Manna in this Desert Time
I sit at my desk, gazing out the sliding glass doors as snow falls in large, deliberate flakes — like manna falling from heaven, I think. In a moment that feels like a meandering journey through an unforgiving desert, the image of nourishment is welcome, even if it’s only enough for today.
Open and face-down on my desk is a book from the library – Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the Criminal Alien. In it, Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez helps me make sense of the disillusion I’m feeling at the incredible power that narratives of criminality have in justifying state-sanctioned violence against people in our communities.
As I try to find hope in essential, immediate, life-saving actions like body cameras and judicial warrants, I can’t help but worry that many will mistake these concessions for justice.
Yet the manna falling outside my window reminds me that this struggle is nothing new. Since the people of Israel were brought out of slavery in Egypt, oppressed peoples have been demanding nothing less than full liberation, and have been sustained by God’s grace in the journey to get there.
In the US, decades of Black mothers and Chinese workers and Indigenous children have known the humiliation of being forced out of their homes, the agony of loved ones held behind bars in a never-ending labyrinth of excuses and delays and falsehoods and court dates and technicalities and abuse and yearning. Those whose lives are marked by addiction, mental illness, or poverty have felt the weight of the criminal label — caught in a system that claims to build justice but instead creates classes of exclusion.
Detractors will try to convince us that striving for full liberation isn’t grounded in reality. That by preaching radical love for all people, we are naive. We don’t understand evil.
Yet hope across generations has not been diminished – not because the ancestors who fought for justice were naive, but because they were rooted in a firm belief in inviolable human dignity that is neither given nor taken by human powers.
Like them, we must hold tight to reminders that this is a long game, trusting the end toward which God is drawing us.
Moments like this can serve as prompts to deepen our own well. Lately I’ve been searching for the right voices to shape my own resilience, like the joy-filled determination captured in Resistance Revival Chorus’ rendition of “This Joy”:
This joy [this love, this pride, this strength, this peace] that I have,
The world didn’t give it to me —
The world didn’t give it,
The world can’t take it away.
I’m also reclaiming familiar faith touchstones from my childhood, shared in ways that feel authentic to the faith I practice now — like the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Washington, D.C.-based African American women’s a cappella group. Their voices remind me that daily closeness with God is practiced, passed down, and shared — not invented in isolation.
Their voices, and the endurance they embody, point me toward a larger truth reflected in the wisdom of our spiritual leaders. Deacon Art Miller put it this way:
“Love to us can sometimes sound like a soft word in a hard world. But scriptures are not talking about soft love. Scripture is talking about a love that endures … That kind of love that kept church folks singing when the world said you aren’t enough … In our community where we’re so often told: prove your worth. Earn your place. Show that you belong. The truth frees us — that God never asked us to earn anything. We don’t have to earn divine affection. God centered and entered our chaos in himself so that our chaos became an opportunity to be with him. … You and I, we’re already standing within the circle of God’s love.”
The love we aspire to is neither new, nor fleeting, nor discriminatory. As we go forward through this desert time, searching for both immediate relief and long-term liberation, may we be grounded within this circle of God’s love – settling on us like the quiet nourishment of delicate snowflakes, sustaining our efforts here and now.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Cortina is a mother raising three bilingual, bicultural children alongside her Mexican husband. Based in Chicago, Illinois, she advocates for restorative justice and accompaniment of individuals impacted by incarceration in her local community and through her work with Catholic Prison Ministries Coalition.