Pyrotechnics

I cannot leave this holiday, our “Independence Day,” without comment. I write as thousands on June 30 are rallying for immigrants coming to this, my country, fleeing oppression, violence, violation, and extreme, poverty to be granted asylum, and for their families detained in this, my country, to be reunited immediately. I had intended to go to the Philadelphia rally, but circumstances, regrettably, prevented me. And so I write.

When we were little, like most families, we went to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. My brother, however, was absolutely terrified of them: the noise, the colors looming overhead, and so my mother had to stay back in the car with his head buried in her lap while my father and I savored the display, the excitement, the oohs of the crowd. It was one of the times I was not fearful of something so terribly out of my control. But then, I had my father with me; I had a family that would be reunited within an hour. I knew I was safe.

Now I am once again fearful of the pyrotechnics all around us, booming forth from my country and from within, where my own powerlessness to control anything blasts anger inside my head. I don’t know who and what my country is; I want to celebrate it – and in so many, many ways I do – but I am trying to figure out exactly what to celebrate.

In a column in the June 24 Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch writes that our current refugee crisis and the harsh reaction to it “amounts to a civil war for America’s very soul” and he points out, “the question that rarely gets asked: What would prompt any parent to grab his or her child by the hand and lead them across raging rivers and over Mexican mountain peaks, only to face such an uncertain fate from armed U.S. law officers at the end of their odyssey?” The answer is obviously tragic: “…these refugees thought it was better to take a chance on the increasingly fraught U.S. border than to risk certain death at home.”

Of course, women, if denied asylum, as usual face something additional and just as bad or worse: marital rape, domestic violence, terroristic acts against their bodies, minds, and spirits. These horrors, however, suddenly do not qualify as conditions qualifying for sanctuary. According to the attorney general, these are “misfortunes,” social problems which asylum is not going to redress.

But here in the midst of all these pyrotechnics, I can do a little celebrating of my own Catholic Church. A delegation from the U.S. Conference of Bishops, led by its president, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, is traveling to the U.S./Mexico border to work with Catholic communities, U.S. government officials, and Catholic Charities to address the most egregious of these issues as part of their “protest against the hardening of the American heart.” Many bishops have issued statements and proclamations in outrage against the policies and treatment of immigrants, have said Mass and distributed communion through border slats, and hundreds in their congregations have offered to be temporary foster parents. Social justice and redressing social problems and “misfortunes” are just, for the most part, what we Catholics do well.

Of course, our own fear, of the “other”, of an assault on our own privilege or our comfort, could ultimately undo the nobility of such acts. I was reading a critique of a book of poems by Terrance Hayes. In one of the excerpts quoted, he is looking in the mirror and sees himself as his own destroyer: “Assassin, you are a mystery/To me, I say to my reflection sometimes,” and then to this same reflection, “You are beautiful because of your sadness,” and then, “You would be more beautiful without your fear.”