8  LIBERTY

I MET MY FRIEND MARYAN because she lived across the courtyard from us. Whenever I would step onto our tiny concrete back patio with my fussy baby in my arms, Maryan would stick her head out of her upstairs window and wave at me, urging me to come up to her place. There I was usually treated to a steaming piece of fresh bread (her specialty) and a plate of whatever was cooking on her stove. She was from Afghanistan and had only been in the United States a few months, and she was incredibly driven to learn English. She practiced on me constantly while she fed me and held my baby.

One day I noticed a large metal pot in an odd shape on her stove. It was thinner at the bottom, got wider in the middle, and then tapered off into a narrow opening with a lid that was tightened with a special screw. I had never seen anything like it. Maryan explained that she had brought it with her from Afghanistan and that it was one of her prized possessions. I finally figured out that it was a variation on a pressure cooker, using trapped steam to cook food more quickly. I eyed it with suspicion, half afraid it would explode in my face, but it only served to churn out delicious meals, day after day.

A year or two later my church asked the congregation for donations for the refugee ministry they ran. They collected the things resettlement agencies asked for, mainly rice cookers and bus passes. Good, practical items, which I heartily approved of, as well as supplies for expecting parents. People love to help during Christmastime, and this was no different—a few people in the church even went above and beyond, buying several of the must-have items of the season, the electric pressure cookers known collectively as “instant pots.” The leader of the refugee ministry showed me the huge closet stuffed full of boxes—not just of rice cookers but also diapers and diapers bags and clothes for babies and toys for kids, and those glorious, luminous instant pots. Did I know anyone who could use one? My mind whirred with the possibilities of being able to help my friends. I had seen the recipes proliferating on Facebook, and I knew these machines were expensive and could work well for my neighbors from other countries. Women who made the same few meals they had eaten growing up, meals that usually required many hours on the stove to make the tough cuts of meat tender. Women who were now busy going to community college, taking care of their families, working jobs. Surely this instant pot could make their lives easier, right?

I delivered the boxes with pride to several of my friends. They all expressed surprise and gratitude. I delivered one to Maryan too. I tried to explain how it worked, that it was a better version of the pot she had brought from Afghanistan. On my phone I showed her a quick YouTube tutorial. We unpacked the gleaming silver-and-black contraption and plugged it in. I was so excited to share it and so sure that it would make her life better and easier.

Perhaps you already know where this story is going. The next few times I visited Maryan, I didn’t see the instant pot anywhere. Finally, I asked about it. She waved her hand around her tiny, cramped kitchen. There was simply no room for a machine that big, one that needed to be plugged in and took up valuable counter space. No, she would keep using her pot, the one she had brought from her own country. She loved that pot. Giggling, she told me she had started to call it “the magic pot.” Why, I asked? Because everyone in the apartment complex wants to use it, she told me. She would cook her family’s dinner on it, and then she would leave it on her front doorstep. A neighbor would pick it up, take it home, and cook her family’s dinner. And then she would give it to someone else. Maryan waved her arm toward her window. Everyone wants to use this pot. It is because it is magic, she said. It is because it cooks the very best food, just like our mothers cooked, in a less amount of time.

I left that day thinking about the magic pot and the instant pot. My cultural value of efficiency was at odds with Maryan’s value of community. It was the difference between a gleaming “instant” solution for one family and a communal pot that gets shared and used and loved by so many. The magic pot not only worked, but it accrued meaning and value with every meal made inside it. It brought people together. It met the needs of so many in a variety of ways, and it did not need me or my individualized solutions to do it. The magic pot came halfway around the world to cook food that has fed me and that my family and so many others have enjoyed. With its thick metal sides and indestructible life, I have to imagine that Maryan’s pot will survive long after I am dead and gone. It’s a morbid, if comforting, thought. Some items survive not only because they are sturdy but because they are intricately connected, not to modern progress or innovation but because they are the cornerstone of neighborliness to their community.

With Maryan I truly wanted to make my friend’s life easier, but I also wanted to feel better. I wanted a psychological reprieve from the pressure that built up whenever I heard her share stories about her life in her country and when I saw with my own two eyes how hard life was in my own city for her. I wanted to forget about the wars and the state-sanctioned violence that had made it necessary for her to flee her home to save the lives of her children. I wanted to gloss over the complex struggles of starting over in a new country in which a large portion of the population did not want you there, where she and her family were either resented and feared or simply patronized by those with good intentions. But my actual relationship with my actual neighbor forced me to step outside of my bubble. To embrace life—including all of its terrible complexities—just as it really was. A world where one shiny new kitchen appliance could not restore what the locusts had eaten.

Autonomy is the right to act, speak, live, or govern as you want without restraint. It is independence. For those who have been imprisoned, it makes sense why freedom is something to long for. It makes sense that Jesus came to proclaim liberty to people who had very little control over their lives, who often lived without knowing where their next meal would come from, their lives governed by the whims of a tiny minority of wealthy and powerful rulers.

But what does it mean when those who are already free start to idolize liberty? It can become a weapon to keep other people down. For those of us who grew up with food in our bellies and a roof overhead and in a place where our skin color and theologies and names were normal, what does it mean to long for a world where we are independent? I’ve discovered how much I resist having my own selfish desires restrained by the needs and stories of others, especially those for whom the American Dream is only a myth.

My husband likes to say that we need the church to be our recovery group; we need it to be a place where we can share how tempted we are by the values of our world: upward mobility, progress, success, programs, achievements, individuality. I am drawn to these values because I want something to hold in my hand, something I can shove up to the sky and prove to God that I have done something, that I have made a difference, or that I have done well with what I was given. With my own clenched fingers I have saved the world. But the truth is, in this mindset I grow ever more lonely and ever more isolated, both railing against the American Dream and unable to listen to those who have always been creating paths of resistance to the dehumanization of others within the myth we all reside in.

My story would have continued on the lonely path of the free if I hadn’t been jolted out of complacency by my neighbors, flesh-and-blood people who ministered to me, taught me, embraced me, confronted me, challenged me, ignored me, and even hated me. My neighbors saved me from myself and from a culture that taught me that at age nineteen I had all the right answers to the mysterious, consuming, burning love of God. They restrained me. Their love allowed me to take small, scared steps into a world that is more broken than I could possibly believe and a faith in the God who will redeem us all. I am and continue to be liberated from my role as the captor with intentions of gold. And God has used my neighbors to pierce through the value of autonomy in my own life.

Several years into our friendship now, Maryan treats me like a younger sister. Recently she noticed the new-to-us car my husband had purchased, a tiny little shiny vehicle with good gas mileage and a cheap price tag. My husband was so proud of this car, a sign of frugality. But Maryan saw it differently. She had multiple children and no driver’s license. Going to the grocery store for her was an immense undertaking, especially since we live in what is technically a food desert. Ever since she left her home country she had been denied the simple pleasure of grocery shopping, of touching the food with her own hands. Now, her husband got together with the other men and shopped once a week, using the long lists she wrote as a guide for what the family would eat.

Maryan took one look at our little car and said, “What, did you not think of us when you bought this car?” My heart sank within me, desperate to explain myself, our decision to purchase something that was cheap and reliable and that suited our small family’s needs. Maryan shook her head. “For someone with a big heart,” she said, “you sure do like small cars.” We laughed together, but her honesty was a gift that cut several ways. She was pointing out that we come from different cultures, with different values. My first impulse is usually to take care of myself first. I do not view Maryan’s troubles as my own, as my responsibility in the way that families care for one another. I do not buy my food or my clothes or my cars in a way that connects me to the “unescapable web of mutuality.” I am lonely in my small car, saving on my gas bill, isolated as I hurtle down the streets to take care of my own personal errands. But friends who cook me good meals and tell the truth about their reality and mine help burst the bubble of my own making, time and time again.

I think about this as I eat yet another meal prepared for me in the magic pot, as I watch Maryan serve me and then prepare to share her bounty with another family. In apartments like hers, I have slowly watched my values change. It hasn’t been instant, as much as I would like it to be. And in many ways it still stings. We are never as autonomous as we would like to believe; someone usually pays for our freedoms, as so many have been trying to tell us. And the only way those of us obsessed with freedom can learn a new way of living depends on taking the time to become connected to the real teachers, our neighbors: the ones who feed us from the deep wells of their one experience. The ones who have the keys to truly liberating us all.