As I prepare for the Sunday homily, I hear the motor of the unmanned drone flying over my home in the foothills of the Mule Mountains on the Mexico-Arizona border. The drone is up early this morning, looking for illegal immigrant groups running through the creosote bush and up the wash near my home.
From my home in the foothills, the wall is a thin dark line that I look down on during the day, and at night the lights, all in a row, tell me clearly that I live on “this side of the border.”
“This side” is where I have lived for eight years. We who live along La Frontera grieve the wall, the sound of the drones and helicopters, the lights of demarcation, the Ford Explorer Border patrol SUVS that rush by, the frequent pitiful sight of groups of 10 to 20 poor immigrants sitting on the ground alongside the highway as the Border Patrol agent checks his clipboard.
Old-timers, ranchers, long-time customs agents, las familias who have compadres on both sides of the border, don’t say too much about the new Homeland Security Department. They just kind of shake their heads and look mournful. The border was never like this before. Much has changed since the mid-'90s.
Borderline property owners pick up abandoned backpacks, baby clothes, shoes, empty water bottles, and they grieve as they hope the folks who left them are OK. It isn’t a question if they “made it” or not. The questions are: Are they still alive? Did some coyote rip a child out of its mother’s arms and pass the child back across the line because it was making too much noise? Did they get caught by one of the kinder Border Patrol agents? Are they being held at gunpoint by a few wild-eyed, trigger-happy vigilantes? Are they stuffed into stifling hot vans, trucks or some Tucson or Phoenix bedroom? Are the younger women paying the cost with their bodies?
Even in the midst of our anger about broken fences, trashed properties, smart-ass coyotes who give you the finger, we know something is not right about our border and immigration policy.
La Frontera boasts some of brightest, desert star-lit skies in the world and some of the darkest sides of human avarice. The United States of America. Land of the free, home of the brave. What has happened? Why have we become so punitive? Why are we so afraid? Do I feel my home, my property is more secure? Secure from what?
The folks running through the dark desert night are seeking work and a way to feed, house and educate their children. Those who would judge them to be terrorists, attackers of our land to reconquest lost lands of years gone by, racial misfits, must be so afraid that their fear has driven them to the mental illness borders of their own minds.
Paul, in the Scriptures, asks us to boast in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The boast that he was referring to is not a boast of ruling power or the culture of tribute. Christians boast only in the freedom that releases us from the culture of boasting. Beware the politicians who would boast that God is on their side. As Abraham Lincoln said to his generals after the great battle of Gettysburg, “I pray gentlemen that we are on God’s side.”
The boast of our nation, this great melting pot, world economic engine, occupier or liberator of Iraq, is not in the culture and power of might but in the “Mother of Exiles.”
The Mother of Exiles stands in the New York harbor. Incised at the base of this great statue reads the following
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Are the imprisoned lighting, and her name?
Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows worldwide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(Emma Lazarus)
Oh, but could we once again humbly boast in the cross of Jesus Christ … and in the Mother of Exiles … once again with one breath and voice say: “Give me your tired, your poor …”
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