I’m getting a ton out of it that feels new, which is, to be very clear, my fault and not the books’.

I’m also in a real head-empty-hands-full spiral prevention mode, which means, to me, audiobooks and cross-stitching, so right now it’s Wolf Hall.

I did just finish Melissa Lozada Oliva’s Candelaria, which is about a Guatemalan grandmother at the end of the world, and is truly deeply delightful and weird.

A little over a month ago, I started my old job at an immigration legal service provider nonprofit back up again. I’ve been doing press releases and social media posts, explainers and briefs, talking to people recently released from immigration detention on the phone to help us convince people that what’s going on is wrong. I liked my old job a lot, I like the new version of it also—even if it has me feeling like I’m moving backwards in a lot of ways. What do you mean I’m at the same place, during another Trump administration, witnessing escalating horrors from behind a computer screen?

It’s been a particularly cursed time to do this work in Chicago—from the first week of September up until last week, we were basically under occupation from federal immigration agents. Every time I logged into social media, I’d see people thrown to the ground, protesters teargassed, all in front of places that are my everyday fabric. I spoke on the phone with a woman who had just been released from detention and still had night terrors. I spoke on the phone with another woman whose husband had been arrested at a Home Depot a few days prior—as soon as I asked her if she wanted to talk about it for a congressional briefing I was working on, she started sobbing and didn’t stop for our entire 45 minute phone call. People are picked up without warrants, without cause—citizens and non-citizens alike—but almost never without violence. There are threats and intimidation, there’s the mandatory stay at Broadview, a “processing center” that is desperately overcrowded and dirty, where they have banned religious services, where they act with violence against protesters. A lot of people are signing voluntary departure orders just to get out what seems like endless detention.

And then, last week: a judge ordered that 615 people must be released from ICE custody, each on a $1,500 bond. These 615 are just a part of what could be class of thousands, a list of names the government should be providing any day now.

In my spare time, I’m on the board of the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund—there’s 15 of us, and we do everything from make the Instagram graphics to actually literally posting bonds. I found out about the ruling in this case because someone DMed our Instagram account on my lunch break, asking if we were fundraising for it. He was the first, he was certainly not the last.

Even though the next week was full of carefully hedged language (“we are working with the litigating attorneys in this case to find out where we can most be helpful,” rinse, repeat), people started donating to us, a lot. Most of these donations were under $100—from real, regular people who saw a glimmer of hope and pulled out their wallets—but they poured in. A lot of us cried about it—I did. All the while, we were scrambling behind the scenes, writing press releases, making landing pages, creating a campaign out of thin air and collaborating with partners to make sure everything met with everyone’s approval, crafting logistical plans and trying to get everything in place so we could make this work. Folks on our bond team were figuring out if we could literally physically get the number of cashier’s checks we would need.

Again: 15 of us. Again, all of us with day jobs.

Today, we launch that campaign. I am so proud of this work—of the people I get to do this with, of the late night and deep discussions that have gone into it, of the brilliance and expertise this represents, and the hearts of all the people I get to do this with.

get someone out of ice today

also: if you don’t have money to give right now, lord knows things are tight, reshare our post, with the link to donate, and you will be doing us a real solid. also: every little bit helps.

Donate Early, Donate Often

I found out, moments before pressing send, that the 7th circuit stayed the original judge’s decision, with further arguments on December 2nd. This is infuriating—we know that ICE agents make the rounds at detention facilities regularly, coercing folks to sign voluntary departure orders, whispering that their situations are hopeless. They now have longer to do this, longer to convince people to give up. But it also means we can build stronger, better coalitions and community so we can be ready to meet the moment when justice actually prevails.

There is nothing that can undo the damage that has been wrought on our families and communities by the federal occupation. People don’t come out of immigration detention the same as they go in. It is a system designed to break you, to make you feel subhuman. But this, at least, gives them all the opportunity to start healing.

Help us bring Chicago home.

have you not donated yet?

I have two upcoming events that I’m really excited about—please come!

tonight, virtually, register here

Jill’s book is such a powerful read—about growing up undocumented, food, and family, and mythology and colonialism. Order Dirty Kitchen here, and come hang out with us tonight.

december 2nd, at pilsen community books in chicago:

I have talked about Mac Loftin’s book before, you will probably get a whole newsletter out of it soon because I think it really shifted and reframed a lot of things about the religion I grew up in for me in ways that made me feel grounded and like these texts were for this moment. Mac and I met, if not in a class on Sacramental Imagination, then definitely in a class on Women & Mysticism, and both should be pretty illustrative of the places where we overlap. Buy Mac’s book at PCB in two weeks :)

I promise that you will have a good time in this conversation even if you don’t know theology, or you aren’t particularly religious.

I feel like I should open this letter by telling all of my dog Chico’s many fans that he is doing ok, but also that this letter contains some details of a fairly gnarly injury my perfect son has recently sustained, so you may want to take care while reading.

Last Wednesday night, when my husband got home from work and was greeted effusively by our dog, he noticed a quarter-sized somewhat crusty and oozy lump on Chico’s back. We called the vet, got an appointment, and the next day, at his office discovered that this was not a small cyst that had burst (my initial assumption) but rather a palm-sized burn, hidden under the fur, that had become infected.

I left the vet an hour later having experienced my tiny dog screaming in pain, and with a good, heart-shaped chunk of his fur shaved from his normally glossy, thick coat with a horrible, oozing mess of skin in the middle of it.

This month marks 10 years of my knowing Chico (and also my husband, I guess) and earlier this year we celebrated Chico entering his teen years. He is a perfect dog—lazy, deeply affectionate, so charismatic it is sometimes difficult to focus on other things when he is in the room, breath bad enough to melt a truck, particular and individual and slightly crotchety, excellent at throwing his butt against you and leaning his whole 15 pounds into your side when he wants attention. I love him wholeheartedly. The last few years have been a process of understanding that he is, like the rest of us, experiencing the ravages of time. He’s almost entirely deaf now, and we think getting a little blind, stairs give him (more) trouble (than usual, he’s really never been a fan), he sleeps more of the day (seemingly impossible), and he will occasionally lose us when we are all on the same couch and run from room to room looking for us. This is both sad and also just the way the world works—I, too, am a little stiffer, a little more unwieldy than when I met Chico when he was 3 and I was 22.

The way the world works is not, however, huge, gnarly injury appearing out of nowhere. Except for when it does.

Neither my husband or I has any idea how or when he got this burn—could he have gotten splashed with boiling water or hot oil when nosing around in the kitchen, even though we try to keep him out? Could it have been an accident at the groomers’ last week? We both feel kind of insane—a week ago we had a perfectly healthy, beautiful dog with all his fur, and now we have a tiny, half-bald guy with a giant, oozing wound, with seemingly no precipitating event in between. Just one day he woke up and his skin fell off. It feels like a horrible dream, complete with horrible dream logic.

Chico, for his part, now that he’s being given painkiller-glazed meatballs every morning, is seemingly unbothered. He’s been spending his days like he usually does1 and other than when we’re putting salve on the burn, seemingly unbothered. But salve we must, twice a day, and I can’t figure out how to explain to him that we are doing this horrible thing to him for his own good. I feel like he knows, given the absolute stoic patience with which he has submitted to me carefully and gently patting goo into his [many texture adjectives here, all of them bad] skin. I am more upset than he seems when his skin flakes away onto my gloved hand.

I am not a person who has ever been good with….the body. I have thrown up a little bit from picking up totally normal dog poop, a thing I do literally every day. The worst part of being sick for me is very often not how I feel but having to deal with the various substances my own body produces. But when it’s Chico, and when it’s my husband, who is better about body stuff than I am but a thousand times more anxious about causing Chico pain, it’s me who is donning the latex gloves and peering carefully at the topography of a burn, gently wiping away grime and dabbing on antibiotic ointment. I am, in the midst of this, worried that it is hurting my relationship with my dog—he knows, already, what it means when I put on blue latex gloves, I watch him snuggle into my husband and avoid me, it hurts my heart.

Of course, we can’t go any farther without bringing in Euripides, trans. Anne Carson2:

Pylades and Orestes are that particular Ancient Greek combo hit of cousins/best friends/lovers. Orestes, still under the particular doom of the house of Atreus, is facing down the barrel of gods-induced illness/madness or a murderous mob. Pylades, although his cousin, is not narratively doomed in this same way, and could choose to walk away, could choose to distance himself from his matricidal cousin, and instead says that he’s not only going to stay, to face Orestes’ fate with him, he will shoulder some of the burdens of Orestes’ condition.

Tumblr user troubledtmesis did some literary analysis of a bunch of translations and of the Greek, and the word that Anne Carson translates here as “care” has some implications around not only tending and tenderness both physically and emotionally, but around ensuring someone has a good death and a proper burial—a duty, an embrace of care that goes beyond life.

I know the context and kind of received meaning of this quote has to do with queerness (remind me, please, to write an essay on my Theory of Queer Chivalry and Courtly Love please, this quote being fig. 1) but I also think this is just what you sign up for when you love someone, particularly a small creature with a shorter lifespan than your own. You sign up, knowing that it’s rotten work. Everything from like, very regularly handling his poop and denying him things he very badly wants because they will make him sick, to making difficult decisions around his health and wellbeing, to some day, in all likelihood, watching him die. But also, it’s not so rotten, after all—what else can you do but tend, but care, but perform the work and fret about it, but do whatever you can to ensure this small creature is happy and lives the longest, most luxurious life the two of you can manage, even if it is, occasionally, marred by discomfort.

My dog is not dying, but I’m also not going to lie or sugarcoat it—it is absolutely, truly, rotten work to care for him right now. It is bad in nearly every way it could be bad—I feel nearly frantic at seeing my dog in pain, I am repulsed by the stuff his body is doing to heal itself, I am constantly worried that I’m going to mess it/him/our relationship up somehow, I hate that I can’t explain to him why I am causing him additional pain and discomfort.

But also, its him, and its me.