Sunday, August 17, 2014

On The Children at Our Border


I am a therapist.  I have degrees.  I am capable of assessing, evaluating, observing and even diagnosing persons. But most of what I have learned comes from the privilege of having people come to my office and sharing their hopes, dreams, doubts and fears. I listen, observe, support and diagnose. However, if I can’t identify with, empathize with and recognize that these courageous and wounded ones are also me and I them, then I cannot see in them my own journey and think and feel and believe even as they do, and I am only full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So it is with these courageous and wounded children who come to this land, though it be one of privilege and poverty. They are like the Israelite slaves stumbling out of and longing to flee the oppression of Egypt who are also like us:

“Then we cried unto the Lord – and the Lord heard our voice –
And brought us out of Egypt with an outstretched arm with great terror, signs and wonders –
And he brought us to this land – flowing in milk and honey – and he gave us this land”
                                                                                                                                                        Deut 26

We have all been given this land.  We are our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers.  Indeed we are all those who came here in small boats and large, stumbling and hoping for a new life.  We are all of them for 15 or more generations.  We are those who have looked to the horizon, smelled the land, seen the birds, and even glimpsed a great statue in New York Harbor, on which is inscribed:
“Give me your tired your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to be free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me
I lift my torch beside the golden door”

In addition to being a therapist, I am also a Christian.  Not a particularly good one, certainly not a pious one, but one whose heart and mind is stirred to compassion and heartache for all those who are oppressed, and as such, a listener to this man from Nazareth, who said:
“Let those children come to me
For unless you become as one of these
You cannot see the kingdom of God”
                                                                                                                                                        Luke 18

And again:
“Come to me, all you who labor and who are heavy laden
And I will give you rest”
                                                                                                                                                        Matthew 11

These are not simple platitudes for comfortable, air conditioned pews. These are a serious challenge to identify with the “gentle and lowly of heart.” We are all the inheritors of those before us and they were like us and we like them. On the shores of the Sea of Reeds (we call it the Red Sea); with the Pharaohs’ chariots hard on our heels (bigotry, racism, greed, manipulated laws and regulations), we are all threatened by our own self-importance, our material greed and our warped notions of love, and as the Israelites needed to be delivered from Egypt, we need to be delivered from the impoverished slavery of our “exceptionalism.”

Recently I heard a line from an old Black Slave Spiritual:

“I’m gonna put my foot in that water
And God’s gonna stir those waters
I’m gonna put my feet in that water
And God’s gonna trouble those waters”
                                                                                                                                                        Anonymous


For me, I am stirred by the plight of these little ones, and I hope, if necessary, our politics, our corporate/profit mentality, our shallow and superficial culture, and our personal agenda driven laws are “troubled” and that the result will be the deliverance of these who came to our land, and in that, we too may be delivered.