Easter 2019 Diary: Holy Saturday - "Planets Without a Sun"
by Hannah Cai
We all know what it feels like to be in a state of limbo. Whether we felt foreign in an unfamiliar space or out of sync with the popular lifestyle around us, we all know too well the chaos, tension, and eternity of an unclear identity. An interrupted trajectory. A future with no direction.
Today, I can’t help but draw parallels between migrants and Jesus’s followers after the crucifixion. The tornado of emotions - anguish, grief, disappointment, disbelief, fear, anger - that brewed in the hours following Christ’s death remind me of the aimless drifting that immigrants and refugees are relegated to. After wandering a barren desert, either buried in the dark trunk of a car or clinging to the handlebars between freight cars, or floating for days, weeks, months above waters of limbo, they arrive to find themselves unwelcomed - sentenced to yet another form of limbo, in an immigration office where lawyers forcefully extract a somewhat cohesive narrative from fragmented memories of trauma, or in a detention center where the promised “American Dream” is understood to be a complete lie.
The following atlas seeks to capture the feeling of being lost when modern time and space are ruptured. However, as it was for Christ’s followers, today’s “least of these” are not condemned to an eternal wandering either.
