The Myth of the American Dream by D. L. Mayfield

Author:D. L. Mayfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: red white and blue like jazz;American dream;justice;affluence;refugees;gentrification;school choice;power;safety;autonomy;pursuit of happiness;life liberty and the pursuit of happiness;American Christianity;culture wars;society;love your neighbor;love our neighbors;assimilate or go home;refugee;immigrant;activism;Christian nationalism;nationalism;American exceptionalism;pursue the American dream;wealth;wealthy;affluent;independence;independent
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2020-04-02T08:59:47+00:00

16 THE SHIP OF THE DOOMED

On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare

a feast of rich food for all peoples. . . .

On this mountain he will destroy

the shroud that enfolds all peoples,

the sheet that covers all nations;

he will swallow up death forever.

ISAIAH 25:6-8 NIV

THE SECOND TIME I ALMOST DIED IN CHILDBIRTH, I could not stop thinking about refugees.1 Specifically, a boat full of Rohingya refugees who were seeking refuge and were not allowed to land anywhere—a ship of the doomed.2 I heard about it in the feverish pitch of the hospital room where I was close to dying. Kept alive by machines and medicines, I caught snippets of the world outside of my bed with blurry eyes. My body had decided to fail. My tiny new baby needed me to get better faster than I was able.

At night, when I was the most alone, I thought about those people in the boat—the slow beeping of the monitors checking my blood pressure, my husband asleep in a chair, our baby in a plastic hospital crib. I could not reach my baby. Other people had to take care of the son I had fought so hard to bring into the world. I did not let myself feel sad about this. Instead, I thought about people who were suffering more. I thought about the boat people, the Rohingya. I saw their faces in my mind.

I had made it; my baby had been born. They had got me on the medicines before my heart burst. We were lucky, I told myself fiercely. The Christian language of my youth drifted up to the top of my mind. We were a miracle.

But were we? We had survived while little children starved to death on a boat that drifted from one closed country to another; the world watched silently as we all agreed there were some people too desperate to help. I turned over the faces of the people on the boat like rocks in my fingers. I wanted to make them smooth with my worry. I wanted to save them with my anguish. I, who had barely escaped death, wanted to save everyone else myself. I didn’t trust God to do it anymore.

A few weeks after I left the hospital I had a dream. In the dream I sat at a long wooden table, which stretched into a black infinity. Not a terrifying blackness, a warm, electric darkness that spoke of saturation and richness. I was sitting in an oil painting, but with colors more real and more familiar. The props reminded me of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: wooden bowls full of artfully arranged fruit, rustic loaves of bread scattered in the middle. I was on a bench at the longest table of my life, quietly and with my hands folded in my lap. Around me people were eating and laughing and talking with each other—people I somehow both knew and did not know, people I recognized but had never met. They were throwing a party to which I had somehow snagged an invitation.

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