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Dan Gonzalez, Director of the Theological Community of Mexico. This prayer was shared during an encounter of Anabaptist leaders in March 2017. The encounter, facilitated by MCC, focused on themes of migration, deportation and the biblical response of the church toward migrants. The prayer is included in the MCC Peace Sunday 2017 packet, along with many other prayers from around the world. The complete packet can be found here. *Translated by Erica VanEssendelft, Connecting Peoples Coordinator and Program Assistant for MCC Mexico.
Our Father who art in the foreign, nationalized be thy name.
Thy political asylum come,
Thy will be done in my land, and all of our peripheral countries,
as it is in the foreign land…the central or northern countries where we look for better
opportunities.
Our daily bread…
…was the motivation that made the matriarch Naomi repatriate; the hope that God had visited her community with bread and returned making what was her daughter-in-law, now friend, Ruth, a “wetback” farm labourer in the field, gatherer of ears of wheat to prepare her own bread… foreign bread! Because: “people do not live by bread alone.”
But by bread as well!
The point:
give us this day our daily dream.
Forgive us our debts, don´t be like our creditors who continue to charge us,
forcing us to leave home, land and family to find a way to pay them.
Even the money-transferring companies charge us fortunes for the remittances and with a
shoddy exchange rate that allows them to earn in minutes what we earn working for days,
which provides our families in the South enough to eat and live for months.
As we forgive…forgive? The majority of the time we don´t know how to forgive.
When someone, out of necessity, owes us a part of the remittances that our sons and daughters send from the North. Or when Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran, African or Asian brothers and sisters arrive as migrants to Mexico to look for their own bread.
And lead us not into temptation, temptation to forget to hope for, or look for, the stateless persons.
New citizenships, new passports and other rights of residence that we do not find in our nation. And let us not fall into the DACA program because we will stop being dreamers, converted into bad men relocatable for deportation.
Deliver us from walls and decrees and three million deportations, and the bad guys…those who are
called “pollero” and leave us in the middle of the journey, in the desert heading North.
Deliver us from the traffickers or networks of prostitution that steal girls to make them addicted and then use them through their bodies.
Deliver us from forced displacement because of ethnic, religious and homicidal hatred.
Deliver us from being boat people, thrown to the sea at the mercy of storms, sharks and dehydration, only to close our eyes and want to believe that hope is just on the other side of the water.
For thine is citizenship, the migration offices and the borders.
For all the exiles and diasporas.
Amen.