Border-Crossing Spirituality

Book excerpt: Border crossing is a significant experience in the global era when many people cross borders, whether in cultural, geopolitical, relational, or existential terms. Border crossing can provide a great opportunity for spiritual growth, yet it is often a violent and dangerous process. Thus there is a need to explore border-crossing spirituality: to examine how various aspects of border crossing impact human life, analyze why border crossing happens, and explain how the act of border crossing provides transformation. Border crossing is an action undertaken to expand one's own boundaries, and from it emerges the borderland--a third space where one's transformation can occur. This book primarily focuses on various teachings of border crossing and the notion of "being in between." Almost every religious tradition has within it a spiritual teaching of border crossing and the importance of the borderland. This book is, by nature, cross cultural, interreligious, and interspiritual. Through the action of border crossing, transformation occurs in the borderland, and border-crossing spirituality can be crystallized as living a radical hospitality, valuing friendship, remaining in the present, and reclaiming subjectivity.