Sisters take a Border Pilgrimage
Submitted by Barb Messerknecht
(From Global Sisters Report)
[The sisters] focus Feb 5-9 was the road from San Diego via the cold desert toward Mexico, to see what the landscape, migrants and the Holy Spirit had to say to them during a five-day “border pilgrimage.”
On the route along US-Mexico Border, they heard moving stories and found abandoned campsites in the desert, as well as cemeteries with anonymous makeshift headstones.
“This wasn’t just nuns crossing the border and feeling good,” said Sr. Suzanne Cooke, provincial of the U.S.-Canada Province of the Society of the Sacred Heart, one of about two dozen sisters from various congregations who participated.
What spoke to her, and others were the stories from those they met on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, including a family of 10 from Afghanistan running from the Taliban’s treatment of women; a Peruvian family of seven who left after threats from criminal elements; and a young Chechen escaping Russia.
Though silent, landmarks that sisters visited in the desert also told of the tragedies people on the move are increasingly facing, such as “a potter’s field with a fence,” as one sister said of a dirt plot where unidentified remains — believed to be of migrants — are buried and kept behind a chainlink fence in a cemetery. Unable to enter the area the sisters threw flowers over the fence near bushes marked “John Doe.” Signs served as tombstones for the unknown. The nuns prayed for those buried there and for their families who may never know what happened to their loved ones.”