Naming the Nameless

On July 29th barring court intervention Arizona's new immigration law will become effective and start to be enforced.  It has been the subject of great controversy between two sides in this grand drama of impersonal rhetoric.  One side says, "the illegals are taking our jobs, our money, bringing us drugs and violence," they look at so many bad parts of America and decide to blame it on the "illegals."  The other side says, "the new law regarding illegals will lead to Hispanic profiling and that would not be right or politically correct and so we shouldn't do it;" for this side it is about the higher issue of race relations and equality. 

have yet to encounter really loud voices on either side that move this from and impersonal theoretical debate to a personal discussion about the lives of specific human beings.  Discussions about Jose or Juanita or Felix or Maria or Juan.  Discussions about people working jobs nobody wants for less than minimum wage to send back to support their families in Mexico who make only pennies a day.  Discussions about hope, or freedom, or love of humanity.  Rather we all seem to get bogged down in this impersonal rhetoric with which we can become very self righteous.  We don't name the people that this affects, we simply refer to them in a very condemning tone as "illegals," not as human beings with value or worth, not as children of God, not as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.  As long as we remain impersonal, we can remain indignant; but the moment we begin to personalize it to the cute little girl named Maria at the vegetable stand; the moment we begin to flesh out a face for the "illegals," our seemingly impenetrable towers of self-righteous indignation begin to crumble.

I know this will shock you, but this morning I was once again reading Thomas Merton.  An article entitled "Conquistador, Tourist, and Indian" from "A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra concerning Giants" (A Thomas Merton Reader, Image, 1974).  Writing post-World War II and pre-Vietnam, he is noting how the superpowers of America and Russia are likely to wipe each other out thus leaving the Third World, places like Central and Latin America as the new "super powers."  Amidst that he begins to discuss our failings as a country, as a church, as human beings of recognizing the value and worth that citizens of these countries and people of these ethnicities have to offer our world.  He pulls no punches, "Let me be quite succinct: the greatest sin of the European-Russian-American complex which we call the West (and this sin has spread its own way to China), is not only greed and cruelty, not only moral dishonesty and infidelity to truth, but above all its unmitigated arrogance toward the rest of the human race.  Western civilization is now in full decline into barbarism (a barbarism that springs from within itself) because it has been guilty of a twofold disloyalty: to God and to Man" (pg. 305). 

Writing over sixty years ago he succinctly, to use his words, captures the very problem we are facing today.  Our impersonal rhetoric is a product of our arrogance towards those in the world we don't understand.  We don't understand their language, their culture, their value and family systems so we get afraid and step into our protective powers of national pride and rather than try to understand we disengage in the same way we as tourists disengage the foreign cultures we go to see.  The truth and reality of our situation in America is that there are millions of people who have entered this country illegally, but they are still human beings and most of them are just trying to provide for their families. 

As Christians we need to enter this debate with a different voice than either side of it in the secular world.  As Christians we need to begin to personalize it, because all of the "illegals" are personal to God.  All of them are children that He loves and cherishes and wants to bless just as He wants to bless us.  This may come as a surprise, but God's blessing is not reserved exclusively for Americans.  My goal with this post wasn't really to argue the law and policy one way or the other, I was just inspired by Merton to point out how we need to move this discussion from the impersonal to the personal, from the valueless to those valued by God, from statistics to families.

Forgive me this long quote from Merton, but I think it so captures the challenge we are faced with when we as Christians try to decide how we are going to respond to our "illegal immigration problem" and so I present it as the closing statement of this post.

"The tourist never meets anyone, never encounters anyone, never finds the brother in the stranger.  This is his tragedy. 
If only North America had realized, after a hundred and fifty years, that Latin Americans really existed.  That they were really people.  that they spoke a different language.  That they had a culture.  That they had more than something to sell!  Money has totally corrupted the brotherhood that should have united all the peoples of America.  It has destroyed the sense of relationship, the spiritual community that had already begun to flourish in the years of Bolivar.  But no!  Most North Americans still don't know, and don't care, that Brazil speaks a language other than Spanish, that all Latin Americans do not live for the siesta, that all do not spend their days and nights playing the guitar and making love.  They have never awakened to the fact that Latin America is by and large culturally superior to the United States, not only on the level of the wealthy minority which has absorbed more of the sophistication of Europe, but also among the desperately poor indigenous cultures, some of which are rooted in a past that has never yet been surpassed on this continent.

So the tourist drinks tequila, and thinks it is no good, and waits for the fiesta he has been told to wait for.  how should he realize that the Indian who walks down the street with half a house on his head and a hole in his pants, is Christ?  All the tourist thinks is that it is odd for so many Indians to be called Jesus" (pg. 309)

Your brother in Christ,
Faron