Fear Not | Redemption

“She understood that God loves us and helps us not because we are good but because God is good.”(1) A few days ago, I read those words about Julian of Norwich, the 15th century writer and mystic and God placed it on my heart to share them with you in relation to the immigration battle being waged in the United States. I believe Julian’s words can guide us when confronted with two of the three main reasons given for blocking immigration from Latin America and to some extent, for blocking or limiting the entry of people of the Islamic faith. One reason, based on the economy, was addressed in an earlier post. The two reasons addressed in today’s post are the risk of criminal or terrorist activity and rewarding people who are breaking our immigration laws.

For those people who seek to exclude immigrants or certain ethnic groups based on the notion that some of them are criminals or terrorists, I ask you to be mindful of the fact that criminal behavior and terrorism are not limited to any specific racial, ethnic, or religious group. And as Americans let’s be honest with ourselves. If our immigration laws were designed to protect the nation from criminals and terrorists, our history would require limiting immigration from Western Europe as much or more so than any other area in the world. Our history also would require limiting immigration by Christians more than any other faith group. We can site instances as recent as the shooting of journalists in Maryland and the rioting of white supremacists in Charlottesville or as distant as the lynchings of thousands of African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the murder of Native-Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. If we talk about gangs and organized crime, we could talk about the Italian mafia, which many of our organized crime laws were initially crafted to combat, and we could add another area of the great white north and speak of Russian organized crime, which has been a lethal part of American crime for decades. We could add many of the modern day corporate and government criminals to that list, executives who lay off workers, raise prices, close businesses, and slash benefits that feed, shelter, and help heal the most financially impoverished among us, not because they must but for financial gain. So, I ask my fellow Americans and fellow Christians to speak out honestly and forcefully against the portrayal of Latin Americans and Muslims as criminals and terrorists. I ask you to be honest in owning the fact that our immigration policies and laws are not about crime or terror. Our immigration policies and laws, as they always have been, are the rotten fruits of racism and religious discrimination.

For those people who seek to exclude immigrants or certain ethnic groups based on the notion that they are entering the country illegally, I ask you to be mindful of the fact that for the most part, laws are created by human beings with power and they are designed to benefit the people who create them, not the nation as a whole. Legality does not equate with justice. Some of the cruelest and most horrific actions taken by our government and by governments throughout history have been taken under color of law. At this very moment across our land, there are innocent people trapped in jails and prisons who have been legally convicted when justice would demand their freedom.

Even when laws are created with the best intentions, they can never be justly applied to every individual. They simply cannot cover every situation or circumstance. That is why it is vital to have competent, caring, and compassionate individuals as police officers, prosecutors, and judges, and to give them laws that are flexible. This way they can connect with the individuals in front of them, apply the law as fairly as possible, and, at the times when a required application is unfair, seek to find ways to limit or counterbalance that unfairness.

Our focus as human beings must always first be not on law and order, but on justice and grace. Our focus as human beings and as Americans, if we truly value family, community, and freedom, must be on the goodness in every human, not on their faults or potential faults. Relying on the law and punishing people often seem to be great ideas until the laws and punishments are applied to us and to the people we love. Then, we open our mouths and our hearts to cry out for acts of mercy. As people of faith, in particular, we are called to remember that each of us makes mistakes, causes harm to ourselves and to others, and participates and benefits from injustices.

If God sat in judgment over humanity in the way we sit in judgment over each other, the human race would long ago have been extinct. We should give thanks every day for God’s justice, a justice that seeks to empower, connect, and liberate life, a justice that is filled with mercy, love, and grace.

To paraphrase the opening quotation, God is good to us not because of our goodness, our purity, our merit, or our obedience. God is good to us because God is good. May we seek to live as ones created in God’s image. May we love others, help others, and welcome others not by our estimation of their goodness, their purity, their merit, or their obedience, but because we seek to be good as God is good.

Amani.

(1). Gloria Durka, Praying with Julian of Norwich (Winona, Minnesota: Saint Mary’s Press, 1989), p. 42.

We are all each other’s children. There are two components to that statement. One component is that each one of us is a child. The other component is that every child is our child. We are all each other’s children.

First, each one of us is a child. No matter our age, we still have a child within us. We are most aware of that fact when we are overcome with joy and laughter, when we are lonely or afraid, and when we bury the people who raised us. Second, every child is our child. We have a responsibility to care for and to nurture each other. It is not always our responsibility under the law, but it is always our responsibility as human beings.

A few years ago, I went to South Korea as part of a ministry team. The primary reason for our trip was to assist with a Vacation Bible School program. I was blessed in many ways by spending time in South Korea and one of those ways relates to this post. The church was relatively large by American standards and had numerous activities occurring in addition to a large Vacation Bible School program. Every day the building was buzzing with students of all ages, teachers, translators and room assistants, kitchen and maintenance volunteers, members preparing for the regular Sunday worship services, and paid church staff. As for the VBS kids, they were everywhere, sitting in classrooms and on the floor during morning worship services, walking and gathering in the hallways, singing in the praise band and sleeping in sheltering arms. They did not have on identifying wristbands. There were no guiding ropes around their waists. There were no huge name placards on their backs.

After one or two days, I gave up on trying to connect any one child to her biological parent. It was a fruitless and unnecessary enterprise, for every child in that building belonged to everyone else. If a child cried, fell, tugged on someone for food or water, or was being picked on by another child, she was immediately attended to by an older child, a teenager, or an adult. I was blessed by what I observed in that church and saddened by what I had observed in many American churches. Our focus in the United States on so-called child safety has unnecessarily increased the risk of any of us caring for children in the ways in which our hearts guide us. It has caused us to teach our children through our words and our actions that there are good people and bad people, when in truth, every human is born good and every one of us can succumb to sin and evil at any given moment. It has caused us to teach our children that security comes from laws, restrictions, and barriers instead of from inclusion, openness, and love.

We have become a society that neglects our responsibility to every child, that neglects our responsibility to each other as human beings. Our current immigration battle is a prime example of our neglect. I say battle, not discussion or debate, because a battle is what this has become. I say neglect because there’s way too much focus on laws and on which government policies led us to this point. There’s too much back and forth about why we care for one group of children and not for another group of children. If we are not to neglect our children, if we are not to neglect each other, our focus must be on caring for all children. Our focus must be on comforting, supporting, and loving every child.

Yes, there are children who are American citizens who are without their parents due to their parents’ abandonment, military service, imprisonment, or death. Yes, there are children who are American citizens who are without adequate shelter, food, or clothing. Yes, we have a responsibility to each of those children AND we have a responsibility to the children at our southern border, regardless of which side of the border they are on. We have a responsibility as part of the human race to all of the children at the border, including the toddlers and teenagers from Latin America and the parents and other adults fleeing persecution or simply seeking to build a better life for themselves and their families. We have a responsibility to every child, including the border patrol agents, immigration lawyers, social workers, journalists, cooks, bus drivers, and any other person who is in the midst of the cruelty that is occurring. What must the child in each of them be feeling? What must the children in them be remembering from their early years or fearing for their futures? What heartache and grief do they take home to their families?

We must resist the temptation to pit one group of children against another group, to become more and more suspicious and less trusting, to limit our interactions and our sense of responsibility to people like us, whatever that means, and to judge who is good and worthy and who is bad and unworthy. The temptation is great because we think that if we do those things, we will be safe and secure. We think we can avoid whatever risk being open to, vulnerable to, and responsible for others might bring. In reality, we cannot live and avoid risk. We cannot be safe and secure as long as our fellow humans are not safe and secure. We cannot be fully human until we are willing to embrace the child in us and the child in others. We cannot be fully human until we risk being responsible both to and for each other.

When we live as the human beings we are created to be, we recognize the child that rests in each of us, a child in need of love, of kindness, of laughter, and of human touch. When we live as the human beings we are created to be, we are grateful for the child within us, the child that reminds us of our vulnerability and of each other’s vulnerability. When we live as the human beings we are created to be, we speak and act with an awareness that we are all each other’s children. We accept and cherish the responsibility to care for each other and to protect each other, not only other Americans but all people. When it comes to immigration or to any issue that confronts us, may we remember the child in each of us. May we remember that every child is our child. May we remember that we are all each other’s children.
Amani.