A Theology of the Immigrant Heart

I grew up as an immigrant in my own country. After the Partition of India in 1947, my grandparents fled what became Pakistan and resettled in Madras (now Chennai), a city in the far south of India with a language and culture entirely different from their own. As a result, I was raised in a place where my family’s customs, food, and even our speech marked us as outsiders. Later, when I moved to North India for college and work—closer to my ancestral roots—I discovered I was no longer quite at home there either. I had become a strange blend of North and South: too Southern for the North, too Northern for the South.

So when I moved to the United States in 2018, it wasn’t a shock. I had already spent a lifetime learning how to adapt, translate, and read the room before I entered it.

But fitting in is not the same as belonging. I knew the lingo, I understood the references, I could pass. But I didn’t want to change myself to be accepted. I believe true belonging begins with being seen and accepted for who you are. To trade that for approval is to betray something sacred. And I’ve always felt that what matters most is not the comfort of the present, but the integrity of the eternal—that our actions ripple through time long after our bodies return to dust.

In that space of dislocation and longing, I found a kind of theology forming. A theology of the immigrant heart—one that begins with fracture, with unbelonging, and slowly turns toward the divine. This journey didn’t start in church. It started with a question: how do you live truthfully in a world that misreads you?

Voices in the Void

Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard's idea of faith as a leap into the absurd felt strangely familiar to me. He once wrote, "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself." I had felt that tension—between safety and truth, between the self you perform and the self you protect. His vision of faith as deeply personal, risky, and hidden resonated with the way I'd always approached life.

Later, I found Albert Camus, Simone Weil, and Richard Wright—existentialist thinkers who were willing to sit with the ache of uncertainty and not flinch. Each of them helped me name the dissonance I felt. They didn't offer me meaning, but they helped me recognize the terrain I was walking.

Weil saw attention as a form of prayer—a way of turning the soul toward something beyond itself, even in suffering. Camus offered a defiant ethics grounded in presence and persistence, even when meaning was absent. Wright wrote with a searing clarity about being marked by race, history, and violence—and how that burden shapes the body and the mind. They didn't give me answers, but they gave me company in the questioning. They showed me that there was a kind of integrity in not turning away.

These existentialist voices prepared the soil of my heart, though I couldn't see it then. Their honest confrontation with absurdity, suffering, and alienation created space for authentic faith to eventually take root. They taught me that genuine belief cannot come from avoiding doubt but must grow through it. Their unflinching gaze at human existence—with all its contradictions and pain—paradoxically opened me to the possibility of transcendence.

The Cost of Truth

It wasn't until I encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I began to see how existential honesty could coexist with profound faith. His theology, forged in resistance to evil and seasoned by suffering, bridged what I had previously seen as incompatible worlds. Where the secular existentialists taught me to face the void, Bonhoeffer showed me how faith could speak into that void without denying its reality.

Bonhoeffer

A German pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer was part of the resistance to Hitler and was eventually executed for his involvement in a plot to overthrow the Nazi regime. His writings, especially during his time in prison, reflect a deep, costly discipleship—a faith lived out in the face of evil and compromise.

After years of wrestling with doubt and longing, his life and writings spoke to both my intellect and my spirit. Here was a man who understood the weight of faith in a fractured world—who lived with clarity, conviction, and costly grace. His theology wasn't abstract; it was forged in resistance, in suffering, in solidarity with the marginalized. He revealed a God who does not ask us to erase who we are but calls us to follow—with all our complexity, wounds, and contradictions.

Bonhoeffer’s Christ is not a cultural mascot. He is a living truth that confronts, consoles, and commands. "When Christ calls a man," Bonhoeffer wrote, "he bids him come and die." That death, to me, is the death of performance. The death of assimilation. The death of anything that demands we betray ourselves to belong.

My Turn to Faith

My faith in Jesus grew quietly. It wasn’t through institutions or traditions that I came to believe, but through the quiet realization that He had always been near. Not through the mechanics of the American church—which too often feels like it idolizes Christianity rather than following Christ—but through a growing awareness of God’s presence in my life. I feel it in moments of silence, in acts of love, in the slow surrender of my heart. I don’t have it all figured out. But I’m learning to give myself more fully each day.

Faith, for me, didn’t come in the form of certainty. It came as a response to exile. And exile, I’ve come to believe, can be holy ground. An immigrant heart knows what it is to live between worlds. Maybe that’s why it can recognize the foreignness of Christ—who had no place to lay his head, who lived among the rejected, who spoke not to the center, but to the edges.

So I write, not to conclude anything, but to testify: that alienation can become intimacy. That the pain of unbelonging can lead to the presence of God. That the heart, even when far from home, can still find rest—not in certainty, but in Christ.