BUSTH Alum Christina Rathbone (STH’09) Has Helped People Excluded from Society Share Their Stories
This article was originally published in focus magazine, the annual scholarly publication of the BU School of Theology, in May 2021. The full magazine is posted here and this article can be found on page 27.
On the Margins: As a Reporter, then a Priest, Christina Rathbone (STH’09) Has Helped People Excluded from Society Share Their Stories
By Andrew Thurston
Cristina Rathbone doesn’t normally wear a clerical collar, but the asylum seekers at the US border needed all the help they could get. If her collar helped nudge a border agent into waving them across, it was worth the effort.
A priest in the Episcopal Church in Boston, Rathbone (’09) spent six months in 2019 working with asylum seekers fleeing violence and persecution in Central America and hoping for sanctuary in the United States. Like many of the people she met, Rathbone ended up in Juárez. The northern Mexican city sits shoulder to shoulder with El Paso, Texas—border cities split by the Rio Grande, but tied together by four bridges that carry thousands of migrants every year.
“I would put my collar on only to go up to the checkpoint and seek to lend a bit of my privilege as a US citizen and an ordained member of the clergy,” says Rathbone, “to try to encourage border patrol to uphold the laws as they stand—that anybody asking for asylum should be allowed straight into the country to pursue that case.” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
In recent years, it’s become harder than ever to claim shelter in the United States. During his four years in office, former President Donald Trump consistently reduced the cap on the number of refugees the country would admit. In October 2020, he set the limit at just 15,000; in 2016, the US had welcomed 85,000. According to the Washington Post, the courts have a backlog of more than 1 million pending asylum claims. “My mother’s Cuban,” says Rathbone, “so I have always had a particular interest in stories of immigration, especially from Latin America.”
In the Heart of Suffering
Born in America, Rathbone spent her formative years in the United Kingdom—her father’s homeland—before returning to the States for college. After starting, but not finishing, a degree in documentary filmmaking in New York, Rathbone became an investigative journalist, publishing articles in a range of papers and magazines, including the Miami Herald and the New York Daily News. It wasn’t until she was in her forties that she switched paths and joined the church. “The kind of journalist I was and the kind of priest I am are so similar,” says Rathbone. The people Rathbone wrote about— particularly in her two books, On the Outside Looking in: Stories from an Inner-City High School and A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars—were on society’s frayed edges. “My home lay out on the margins,” she says.
“The homeless folks in Boston taught me everything I know about how to pastor to people even as they are in the heart of suffering. They taught me that mostly all I really need to do is listen and learn, and then I’ll be given the skills that I need, as I need them, from the community on the ground.”
It still does. After studying theology at STH, Rathbone joined the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, serving as a canon missioner and pastor to people experiencing homelessness. “The homeless folks in Boston taught me everything I know about how to pastor to people even as they are in the heart of suffering,” she says. “They taught me that mostly all I really need to do is listen and learn, and then I’ll be given the skills that I need, as I need them, from the community on the ground.”
On the Border
When Rathbone arrived in Juárez in August 2019, she joined with the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande in El Paso to do what she describes as small things: provide water, food, blankets, and clothing; later, she helped start a class for children and began walking with families to the border.
“I’m a great believer in small things,” says Rathbone. “Once we get sidetracked by trying to create big things, we spend more time thinking about the big thing than the actual work the big thing is supposed to contain and represent. “Having said that, it’s really hard doing small things in the face of such dire and multiple suffering.”
She says the resilience of the people she met—groups of moms and kids who’d banded together for the journey, parents whose children had been tortured and murdered by narcos—“enlarged and transformed my heart.” But caring for them required caring for herself too. Rathbone says she relied on encouragement— spiritual and financial—from the institutional church, as well as from friends and family. “When one’s operating very much out on the edge of things,” says Rathbone, “it becomes very important, at least for me, to feel tethered to the center.”
In November 2020, Rathbone started a new program to train and guide others in the church who want to help those seeking safe harbor in the United States. Neighbor to Neighbor connects asylum seekers with local Episcopal churches to help them adjust to life in the country. “I went to the border thinking it was the place where I needed to be in order to be of the most use in this immigration quagmire,” says Rathbone, who is leading the organization in collaboration with Episcopal Migration Ministries. “I’ve realized that the border is everywhere in this country already: people who cross the border go to literally every town and city. We can be of service wherever we are.”
Having spent so much of her life hearing and telling the stories of those excluded from society, Rathbone hopes Neighbor to Neighbor—which launched in the Episcopal Dioceses of Massachusetts, Southeast Florida, the Rio Grande, and New Jersey—will enable others in the church to spend more time with them too.
“We, the church, need to be in relationship with the people who are most suffering, because they have the most to teach us about love.”
“We, the church, need to be in relationship with the people who are most suffering, because they have the most to teach us about love,” she says. “Those of us in the church tend to be particularly good at pretending we’re not broken. Being with people who can no longer pretend liberates us to confess our own brokenness; once we do that, the healing has already begun.”