In March of 1992, I visited a dear friend named Charalambous in Cyprus whom I met during my graduate theological studies at the Bossey Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches in Switzerland a year earlier. He lived in Paphos, but that was not the place of his birth, nor was it the location where his family originally lived and owned land.

In 1974, Charalambous and his family were forced to give up their land and home when Turkey invaded the island on the premise of protecting the Turkish minority over concerns that Cyprus would merge with Greece. The conflict and its causes are too complex to sort out here, but the result was the partitioning of the island into two parts, with the northeastern third of the island being occupied and controlled by Turkey to this day.

Charalambous and his family would live the rest of their lives in exile from their home and their land. When I visited Charalambous in Cyprus, he took me and another one of our friends from Bossey into the mountains where we could see the line of partition, and as he pointed to where his home and land were, he wept. 

Living in exile is a horrific experience. Being cut off from one’s land, one’s community, one’s home, and many aspects of one’s way of life is an experience that is in many ways worse than death. When whole peoples are forced into exile, the trauma of such an experience is felt for generations.

We see this generational trauma expressed in the Hebrew Bible as the experience of exile and the attempts to make sense of it are a central theme in a significant portion of the Hebrew scriptures. And now, every day in the land where those scriptures were written, we are reminded of the violence, suffering, and trauma caused by the exile and genocide of the people of Palestine. 

We also see this generational trauma in the lives of our indigenous siblings who were forced from their lands and their ways of life by the racist militarism of European colonizers. And we see this generational trauma in the millions of black Americans whose ancestors were kidnapped from their lands and enslaved, and who experienced segregation, discrimination, and economic injustice even after their emancipation. 

The experience of exile is not necessarily only found in the physical removal of a person or a people from their land. When the reality of isolation, separation, and oppression is so intense; a person or a people can experience living in exile in their own land. 

One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Lincoln (at the urging of my cousin Cassius Marcellus Clay), while giving one of the most powerful speeches in human history from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in a city named after George Washington who was enslaving 123 human beings at the time of his death, Martin Luther King Jr. said these words: 

“But one hundred years later, the [black person] still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the [black person] is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the [black person] lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the [black person] is still languished in the corners of American society and finds [themselves] an exile in [their] own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition” (I Have a Dream, 1963). 

One would have hoped that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would have been the beginning of the end of the centuries-long exile experienced by black Americans, but with the rise of fascism in our country, this very day a significant portion of our population and those who hold the reigns of political power in our land are venerating a man who said that “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” (Charlie Kirk, December 2023, as reported by Wired Magazine). And today we are seeing cities with black mayors and large populations of black and brown people being occupied by our own military, including the city where Martin Luther King shared his dream for America in 1963. The long exile of our black siblings continues. 

Today, millions of persons in the United States are living in a kind of exile in our own land – an exile that oppressed groups in our country have experienced for centuries, an exile from economic justice and political power, an exile from safety and security for our lives, an exile from justice and true freedom. 

There will be no return home from exile in our land as long as fascism controls the political, economic, and cultural landscape in which we live. We will continue to see the exile and persecution of any and all persons who resist as the institutions and leaders who were meant to protect us from tyranny continue their capitulation to our fascist regime. Now the task of caring for each other, protecting each other, and resisting injustice and oppression is left up to us, the people. This is the work of our community, and for now we are a community living in exile, but even in exile we can be present to one another in love and justice as we resist all evil and work together to return back home to a land of liberty and justice for all. 

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