Rocio

Rocio is eight years old and lives in the neighborhood called “Los Comunicadores” in Matamoros, the Mexican border city that sits just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. She seemed to be a healthy child—bright, inquisitive, active—until she turned three years old. She quit growing, lost a lot of weight in a hurry—and her bones became fragile. She suffered repeated fractures, often from incidental contact.

Her skeletal system, that lovely invention of God’s nature, had turned into a torture machine. She began to shrink in upon herself.

A group of evangelical Christian doctors discovered Rocio during a quick missionary trip to Matamoros. The circumstances of her life, the vibrancy of her spirit, the hopelessness of her case--it is hard to know what moves a group of people from observation to action. In any case, the missionary doctors wanted to save her. But their time was limited, as were their local contacts, and, in the end, they headed home, unable to do much of anything other than raising false hope.

The hard truth was that there is not much that can be done, not now. Rocio had been through the Mexican medical system and the doctors had in fact done good work. She had received a plethora of examinations at no cost to her family. It doesn’t seem that she has rickets, but there is a possibility that she has an metabolic disorder. Rocio is being afflicted by something that is extraordinarily complicated, something that would be very difficult to treat, even in the best of circumstances.

The circumstances of Rocio’s life have made such treatment an impossibility. Rocio’s mother, Enriqueta, is raising her three children alone. She works on a factory assembly line where she earns about a third of what is needed to feed, clothe, and shelter her family. At 26 years of age, Enriqueta is worn out.

Taking Rocio across town to a doctor’s visit is a journey of pain for the little girl, who only breathes with any comfort when she is sitting up.

My friend Dr. Marsha, a pediatrician from Brownsville, and I pay the little girl a visit. Marsha sat with her and gently lifted her arm. Rocio indicated where they had taken a bone biopsy from her collarbone. She quietly told Marsha, that, yes, she was in pain. Marsha then asked the mother about Rocio’s medical history. The mother answers perfunctorily, her gaze out beyond the small sadness of her yard.

When Marsha asked Rocio what she would like to do, her eyes lit up. “Go to school!” she says. Her mother, for the first time during the visit, smiles, “She knows how to read!” she proudly exclaims.

As we continued the visit, Rocio turned in her little wheelchair so that she could better see the neighborhood kids scampering up and down a tree. “Rocio loves to watch the kids play,” her older sister says, helpfully.

We take our leave, promising to come back.

Once in the car, Marsha sighs, “I doubt that she will live out the month. Did you notice how much trouble she was having breathing?”

Actually, I hadn’t noticed that. I was caught up in the luminosity of her eyes, when she spoke of looking forward to the opening of school, and in the brightness of her smile, as she watched the kids from next door act like monkeys.

“The people asked him, ‘What, then, are we to do?’” (Luke 3: 10)
(Photos by Michael Seifert and Marsha Griffin, MD)

Matthew 25: 36

Yesterday the Border Patrol began Operation Streamline in the Rio Grande Valley. They intend to catch all undocumented people who are here and jail them for at least three months. They have not said what they would do with children--or with the maids and gardeners that most Border Patrol officials themselves hire.
Which of these is illegal? The chicken, the duck (already in a cage!) or one of the girls? Or perhaps it is all in my head (or my soul).


(This is from the New York Times):
The Great Immigration Panic

Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. After the largest raid ever last month — at a meatpacking plant in Iowa — hundreds were swiftly force-fed through the legal system and sent to prison. Civil-rights lawyers complained, futilely, that workers had been steamrolled into giving up their rights, treated more as a presumptive criminal gang than as potentially exploited workers who deserved a fair hearing. The company that harnessed their desperation, like so many others, has faced no charges.

Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.

This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.

There are few national figures standing firm against restrictionism. Senator Edward Kennedy has bravely done so for four decades, but his Senate colleagues who are running for president seem by comparison to be in hiding. John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so. The American public’s moderation on immigration reform, confirmed in poll after poll, begs the candidates to confront the issue with courage and a plan. But they have been vague and discreet when they should be forceful and unflinching.

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

The New York Times
June 3, 2008

Litter

I take a half-finished Coca-Cola can from the car. I empty out the leftover soda and toss the can to the side of the road.

I am not littering.

This can is for Elvira or for one of the Martinez children. They are the most prolific of the scavengers who wander the neighborhood each afternoon, loading up large plastic bags with aluminum that can be recyclable.

They are our equivalent of those Guatemalan Indians that I have seen bent over in half by the load of wood they have scavenged from their hiways and byways.

We are foolish if we think that we are a more advanced civilization.

I think for a bit about what it means to know the name of the person who will pick up what I consider trash and find a better use for it than I have.

(Photo by Michael Seifert)

Pieta

January 26, 2008

The pieta in the church is small, and old and well-touched. When people conclude their prayer, they like to caress the Virgin. I believe that they are offering her condolences, and that that gesture is a part of their prayer.

As a result, the little statue has become chipped in places and looks like it could use a touch up. I like it that way; it is a sign that others have been here and have prayed here as well.

The pious lady who comes to daily Mass and who will not say hello to anyone and who refuses to hold hands during the Our Father or offer a sign of peace and who will only take communion from the priest (all of this within her rights) wants to take the statue home to have it re-touched. “It looks horrible and is disrespectful,” she tells me. She will not tell me her name.

A neighbor is going through our garbage. She is pulling out the remains of a very picked over roast chicken when Br. Albert walks out the door. She looks up at him with a question, “Can I have this?” He says, “Well it has been in the refrigerator for more than a week. It’s your call.”

There are more pietas than I can count.

Some of them need different kinds of re-touching. Some of them can’t share even their names. Some of them just need a meal.

Thanks Be To God

Happy Thanksgiving!

We all remember the beginnings of this festive week. One of the things that binds us together as a people is the experience of having been dressed up (while children, in most cases) as pilgrim women and men, Indians, or turkeys (those of us who were being prepared at an early time in life for social sacrificial roles).

We remember but perhaps we don't realize that the pilgrims were amongst the first foreigners to come to America (I don't know much Biblical Hebrew, but I believe that aliens are called maguwr, as in Genesis 17, 8, wherein Abraham is promised by God legal permanent residence in the Promised Land). The pilgrims were surely undocumented. Although the native Americans did not have as complicated an immigration law as we do, they did know who was whom and which tribe had rights to settle in which coast and valley. Unprotected aliens as well, these first Other Than Mexicans. They proved as resilient as most desperate refugees tend to be: they survived that first hard year and then settled in amongst the native peoples.

So to speak.

Cristina is a pilgrim who came to these shores five years ago. Two of her children are native born and so are citizens. She and her husband are undocumented, and according to radiospeak, "potential terrorists." In reality, they are simple people who are doing what they can to get through one crisis after another. They live in Brownsville, Texas, and are grateful not to have to be braving the New England winter that nearly wiped out the first pilgrims.

They had turkey this Thanksgiving, but would have happily passed on the meal in exchange for some peace of mind.

Cristina told me that she is afraid to go to the store, as the "Border Patrol are everywhere and they are arresting everyone. I don't think that I could live separated from my children."

The question on the tip of one's tongue, always, is "so why not go back to your home country?"

I wonder what a pilgrim would have answered to that question.

I confess it is hard to imagine them getting back on their boats and going back to England. I wonder what would have happened if our "Father in Faith" Abraham had returned to where he came from.

Perhaps there wouldn't have been a Jewish people, and therefore no Christian people, and certainly, then, no pilgrims. Or thanksgiving.

Perhaps we would all be reading and writing in Cherokee.

And practicing that most ancient American virtue: hospitality.

The Feast of All Saints

Each year, on the 1^st of November, the church celebrates and gives thanks for those special friends of God that we call saints. When the Scripture speaks of the “144,000” enjoying the glorious light of God, it is assuring us that there are an untold number of saints (“144,000” is a symbolic algorithm: 3 (meaning “holy”) times 4 (the four corners of the earth) times three times four over and over again—the complete guest list for the Reign of God, so I am told, the moment when God’s plan to unite all in Jesus Christ is realized. A moment that represents that final day when God’s Goodness breaks down the barriers between all of us and once and for all routs every vestige of evil and of injustice, a time of God’s peace and God’s justice.

Heaven, in other words.

So, today, we celebrate heaven—those of us who have already arrived, and those of us who are making our way, haltingly.

Is heaven a place of clouds and harps, angels and sunsets, good views and great food?

Or is it the place that is the end point toward which point babies’ smiles, gentle acts, poetry which rends the heart and sweetness that heals the wound?

Perhaps all we can do is trust the signs that God gives us, the moments that allow us to peek into the deeper mystery of goodness.

Today I remembered Lupita, a nineteen year old who finally passed after a long and wasting illness. She lived in a working class neighborhood in Matamoros, Mexico, and although I would only see her once in a great while, we had become friends. Her great gift was her sense of appreciation.

In her last year, as she lost her ability to walk, I managed to find her a wheelchair. When she saw it, she managed a heartbreaking smile.

As she lay dying, one of the hospital social workers asked Lupita if she would give her wheelchair to someone who needed it now.

Lupita told her no, that it was a gift “from Padre Miguel.”

At first I wondered how could Lupita had said such a thing. But upon reflection, I realized that Lupita could not just give away something that was given to her in love. No regifting for this young woman.

As we prayed at Mass yesterday, I thought of how God works. There will be no one to replace Lupita. She has moved on—no more hearing her laughter or enjoying her smile. She won’t be repackaged, reincarnated. No one can replace her, as well it should be, for God doesn’t regift either.

And yet some essence of her has stayed behind, etched in my heart’s memory, a space aching to be filled, a seventh note waiting to be completed. A hope, I would call it. A joyful hope that one day death’s barrier is shattered by the power of love, and the 144,000 of us will be finally gathered together, once again.

PS After Lupita passed away, the wheelchair found a new owner. I don’t think she minded at all. Regifting after death--a better name for last will and testament. . .