August

On mangoes, being the stranger, Bonhoeffer, and A Hidden Life

I sit on the floor of my bedroom, fingers prying open plastic packaging. Inside is dried mango brought back from Thailand, by way of North Carolina, now gracing the town of Alamosa. For all its criticisms, sometimes I am unabashedly grateful for globalization. The fruit is a deliciously pale yellow, not the small curled brown pieces sold by trader joes. Sugar dusts the outside, the edges are almost translucent, melting in your mouth.

Whenever I eat dried mango, I find myself thinking about the book Inside Out and Back Again, the story of a young Vietnamese refugee told through poetry. In the story, Hà’s favorite fruit is papaya, and she compares the fruit to her own body and her home in Vietnam. When her family is relocated to Alabama she grieves the loss of her papaya tree. Later, a friend gifts her dried papaya, knowing that it’s her favorite fruit. It tastes of disappointment, making her cry because it’s so much worse than the fresh fruit she grew up with. Quietly, her mom rescues the package from the trash, soaks the pieces in water, washes off the sugar, and reheats it in the microwave, trying to return it to a more familiar texture.

In college, a friend heard me share about how I missed the mangoes I had grown up with in Thailand. I described the Asian mangoes I missed from home, how the skin was thin and yellow, different from the swollen red mangoes from Mexico that were more available in the states. One day she arrived at work with a plastic bag full of yellow mangoes that she had gone to find at an Asian grocery store. I almost cried, it felt like one of the kindest things anyone had done for me.

Thankfully, I love dried mango just as much as fresh mango. I share one package with my coworkers, and I hide the other in my room, carefully rationing the pieces out on sadder days. A little piece of golden, sugary joy. A little piece of home. A little piece of myself.

I have been thinking a lot about those moments recently. In my life I have cycled through several rounds of being secure and at home, then feeling like a stranger, then feeling belonging, then feeling like a stranger all over again. I suspect this pattern won’t end anytime soon. In the words of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Cause with all the changes you've been through, it seems the strangers always you, alone again in some new wicked little town.”¹ I don’t enjoy being a stranger, an outsider. It’s uncomfortable, lonely, and often filled with a grief that is difficult to share or translate.

Just before my sophomore year of high school my family moved from Thailand, where I had spent ten years of my life, to North Carolina, a place I had never been. In Thailand I had been an insider. Ten years of experience in an expat community where people frequently cycled in and out gave me and my family a certain level of seniority and power. In North Carolina I was suddenly the new kid. Instead of being the host, I became the one needing an ambassador family. In Thailand my dad had de facto run the school but now he was a new teacher in a school shaped by American challenge of authority rather than East Asian deference. Whereas I had benefitted from his status in Thailand, in the US I cringed when I heard students complain about him. It was a total loss of power and identity. I remember feeling resentful that no one knew who I used to be. I fantasized about telling the students I saw as powerful and well-known that - “I used to be you. I used to be cool. You think you’re different from me but you’re not.” I hated feeling pitied. I hated that no one knew how I used to be perceived. I was not at the center anymore; I was an outsider.

I cannot romanticize this experience. It was the worst year of my life. I read Inside Out and Back Again, suddenly identifying with elements of Ha’s refugee experience (which to be clear is much more extreme and I cannot claim to understand). Falling off a pedestal is painful, and you find yourself amongst the people you used to look down on or pity. You become one of the people you used to dread inviting. You become desperate for such an invitation.

In college I read a profound piece by Willie James Jennings² where he insists that white Americans must remember that we are the gentile outsiders, graciously grafted into God’s story. This is a truth that rubs up against our false mythology of the American founding and whiteness, and our convenient comparisons of our nation to ancient Israel. We are not the center, choosing whether to include others or not. It is only by remembering our position as outsiders who have been brought into the family of God that we can then humbly include others. If we forget our own inclusion, we become arrogant and prone to fantasies that we are at the top of God’s ‘hierarchy’ and the arbiters of ‘true’ Christianity.

This reminder that we were once the stranger echoes throughout Scripture as well. Over and over in the Old Testament, God commands the ancient Israelites that “You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”³ It is their past existence as strangers and foreigners that should lead God’s people to be merciful and welcoming to strangers and foreigners. It is a commandment that insists on empathy towards the outsider.

Again in Deuteronomy, “[God] defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”⁴ YHWH’s people are to love the outsider because YHWH loves the outsider, and because they used to be outsiders themselves. It is an intriguing one two punch of a command and echoes Jesus’s insistence in the New Testament that all the law and the prophets hang on the command to love God and love our neighbor.

In the New Testament this command is expanded. Paul commands the church to remember. “Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth…remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility”.⁵

We remember our status as outsiders, as those far away, as those excluded and without hope. Why? Because when we remember our status as outsiders we see ourselves as connected to those the world tells us we have no relation to. When I experienced being an outsider my sophomore year, I suddenly saw myself as connected to the girls on my soccer team who were literally refugees. I saw myself as connected to women going through re-entry from the prison system, experiencing parallel culture shock to communities they had been isolated from for years.

By remembering our own exodus, our salvation from alienation back into belonging, we are able to see ourselves as siblings to everyone. The dividing walls of hostility have been removed. Paradoxically, remembering that we are outsiders allows us to belong to everyone.⁶

“You was looking at me, I was looking at you. You had a way, so familiar I could not recognize. Cause you had blood on your face, I had blood in my eyes. But I could swear by your expression that the pain down in your soul, was the same as the one down in mine. That's the pain that cuts a straight line down through the heart.

We call it love.⁷

I’ve been reading Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, a manual for Christian living written while he was incarcerated in Nazi Germany. I’ve been struck by his opening reflections on loneliness and feeling like an outsider. He writes that “God’s people remain scattered, held together solely in Jesus Christ, having become one in the fact that, dispersed among unbelievers, they remember him in far countries.”⁸ These words have a particular potency coming from Bonhoeffer as he is imprisoned, isolated from loved ones because of his actions to undermine the Nazi regime. The hope of return after exile is not restricted to the ancient Israelites, it is a longing felt by all whose obedience to Jesus has led them into seasons or places of loneliness.

Bonhoeffer is particularly concerned with our ministry to one another, and he writes of the essential practice of visiting isolated and lonely brothers and sisters, using the incarnation as his basis. He writes, “Visitor and visited in loneliness recognize in each other the Christ who is present in the body; they receive and meet each other as one meets the Lord, in reverence, humility, and joy.”⁹ This is a stunning image where both the outsider and the insider meet the other as Christ himself. I also love this description as it affirms the goodness of bodily presence. In times of loneliness, phone calls and letters are precious, but visits feel as mystical and dynamic as the incarnation.

My time with Bonhoeffer’s text, so informed by his own life, have also caused me to reflect on one of my favorite movies, “A Hidden Life” directed by Terrence Malick. The film tells the true story of Franz and Fani, Austrian farmers struggling with Franz’ Christian conviction that he cannot swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler and join the Nazi army. It is a movie that feels like a meditative prayer, the sparse dialogue potent, the weight of people’s words lingering over frames of farmwork and mountains. The film takes the trite casuistry of “what would you have done as a Christian in World War 2?” and refuses to let the audience get away with arrogant or easy answers by plunging them into the real decisions facing these ordinary people.

A character remarks that the church has done a great job of creating admirers of Christ and failed at developing followers. It's a line that cuts through to me today. Am I really willing to suffer the consequences of following Christ? When my government is contributing to genocide am I willing to suffer material consequences for the sake of the strangers being massacred?¹⁰ When my government is abducting and imprisoning Christian siblings and neighbors because of a lack of documentation, what will I do?¹¹ Am I willing to go to jail? Am I willing to give up a ‘promising future’?¹² Am I willing to lose my own life for someone else? Would I really not have been a Nazi if it meant being executed and losing a precious future with a spouse and children? Will I actually love the stranger, the foreigner, the enemy, as myself if it means suffering? I don’t know. I really don’t.

The witness of Franz is that you become truly free when you are willing to give up everything, even your own dear life for the sake of faithfulness to God. Hitler doesn’t own you, the military doesn’t own you, your society doesn’t own you. It is another paradox of Christianity, that by giving up your life you gain it. When you fall off the pedestal of power, you find belonging. When you love your neighbor, you become a neighbor.

Again, these decisions can only be romanticized by admirers. Followers quickly discover that there is darkness and hopelessness when you make these choices. Franz at times feels as though God has abandoned him, and he questions his own convictions and beliefs. And yet, the testimony of followers is that there is also true joy, a humane happiness as Andrew DeCort puts it.¹³I don’t think I fully understand this. Perhaps this is the peace that passes understanding.¹⁴

At this risk of this becoming overly heavy, I want to return to the mangoes. There is a time for extreme sacrifice on behalf of others. There is also a time for loving the stranger in simple ways. In fact, it may be that by being faithful in little¹⁵ that we eventually become courageous enough for the big moments. Maybe I can’t give up everything right now. I can still look for the outsiders in my own life. The people with their backs against the wall¹⁶, the poor, the poor in spirit. I can recognize in these people “the Christ who is present in the body” and meet them as “one meets the Lord.”¹⁷ I can give and receive fresh mango and papaya.

P.S. This Sunday, I was invited to join my little church’s Hospitality Committee. The best part is that due to a typo, we call ourselves the Hostility Committee. I hope we can all form our own official or unofficial Hostility committees.

1. Wicked Little Town (Tommy Gnosis Version)

2. Willie James Jennings - “Overcoming Racial Faith” in Spring edition of Divinity magazine

3. Exodus 22:21

4. Deuteronomy 10:17-19

5. Ephesians 2:11-14

6. Read Andrew DeCort’s new book, Reviving the Golden Rule to learn a more comprehensive overview of the golden rule: Christ’s call to love our neighbors, our enemies, and the ‘other’.

7. Origin of Love by Hedwig and the Angry Inch

8. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, and John W. Doberstein. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. HarperOne, 1954, 18.

Bonhoeffer is quoting Zechariah 10, “Though I scatter them among the peoples, yet in distant lands they will remember me. They and their children will survive, and they will return. I will bring them back from Egypt.”

9. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, and John W. Doberstein. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. HarperOne, 1954, 20.

10. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/israel-opt-israeli-organizations-conclude-israel-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza-in-another-milestone-for-accountability-efforts/

11. MC USA and more than two dozen Christian and Jewish denominations and associations sue to protect religious freedoms | Mennonite Church USA

12. “when you motor away... when you free yourself from the chance of a lifetime... you can be anyone they told you to.” Motor Away

13. DeCort, Andrew D. Blessed Are the Others: Jesus’ Way in a Violent World. Bitter Sweet Books, 2024.

14. Phillipians 4:7

15. Luke 16:10

16. Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited

17. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, and John W. Doberstein. Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community. HarperOne, 1954,18.