Flee into Egypt

Some initial notes on fugitivity as a positive theological category

After the wise men were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,” the angel said. “Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.

As recounted in the Torah—the Pentateuch for those of us who are Christian—for Jews and their Israelite ancestors, Egypt was the place from which the Lord God liberated them, from which He brought them out of slavery and, by means of a long journey through the Sinai wilderness, into the fullness of life and blessing as a people and a nation promised to their father Abraham.¹ Thenceforth, Egypt became not simply the name of a place, but also a metaphor for all that God had liberated His people from and from all that is other than what the Israelite people as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation were called to—for idolatry, for immorality of all sorts, for a state of spiritual slavery and death founded in spurning the ways of the Lord God who saves. The later Christian tradition, as for instance expressed in Gregory Nazianzen’s The Life of Moses, follows its Jewish forebearers in religion in taking Egypt as a metaphor for everything that is outside the community of believers and its ways, everything that is outside of or (on the whole) opposed to the Christian ekklesia and its journey through the wilderness of this world to the promised land of life with God in Christ in the world to come. One may—and should—draw from or take from Egypt, from the world, what is good and useful, as Nazianzen argues and as the Christian Church attests by appropriating, for instance, Greek philosophy and its insights; but Egypt, and what Egypt serves as a metaphor for, remains for Jews and Christians alike what they must flee from, must keep away from: it is the place and all of its ways, real or metaphorical, to which they ought not ever return lest they betray the Lord God or Christ.

Or so the tradition has treated Egypt. But the Christian scriptures, at least, create a wrinkle in this understanding of things, even opening a way for understanding how fugitivity from official religious structures, practices, discourses, how a return or flight to what is “objectively” outside of or opposed to what are communally-accepted and officially-sanctioned ways to God may in fact be called for if in fact one would listen to the still small voice that would lead him or her to true health, true freedom, true life—to salvation.²

In the infancy narrative of the Gospel of Matthew, shortly after Christ is born his parents have to flee with him to Egypt, to bring Him quickly out of His home country and the place of His birth to save Him from the predations of the one who ruled His place of origin. A leitmotif throughout the whole history of Christian Scriptural commentary is that Scripture and the words of Scripture have not only a plain and literal meaning but spiritual meanings as well; any happening recounted in Scripture is an occasion, even an invitation, to think allegorically about one’s own life and the life of the family of God on earth the Church. And Christ, in and through being cared for by His parents who loved Him, fled to the physical place not only whence His ancestors were brought out of captivity but also the place that serves in the Judeo-Christian tradition for what is opposed objectively to God and the ways of God. Christ, that is, was a fugitive, and this from His homeland and from the structures and ways of life of His homeland on account of how they were being governed—which rendered the place directly hostile to Christ’s continuing existence, as evinced by the fate of the Holy Innocents—to a place not only outside of where He belonged but that was and is metaphorically opposed to where He belonged.

As Christ was a fugitive from His place of origin, from where He belonged and the ways and structures of where He belonged, and dwelt in the place and among the people that have represented what is objectively opposed to His home and to the place where He belonged, we are invited to think about how fugitivity might not be something simply reasonable from the standpoint of natural reason but also something positively condoned by God as an option for those who would follow after Christ. For if Christ went the way of a fugitive to Egypt, so may we who would follow in His way.

This is a source of hope for those who have found that, for the sake of their well-being, even sometimes their very life, they must flee their homeland on the way to our shared Homeland—they must, that is, escape from the institutional Church in some way or other and flee to what is not the Church in her institutional structures if they are to act for their own good. Some would claim this is impossible, for the institutional Church and her sacramental life are together the ordinary means of salvation, and thus that no one of goodwill can leave her in good conscience. But examples of those who, to all appearances, have determined by their best lights that they must leave abound. For example, surrounding 16th century Cartegena, the Caribbean colonial settlement where Peter Claver baptized and worked and taught, keeping enslaved Africans docile and slaveowners happy, there were communities of escaped Africans called palenques; while being recaptured from such a settlement meant possible execution, and while those who escaped there had had it drummed into their heads by Claver and his white ecclesiastical ilk that seeking their freedom meant committing mortal sin, those who so escaped had the courage to flee institutional and official structures to know and to experience life as willed by their heavenly Father, to know the fullness of life and love in community denied them by the institutional Church.³ They had no sacraments other than those of Baptism and Matrimony (for the Roman Church was then unwilling to ordain Black priests), but they did what was right for themselves and what anyone in their right mind would find reasonable: they fled from their supposed homeland on the way to the Homeland, the Church, into Egypt, into that which is outside the sacramental and ecclesial structures of the Church. In so doing, they did the will of God; in so doing, they followed Christ, who Himself fled into Egypt so that He might live.

The Africans of the palanqueros surrounding the Catholic colonial center of Cartegena are a powerful and courageous witness to the positive possibility of fugitivity from institutional, ecclesiastical, and even sacramental structures in the Church; lest one claim that they were somehow a “special case,” other examples, including contemporary examples, may be found. Another example, discussed by Katie Walker Grimes toward the end of her book Fugitive Saints, is that of the Black educator Constance Daniel. Daniel had fled the abject racism of the Unitarian Church, the church of her youth, to the Catholic Church, which promised to be a bastion of freedom, a place where Daniel could finally come home to Christ and know the fullness of life and love willed for us by God in Christ on our way to our ultimate Homeland. The institutional Catholic Church, however, was no such refuge: there, Daniel met not only with opposition from ecclesiastical authorities to provide Black folk with an education for more than simply servile labor, but also pressures from white prelates to be docile, to be grateful to the white folk above her for what she could get, to be patient ways that no one else in the Church without heavily melanated skin would be asked to be patient; thirsting for justice, she found none in the institutional Church but hostility and indifference to both her full good and the good of those like her. And so, finding no justice where justice was promised, and finding those wielding and overseeing ecclesiastical structures, including sacramental structures, opposed to her full good, she fled those structures and followed her Christ to Egypt, to places where she was not home but where she could live. Beyond Daniel, we could adduce the (horrifyingly) untold number of victims of abuse and abuse cover-up at the hands of ecclesiastical power and authority who find in the Church’s structures what does not heal but rather that keeps open the wounds the Church herself in her members has inflicted on them, whose structures keep alive in the abuse victims who encounter them and perform the rites and rituals she demands the memories, the pain, the suffering wrought in them by their abusers. They, too, act reasonably if they follow in the footsteps of Christ and flee to Egypt, waiting to be called out of that land of outsides, of alienation from what should be home but that, in its opposition to their good, is not, to return to their true home—which may, for many, simply be the Homeland that Christ the fugitive welcomes them into upon their death, far from the institutional structures of His Church.

The above is only a sketch. It seeks to build on the work begun by Grimes in her work Fugitive Saints, but it only builds on this work partially; it is a beginning, and I the author do not claim for it to be more than that. It does not look into, for instance, ways in which fugitivity can be realized inside of the Church—as so many queer folk, to whom the Church as an institution and the Church in her members has so often and in so many places been, at best, has been largely indifferent, and to whom that same institution and those same people have often been outright hostile, seek to live the freedom of the children of God in Christ, to love as they best know how, in contradiction to, for instance, official teachings regarding what they can and cannot do, and whether or not they are welcome as they are in their fullness at the Eucharistic table. But that is all for later work, later efforts; if the present article serves as part of a solid foundation for that work along with the work of my sister in Christ Katie Grimes, then it has done enough.

1. Header image: Claude Monet, Étretat, la porte d'Aval: bateaux de pêche sortant du port (circa 1885).

2. I draw heavily, both conceptually and by way of inspiration, from Katie Walker Grimes’ work in her book Fugitive Saints: Catholicism and the Politics of Slavery (Fortress Press, 2017). Her aim there is no to develop a a theology of fugitivity, let alone a general category of fugitivity, but to consider how the Church in her members, even her saints, and in her member-governed structures have been opposed to the full being-alive of enslaved Africans brought across the Middle Passage to labor under white masters in the Americas. From there, Grimes sketches out a way to think of how the Church can affirm the positive character and goodness of Black fugitivity, of efforts by Africans enslaved or the ancestors thereof still living under the heavy and unjust yoke of racism to seek freedom and peace and a loving knowledge of their God apart from the Church that would keep them enslaved or oppress them. In trying to develop out of Grimes’ work a general positive category of fugitivity, I do not mean to elide differences between Black fugitivity and, say, the fugitivity of queer folks or white sexual abuse survivors, or even that of Native American Christians fleeing the legacy of the Native American boarding schools: each is different, and each deserves its own proper consideration and appreciation. But I do think that Black courage to live fugitivity despite threats from white masters, physical or spiritual, of death or hellfire for fleeing slavery or the oppression of racism—as Peter Claver threatened them, per Grimes—is a witness in the truest and deepest sense to Christ who for freedom has set us free, and who has loved us to the very end. In being fugitives, Black folk bore witness to the positive character of fugitivity; by pointing toward a development of the light they’ve given us into a general positive category, I mean not to occlude or snuff out their light but, as one human being working within the unfolding of a history marred by sin, to let that light shine and be known further as I may.

3. See Katie Walker Grimes, Fugitive Saints.