To understand how I envision my place at God’s table, it is best to start at the beginning. I am the oldest of four sisters and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the Bay Area of California in a mixed-race family. My mother is Caucasian and my father is Mexican. One of dad’s side, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from Durango, Mexico in the 1930s, settling in the Salinas Valley of California. Both great-grandparents worked as migrant farmers to support their family. As an immigrant family, hard work and resiliency were incorporated with values derived from their Mexican culture, including loyalty, gratitude, and a heavy emphasis on the family system. Like many Hispanic cultures, machismo was also a prominent value, which refers to exaggerated pride in masculinity. Machismo creates
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Unresolved pain blocked me from seeing and understanding the greater narrative of my history, both suffering and joys, and how it so deeply informed my personal and professional identity. It was not until right before graduate school that I began to understand, grieve, and accept my wounds. In the months before the start of graduate school, I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which became my first encounter of a new way of understanding my story. The family dynamics, passionate but flawed characters deeply resonated with me. There is a section of the book in which Steinbeck discusses the word “timshel” which is the Hebrew word for “thou mayest”. It is found in the story of Cain and Abel and refers to the choice that mankind has to overcome sin. The whole plot of East of Eden centers around how the darkness and “sins” of the past, the “sins” that are inherited do not bind us to a certain fate. I learned that I had choice in my pain, I had a
Unresolved pain blocked me from seeing and understanding the greater narrative of my history, both suffering and joys, and how it so deeply informed my personal and professional identity. It was not until right before graduate school that I began to understand, grieve, and accept my wounds. In the months before the start of graduate school, I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which became my first encounter of a new way of understanding my story. The family dynamics, passionate but flawed characters deeply resonated with me. There is a section of the book in which Steinbeck discusses the word “timshel” which is the Hebrew word for “thou mayest”. It is found in the story of Cain and Abel and refers to the choice that mankind has to overcome sin. The whole plot of East of Eden centers around how the darkness and “sins” of the past, the “sins” that are inherited do not bind us to a certain fate. I learned that I had choice in my pain, I had a