A Candle at the Threshold of Belonging

“There are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from.” —Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others

At my desk, mindlessly scrolling through the news, my heart jumped at an image of people yelling at one another in the streets. It was Belfast, a city I’ve never visited, yet one that has long lived in my imagination as a symbol of something I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand.

Belfast lays claim to me. Partly because of Ireland itself, and the biological connection that came to me through my father’s birth mother, the Irish woman who gave him up for adoption when he was eighteen months old. Partly because, in the years since writing Reunion, I’ve allowed myself to know more fully how much Ireland, and the longing to belong to Ireland, lives in me.

But Belfast also opens an old wound in Catholicism.

It brings to mind the Troubles and the sectarian violence that turned Christian against Christian, neighbor against neighbor, Catholic against Protestant, all while invoking the language of liberty, home, and belonging. I know, of course, the history is more complicated than religion alone. Politics, colonialism, class, national identity, occupation, and power all live within the Molotov cocktails of that conflict. But in my mind, Belfast symbolizes one of the unbearable contradictions of Christianity: that those who claim to follow the crucified Christ could still bomb, burn, and terrorize their neighbors in the name of protecting their tribe. Often, in the name of Christ.

Would Christ have bombed his neighbors because they worshipped Him differently?

The question is absurd, and yet history makes us ask it again and again.

So, when Belfast appeared in the news again, this time migrant families threatened, homes attacked, migrants wondering whether the place they’d fled to for safety was now unsafe, my ache was visceral. And theological. It touched upon my father’s hidden Irish story, my own complicated inheritance from the Church, and the question I keep circling now: what does it mean to be Christian, to be Catholic, if the stranger at the door is treated first as a threat and only later, if ever, as a child of God?

I thought of my friend in Montreal, a mother explaining anti-immigrant posters to her young daughter. I thought, too, of my own immigrant ancestors, Irish and Italian, who came to this country and were told, in one way or another, to go back where they came from. I thought of all the ways people learn to pass, to become acceptable, to leave some essential part of themselves outside the door to be allowed in.

And, unexpectedly, I thought of Barcelona.

On my visits there, in between long days of teaching at IESE Business School, I sometimes slip into a church not far from my hotel, Església de Sant Ramon de Penyafort, on the Rambla de Catalunya. It’s not the Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s glorious, impossible flowering and flowing of stone and light, the most nature-like stonework I’ve ever seen. Sant Ramon doesn’t overwhelm you with genius. It’s humble, ordinary, darker, and perhaps because of that, more accessible.

The bones of the building date back centuries, though not on this spot. The church began its life elsewhere, as the chapel of a Dominican convent, Santa Maria de Montsió. In the 1880s, when the sisters could no longer stay, it was taken down and carried across the city—stones and bones—to be rebuilt and renamed on the Rambla. The church itself, I learned only later, is a migrant: dismantled, displaced, re-rooted, received. I had been kneeling in a displaced building, praying for displaced people. Since its arrival, its walls have held the residue of smoke and prayers, the tears, heartaches, and joys of the faithful. When I kneel in its pews, as I do whenever I visit, I can hear the whispered pleas of elderly women in their black mourning clothes, reminding me of my grandmother fingering her prayer cards and pleading with the Lord to welcome home her heavenly ancestors.

Still, despite the mystery of old stones bathed in generations of prayer, Sant Ramon feels ordinary in the way I suspect the Church is meant to be ordinary: a place where the tired and weary come in from the street to recover their faith, in God perhaps, but also in one another. It’s the kind of place where people might sit for a few minutes before returning to the day. Or where a coach, tired from travel and from the work of asking leaders to become better humans, might catch his breath before beginning the lessons again.

Perhaps that is why I thought of Mary and Joseph. Not because the church resembled Bethlehem but because the story of Christmas begins, in part, with parents on the move searching for shelter only to be denied.

Inside, the air was still and cool. The noise of Barcelona muffled each time the door opened and closed behind me. The smell of incense, old stone, and melted wax made the space dreamlike, as if the ordinary rules of time had been suspended. There were candles, large and white, set in glass, bought for a euro from a vending machine in the vestibule. That detail should have broken the spell, I suppose, but it didn’t. If anything, the small machinery of it—the coin, the candle, the flame—made the gesture feel more human. There was nothing grand about it. Only the shimmer of light against the dark, shining like shook foil, and the simple act of asking for mercy for those who need it.

Surprising myself, I lit a candle there more than once.

I hadn’t lit a candle in a church since I was a boy, fifty years ago. When I was young, I served at Mass and would become dizzy with the scent rising from the censer as I swung it rhythmically at the end of its chain, while the priest, Father Joseph perhaps, beseeched Mary for her intercession in the world.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of death.”

I remember the solemnity of it all: the bell, the smoke, the bowed heads, the body learning reverence before the mind could explain what reverence meant.

But each morning during that visit to Barcelona, I found myself returning to the cool dark of that church because, frankly, I was scared. Donald Trump was about to be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, and the rhetoric of hatred and division was rising again in ways I feared would make vulnerable people suffer. People would be targeted, told they didn’t belong, forced to carry the fear others could not bear to face in themselves.

Unexpectedly, I then turned to an old source of comfort and confusion.

I don’t stand in the faith of my childhood in the same way anymore. I cannot. Life, grief, therapy, Buddhism, writing, and the long work of growing up have changed too much for that. And yet the Church has never been simple for me. I was drawn to it as a boy: to the incense, the bells, the chants, the long shadows of Good Friday, the old women fingering their beads, the cassock and surplice, the hunger of fasting, the terrible beauty of the Crucified Christ.

I was drawn, too, to teachings like liberation theology. I was drawn to the insistence that God’s love belonged especially to the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, the imprisoned, the stranger. That version of the Church called me. It still does.

But I was also wounded by it. I knew the Church as a place where a boy could learn to fear his own body, where sexual feelings curdle into shame, where the longing to be holy became a wish to cut away whatever felt most human.

When I lit those candles in Barcelona, I was not simply returning to faith but returning to a wound as well as hope; a wound and a wellspring of hope.

Kneeling, I was drawn backward toward the boy I’d once been, awed by the Crucified Christ above the altar and the strange, terrible story that He had died for our sins. I remember the hush that falls over a child when he senses, before he can explain it, that suffering and love may somehow be bound together. I remember, too, the other lesson, the one no child should have to learn: that the body might betray the soul, that desire might endanger goodness, that to be holy one might have to disappear from oneself.

That is too heavy a burden for a boy. It’s too heavy for anyone.

Perhaps that’s why Pope Francis’s final Easter words stayed with me. He was too weak to read them himself; another voice carried them across St. Peter’s Square while he sat on the loggia, one day before he died. “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” A dying man’s last plea, and it was for the stranger. And perhaps that’s why Pope Leo’s words from Spain moved me. Together, they reminded me of the Church I once hoped was true: not the Church of shame and self-punishment, not the Church that taught a boy to distrust his own body, not the Church that lets Christians imagine Christ would bless the bombing of neighbors, but the Church of mercy, accompaniment, liberation, and belonging; the Church that insists we meet Christ in the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned, the naked, the sick, and the stranger—the migrant, standing again at the door; the embodiment of all we wish to protect ourselves from.

Leo spoke of migration not as a logistical challenge or political argument, but as a moral test. He called for safe and legal pathways, protection from traffickers, and a welcome that includes real opportunities for integration. He reminded the world that the moral greatness of a nation is revealed in its capacity to “accompany, protect and love those lives that are most fragile.”

Pope Leo’s words from Spain were more than commentary on migration policy. In them, I heard Belfast, Montreal, the memory of my migrant ancestors, the contradictory wound of the Church, and the small flame of a candle I lit in Barcelona and the ones I lit in Brooklyn. In the candlelight, I saw the Brooklyn church of my childhood, the Church that formed and wounded me, and the Christ I met as a boy.

Fragility, though, isn’t much honored in our time. Empathy is dismissed as weakness. Desperation is treated as a disorder. Difference is treated as danger. The stranger becomes the container for everything unresolved: economic fear, cultural dislocation, loneliness, loss of trust, failures of governance, failures of imagination, failures of care.

And yet Morrison’s words keep working on me: “There are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves.” Including, she reminds us, versions we have not embraced, versions we wish to protect ourselves from.

That may be the deeper terror. The fear is not only that the stranger will change us. The fear is that the stranger will reveal us: our dependency, our need, our history, our vulnerability, our capacity for cruelty, our longing to belong, our own unacknowledged knowledge of what it means to stand at the threshold and wonder if there is a place for us.

In Reunion, I wrote about the longing to belong because I believe that longing sits near the center of human life. We are born into dependence. We come into being through relationship. We are shaped by families, neighborhoods, languages, ancestors, wounds, institutions, myths, and exclusions. We spend much of our lives asking, often without words: Am I safe here? Am I wanted? Is there a place for me? Must I leave some part of myself outside the door to be accepted?

Migrants and refugees ask those questions with particular urgency. They ask them after leaving home, often not because they wanted to abandon home, but because home became impossible. War. Poverty. Persecution. Climate change. Political collapse. Gang violence. Economic desperation. The slow exhaustion of hope. And then, having left one home, they arrive at the threshold of another, a threshold of hope and possibility.

What happens at that threshold reveals much about the society they come to. It reveals the moral structure of its leadership. It reveals whether belonging is understood as a scarce commodity to be defended or as a civic and spiritual capacity to be cultivated.

This is where the conversation so often becomes confused and discordant. Some insist that welcome is simple: open the door, let everyone in, and dismiss any concern about limits, laws, schools, housing, jobs, language, or local capacity as cruelty. Others insist that exclusion is a necessity: close the door, harden the border, treat suffering as invasion, and teach people that belonging can only be secured by denial.

Both answers fail us. A society that pretends borders, laws, housing, work, schools, and civic trust don’t matter isn’t being compassionate. It’s being unserious. Communities receiving large numbers of migrants are often asked to respond to human need at a scale that overwhelms good intentions. The work of welcome has to become practical or it becomes merely performative. But a society that trains itself not to see suffering is surrendering a part of its own soul.

What happens to a people when desperation is treated as contamination? What happens to a nation when it learns to protect itself from the fragile? What happens to leadership when the stranger is framed first as a threat and only later, if ever, as a human being?

This is why pairing welcome and integration matters. Welcome alone can become sentiment. Integration is where the real work begins. It is one thing to say, “You may come in.” It is another to create the conditions under which a person can participate, contribute, learn the language, find work, send children to school, receive care, build friendships, worship, grieve, celebrate, and be seen as more than a problem to be managed.

Integration turns welcome from a feeling into a structure. This is systemic belonging. More than that, it’s how strangers become kinfolk.

Systemic belonging isn’t a poster on a wall or a value statement on a website. It is the design of systems that allow people to belong without erasing themselves. It is habit. It is leadership. It is translation. It is access. It is accountability. It is the patient work of making room. And making room always means something changes. The table gets longer. The food changes. The language changes. The stories a nation tells about itself become less simple and more true.

That, I suspect, is what frightens people. The fear is not only of the stranger. It is the fear of losing an old story. The fear that if others belong, then I belong less. The fear that if the circle widens, the center disappears. But belonging doesn’t work that way. It’s not a fixed quantity, a loaf of bread that shrinks with every additional hand. It’s more like a fire: tended well, it can warm more people; neglected, it burns the house down.

Leadership is tending the hearth of belonging.

This is as true in a company as it is in a country. I’ve spent much of my adult life sitting with leaders at thresholds. Not national borders, perhaps, but thresholds nonetheless: the threshold between who is included and who is merely tolerated, between who is invited into power and who is invited only into performance, between who gets to be different and who must assimilate to survive.

Every organization eventually faces its own version of the belonging question. Who is considered a “culture fit”? Whose accent, background, education, body, temperament, grief, or way of knowing is treated as evidence of belonging, and whose is treated as a problem?

Leaders often say they want diversity. But diversity without welcome is display. Diversity without integration is hollow. Diversity without shared power is performance. Diversity without belonging is another form of exile. The work is to invite difference into the room without punishing it for being different.

Welcome requires boundaries, but contempt must not become one of them.

Across the world, frightened people are being told that their loneliness, economic insecurity, cultural dislocation, and loss of trust can be healed by identifying who does not belong. This isn’t new; it’s ancient. It’s also useful to those who seek power. Find the stranger. Name them a threat and call it protection.

Welcome is often treated as softness, but real welcome requires courage. It requires the courage to stand against the politics of humiliation, to resist easy applause, to ask citizens not only what they fear but what they might become if they organize their lives around fear. It requires the courage to say: our home can change and still be home.

This, too, is reunion. Not nostalgia. Not a return to an imagined past. Not the fantasy of purity restored. Reunion as the reweaving of relationship after rupture. Reunion as the expansion of the circle of belonging. Reunion is the hard, holy work of remembering that the stranger at the border and the frightened citizen inside the border may both be asking some version of the same question: Is there a place for me?

The answer cannot be naïve and must be human.

Perhaps this is where redemption belongs. Not as absolution for past sins or the fantasy that we can undo every harm or purify ourselves of every shadow. Redemption begins when we tell the truth about what fear has made of us and choose, however imperfectly, to act from something larger than fear.

A nation can be redeemed only by remembering what it has forgotten. A community can be redeemed only by making room for those it has cast out. A leader can be redeemed only by refusing to use other people’s vulnerability as the container for their own unexamined terror. A tradition, perhaps, can be redeemed when it returns to the mercy it betrayed. And a life, perhaps, is redeemed by the legacy it leaves in others.

What do we leave behind when we narrow the circle, when we teach our children that the stranger is the enemy, when we allow the frightened parts of ourselves to set the terms of public life? And what might we leave behind if, instead, we build homes, companies, communities, and nations large enough to hold the future?

I don’t know how to solve the challenges of migration. I don’t pretend that welcome is simple. I know laws matter. I know borders matter. I know housing, schools, work, language, safety, and civic trust all matter. But I also know what happens when fear is allowed to become the keeper of the door.

And I know, too, the strange power of a small act: a mother explaining hatred to her daughter without letting hatred have the final word; a family keeping vigil in Belfast while others set fires; a pope standing near the waters where the desperate have come ashore; a man lighting a one-euro candle in a darkened church after fifty years away, watching the white wax catch flame in the cool, incense-thick air, returning to the wound and the hope that formed him, praying, perhaps, to the Christ he met as a boy, for a world more just and kind than the one he fears we are becoming.

There is another way to belong. It begins at the threshold, often lit by a candle, when we see the person standing there not first as a threat, not first as a burden, not first as a category, but as a human being carrying a story. A child, perhaps, carried by parents searching for shelter.

And then we ask the question every moral tradition worthy of the name eventually asks: What does love require of us now?