Abstract
This essay places Blessed Francis Solanus Casey in conversation with Palestinian Muslim political prisoner Israa Ja’abis through the lenses of liberation theology, first-person testimony, and the sacred tradition of witness. Drawing on the author’s own life as an undocumented immigrant, the son of a deported mother, and a hunger striker who fasted twenty-six days for education equity, the essay argues that Casey’s vocation as porter, his ministry through a literal door, finds its most urgent contemporary meaning in the bodies of those the world has locked out. Through the theological frameworks of lament, counterstory, sabr, and what the author calls “the ministry of the threshold,” the essay weaves Qur’anic and biblical women’s traditions with Casey’s documented gift of healing and his own marginality as a simplex priest to argue that God habitually works through those the institution has refused to authorize fully.
I. The Door I Came Through
I did not arrive in this country through an airport. I arrived through a door that was not supposed to open for people like me, and I have spent the decades since learning that the holiest work I know happens at thresholds, at the borders between belonging and exclusion, between the recognized and the refused.
I grew up undocumented. My mother was deported more than once. I know what it means to stand at a door and not know whether it will open, and I know what it means to watch someone you love to be dragged back through one. That knowledge has shaped everything I believe about God. It is also why, when I encountered the story of Blessed Francis Solanus Casey, porter at the Capuchin monastery in Detroit, I recognized something I had been looking for without knowing its name. Casey did not stand at the door as a gatekeeper. He stood there as a door opener. He was a man the institution had refused to fully authorize, a simplex priest deprived of the faculties to preach publicly, to hear confessions, to anoint the dying, and yet over twenty thousand people came to pay their respects when he died, bearing with them thousands of documented accounts of healing and grace received through a man the church had assigned to answer a door.1 That is the theological lens I want to employ in this essay. I want to think with the door.
On April 30, 2026, I sat in a packed room at the University of California-Berkeley Law School to hear Israa Ja’abis speak for Palestinian Political Prisoners Day, organized by Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine. My wife, Jazmín Preciado, Esq., was with me. I listened to a woman who had been severely burned, whose fingers had been amputated, denied surgery for years inside an Israeli prison, who had not held her son in eight years, speak about freedom without bitterness. She thanked Allah. She called for the release of all prisoners. She was not broken. She was, in the truest sense I know, a warrior, a healer, a scholar, a mother, and a witness. Sitting in that room, I thought of Solanus Casey standing at his door in Detroit, because it seemed that Israa was doing the same thing he did: receive the suffering of the world and refuse, absolutely refuse, to let that suffering be the final word.
This essay is my attempt to think those two vocations together, and to bring my own life into the conversation, because I believe that theology done without testimony is theology done at a safe distance, and the God I have encountered does not live at a safe distance from anything.
II. The Simplex Priest and the Refused Body: On Being Unauthorized
Bernard Casey was born in 1870 to Irish immigrants who had themselves been refugees of famine and empire. He entered the Capuchins in 1897, took the name Francis Solanus, and struggled sufficiently with his studies that his superiors concluded he could not be allowed to function fully as a priest after he was ordained. While ordained in 1904 he was denied the faculties to preach publicly, hear confessions, or anoint the dying, remaining a “simplex priest” for his entire ministry.2
The institution assessed him, found him insufficient in the ways the institution measured sufficiency, and assigned him accordingly. He was assigned to be the porter, the brother who answers the door.
What the institution could not assess, and could not therefore restrict, was the quality that draws over a hundred thousand pilgrims annually to his tomb at the Solanus Center in Detroit, and that generated over a million prayer requests in the five years following his beatification alone.3 Casey possessed what I can only call a ministry of presence so saturated with God’s compassion that people who encountered him were changed. He listened. He prayed with people. He kept a notebook of thanksgivings and petitions, recording not his own prayers but the favors people reported they had received, because he understood that the archive of gratitude was itself a theological act.4 When he died in 1957 and twenty thousand people filed past his casket, they were honoring a man the institutional church had quietly told was not quite enough, and they were testifying with their feet that he was more than enough, that he was in fact the reason they had come to the door at all.
I understand something about being told you are not quite enough.
I spent years undocumented in this country, which is to say I spent years being officially designated as someone who does not fully belong here, someone whose presence is a legal irregularity, someone who must be managed and processed and, when the moment arrives, removed. I watched my mother be removed. I have lived inside the administrative theology of the nation-state, which is a theology of documents and authorizations and the very specific kind of violence that is committed by paperwork. I have also watched what happens when people who have been refused by that system refuse, in turn, to accept that refusal as the final verdict on their worth.
Solanus Casey refused to accept it. He took the assignment he was given, the door, and he transformed it into a sanctuary. He stood at the threshold between the official church and the people the official church had not always prioritized, and he became the place where those people found God. His beatification in Detroit drew over seventy thousand faithful, with an online global audience estimated at over two hundred fifty million people.5 The simplex priest who was not trusted to preach publicly preached, in his silence and his presence and his careful notebooks, to the world.
III. The Kyriarchal Cage: What Occupation Does to Bodies
Israa Riyad Jamil Ja’abis is a Palestinian Muslim woman from Jerusalem, a mother, a storyteller, a social worker, and a political prisoner. She was arrested in October 2015 and sentenced in 2017 to eleven years in an Israeli prison, convicted of attempted murder by explosion: a charge she and her family have consistently denied.6 Palestinian accounts, her family, and her lawyer Lea Tsemel have maintained that her car engine failed while she was transporting butane canisters, that the car caught fire, and that Israeli soldiers prevented her from escaping before opening fire.7 What is not contested is what her body endured: Israa suffered third-degree burns to sixty percent of her body, lost eight of her fingers, and spent eight years in Israeli detention being denied the medical care international law requires.8
Theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy gives us language for understanding what Israa’s body was made to endure. As theologian Elaine Wainwright summarizes, Schüssler Fiorenza opts for the term kyriarchy over patriarchy because it encompasses a broader view of the types of oppression religious life confronts, referring to multiple forms of domination that result from structural power, accounting for the fact that a person can be dominated in one social setting and privileged in another.9 For Israa, those systems stacked upon each other with terrifying precision: the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the carceral apparatus of the prison, the gendered control of her body, and the deliberate weaponization of medical neglect as punishment.
Her book Pained documents this systematic cruelty. It was not negligence but policy: “this is part of a systematic strategy aimed at killing prisoners through medical neglect and weakening the prisoner movement.”10 She describes conditions in which medical procrastination becomes a form of punishment, and in which treatment is accompanied by humiliation, with hands and feet shackled during any medical contact.11 When placed on a hospital waiting list she was told she was number 700.12 She needed eight surgeries, including finger separation, nose surgery, and the removal of a mass inside her mouth.13
At Berkeley, Israa described this medical regime with precision. The prison commissary had a single treatment for everything, antibiotics or painkillers, regardless of condition. As a result of this blanket overuse of painkillers, she now has liver and kidney issues, consequences of years without proper treatment. She also named the weaponization of nutrition: an intentional effort to provide no fresh fruits or vegetables, with the bulk of food being sugary or starchy, with no nutritional value. Furthermore, she named the timeline clearly: all of what she described was prior to October 7, 2023, after which even basic nutritional provision became a luxury.14
I have known hunger differently, but I have known it deliberately. In 2006, I hunger struck for twenty-six days to demand that the State of California return vital educational programs to communities that most need it. I was not imprisoned. I did this by choice, from a position of relative freedom, and I ended my fast when I chose to end it. I am not comparing my experience to Israa’s. I name it only to say that I know something about what it means to use your body as testimony, to make your own flesh the document when the institutions that are supposed to protect you have refused to issue you one. A hunger strike is a form of lament written in the body. And what Israa endured for eight years was her body kept in permanent lament by the state, without her consent, without relief, and without end.
IV. The Ministry of the Threshold: Casey, Israa, and the People at the Door
What I want to argue is that Solanus Casey’s ministry as porter is not incidental to his sanctity. It is the form his sanctity took. He was assigned to the door because the institution had decided he was not adequate for the altar, and the door became the place where God did through him what no altar assignment could have accomplished. The door is the threshold between inside and outside, between the recognized and the refused, between those the institution has authorized to belong and those who come hoping to be let in. Casey stood at that threshold for decades, and what over a hundred thousand pilgrims a year make their way to his tomb to remember is not a canonically credentialed priest but a man who, at the door, practiced what I can only call the ministry of unearned welcome.
That phrase, the ministry of unearned welcome, is the theological heart of this essay. The idea of unearned welcome is used here to acknowledge that Casey did not require people to demonstrate worthiness before he prayed with them. He received them. He listened to them. He wrote down their thanksgivings and prayers. He was, in the language of the Qur’an, present with the people the way Hajar was present with her child in the desert, not as a dispenser of authorized grace but as a human being oriented entirely toward the survival and flourishing of the other.15
Israa Ja’abis, from inside Ramleh Prison, which prisoners call “The Slaughterhouse,” practiced the same ministry.16 She had no door to stand at. She had a cell, and she made that cell into a threshold. She made bracelets embroidered with her child’s name even without fingers. She taught embroidery to other prisoners. She drew portraits of a mother holding a child. She wrote poems that circulated outside the prison walls and reached solidarity networks across the world. A fellow prisoner, Iman Al-A’war, wrote of watching Israa: “She was writing and drawing (without eight fingers) for her son. She’s not writing with her hand, but with her heart, with the love and compassion that flows from her, not ink.”17 That sentence stopped me when I read it. It stopped me because it is a description of ministry in conditions that were designed to make ministry impossible.
Solanus Casey was also making ministry in conditions designed to make it at least difficult if not impossible for him. Not the same conditions, not conditions remotely as brutal, but a structural refusal to recognize his gift as a gift; his response to that refusal was to keep giving anyway. To keep answering the door. To keep writing in his notebooks. To keep receiving people with the attention that his superiors, and the church that only partially authorized him, had apparently not thought to ask him for.
V. Lament as Theological Act: The Dua and the Porter’s Notebook
In my coursework at the Graduate Theological Union through the Pacific School of Religion (Doctor of Ministry student), lament emerged early and powerfully as a strategy women claim to protest in public. Professor Mahjabeen Dhala in the course “Women in the Qur’an and Biblical Texts” opened our first class session by naming lament as an emotional compass, a space women claim to protest against injustice, and she traced how, in the Islamic tradition, tears were eventually discouraged as a sign of insufficient reliance on God, making the act of public lament by women even more politically charged.18 Author Diane D’Souza, in Partners of Zaynab, deepened this for me, showing how dua, a verbal plea, a crying out to God, is woven into the daily practice of Muslim women not as passivity but as active, embodied resistance.19
Israa’s poem “A Sigh,” written November 2, 2022 from inside the prison, is a masterwork of lament: pained is a word that embodies despair yet offers relief to the souls who must bear, a sigh from the lips of the longing, distressed, a cry from the wounds that time laid to rest, eight years have faded, yet still she holds on, bound in her chains, yet her spirit stands tall, unbroken, unyielding.20 This is not surrender. This is the theological act of naming suffering in the presence of God and refusing to let that suffering be the end of the story.
The lament tradition runs through the Hebrew Bible with a ferocity that the church has frequently domesticated. Rizpah spread sackcloth on a rock, guarding the corpses of her slain sons against the birds of the air and beasts of the field. Hannah wept so fiercely in prayer that the priest Eli thought she was drunk, and God heard her. Hajar cried in the desert and her lament was answered with water from a stone. These women did not pray politely. They pressed God. And their pressing was not weakness. It was the fullest expression of faith available to them: the faith that says, I know you are there, I know you hear me, and I will not stop speaking until you respond.21
I am the son of a woman who prayed like that. My mother prayed that way across the border, across deportations, across the years when she was not with me and I was not with her and neither of us knew what would happen next. She was not authorized to be in this country. She had no document that gave her permission to exist in this geography. And she kept existing, and she kept praying, and she kept pressing God, and she is still here. That is what I mean when I say the theology of the door is a theology of lament heard and answered. Not always answered the way we want. Not always quickly. But it is answered, because the God that Solanus Casey served and the God that Israa Ja’abis served and the God my mother pressed in her undocumented prayers is a God who has a specific orientation toward the people at the door.
VI. Counterstory and the Word as Weapon
Professor Elaine Wainwright, in her feminist reading of the biblical testaments, offers the concept of counterstory: a story that contributes to the moral self-definition of its teller by undermining a dominant story, undoing it and retelling it in such a way as to invite new interpretation and conclusions.22 Israa’s entire literary project is counterstory. The Israeli state told one story about her, a terrorist, a would-be murderer, a security threat. Israa told another: a mother, a prisoner of occupation, a woman burned alive and denied healing, a human being who refused to disappear.
Her poem “A Response to Yedioth Ahronoth” is extraordinary in its directness. Written in response to Israeli newspaper coverage of her case, she names herself and faces the slander head-on: “My name is Israa, I stand my ground, a truth this land has ever found, and as for you, your ink runs dry, soak your paper, drink your lie.”23 Biblical scholar Mitzi J. Smith, reading the Syrophoenician woman through a womanist lens, names this kind of speech as heteroglossia: a culturally embedded, socially resistant language that refuses erasure.24 That is what Israa does in every word she publishes from inside the prison.
Solanus Casey practiced a quieter version of counterstory. He did not publish. He did not preach, because the church had taken that faculty from him. But he kept his notebooks, and in those notebooks, he assembled a counter-archive to the institutional assessment that he was insufficient. Every entry was a record of God working through a man the church had decided could not be trusted with full sacramental ministry. His notebooks say: regardless of what the institution concluded about me, here is what happened. Here are the people who came to the door. Here is what they told me God had done.
I have spent my adult life building institutions that practice counterstory. Homies Empowerment, which I co-founded with Lizbeth Gomez in Deep East Oakland and which now serves over twenty thousand people annually through the FREEdom Farm, the Freedom Store, and the Homies Kitchen was built on the premise that the communities the dominant culture had written off as dangerous, as insufficiently educated, as not worthy of investment, were in fact full of healers and scholars and warriors and hustlers whose wisdom the dominant culture could not afford to ignore.25 That is counterstory as community practice. That is the ministry of the threshold applied to an entire neighborhood.
At Berkeley, Israa told us what she wanted from us. She called on those pursuing international and human rights law to look deeply into the Geneva Conventions, into the so-called peace agreements between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, to see these violations and raise them. She told us: it is the role of advocacy, the role of bringing messages that are often untranslated and buried and sharing them from positions of privilege and power.26 She was doing what Casey did. She was standing at the door of the powerful and saying: let this be known. Let this be written down. Let this not disappear.
VII. Faith as Survival Technology: Sabr, Sanctity, and the God Who Does Not Abandon
Every dimension of Israa’s resistance is grounded in her Islamic faith. When asked in Pained what life in prison was like, she responded: “The most important thing is the gift of reason. Without it, the soul and body would be lost.” 27 This is akhlaq in the deepest sense. Theologian Zahra Ayubi defines akhlaq as the practice of virtue, morality, and good manners representing the inner and outer character of a person, covering ethical behavior towards God, oneself, and others. 28For Israa, the cultivation of that inner character was a survival technology when everything external had been stripped away.
At Berkeley, when I asked what role faith had played in keeping her alive through imprisonment, she answered directly: her faith played a fundamental role in her perseverance. She said she had certainty that whatever came next would be positive. Even hypothetically, even if everyone abandoned her, she knew God would not abandon her. She cited the Qur’anic verse that with every hardship comes ease and said she had certainty that whether in this life or the next, this hardship would manifest itself in a positive recompense. Even if it was not witnessed in this lifetime.29
This is the Islamic theological tradition of sabr30: perseverance not as passivity but as active spiritual discipline. Sabr is the choice to remain rooted in God when everything around you is designed to uproot you.
Solanus Casey practiced what I would call the Christian equivalent of sabr, and he found it in the same place Israa found it: in a faith that was not contingent on institutional recognition. The institutional church had told Casey that he was not sufficient. God, apparently, had not received the same memo. His biographer Michael Crosby documents how Casey’s own understanding of his vocation was shaped by a deep personal surrender to what he called “God’s will,” a surrender that was not passivity but attentiveness, a kind of radical listening that made him available to the needs of whoever walked through his door.31 That availability, that listening, that willingness to receive the suffering of another person without managing it through institutional channels, is precisely what Israa did from inside her cell, and it is precisely what my mother did in her prayers, and it is precisely what I learned on the twenty-sixth day of my hunger strike, when I understood that the fast was not about winning an argument but about being willing to stake your body on a truth you believe the world needs to hear.
Asiya, wife of Pharaoh, is one of the great exemplars of this tradition in the Qur’an. She lived inside the household of the most powerful oppressor of her time and chose God anyway. Dr. Dhala names Asiya as a Muhaddatha, a person who communicates with angels, one who has direct access to divine guidance, and traces how she played an instrumental role in rescuing Moses by protecting him from the Pharaoh’s murderous intentions.32 Asiya’s prayer, preserved in the Qur’an, is a prayer from inside Pharaoh’s house: “my Lord, build for me near You a house in Paradise and save me from Pharaoh and his deeds, and save me from the wrongdoing people.” 33 She asked God to free her soul even before her body was free. Israa does the same. And so, in his way, did Solanus Casey, whose institutional vocation was deeply constrained, and who found in that constraint the freedom to be exactly what the people coming to his door needed him to be.
VIII. Solidarity, Testimony, and the Obligation of the Witness
Israa’s final word from inside the prison is not a word of despair. It is a word of solidarity and demand: “Solidarity is not enough. Our voices must be heard beyond the walls of prisons and detention centers.”34 At Berkeley she extended this further, saying that freed prisoners collectively carry one message: there needs to be severe external pressure by international organizations and international law to bring forth the struggle of the prisoners, to ideally liberate them, and at minimum to provide them basic human rights.35
She also told us what release looked like, because it was not what she had imagined. Many prisoners were not released back to where they came from. She was initially released to the West Bank, but after witnessing fellow released prisoners get reimprisoned soon after their release, she went to Jordan. She is very afraid of going back to Palestine, where her children and family are, out of concern that she would be reimprisoned once again.36 She lives in exile from her own children, still separated, now not by a prison wall but by fear of a prison wall.
I know exile of a different kind. Being undocumented in your own home country is its own form of exile. You are inside the geography but outside the law. You exist in the place but not in the documents the place uses to recognize your existence. I have spent years navigating that gap, building something inside it, making a home in a place that had not officially authorized my presence. That is not the same as Israa’s exile. But it has similar roots. That root is a structure of power that has decided certain bodies do not belong, and the refusal of those bodies to accept that verdict.
Solanus Casey was never exiled geographically, but being denied priestly faculties made him a kind of internal exile in his own church. He was inside the institution but outside its full authorization. He served at the door rather than at the altar. And from that doorway position he built something that no altar assignment could have built, because the people who came to his door were not coming for the sacraments, he was not authorized to administer. They were coming because he was there, because he listened, because when they told him what God had done in their lives he wrote it down, because the act of being received by him was itself a form of grace.
Rateb Hreibat, one of the prisoners who wrote about Israa in Pained, captured this obligation of the witness when a fellow prisoner told him it was useless to speak because the world was blind and deaf to Palestine, and he replied: “even if they are blind, we see. If they are deaf, we hear. We will carry our people’s suffering to every free soul in this world.” 37 This is what Casey’s thanksgiving notebooks were. This is what my thirty-four years in East Oakland have been. This is what this essay is: a carrying of testimony from one threshold to another, an insistence that these lives, Israa’s, Casey’s, my mother’s, the young people at Homies Empowerment, be known.
I have been shaped by Ubuntu: I am because we are. I have been shaped by En Lak’ech: you are my other self, tu eres mi otro yo. Both ancient frameworks converge with the Islamic teaching that all human beings are created from a single soul and carry a shared dignity that no state has the right to burn away. When Israa’s body was set on fire, something in all of us was set on fire. When she survived, something in all of us survived with her. This is not sentiment. This is theology. This is the koinonia, the beloved community, that the Qur’an, the Torah, and the Gospel all reach toward, and that a Capuchin porter in Detroit and a Palestinian prisoner in Ramleh both practiced, from their very different doorways, with everything they had.
Conclusion: The Door Is Still Open
Israa Ja’abis has now undergone more than twenty surgeries in Turkey and Jordan. She continues to thank Allah. She continues to speak. She closed her remarks to us at Berkeley by saying she hopes we gather at a time where not only are the Palestinian prisoners freed, but our societies are freed of oppression and servitude, envisioning a collective liberation for all of us.38 She is still writing for her son, still with her heart, still not with her hand.39
Blessed Francis Solanus Casey is entombed in Detroit at the Solanus Center, and pilgrims continue to come. Over 1.5 million prayer requests have been recorded in the past five years alone.40 He is still answering the door, in whatever form the dead answer doors, which I believe they do, because the tradition I come from, Yoruba and Mexica and Catholic and Buddhist and Liberation Theologian, holds that the ancestors do not simply stop. They continue. They stand at thresholds. They receive.
I am writing this essay as a seminarian at Pacific School of Religion, as a community organizer who has spent over thirty-four years in Deep East Oakland, as the son of a woman who was deported and came back, as a man who hunger struck for twenty-six days because he believed education was worth staking a body on, and as someone whose dissertation research is centered on active hope across seven world faith traditions. I have stood at many doors. I have been refused by some of them. I have been let through others by people who were, like Casey, willing to exercise a welcome that the institution had not specifically authorized.
What I want to say, finally, is that the contemporary significance of Solanus Casey to U.S. society and Christianity in the United States cannot be separated from the question of who is standing at the door right now. Casey’s sanctity is not a museum piece. It is a living challenge to a church and a nation that continues to sort people at the threshold, that continues to assign the label of simplex, of insufficient, of unauthorized, of illegal to whole populations of human beings whose gifts the institution is not equipped to recognize. The millions of undocumented people in this country are at the door. The Palestinian prisoners, burned and fingerless and denied surgery and told their number is 700, are at the door. The young people in Deep East Oakland whom the school system decided were not worth investing in are at the door. Casey stood at that door for decades.
The door is still open. That is the theology. That is the witness. That is what Israa Ja’abis, in her prison and in her exile, and Blessed Francis Solanus Casey, in his monastery and in his tomb, are both still saying to us: the door is still open, and God is on the other side of it, and the people who need to get through are already there, already knocking, already waiting for someone with the courage and the humility and the love to let them in.
Asé. Ameen. Amen. Así sea. Mexica Tiahui. En Lak’ech. Mitakuye Oyasin. Ubuntu. Om.