Love In Action
by the Rev. Colin Bossen, August 8, 2010
Last week, when I was in the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix, Arizona for committing civil disobedience, I met a young man on his way to being deported. We were placed in the same holding cell. That morning he had been out playing in a soccer match. After the game, on his way home, his car had been pulled over by deputies from the Sheriff's Department. His vehicle had a broken taillight. Instead of giving him a ticket the deputies had questioned him about his citizenship status and then arrested him. When I met him, as he awaited transfer to a deportation center, he was still dressed in his orange soccer uniform and grey cleats.
Imagine yourself in the same situation. You go to the store to buy groceries. On the way home you are pulled over by the police and arrested. They take you to a detention facility and inform you that you are to be deported. You will probably never see your family--your wife, your kids, your siblings or your parents again. Perhaps you came to the United States as an infant and you are about to be deported to a country that you have never known. Imagine yourself in that situation and imagine the terror and despair it must bring.
The young man I met in jail is a living symbol of what is wrong with our country's broken immigration system. In the name of cracking down on illegal immigration, the system targets the poor and the marginalized. It tears families apart, separating mothers and fathers from their children and lovers from each other. It criminalizes a whole group of people whose only crime was to entered the United States without proper paperwork.
This morning I want to talk about sin and salvation. I want to examine the situation of undocumented immigrants in Arizona and in the rest of the country through a religious framework that these two theological concepts provide. Sin and salvation are not popular words in many Unitarian Universalist congregations. They echo of Christian theologies that many of us are trying to leave behind. So lest I stir up unnecessary emotional baggage, let me pause to carefully define both sin and salvation. I will do so in terms that I hope will work for both the humanistically and theistically inclined.
The great theologian Paul Tillich understood sin as separation. Sin, as he conceived of it and as I will use the term, is a marking of the self as somehow different than and separate from the other. This separation might alternatively be termed alienation. It is not taking time for one's self or removing one's self from a bad situation. It is denying our common humanity, objectifying others and treating them as a means to an end rather than honoring their inherit worth and dignity.
This separation is a great lie. All being, indeed all matter and energy, is one. All people are united into a single human family. All life on Earth is woven into a vast and unitary ecosystem. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Salvation is anything, any experience, that affirms our sacred unity. If sin is manifest in the broken relationships in our lives then salvation is the love that heals those relationships. This love is often messy. When I think of it I think of one my favorite passages from Fydor Dostoyevsky's great book "The Brothers Karamazov." We heard the passage earlier. Within it there is a particular phrase that has always caught my attention. It reads, "love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." These words have the deep echo of truth about them. Love, real love, is a demanding mistress. She profoundly transforms all who engage with her. Love, real love, heals broken relationships. Love is not an abstract idea or a fleeting emotion that briefly sets our hearts flittering. It is something we create together when we genuinely engage with and see each other for who we really are, part of a single sacred unity.
Sin, that sense of separation, is often born from a lack of love. When love is absent relationships are broken. When it is present they can be healed. The world's wars result from the loss of love, broken relationships, between nations, peoples and politicians. The looming ecological catastrophe of global warming stems from a lack of love for, a broken relationship with, Mother Earth.
Sin is often manifest in our own lives. It is present when we dishonor our spouses and partners, mistreat our children, succumb to the demons of drugs and alcohol and break the ties of love and trust that bind us. We can find salvation when we seek to heal these bonds, earn trust, change patterns of substance abuse and reaffirm our love for each other. Sin and salvation in our personal lives is a grand topic for another day. I want to focus this morning on instead on example of sin born from a societal level, the sin born from the broken relationships fueling our country's immoral immigration system.
Our country's immoral immigration system is yet another example of sin born from broken relationships. The broken relationships are at least two-fold. First, there is the broken relationship between the world's former colonial powers and colonies. Second, there is the broken relationship of racism, what W.E.B. Dubois called "America's original sin."
Most of the undocumented immigrants who come to the United States are fleeing economic, political or ecological catastrophe in their home country. Often the conditions that they are fleeing have been created by our country's foreign and economic policy. As Peter Morales, the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, described succinctly in an editorial in the Washington Post: "We have to understand that the...[United States] has set in motion the forces that drive people to risk their lives to come to America. In the case of Guatemala, our CIA overturned a democratically elected government in the 1950's. The massacres of the 1980's were carried out by a military government we supported, by US-trained officers and by military units using American weapons. More recently, our economic policies have helped contribute to massive unemployment and dislocation in Mexico and Central America. The vast majority of immigrants from the south are not criminals, they are economic and political refugees."
The broken relationship between the United States and much of Latin America causes undocumented immigrants to come here. The sin of racism shapes how they are treated once they get here. Undocumented immigrants do not present a threat to this country. The battle over immigration is far more about race than it is about immigration. Sometime in the next fifty years people of color will make up the majority of the populace of the United States. On both a conscious and an unconscious level much of the debate over immigration is really a debate over this fact. Segments of the white population are terrified of the prospect of living in a country where whites are not the majority. They are trying to halt the oncoming demographic shift and stop people of color from coming here.
One of the myths often heard about undocumented immigrants is that they are asking to be treated differently than immigrants in the past were. Previous generations of voluntary immigrants, immigrants from Europe, the logic goes, followed the rules when they came to the United States--they had the proper documentation. If people want to come to the United States today they should follow the same rules that previous generations of immigrants did.
This argument ignores the reality that the majority of European immigrants came here without any immigration papers. Up until 1924 the United States had open borders for white immigrants from Europe. The borders were closed to people of color who were deemed "aliens ineligible for citizenship." This means that if you are white chances are your parents or grandparents came to the United States without papers. My grandparents and great-grandparents certainly arrived without them.
The time period when most European immigrants came to the United States was a period of great social upheaval in Europe. My father's parents and grandparents left the Ukraine seeking sanctuary from pogroms and a communist revolution gone afoul. They were not that different from many contemporary undocumented immigrants who leave their home fleeing political or economic instability. Indeed, today's undocumented immigrants are simply asking to be treated the same way that previous generations of immigrants were. They ask that as long as they do not present a threat to the country they be allowed to come and contribute to it.
The struggle over immigration has been called the civil rights struggle for our time. One of the core ideas of civil rights is that everyone--regardless of race, color, gender, sexual orientation or creed--is treated equally under the law. One of the key questions of the debate, then, is whether or not today's undocumented immigrants will be afforded the same opportunities earlier generations of European immigrants were.
The rules for people of color have always different in this country than those for Europeans. As the scholar Aviva Chomsky writes, "The history of people who don't fall into...[the] category [of white] is incidental, rather than central, to the story...[of the United States taught] in school. 'The rules' [by which people came to the United States]...were different for Europeans than for Africans, Asians, and Native Americans. For latter, 'the rules' meant enslavement, exclusion, and conquest." Undocumented immigrants are asking that the same rules that applied to earlier generations of white European immigrants apply to them.
This situation of sin, this immoral immigration system born of racism and broken relationships between the nations, is what has fueled hateful legislation like Arizona SB1070. This immoral law was not born in a vacuum. It is the logical outcome of a system which treats members of the human family differently based upon the color of their skin.
Those of us who went to Arizona last week to protest and resist the implementation of SB1070 went not just to overturn the law but to change the system that produced it. We went to put love into action and collectively seek salvation for our country. Our actions were born of an effort to heal the broken relationships between the races. The predominately white Unitarian Universalists who travelled to Phoenix travelled there because we understood, with Martin King, that "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
I am not being abstract or metaphorical. SB1070 targets the entire community and creates an atmosphere of repression. In addition to its provisions focusing on undocumented immigrants it also contains an article criminalizing those who give aid to the undocumented. For example, it is now illegal in Arizona to give an undocumented immigrant a ride in your car. If you are stopped for a traffic violation and it is discovered that you traveling with an undocumented immigrant then you could be charged with a misdemeanor or even a felony. I do not want to live in a society where it is a criminal act to give someone a ride in my car. Surely such a society is moving towards a police state.
While I was in Phoenix I was arrested for committing civil disobedience. I was part of a group, comprised largely of Unitarian Universalist clergy and laity, that was arrested for blocking an intersection outside of one of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's offices. The Sheriff had declared that the day SB1070 went into effect he was going to conduct raids on immigrant communities in search of the undocumented. The civil disobedience actions that I participated in were designed to prevent Arpaio's deputies from being able to conduct the raids. If the Sheriff's offices were blocked no officers could enter or leave to execute a raid. Each minute that we blocked the Sheriff's offices was another minute that a family could spend together.
In the Phoenix heat we held the street for about two hours--burnishing a banner declaring it a human rights zone--before we were put into FlexiCuffs, loaded into paddy wagons and taken to jail. When I was arrested I was part of a group of protesters sitting in the street. As we waited for the police to arrest us we sang a hymn to center ourselves. It is called the "Meditation on Breathing" and the lyrics are very simple. They run, "When I breathe in, I'll breathe in peace. When I breathe out, I'll breathe out love." Try it with me.
This song mirrors the reality we are trying to create. Instead of a world where people succumb to the separating myth of race we want a world where everyone is united by their membership in the human family. In such a world peace, not war and strife, would be the norm.
The song grounded me for my experiences over the next 26 hours. Jails are disorienting and dehumanizing places. I suspect that the Maricopa County Jail is more dehumanizing than most. Sheriff Arpaio likes to bill his jail as "America's Toughest Jail." Humiliating the prisoners seems to be norm. To offer one example, the male prisoners are made to wear pink underwear and pink socks--a gesture, I imagine, meant to threaten our masculinity.
In the jail there were no clocks and no view of the outside world. The lights were kept at the same level in the holding cells both day and night. The only way to tell time was by the two meals that were served--one at 6:00 a.m. and the other at 6:00 p.m. While we were kept in the holding cells we were moved around arbitrarily. In a scene that could have been drawn from a Kafka novel I was moved from one cell and then to another and then back again within the course of an hour.
The prison guards themselves frequently seemed as perplexed by these moves as the prisoners. Several times a guard appeared at the door of a holding cell asking for a prisoner who was not present. In the women's cell block this reached the level of the truly surreal. Throughout the night the guards repeatedly came to the cell where some of the female protestors were being held asking for someone named Cindy Martinez. After the first half dozen times, each repeated request for Cindy Martinez was met by a prisoner shouting, "She's still not here." I am told that eventually the guards discovered that Cindy Martinez was not even a prisoner in the jail. She was being held in a different jail miles away. Her presence in the Maricopa County Jail was merely a figment of misfiled paperwork.
More seriously, at least one protestor was denied access to medication and after spending the night in jail was reduced to using a wheelchair. The Maricopa County Jail has a history of denying prisoners access to their medication. The Sheriff is currently under investigation for human rights abuses for his treatment of prisoners.
Certainly the jail was a place of sin. It was a place designed to keep prisoners separate from each other, from the natural world, from the guards and from society. Yet within that place for those of us who were there for committing civil disobedience, I suspect that there was salvation and healing to be found.
The common experience of jail erased some of the barriers between between us. Among those of us who were arrested together the, in Martin King's words, "radiant stars of love and brotherhood" shined. Our shared purpose in opposing SB1070 allowed for some healing between the racial groups present. The Latino brothers and sisters in jail with me were genuinely moved that so many white people had come to participate in struggle with them. I suspect that for some of the white Unitarian Universalists their time in jail was some of the most intimate they had ever spent with people of color.
When we were transferred to a cell block for the night I was blessed to be bunk mates with an organizer with the Puente movement. Puente is one of Phoenix based organizations that the Unitarian Universalists have partnered with. They were one of the organizations that invited us to Phoenix and organized the protests. They have been one of the loudest opponents of SB1070 and the climate of fear that Arpaio and others have created among the immigrant community.
My bunk mate was a man named Tupac Enrique. Tupac is the coordinator for Tonatierra, an embassy for indigenous peoples. In our conversations placed SB1070 within the broader context of the conquest of the continent by Europeans and the ongoing attempt to obliterate the indigenous cultures of the Americas. He pointed out that the peoples of Arizona and Mexico have been moving across the border between what is now the United States and Mexico for thousands of years. The border artificially separates families and cultures. SB1070 is an attempt to once again remove people from their ancestral lands for Mexicans are Indians and Indians are Mexican.
SB1070 is, therefore, a product of the sin of colonialism. It is, in Tupac's words, "a deformation of our common humanity." Overturning it is not just a matter of repealing a bad law. It is about healing the relationship between the indigenous peoples of this continent and the descendants of the continent's colonizers. Only by affirming our community humanity and recognizing that our relationships with each other are more important than borders or national or economic interests can we fix the broken relationship.
Perhaps, the events in Phoenix were a small step towards fixing that relationship. Many of the people who went there were transformed. Salvation, the healing of America's original sin, could be a little closer at hand. Or it could still remain far off. Copycat legislation to SB1070 is proposed in many states throughout the country, including Ohio. If people organize to defeat this legislation it will be a sign that Americans are, on some level, rejecting the racism from which the legislation was born. If they do not then it may well be the dawning of a new apartheid state where a class of people live in constant fear of the police.
It is up to us as a society to choose. Already there have been enough sins, enough people like the young man I met in the holding cell separated from their families. We now must collectively decide between sin and salvation, broken relationships and healing. May we choose wisely between the two and in doing so find ourselves transformed.
Amen.