By the time you read this, certainly by the Day of Pentecost, the situation will have changed.
(What is really going on will remain; what is happening will be new - or is it always the reverse?)
Right now at the end of Epiphany season, at a former monastery - the shrine of perpetual adoration - the place has been transformed into a hospital in the best old Christian sense - like the hospital of Saint John near the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - serving as a place offering respite for weary travelers, who receive hospitality: welcome, food, attention to medical needs, sleep, warm clothing, and a chance to connect with the folks ahead on their journeys and the people back home.
Here, quietly, with need for no fanfare, volunteers from various churches meet individuals and groups of people who seek asylum in the United States. They have been interviewed and released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are headed by bus to connect with sponsors diaspora’d across the country - friend or family in Houston, New York, Chicago, D.C., Florida. They have come from Guatemala, Hondoras, El Salvador, Nicaragua. They tap the flags on the wall of the comedor as they go by, to show where they come from.
Fewer people than for many years now are arrested between legal ports of entry - though that continues, so does the desperation and the deaths alone in the forbidding desert - but more and many flood through the gates, released after initial interviews, found plausible in their cases for asylum.
There are cousins I have who exist because their father and his family, refugees from civil war, became citizens. He met a girl whose mother arrived as a small child from a faraway country. Now they are here and citizens.
Today’s travelers, gathered at the former monastery currently serving as a way-place of hospitality, have been accompanied by Our Lady of Guadalupe, or the Holy Child of Atocha. A century and a half ago, some of my ancestors were accompanied by a different holy figure, a former slave named Patrick. But they too sought sanctuary, freedom, and I hope a respite on the way served by hospitable people who saw what was really going on.
“It’s now, it’s real, it’s bad, it’s us, and there’s hope” — that is how an eminent scientist recently summed up for me the crisis of climate change. But it can serve to characterize also what is happening among immigrants today, on the U.S. southern border, in the Mediterranean, and between countries in south Asia.
That “there’s hope” means we’re not off the hook; there is something we can do.
What is really going on - people move, that’s what they do — continues. Our Lady of Guadalupe, our Saint Patrick of the captives of Ireland, Child of Atocha, pray for us. Jesus dwell with us forever.
—- John Leech, Tucson, Arizona.
The Coracle is the magazine of the Iona Community.
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