Vachon Imagined

A Muslim woman walks down the street, her children close beside her.

She wears her hijab.

Her culture. Her identity. Her faith.

All of it visible.

And because it is visible, it is available for Western judgment.

She left a country torn apart by violence—a place where her identity, her culture, even her faith had been turned against her by her own people.

And now she walks here.

Perhaps all she wants is something remarkably simple:

To walk down the street without being hated.

To raise her children without someone dividing them into categories.

To live without someone telling her which God belongs to whom.

Her God.

My God.

As though God could be divided according to who is standing on which side of the street.

And then there are women who see her and tell her she needs to westernize herself.

They tell her that liberation means removing the thing she has chosen to wear.

But when women put another woman down, it is a betrayal of another kind.

Because who are we becoming when another woman needs our permission to be free?

What if she is already free?

What if the most liberating thing we can do is leave her alone?

Let her walk.

Let her pray.

Let her raise her children.

Let her be Muslim.

And if her hijab needs adjusting, perhaps it takes only one woman among us to see the human beneath it—not to remove it, not to judge it, but to reach out and help her fix it.

Here. Let me help you.

And then let her keep walking.

In honor.

In dignity.

In freedom.

Because the world was free before her religion.

Before her children.

Before my children.

Before any of us named it, divided it, claimed it, or tried to make it ours.

There was life.

There was earth beneath our feet.

There was breath moving through human beings who had not yet learned to separate themselves from one another.

And this is what we keep forgetting.

Under one God.

Within one life.

A life born through everything and born through everyone.

A life that stands inside time and does not abandon it for temporary gain, temporary assurance, or the temporary comfort of believing that our way must be the way.

The Muslim woman.

The Jewish woman.

The Christian woman.

The agnostic woman.

The atheist woman.

All of us are here.

All of us walking.

All of us raising children.

All of us trying to make meaning from the brief and astonishing fact that we are alive.

None of us owns God.

None of us is worthy of God.

And yet somehow, mysteriously, we are all invited to participate in life.

Liberation is not making everyone believe what we believe.

It is creating a world where a woman can walk down the street with her children and not have to defend her existence.

Where her hijab is not an invitation to judge her.

Where my faith is not a weapon against hers.

Where her God does not have to defeat my God.

Where nobody has to win.

Because there is no victory in making another human being smaller.

There is only the strange poverty of having mistaken domination for freedom.

I want something much simpler.

I want her children to grow up knowing that they belong here.

I want her to walk among us without fear.

I want my children to understand that another person’s faith does not diminish their own.

I want the streets we share to belong to all of us.

Because this is what we too often forget:

Life is abundant enough for all of us.

Like a child tugging at his mother’s dress for just one glimpse of her love, we keep reaching toward God for a glimpse of something we already have—the invitation to belong to life.

God isn’t asking us to choose who gets in.

God is asking us to stop deciding who doesn’t.

And until the Muslim woman, the Jewish woman, the Christian woman, the agnostic woman, and the atheist woman are free to walk these streets as themselves, none of us is completely free.

Because freedom that requires another person to disappear isn’t freedom.

It is simply another form of temporary power, of temporary control.

And I want more than that.

I want us to walk among one another with peace in our hearts, abundance in our bones, and enough humility to understand that whatever God is, whatever Life is, it was never ours to divide.

It was something for us to return to, to the knowing we are walking in a time that is abundant, a time that is empty of sin, and empty of selfish gain.