Tending the Thorny Ground: Diaspora, Displacement, and Belonging in America
Living East of Eden
My husband Colin is a pastor, and in his sermon a few weeks ago, he mentioned diaspora, a method employed by Rome to hurt populations by forcibly removing people from their territories and homes. During his sermon, this thought struck me:
America is a country uniquely shaped, and simultaneously wounded, by the displacement of people.
We are one of the few nations truly made up of dispersed peoples, many of whom were forced to its shores, who must coexist with others who chose to move and those who went because their homelands had become untenable. And then, because America was not an empty receptacle that we could simply fill, we brutally relocated those who were already here.
We are a country of fusion and fracture.
Rome did not invent the concept of diaspora; prior civilizations like the Assyrians and Babylonians did, but Rome certainly refined the technique. For Rome, this was a method of conquering truly resistant populations. Driving a tribe from their homeland and forcing them to resettle in a region seized from another people was an effective way to scramble any rebellious organization and extinguish behaviors distinctive to a group within a generation or two.
In the biological world, a habitat change can exert such pressure on a species group that it is forced to change fundamental aspects of itself in order to survive. Beaks become longer, colors mute or alter, diets or mating behaviors shift, wings weaken, legs lengthen, and resources are reallocated. In fact, if done over a long enough time, considerable habitat change can cause two groups that started out the same to diverge so much that they become unrecognizable to each other.
And one could argue that nearly all American citizens have undergone considerable habitat change.
In fact, I think land displacement plays into how successful Christianity has been. Folk and indigenous religions often use the land as sacred space, with things like tree groves, holy springs, rives, mountaintops, and more acting as temples or residences for sacred spirits. Even Rome was inhabited by gods. Augustine "scornfully noted that the Romans needed three gods to guard the door: Forculus to guard the door, Cardea the hinges; Limentinus the threshold."1 The gods of nearly any ancient pantheon were attached to localized domains, living out their story in a landscape.
Diaspora and dispersion effectively ended people’s access to their religions.
This is not to imply that Christianity didn’t have its own version of land connection (consider how many wars were waged for access to Jerusalem), but for the most part, Christianity was generally a portable religion. Your body is the temple, your citizenship is in heaven, and a relic, icon, rosary, or crucifix can meet your needs for something tangible.
But when people left or were carried from their homelands, they lost access to the places and things that made their belief system possible. Completing this loss of access were competing religions, often a large driver in the destruction of sacred spaces when new populations took up residence in new areas.
The Bible often talks about the experience of diaspora; entire books are devoted to attempts to avoid it or laments when they are unable to. Christianity’s Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and Jesus) fled to Egypt for several years to escape persecution from a mad ruler. In fact, some academics believe that Galilee was inhabited by people taken from elsewhere, making Galileans (and Jesus by proxy) Jewish by faith rather than ethnicity. (There is some circumstantial evidence, but it could also be the work of people who simply dislike Jesus’ Jewishness, which is a whole other post.)
We also see displacement in the refugee status of Adam and Eve. Genesis 2:15 – “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Then in Genesis 3:23-24- “So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
Whether or not you believe in a real Adam or a mythic one, at its heart, this story is one of displacement. At one time, the human and the land were intimately connected and interdependent. And then they were not.
(I also have theories that the story of Eden may be a record of humankind’s painful transition from foraging to agriculture, but that is yet again, another post.)
I find it fascinating that Adam was told to work the land of Eden, but then also to work the land in the country east of Eden, where he was sent. His mission remained the same; only it had become more difficult outside of his own home landscape. Tending would be more labor-intensive, and the garden would be more likely to produce thorns alongside its fruit.
Colin always says that a sermon or a piece or writing should have good news. In this case, I think that this is our good news. We are all east of Eden, yes. But we are still called to work and to tend. The ground here will still respond to us.
Thorns expected, though.
In her book Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, Tamar Novik tells of the attitude of a small group of Jewish settlers who began to return to Palestine during the end of the Ottoman Empire, “In the early twentieth century, European travelers, researchers, and settlers as well as some Palestinian intellectuals considered the local Arab population to be the link between the biblical past and modern Palestine, and therefore they studied and to some extent adopted Palestinian Arab ways of life.” The Jewish settlers at this time had extensive discussions about how to become “native” to this area.
And a small portion of them chose to turn to the land and its people. The concept of learning to raise sheep in the Bedouin style particularly piqued the Jewish imagination. Sheep and herds appear hundreds of times in the Bible. These Jewish people believed that if they worked with their ancestral animals on their ancestral lands alongside their ancestral brothers, they would get a deeper understanding of themselves and their people.
Novik discusses the experience of those who approached the Bedouins and accepted their authority. As they did, something within them changed. The land took on a character and personality. Sheep stopped being sheep and became individuals. The new shepherds learned to distinguish sheep by minute variations in ear shape, size, hair length, even facial expressions and temperament. She quotes one as saying: “You realize that the sheep is not so innocent as you initially imagined, that she has her own wisdom, and that she is not so helpless and miserable.”
They learned to find food in season, learned when tree branches should be chopped down to augment available grazing, where still waters could be found, and even how to embody the movements and calls of Bedouin shepherds. According to Novik’s research, they even learned that their sheep had a smell distinct to their herd, which could be used for sorting.
Now did each settler do this? Of course not. Novik discusses how the strong urge to “re-nativize” gave way to something else: the drive to be more efficient and get more out of the sheep and herds. They hustled the beasts back into the small fields and large barns, abandoning the pastoral life. Bedouin stopped being brother and became bother.
So, in this season of election bluster that centers on loving this country made up of people from many lands, I would suggest we take a walk.
Read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Notice how the light falls on the leaves at this time of year. Learn the name of a native plant. Pull an invasive species from your garden. Pay attention to the specific dip of your yard that stays wetter than the rest.
Engage with the environment around you, even if it’s not the land of your ancestors, and find something sacred in it.
This land may be thorny, and we are far from Eden, but we still have a calling to tend to it. By doing so, we might begin to heal the scars of diaspora and displacement, even in small ways.
While we acknowledge that we are a country of fusion and fracture, we equally recognize that we have the capacity to evolve, reconnect with the land, and to find our place within it. Holding the best intentions of those that sought to learn from the land and its people, we might explore what it means to be part of this place, to know it, to tend it, and to care for it as if it were your own—because, in many ways, it is.
In the end, perhaps our good news is that, while we may be east of Eden, we are not without hope. The land is still here, waiting to be cared for, ready to respond to our efforts. And in that care, we might find a new sense of belonging—founded on a shared commitment to nurture the place where we stand.
And in doing so, may we all find our way home, thorns and all.
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Salisbury, Joyce E. Perpetua's Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. New York: Routledge, 1997.