A Passport and a Prayer

by Wesley Steven Rowell

A couple of weeks ago, as I was leaving my house to head to Calvary, a new thought flashed across my mind: Take your passport with you. I couldn’t explain why, but I obeyed that quiet inner nudge. Ever since then, I’ve packed my passport every morning, right alongside my laptop and my lunch. It’s become a strange sort of ritual, a small but potent reminder. As a queer Black man who carries both vulnerability and privilege, it might seem like an unnecessary precaution, a loss of freedom so minor it hardly counts. But to me, it’s a daily reminder of how fragile “liberty and justice for all” can really be.

You may have read about the Episcopal priest in Texas who is currently being detained by ICE for no apparent reason, or about the daughter of another Episcopal priest who was taken into custody this summer for allegedly overstaying her visa, even though it doesn’t expire until December. These stories are chilling not only because they reveal the instability of the systems we depend on, but also because they show how quickly safety and belonging can turn uncertain. These are scary times for our most vulnerable neighbors.

It would be easy to say that these are unprecedented times. But a quick glance at scripture tells us that these times are quite precedented. God’s people have always lived under the shadow of empire. They have always known what it is to be strangers in strange lands, to have their safety depend on the whims of power. “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger,” says Exodus, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21) Over and over, the story of faith is a story of people learning to remember their own deliverance so that they might become deliverers for others.

In my four months in Memphis, I’ve been surprised again and again by its beauty: the blazing sunsets, the luminous moons, the warmth of its people. It’s a different picture than the one painted by national headlines, which so often reduce this city to an unrelenting hellscape. Of course, Memphis bears deep wounds —historic and systemic —and there’s real work ahead to heal them. But this city, like so many of us, is more than its trauma. It’s also laughter on porches, and music spilling from open church doors, and the smell of barbecue that feels like home.

Still, there are moments when love and unease coexist. The sight of armed militia on our streets doesn’t make me feel safer, even when most of those young men look barely old enough to understand the ancestral pain embedded in the ground beneath their boots. And yet I try to hold both my uneasiness and my empathy together in the wide container of God’s love. That’s what faith feels like to me lately, not certainty, but a holding. A hope, sometimes against hope, that we are still moving towards “on earth as it is in heaven.”

I’m falling in love with Memphis, and like all love, it demands honesty. Love asks us to see clearly what is broken while refusing to give up on what is possible. It invites us to live as people of the kingdom. People who seek, in the words of the prophet Micah, “to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” (Micah 6:8)

So, maybe carrying my passport isn’t just an act of caution. Maybe it’s a sacrament, a reminder that my truest citizenship has never depended on any earthly power, but on a God who calls us all to freedom, and who is forever leading us home.