.png)
Presente
- Robin Lunn
- Mar 19
- 3 min read
Last Monday evening, as the cherry blossoms were about to burst, I was part of a gathering at Capitol Mall Plaza to observe a Day Without An Immigrant Vigil for the Dead and Disappeared. Warm air on our faces. A clear sky above. The smell of sage and palo santo moving through the crowd, blessing us all. Artists from the Mexican Indigenous tradition had laid a stunning ground painting at the center of it all. PCUN had built an ofrenda - paper flowers, monarch butterflies, photographs of people killed or taken by ICE and CBP. The Stone Church Band (Steve Yant, Mark Babson, and Rick Bingham) played. Danza Azteca opened us with prayer and a land acknowledgment, rooting us in something ancient before we turned to face what is immediate and urgent.
And then, after each of the four faith leader spoke, one by one, we spoke the names of the dead and disappeared into the evening air. Together we answered:
Presente.
You are here. You are not forgotten.
I have been sitting with that word ever since.
Hebrew and Christian scripture are insistent, repetitive almost to the point of obsession, on one commandment above nearly all others: do not oppress the stranger.
You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:34)
It appears in one form or another thirty-six times in the Torah alone, more than almost any other instruction. The ancient teachers knew how easy it would be to forget. They understood that the temptation to draw the circle of belonging tightly - to decide that some people's disappearance is acceptable, that some grief does not need to be witnessed - is not an aberration. It is a constant human failure requiring constant, deliberate resistance. Jesus inherits this tradition and deepens it: the stranger at the gate, the neighbor who turns out to be the one you least expected, the face of God hidden in the face of the vulnerable.
We are living inside the breaking of that commandment, on a massive scale, right now.
In Gaza, families search the rubble to find their dead, people whose names they know and love, whose bodies they cannot reach. In Sudan. In Congo. In the detention centers of our own nation. People are taken in the night and made unreachable, disappeared into a system that depends on our silence and our forgetting. The desaparecidos are not a metaphor from another era. They are present tense. They are here.
And we are not the first people to be called back to this commandment in a time of state violence against the vulnerable.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo walked every Thursday for decades, photographs of their disappeared children pinned to their chests. Las locas: the crazy ones. Their love outlasted the regime. The Black churches of the American South held sanctuary and grief and Spirit together when the law offered nothing. Indigenous communities across this continent survived removal, erasure, enclosure, the theft of children, and still passed language and ceremony and memory forward across generations. Each of them was practicing, in their own way, the ancient insistence that every person belongs and is beloved. They were insisting that no regime gets to decide otherwise.
That insistence is what brought people to Salem on a warm spring evening, under a clear sky, with the smell of sage still in the air. It is why the ofrenda was built, because beauty in the face of erasure is its own form of resistance. It is why we said the names. It is why we walked.
We do not know how long this struggle will ask us to keep showing up: how many vigils, how many names, how many evenings we will stand together and refuse to look away. Our ancestors didn't know either. But they built something that reached us, across decades, across borders, across death itself. We are building something too, for those who come after us.
We are not walking alone. We walk with the Mothers. With the churches. With every community that has refused to let the stranger disappear without a name. And our tradition tells us: we walk with the Christ who has always been found among the vulnerable, the taken, the disappeared, calling their names.
Presente.
In Solidarity and Hope,
Pastor Robin
To read my remarks, click here.
Comments