Friday, August 10, 2007 at 1:01am
A risk of faith
Column: God Said What?
It's been one year. Just about, anyway.
That's one year that Elvira Arellano has been living in Adalberto United Methodist Church here in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood. It's one more year that Ms. Arellano has gotten to spend with her 7-year-old son, Saul, a U.S. citizen. And one year that the U.S. government and the Church have been in a staring contest of sorts.
It should be no surprise that Ms. Arellano is an undocumented worker. Her story should sound familiar by now. She came to this country once and got deported. She came back again in 1997, had a son and eventually made her way to Chicago in 2000. She was hired to clean airliners at Chicago's O'Hare Airport for five times more per hour than she could make in Mexico. She began to make a new home here for herself and her son.
Things changed in 2002. That's when Ms. Arellano was arrested in the post-9/11 airport security crackdown. And she pleaded guilty to using a falsified Social Security card in obtaining her job cleaning planes. For four years she was given an extension to remain in this country in order to take care of her son. In August 2006, however, she was ordered to return to her native Mexico by the Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It was then that she took sanctuary in Adalberto United Methodist Church. And then an amazing thing happened: nothing. As the Rev. Walter Coleman was quoted in The Chicago Tribune, "We were ready to go down in a blaze of glory. ... We really thought the feds would come in." But they didn't. And no one really knows why.
Because taking sanctuary in a church is not legally binding. It is an old tradition that gives refuge to those being pursued, but the government is not bound to honor it. Sanctuary has moral and spiritual authority rather than legal. So even though the U.S. government has the right to enter the church and seize Ms. Arellano, as of this writing it has chosen not to do so.
Adalberto United Methodist Church has taken its stand. This is the path that Rev. Coleman and his congregation have discerned for living their discipleship to Christ. In this case, the path was simple: to protect a valued member of their community. So it seems that our churches are still a force to be reckoned with. At least when they want to be.
Adalberto and Ms. Arellano have taken a risk of faith. Because sometimes it's unclear what's the best path to take. Complicated problems have cloudy solutions with unintended consequences. The interests of the Church, government, business and society are often at odds. And human sinfulness is so infused into our lives, cultures and worldviews that we are rarely certain as to the correct course of action in difficult times. Such times call for serious discernment and then the responsibility to accept the consequences.
To some, giving Ms. Arellano sanctuary calls into question the Church's respect for the law. After all, it's an act of planned civil disobedience. But in truth, she and the Church are adhering to the idea that law is necessary for society to survive. Their point is just that God's law and human law aren't always the same. And we have a responsibility to stand up and be counted when we see a discrepancy between the two. That's a bold claim to make, and it has its problems, but it's no less true because of its audacity and difficulty.
Their action is something that isn't taken lightly. And it's taken to promote the concrete well-being of Ms. Arellano and others like her whom we consign to the shadows. This is love of neighbor, not love of self.
It's a risk of faith. And if we take Jesus' self-sacrifice on the cross seriously, then the scandal of the cross should remind us that we can't have it both ways. We can't follow God and live self-centered lives. In this case, that means that we can't bring undocumented workers to our cities and hometowns to benefit from their labor and then not accept and nurture them as part of our communities. We can't use them and then toss them away when they are no longer convenient to us. They're human beings, not economic gears.
Ms. Arellano no longer is invisible. She is now a fully visible person caught in a larger power struggle between the interests of government, business, Church, family and individual conscience. And for the past year, the Church has been winning. Ms. Arellano and her son are still together and still members of Adalberto Methodist.
A week from now, a year from now, who knows what will happen? The government may get tired of the staring contest and take her away. Those are the consequences that Ms. Arellano and Adalberto Methodist have accepted.
But the rest of us should be grateful for their risk. For a year, they've highlighted the human toll in the immigration debate. Their concern is for the least and the lost. In this way, they've been pointing to Jesus. And they've been calling us to rethink our own relation to undocumented workers.
— — —
Kevin Considine is a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Recently he was married to a most wonderful woman who keeps him in line and reads his columns to see if they make sense. He and his wife live on the South Side of Chicago. He welcomes comments, feedback or fits of anger and can be reached at {email considkp@yahoo.com}considkp@yahoo.com{/email}. © Copyright 2007 by Kevin Considine.
That's one year that Elvira Arellano has been living in Adalberto United Methodist Church here in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood. It's one more year that Ms. Arellano has gotten to spend with her 7-year-old son, Saul, a U.S. citizen. And one year that the U.S. government and the Church have been in a staring contest of sorts.
It should be no surprise that Ms. Arellano is an undocumented worker. Her story should sound familiar by now. She came to this country once and got deported. She came back again in 1997, had a son and eventually made her way to Chicago in 2000. She was hired to clean airliners at Chicago's O'Hare Airport for five times more per hour than she could make in Mexico. She began to make a new home here for herself and her son.
Things changed in 2002. That's when Ms. Arellano was arrested in the post-9/11 airport security crackdown. And she pleaded guilty to using a falsified Social Security card in obtaining her job cleaning planes. For four years she was given an extension to remain in this country in order to take care of her son. In August 2006, however, she was ordered to return to her native Mexico by the Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It was then that she took sanctuary in Adalberto United Methodist Church. And then an amazing thing happened: nothing. As the Rev. Walter Coleman was quoted in The Chicago Tribune, "We were ready to go down in a blaze of glory. ... We really thought the feds would come in." But they didn't. And no one really knows why.
Because taking sanctuary in a church is not legally binding. It is an old tradition that gives refuge to those being pursued, but the government is not bound to honor it. Sanctuary has moral and spiritual authority rather than legal. So even though the U.S. government has the right to enter the church and seize Ms. Arellano, as of this writing it has chosen not to do so.
Adalberto United Methodist Church has taken its stand. This is the path that Rev. Coleman and his congregation have discerned for living their discipleship to Christ. In this case, the path was simple: to protect a valued member of their community. So it seems that our churches are still a force to be reckoned with. At least when they want to be.
Adalberto and Ms. Arellano have taken a risk of faith. Because sometimes it's unclear what's the best path to take. Complicated problems have cloudy solutions with unintended consequences. The interests of the Church, government, business and society are often at odds. And human sinfulness is so infused into our lives, cultures and worldviews that we are rarely certain as to the correct course of action in difficult times. Such times call for serious discernment and then the responsibility to accept the consequences.
To some, giving Ms. Arellano sanctuary calls into question the Church's respect for the law. After all, it's an act of planned civil disobedience. But in truth, she and the Church are adhering to the idea that law is necessary for society to survive. Their point is just that God's law and human law aren't always the same. And we have a responsibility to stand up and be counted when we see a discrepancy between the two. That's a bold claim to make, and it has its problems, but it's no less true because of its audacity and difficulty.
Their action is something that isn't taken lightly. And it's taken to promote the concrete well-being of Ms. Arellano and others like her whom we consign to the shadows. This is love of neighbor, not love of self.
It's a risk of faith. And if we take Jesus' self-sacrifice on the cross seriously, then the scandal of the cross should remind us that we can't have it both ways. We can't follow God and live self-centered lives. In this case, that means that we can't bring undocumented workers to our cities and hometowns to benefit from their labor and then not accept and nurture them as part of our communities. We can't use them and then toss them away when they are no longer convenient to us. They're human beings, not economic gears.
Ms. Arellano no longer is invisible. She is now a fully visible person caught in a larger power struggle between the interests of government, business, Church, family and individual conscience. And for the past year, the Church has been winning. Ms. Arellano and her son are still together and still members of Adalberto Methodist.
A week from now, a year from now, who knows what will happen? The government may get tired of the staring contest and take her away. Those are the consequences that Ms. Arellano and Adalberto Methodist have accepted.
But the rest of us should be grateful for their risk. For a year, they've highlighted the human toll in the immigration debate. Their concern is for the least and the lost. In this way, they've been pointing to Jesus. And they've been calling us to rethink our own relation to undocumented workers.
— — —
Kevin Considine is a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Recently he was married to a most wonderful woman who keeps him in line and reads his columns to see if they make sense. He and his wife live on the South Side of Chicago. He welcomes comments, feedback or fits of anger and can be reached at {email considkp@yahoo.com}considkp@yahoo.com{/email}. © Copyright 2007 by Kevin Considine.