For one of my upcoming classes at Fordham, we are reading selections from Our God is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice, by theologian Ched Myers and pastor Matthew Colwell (Orbis, 2012). Myers and Colwell argue that a close reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures, in the context of the pressing controversies about immigration in the West, and particularly in the USA, show that care for the immigrant is fundamental to the continual “care for the stranger” theme in these biblical traditions.

They argue that the practice most fitting these biblical disclosures is, in the language of organizer and activist Alexia Salvatierra, “prophetic hospitality,” in which care for the vulnerable transcends concern for contingent political borders. Myers and C0lwell emphasize that the theological ground of care for the “undocumented” is the “statelessness” of God, expressed also in the injunction to ancient Israel to care for the stranger, because they were strangers in Egypt. Along the way, Myers and Colwell remind us that the Christian scriptures picture Jesus’ family as political refugees, and Jesus’ stateless itinerancy comes up again and again (nowhere to rest — Luke 9:58; needing hospitality — Luke 19:5; knocking on the door and asking for a meal — Revelation 3:20). The city for all time, the “New Jerusalem” in the book of Revelation, is pictured as a city whose gates are permanently open (21:25).

As I reviewed their work over the last few days, I thought that what Myers and Colwell are suggesting is that readers come to greater terms with the “immigrant within” each of us, that we perhaps deny or repress, as a way of rendering “secure” and “documented” persons more available to acting in the interest of the undocumented, the immigrant. (See here for information on the New Sanctuary Movement.) As they put it, “Individual, family, and social health all depend on our willingness and ability to transact our past. It is thus a pastoral challenge to our churches to facilitate the process of ‘excavating’ our buried immigrant identities.” (p. 66)

I wondered, what musical experiences or songs have aided, or might aid, this state of awareness?

For me, Radiohead’s song “The Tourist” has been one aid to such an exercise. The song’s languorous and elegiac tone allows a kind of reflection on the ways that I have made journeys from one place to another, internally and externally, in my life, and brings me into, I hope, further sympathy for the ways in which everyone around me is in process of negotiating borders in their (more…)

This Friday, I’ll be seeing Radiohead in New Jersey. Radiohead and U2 are two bands that I feel like I should have seen live many times before, given their influence on my life, musically, theologically and otherwise, but I have never seen either band live. Radiohead wound its way into my head through their OK Computer album, a conversion experience that I wrote a bit about earlier at R&T here.

In anticipation of Friday’s show, I have been thinking especially about “Airbag” from OK Computer, because that is the song that most compelled me day after day as I would hear that album played at a coffee shop in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was the theological fragments that got me, resituated as they were amidst fresh sounds and new words that were not trying to hold them in an unchanging theological system, but rather let them be the cry of a personal search:

“In the next world war / in a jack-knifed juggernaut / I am born again

In the neon sign / scrolling up and down / I am born again

In an interstellar burst / I am back to save the universe

In a deep deep sleep / of the innocent / I am born again

In a fast German car / I’m amazed that I survived / an airbag saved my life

In an interstellar burst / I’m back to save the universe”

The words to me seemed ancient and new, theological and psychological, intercut by those weirdly baffled drums, the modest and thoughtful bass, the inquiring and companionable guitar, the keyboards

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Sitting last night in the Beast bar in Brooklyn, Radiohead came over the sound system, which consisted — like many bars now — of the bartender’s IPod connected to the stereo.

Taken in by the characteristic blips and beeps alongside garage-rock guitar, I was taken back to 1998, when I was in graduate school, working on my doctorate at Boston College, and to pay the bills I was “temping.” This means I was filling in as a secretary at a tech firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the summer. I was paying the rent and not much more, and would steal away during lunch breaks to the Someday Cafe in Davis Square, in Somerville (adjacent to Cambridge).

Someday Cafe (now defunct, sadly) featured Kiss albums as permanent art across two walls of the large main room, made the best latte I have yet tasted — sonorously dark gravel with an extraterrestrial charge — and I spent almost every midday in the summer of 1998 reading or reveling there. And did I say the most important thing? They played Radiohead’s new “OK Computer” album almost daily.

Let me remind you that Someday Cafe was somewhat grungy. The bathrooms were graffitied and sometimes unseemly; the couches crumby but not quite unsanitary; the tables and chairs a little worn but not dangerous; the clientele alternative but not too unwashed, looking for what passed for a genuine space of existence in the 1990s, tattooed, sensitive, gender-deconstructive, alternative-rocking.

And last night’s musical citation reminded me of the soundtrack peculiar to that time and place: in my thirtieth year. And I thought of how unusual things have become so quickly in our culture, when musical soundtracks that also provide spiritual points on a compass can inform us not only in our teenage years, but well through our 20s and into our 30s and beyond. New discoveries about music and spirit can keep being made, so long as one does not allow either music or one’s sense for the sacred to be another way of repeating oneself.

Last night, I was grateful for the summer of 1998, Someday Cafe, OK Computer, and the mild and fairly relentless restlessness of my searching in faith and music, an experience I probably take as a clue for what I look for in all of my theology, and certainly in the way I make sense of how others talk about their musical and spiritual sensibilities.

“Airbag,” the first track from that album, reminded me, and many many others in that cafe, and in my cohort, “I’m amazed that I survived.” “I am born again.” That memory can still give courage for new births, and renewed amazement.

Tom Beaudoin
New York City, United States