“…no longer Jew or Greek…”

by Dave Markay.

I am now a dual citizen. It’s a new status, as fresh as the crisp, unbent and as-of-yet unstamped British passports my wife and I now hold. After a few weeks of statelessness, during which the Home Office held our original documents, we are now in possession of passports from both our birth-country and our adopted-country.

Thus, our travel pouches thicken. Our embarkation rituals shift. On all future questionnaires, when the drop-down box asking nationality provides space for only one country, we will pause. More than a choice of which box to tick, dual citizenship poses fundamental questions of identity: To which state do we belong? Where is home? To whom is our allegiance?

We are aware of the privilege of being considered ‘dual nationals.’ Yet we are also relieved to have completed many years of paperwork, references, interviews, and exams. For the ‘Life in the UK’ test, we studied Capability Brown and the rules of cricket.[1] (So, you can ask us about the Hansard, William of Orange, or which information must be printed on a dog tag, but if your ball rolls over to us in the park, we will throw it back to you in a style closer to baseball than cricket! Such are the layers of multiple belonging.

The thirty new citizens in our ceremony group had been encouraged to wear ‘formal attire from our homeland,’ so the kurtas, saris, and kente cloth accentuated our varied backgrounds. Relatives assembled and clapped, knowing the complicated pathways and stories behind their loved one’s oath. When it came time to pose for pictures, there were many tears. It is no small thing to change one’s status, or address, or loyalties.

We have found a new appreciation for our immigrant forebears, who must have also pondered questions like Is the old country home, or is it here now? Do we keep the unpronounceable surname, or shorten it to blend in? Where are our roots? Does family include new neighbours? Perhaps you, too, know what it feels like to have a foot in two lands, a heart in several places, an allegiance to more than one kingdom?

My guess is that our Methodist family tree includes many who asked similar questions. Mr. Wesley clocked many miles on horseback, crossed oceans, and learned a new language. He was known enough in some places to have a guest room with his name on it, and distrusted enough in other locales to have eggs thrown at him. Missionaries like Coke and Asbury made multiple-entry visits to the colonies, probably turned heads with their accents and manners, may have learned how to hold a fork with either hand, encountered both hostility and welcome, and when a war of independence began, were forced to take sides. Other Christian sojourners like Olaudah or Zinzendorf would have experienced the exclusion of prejudice and the embrace of cross-cultural Christian friendships.

Those among us who are itinerant, may recognise (is that word spelled with an ‘s’ or a ‘z’?) those sentiments. Is not the term stationing a description of transience? It involves one from the outside, being dropped into a community of insiders. Moves can be exhilarating and isolating. One who is stationed knows the perplexities of arrival, the warmth of welcome, the confusion of interpretation, the joy of new community, and the eventual pain of departure. Abraham, Sarai, Moses, Ruth, Naomi, Jesus, the magi, Paul and others knew what it meant to perambulate, all the while keeping an eye on the heavens for orientation.

With two passports in hand, I recently rediscovered a text by an early Christian disciple. Mathetes was a Greek writer and Christian apologist who lived in the 2^nd century. In his Epistle to someone named Diognetus, he reflected on what it meant to hold another kind of dual citizenship. Listen to the way he describes followers of Jesus and their relation to place:

“But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. … They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.…”[2]

In August 1989 my wife and I had our US passports stamped at Manchester Airport, were met by some friendly Circuit stewards, and driven to what would be our home for the next probationer year. The grass out front of the manse in Goole was freshly cut, and alongside a cake on the kitchen counter was a stack of welcome cards from as-of-yet unknown parishioners. One, from a Local Preacher named Betty Chant, included an index card with a handwritten verse of scripture: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God”.[3]

We have made several moves since then, and we still have that index card. In fact, it’s in the same drawer as our passports.

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[1] Life in the UK Test, Practice Questions, London: Red Squirrel Publishing, 2016.

[2] ‘The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus,’ translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.

[3] Ephesians 2:19 NRSV