ACROSS THE LINES

On the 40th Anniversary of Friendship Park

2011-10-03T07:40:00.000-07:00

Imagine the First Lady of the United States punching a hole in the fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Imagine her publicly lamenting that there was a border fence at all.

In fact this scenario doesn’t need to be imagined … because it happened forty years ago right here in San Diego County. The date was August 18, 1971 and the location was “Friendship Park,” the small cement plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, at the southwest-most corner of the continental United States.

The First Lady was Pat Nixon, who had been a prominent champion of our state’s public parks when her husband Richard Nixon was Governor of California, before being elected President of the United States. She came to Friendship Park to inaugurate the surrounding area as California’s Border Field State Park.

After planting a tree as part of the inauguration ceremony, Mrs. Nixon approached the large stone monument which sits at the heart of Friendship Park. The monument commemorates the first meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission in 1849, at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War. Its base sits half in the United States and half in Mexico and bears bold inscriptions on either side: “Boundary of the United States;” “Punto Límite de la República de México.”

Overcome by the welcome she received from the people gathered in Mexico, Mrs. Nixon ordered her security detail to cut what was then just a barbed wire fence beside the monument. She then stepped into Mexico and was thronged by the adoring crowd. “I hope there won’t be a fence here much longer,” she told the press.

Mrs. Nixon was not the first person to catch the spirit of international friendship at this unique location. Across the generations, people from around the world have visited Monument Mesa, both for its historic significance and for the spectacular ocean view. For generations, especially on weekends and holidays, locals from San Diego and Tijuana could be found clustered around the monument, and on the beach below, visiting with family and friends “across the wire” or “through the fence.”

In 2008, as part of a Congressional mandate to create double and triple barriers along 670 miles of the border, Department of Homeland Security officials built a second barrier across Friendship Park, the new wall running parallel to the border fence at a distance of some 90 feet. Since January, 2009 U.S. citizens have been forcibly prevented by San Diego Border Patrol from approaching the border fence at Friendship Park.

Across recent years, community leaders have come together as the Friends of Friendship Park coalition, and have taken up negotiations with San Diego Border Patrol, seeking to re-establish routine public access to this unique and historic venue. I am proud to be a part of this coalition, whose members have dedicated thousands of hours of volunteer time to the effort. This Saturday members of our coalition will lead a celebration at Friendship Park, marking the 40^th anniversary of Mrs. Nixon’s visit.

In our day most of us have come to think of the U.S.-Mexico border as somehow “natural.” To most the massive wall we have built along it seems an unfortunate, but perhaps necessary, curiosity. And in the current political environment, the idea that there might not be a border fence someday seems laughably implausible.

But the anniversary of Pat Nixon’s visit to Friendship Park reminds us that times change, and it should inspire us to consider the border in a different light.

After all, the globe is scattered with the ruins and remnants of walls that other nations have built across the years, trying to protect their own privilege and keep their neighbors at bay. Each ruin is a testament to the fact that the basic human aspirations – freedom of movement, economic opportunity – are more powerful than any barrier we are able to devise.

If you think that our wall is somehow fundamentally different from all these others – well, I’d suggest you’d pay a visit to Friendship Park. It’s time to start taking your imagination out to get a little more exercise.

Are You Being Detained?

2011-08-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

A newly-released video of immigrant rights activists Daniel Alfaro and Angel Navarrete contesting the legitimacy of DUI checkpoints in Escondido should serve as a caution to us all.

When Mr. Navarrete is stopped by Escondido Police, he demonstrates that he is sober, clearly meeting the purported "test." But when police ask him to produce a drivers license, he refuses to do so, asking instead a series of quintessentially American questions:

"On what grounds are you asking me to produce identification?"
"Am I being detained?"
"Am I free to go?"

Police officers persist in asking for his license, and when he refuses, they break his car window and drag him from the car.

These checkpoints are just one of the reasons Escondido has earned the reputation as a hotbed of local anti-immigration sentiment and enforcement. Local police erect random and mandatory stops for all vehicles, obstensibly to check sobriety, but along the way identifying immigrants suspected of being in the country without documents. (In 2010 Escondido entered into an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement which leaves local officers largely unaccountable to immigration enforcement measures being pursued elsewhere around the country.)

Some people appear to believe that the solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to repeat this scene millions and millions of times over. (According to the Pew Hispanic Center, some 11 million people are believed to be living in the United States without documentation.) Nevermind that to pursue this course would require the detention of millions of U.S. citizens like Mr. Navarrete along the way.

But is this the kind of country we want to live in?

Sadly, most of us already do, the federal government having asserted extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within 100 miles of the nation's land and martime borders. The ACLU has noted that over 2/3 of the residents of the United States live within these boundaries.

Of course there is an alternative to all this: some meaningful form of comprehensive immigration reform which would acknowledge that the vast majority of people living in this country without authorization came to the United States for precisely the same reason as earlier generations of immigrants. But, as I have written elsewhere, the chances of such reform appear slim in light of the American public's apparently insatiable appetite for ever-increasing border and immigration enforcement.

We are living through dark times, indeeed, analogous to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the eviction of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression, and the anti-Chinese hysteria of the late 19th century.

Not all of us would endorse the confrontational tactics employed by Mr. Alfaro and Mr. Navarrete. But we owe them a debt of gratitude for reminding us that we are all being detained by our disfunctional system of immigration enforcement, and being prevented from creating a future in which we can all live and work productively together.

Beyond Moats and Alligators

2011-08-01T06:05:00.000-07:00

My Thoughts on President Obama's El Paso Immigration Speech
On Tuesday President Obama renewed his call for comprehensive immigration reform in a much-publicized speech in the border town of El Paso, Texas.

Lamenting that public discourse about immigration remains dominated by a “border first” mentality, the President rolled out for a national audience the message that has been presented on smaller stages by Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Alan Bersin and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Following the lead of Bersin and Napolitano, President Obama accused Republicans in Congress of “moving the goalposts” on border enforcement, saying, “all the stuff they’ve asked for, we’ve done.” Specifically, the President said:

The Border Patrol has over 20,000 agents — “more than twice as many as there were in 2004.”
Apprehensions along the border have dropped nearly 40 percent over the past two years, a sign that “far fewer people are attempting to cross the border illegally.”
Unmanned aerial vehicles now patrol the skies “from Texas to California.”
El Paso and other border cities “are consistently among the safest in the nation.”

But these efforts have fueled, not dampened, the fire for border enforcement. President Obama acknowledged as much in El Paso, saying of enforcement advocates in Congress, “Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat.”

The President’s wisecrack met with laughter, but it betrays a sad reality: administration officials are hooked on the horns of a dilemma.

After all, if current policies of heavy-handed enforcement have proven so successful, why not completely encircle the United States in walls and armed personnel? Why deprive the residents of Arizona (or Minnesota, for that matter) the same kind of “security” enjoyed by the people who live in places like San Diego and El Paso?

Sadly, the last two decades have taught us that a great many Americans – ably represented by immigration hawks in Congress – possess an insatiable appetite for the totalitarian vision of completely locking down our nation’s borders.

This vision was enshrined in law when Congress enacted the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called on the Department of Homeland Security to achieve “operational control” of the nation’s land and maritime borders. The act defined operational control as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”

Of course there is no plausible (or affordable) end-game to this quest for “operational control,” and DHS officials are now developing what they call “a new methodology and performance measures for assessing border security.”

One can hope that more sensible metrics will emerge from this reassessment, and that a new border strategy will finally pave the way for comprehensive immigration reform.

But if the goal of the Administration's current public relations campaign is to change the way Americans think about the border, it should not trumpet the success of past efforts. Doing so does not beget immigration reform. Rather it reinforces in the popular mind the desirability of a complete and utter lock-down of the nation’s entire perimeter.

Maybe moats and alligators are needed to inspire this administration to step up to the plate with a message that would change the terms of the debate altogether. I’d propose something like this:

We need immigration reform now, but not because the border is under operational control.

We need immigration reform now because Mexican migration is not a threat the United States, and it never has been.

And we need immigration reform because for nearly two decades we have been throwing good money after bad, undermining our nation’s security by diverting precious resources away from genuine threats and toward excessive border enforcement.

And we need immigration reform now because we disgrace our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants when we deport people whose only crime is to respond rationally to the free market forces we have embraced with our trading partners.

This is what President Obama should have said in El Paso: The time has come to begin rolling back immigration enforcement, tearing down the border wall and creating a path to legal residency for the millions of immigrants upon whose labor our economy depends.

The Rise of Latino California

2011-08-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

Here are just a few nuggets from a recent National Journal Article on Latino Gains in California:

Three in five Californians are now ethnic minorities.
Latinos now make up 38 percent of the state, which nearly surpasses non-Hispanic whites (40 percent).
51 percent of Californians younger than 18 are Latino.

In the introduction to his 2005 book, North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States, Richard Griswold del Castillo wrote, “Since 1848 the Mexican people have been engaged in the slow-going process of repossessing the lands that they lost to the United States as a result of war.”

"Reposession" may be too strong a word - Mexicans moving to the Uniteds States are not doing so as a part of some imgagined "reconquest," but rather as an expression of quintessentially American aspiration. Still, the newly released results of the 2010 Census display that the pace of this demographic transformation is picking up.

What does the Foundation for Change have to say about this? Read our most recent press release:

Local Foundation Celebrates 2010 Census Results

San Diego's Democratic Disconnect

2011-08-01T05:50:00.000-07:00

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, January 28, 2011

At the dawn of a new decade, California is about to launch an unprecedented experiment. In the coming year, a commission of citizens – not the Legislature – will redraw the state’s political map. There is a great deal at stake in San Diego.

California’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission will redraw the boundaries of the five congressional seats, four state Senate seats and eight Assembly seats representing residents of San Diego County.

Independently, a commission of San Diego city residents will create new City Council districts and for the first time apportion the city’s population across not eight districts, but nine.

And the five members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors ... well, they still draw their own districts, a textbook case in the power of incumbency.

Aggregate population numbers from the 2010 Census, recently published by the U.S. Census Bureau, will provide the basis for redistricting at all levels. But the true depth of the challenge facing California will become evident in the coming months when the release of data detailing racial and ethnic demographics will confirm that our state is in the midst of an epic transformation.

Ten years ago, the 2000 Census counted California’s Hispanic population as 32 percent of the total. The most recent estimate – based on cumulative data gathered across five years, between 2005 and 2009, by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey – puts this figure at 36 percent. Look for this number to be even larger when the 2010 results are released, perhaps as high as 40 percent.

Even more striking is the growth in the population of Californians who claim Mexican ancestry. In the 2000 Census, one in four Californians (25 percent) did so. The Census Bureau’s estimate for the five-year period of 2005 to 2009 was 30 percent. The 2010 Census is almost sure to show that one in three Californians trace their ancestry to Mexico.

San Diego County’s demographic profile differs from the state’s, but only to a small degree. If expectations hold, San Diego will be portrayed by the 2010 Census as slightly less Hispanic than California, but equally “Mexican” because the vast preponderance of the county’s Hispanic residents claim Mexican ancestry.

San Diego’s Asian and Pacific Islander population will prove roughly proportional to the state’s – between 10 percent and 12 percent of each total. When San Diego’s small, but historic African-American and indigenous populations are counted, along with a growing population of refugees (especially from Africa and the Middle East), San Diego will be portrayed by the 2010 Census as a county in which “minorities” collectively comprise a majority of the population.

I believe the fundamental challenge facing San Diegans in the coming decade is that of reshaping our local political culture to more closely match this changing demographic profile.

While ethnic minority representation in elected office is just one measure of democratic vitality, it is suggestive of how far we have to go. Of the top San Diego County elected offices listed in the first paragraphs of this commentary, 25 of 31 (81 percent) are occupied by persons from a racial/ethnic background (white) that is now in the numerical minority.

In the coming decade, San Diegans must choose what to make of this democratic disconnect.

Some people will surely greet the release of 2010 data with alarm. They will call on San Diegans to fight against this tide of history, to do everything in our power to prevent all things Mexican from spilling over into the United States.

If we choose this path, we are destined to fail because the project of fear and separation is based on a faulty premise – that those of Mexican descent somehow are not part of us. Alternately, we can acknowledge that immigrants from Mexico and their descendants (and from other nations, too) have always played a prominent role in our region, and we can embrace that they are destined to do so in increasing measure.

If we choose this latter path, we just might discover who we really are as a people, who in fact we have always been. We might also discover how, together, we can create a democracy that is truly of, by and for all the people of San Diego.

Fanestil is executive director of the Foundation for Change, an organization committed to progressive changes in the San Diego/Tijuana region. He was involved in the funding and training of 300 leaders from San Diego’s immigrant communities for the work of census outreach.

Asking, Telling, still Dreaming

2010-12-18T20:18:00.000-08:00

December 18, 2010 was a day of mixed emotions. Wonderful to see "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" go down - the progress of LGBT Americans in acheiving fuller and fuller inclusion across recent decades is nothing short of amazing, and well worth celebrating by all who believe in justice.

But the collapse of the DREAM Act tears a hole in my heart. Or, rather, it tears many holes, each one the shape of someone I know whose dreams were dashed today. If you can spare 4 minutes, please allow yourself the privilege of getting to know Nydia, someone whose work (I am proud to say) the Foundation for Change has been supporting through one of our grantees. I think you'll agree with me that the United States needs more Nydias! And so I will not stop dreaming of an America that lives up to its promise as a land of opportunity for all.

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A Great Day for All Marriages

2010-08-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

A GREAT DAY FOR ALL MARRIAGES

Last week Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional. The ruling felt to me like a personal vindication, and a fitting tribute to what marriage is really about. Let me tell you why.

The lawyers defending Proposition 8 presented two basic arguments about marriage. First, they argued that the essential purpose of “traditional” (read: heterosexual) marriage is “to promote naturally procreative sexual relationships and to channel them into stable, enduring unions for the sake of producing and raising the next generation.” Second, they argued that the state’s sanction of same-sex marriage would undermine this institution.

These arguments cut close to the bone.

When my wife and I were married twenty years ago, we were ready to start a family – or so we thought. But after a year of trying and failing to get pregnant, we began to suspect that something was wrong. A slew of medical tests confirmed our fears.

Grappling with our infertility plunged us into a deep depression. I remember distinctly the darkest moment – when my wife shared with me her greatest sorrow: that we would never have a child with eyes that looked like mine.

Today we are raising two children whom we adopted at birth – our daughter is almost 16 and our son is 9.

Sometimes when I look into my children’s eyes – both have big brown eyes, so different from my own blue eyes and from my wife’s beautiful green – I am simply overcome with emotion. And when I think back to those dark times of our struggling with infertility, I find myself grateful that we were not able to conceive a child. If we had gotten pregnant, I remind myself, we would not have these two children that we do … and I do not want any other children than these. I cannot imagine life without my daughter and my son.

As things turned out, the marriage my wife and I created was stronger than the narrow biological urge to reproduce. The life we have built together is based on something deeper, more mystical, more human than that. Our marriage and our family are based on love.

There was a time in American history – not so long ago, in fact – when my family would have been considered by most people to be somehow imperfect, even inferior. In some cultures around the world it would still be thought of in this way.

But I cannot imagine a time or a place in which someone would construct an argument that our family threatens the institution of marriage by the fact that we have put it together in a way that departs from the cultural norm. The thought that someone might make this argument – or, even worse, might seek to codify this argument in law and declare our relationship something less than a marriage – causes my blood to boil and my heart to fill with righteous anger.

All these memories – the pain, the anguish, the discovery, the renewal – and all these emotions came rushing back to me as I read Judge Walker’s ruling last Wednesday. I came home at the end of my workday and gave my wife a kiss. I hugged my kids – they rolled their eyes, as they usually do when I show them too much affection.

And then I thought:

If I can be so happy in a family like this – a family rooted not in biology, but in something more powerful, a marriage – why on earth would I want to deny the prospect of this same happiness to my gay and lesbian friends?

What it is About Illegal Immigration that I Don't Understand

2010-08-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

As an advocate for comprehensive immigration reform and a champion of immigrant rights, I am often asked how I can sanction the breaking of U.S. law.

Clearly, the 12 to 15 million people living in the U.S. without documents broke the law when they entered the U.S. without authorization. Or, as is the case with an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the undocumented, they broke the law when they overstayed their visas.

So, some people will ask me, “What is it about the word ‘illegal’ that you don’t understand?”

The question merits an answer, but first requires a brief history lesson.

When Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, one of the most contentious provisions was the one calling for employer sanctions. The U.S. Chambers of Commerce and other influential business lobbies opposed any such provision … until, that is, a simple phrase with a key word was inserted. The word was “knowing” and it appeared this way in the legislation: “It is unlawful for a person or other entity to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien.”

The word “knowing” is the loophole through which American employers have been merrily skipping for the past quarter century. It provides an “affirmative defense,” effectively releasing employers from the obligation of making a good-faith effort to check the authenticity of documents presented to them by their employees.

The game is well-known and oft-played: employees present a reasonable-looking document and a social security number with the right number of digits, and the employer — who, after all, can’t be expected to be an expert in these things — accepts them as verifying eligibility to work.

Whether as employers who accept false documents or as customers who look the other way, most Americans are ambivalent (the harsher descriptor is “hypocritical”) when it comes to illegal immigration. We do not like it in the abstract, but we think the mechanic who gives us such a good rate on our oil change is a pretty decent guy. The same goes for the bricklayer who patched our patio last winter and the nice young woman who is so attentive at our toddler’s church-run pre-school.

This is what I do not understand about the word “illegal.”

If illegality is truly what alarms us, why have we not allocated billions of dollars and mobilized thousands of federal law enforcement officers to identify employers who hire undocumented workers? If illegality is truly what offends us, why are we not angry with our neighbor’s gardener and our neighbor? Why are we not angry at the owner of our preferred barbershop … and at ourselves for returning time after time for the $7 Tuesday special?

Again and again people insist that what offends them about illegal immigration – their outrage is palpable – is the sheer illegality of it all.

So when will these same people join me in advocating that we triple the number of legal work visas we offer to Mexican nationals next year? Why, if it means that we could close the illegality gap, should we not increase the number of legal visas by a factor of eight? Or 10? Or 20?

That this suggestion is, on the face of it, so implausible, makes clear that much more underlies most objections to illegal immigration from Mexico than a concern with illegality.

Which is a shame.

Because if we made it legal for Mexican workers to come to the U.S. in a number befitting supply and demand, we could then take the extraordinary enforcement resources the federal government has mobilized on the U.S.-Mexico border and allocate them far more efficiently: in ways that would take a lucrative trade in smuggling immigrants away from the international criminal enterprises we insist we are waging war against; in ways that would improve our relations with our allies, most of whom consider our treatment of Mexican migrants deplorable; in ways that would enhance our national security by focusing on our real vulnerabilities.

We could, in other words, turn our attention away from people who want little more than a decent wage, and we could turn it instead toward the people who really are engaged in serious criminal activity, who really would like to do us harm.

To do this would make perfect, utter commonsense if our real concern were the illegality of Mexican immigration to the U.S.

But to do this we would also have to take a good, long hard look in the mirror and admit what we have been up to these last 25 years. We have been inviting Mexicans to come into our country without the requisite documentation … to wash our cars, harvest our crops, bus our tables and nurse our youngest and oldest generations.

And we have been inviting them to do so knowingly.

The Arizona Law and Immigrant Families

2010-05-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

A little more than a week ago, a 36-year-old woman I’ll call Sonia Rivera answered a knock on the door of her downtown San Diego apartment. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Rivera they were searching for a Mexican man suspected of criminal activity, who an informant had told them could be found at their address.

After failing to find the subject of their search – Rivera insists she does not even know the man – the ICE agents asked Rivera to provide documents proving her legal residence in the United States. Unable to do so, Rivera was taken into custody, along with her three sons.

The next day Sonia Rivera and her two teenage sons were deported to Mexico. Her youngest son, an 8-year-old U.S. citizen, was released into the custody of relatives residing permanently (and legally) here in San Diego.

Another “mixed-status” family had been torn apart by the deportation of its undocumented members.

Sonia Rivera and her family were victims of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials call “collateral arrest.” They were not the target of a search, nor had they done anything specific to run afoul of the law. But ICE agents came across them in the course of doing their duties, and so subjected them to the full weight of their enforcement authority.

I cannot stop thinking about families like Sonia Rivera’s as I read the news about Arizona Senate Bill 1070. Signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer late last month and scheduled to go into effect by August, SB 1070 makes it a state crime for immigrants to be in Arizona without appropriate documentation issued by the federal government. The law also requires Arizona law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally.

If the new Arizona law survives challenges in the courts, the most hurtful practices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will become codified as a systematic and ongoing priority for all of Arizona’s law enforcement personnel.

Arizona police officers and sheriffs will be required to make on-the-spot judgments about the immigration status of ordinary Arizonans – at routine traffic stops, while out walking the beat, when called to the scene of an emergency.

And because they will be subject to citizen complaints for their perceived failure to enforce the new law, agents of law enforcement will be incentivized to apprehend people unable to document their legal residence.

The “collateral” arrest of undocumented immigrants – and the breaking up of “mixed-status” families – will become standard operating procedure for the entire law enforcement community in a border state in which over one third of the population is of Mexican ancestry.

The Arizona law will be challenged in the courts, but the threat of its implementation is sending shock waves through immigrant communities across the nation, including here in San Diego.

If laws like Arizona SB 1070 become the new fad for politicians wanting to burnish their credentials as opponents of illegal immigration, Arizona will have laid a legal foundation to what for millions of American families will look and feel like a police state.

Most impartial observers estimate the number of people living in the United States without authorization at somewhere between 12 million and 16 million. But nobody knows how many of these millions share a home with family members fully entitled by U.S. law to reside here.

Champions of liberty and common human decency would do well to think ahead and anticipate the promotion of more legislation like Arizona SB 1070. And as we do, it would behoove us to ask whether it serves our nation’s best interests to dedicate our law enforcement officers to tearing apart families like Sonia Rivera’s.

We Owe It to Ourselves to Count All

2010-01-30T23:03:00.000-08:00

Published in the San Diego Union Tribune, January 29, 2010

As they do to people living elsewhere across the United States, the coming months present to those of us who call San Diego County home a once-in-a-decade opportunity to take an honest look at ourselves.

I refer, of course, to the 2010 Census.

From the time that Congress first mandated “the enumeration of the inhabitants of the United States” in 1790, Americans have understood that there is nothing more basic to our democracy than the notion that every individual counts. The decennial census gives us a chance to consider whether our democracy really works for all of us.

But this will be a difficult year to obtain an accurate count all of the region’s residents. Because San Diego County is home to so many immigrant, refugee and cross-border households, it has been ranked by the U.S. Census Bureau as the 11th “hardest-to-count” county in the United States.

Gaps of language and literacy are the most obvious obstacles to securing immigrant participation in the census, but there are many more: limited experience with, and sense of belonging to, the civic process; economic hardship and dislocation, from which immigrants suffer more than most; a sense of frustration and confusion over the limited choices offered by the census form for specifying racial and ethnic identity.

Worse, a generalized atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment and heightened enforcement of immigration law will make it even more difficult to convince many immigrants and refugees to participate. Some immigrant rights advocates have gone so far as to urge immigrants to boycott the census altogether. If even a single household member believes participation in the census may jeopardize his or her immigration status, the entire household may refuse to be enumerated.
We cannot afford to have our fellow residents go uncounted. If we allow this to happen, we stand to lose out on our political representation (states use census data to draw political boundaries), and on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal government disbursements. For each person not counted, according to the Brookings Institute, San Diego County will lose an estimated $12,000 over the next 10 years in federal funding alone. State, county and local governments also use census data in designing and funding public programs. In times like these, it just doesn’t make sense for San Diego County residents to leave money on the table for others to take.

Across the state, foundations are supporting outreach campaigns to promote immigrant participation in the census. Here in San Diego County, the Foundation for Change, working with the California Endowment and other local funders, is spearheading a campaign: “Make Yourself Count/Hágase Contar” to mobilize trusted community leaders as passionate advocates for census participation. (The slogan for the campaign is drawn from a national media campaign sponsored by NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.)

Through this campaign, dozens of organizations with deep roots in San Diego County’s immigrant and refugee communities will receive grants totaling close to $250,000 to engage in the work of advocating for participation in the census. The campaign will supplement the work of the Census Bureau itself, whose capable staff is working hard to engage community-based organizations in hard-to-count neighborhoods as formal census partners. Especially in the current environment, only credible leaders with already established relationships of trust will be able to persuade many immigrants that participating in the census is worthwhile.

Some San Diego County residents may feel unsettled by our region’s changing demographics. But I like to think of the census as truth-telling time. In the coming weeks and months we are being invited to step up to the mirror and consider who we really are as a community – who, in fact, we have always been.

Perhaps someday future generations will look back on 2010 as the year we finally embraced San Diego County’s true identity as a border metropolis with a vast, diverse and vibrant population of immigrants and refugees.

Border Walls Offer No Real Solution (Opinion)

2009-08-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

Published on San Diego News Network, August 10, 2009

Earlier this spring President Obama urged an enthusiastic crowd of university students in Istanbul, Turkey to “build new bridges instead of new walls” around the world.

I’m guessing Mr. Obama avoided this rhetorical flourish during his visit this week to Mexico. After all, as he sat down in Guadalajara with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, contractors for the Department of Homeland Security were putting the finishing touches on 670 miles of double barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Right here in San Diego border walls now cut through the Tijuana Estuary, an internationally-recognized coastal preserve, and prohibit public access to Friendship Park, a historic venue where for decades residents of the two nations have gathered peaceably at the international boundary. And in eastern San Diego County, DHS contractors are blasting their way through the Otay Mountain Wilderness to build more border walls where the mountains themselves are an overwhelming deterrent to illegal border crossing.

In Arizona federal officials pressured wildlife managers to approve new border walls in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and border wall construction in Nogales caused millions of dollars of flood damage in the neighboring town of Nogales, Mexico.

In Texas, border walls threaten to cut off entire communities from the Rio Grande River and to decimate dozens of private landholdings, many of which have been occupied by the same families for generations.

This latest frenzy of border-wall construction was made possible because in 2008 Michael Chertoff, then head of the Department of Homeland Security, waived some 35 federal laws and dozens of state and local laws along hundreds of miles of the border. The waivers were enabled by Congress, which acted in 2005 to grant Mr. Chertoff the authority to waive any and all laws he deemed necessary to expedite border wall construction. While many considered this an abdication of Congress’ constitutionally-mandated responsibility to oversee the Executive branch, it has withstood challenges in the courts.

Much like people in other parts of the country, many of us who live on the border had come to expect that laws enacted by our duly elected representatives would protect our region’s environmental and cultural heritage. This expectation – that the most basic democratic principle, the consent of the governed, applied to residents of the borderlands – now seems naïve in the extreme.

In the last years of the Bush Administration DHS officials refused to consult with experts in border ecology and topography, dismissed out of hand the protestations of local elected officials, minimized the impacts of border wall construction on tribal lands and neighboring Mexican communities, and quite simply ignored the borderlands’ leading environmental, human rights, religious and cultural organizations.

To its credit, the Obama Administration has begun a new campaign of community outreach, with “Border Czar” Alan Bersin convening a series of conversations with leaders from across the border region. When I get my turn with Mr. Bersin I will share with him my recent conversation with Laura Silvan, a colleague from a small community foundation in Tecate, Mexico.

Speaking to me through the border fence at Friendship Park before public access to the site was eliminated, Silvan said, “I find it curious to be standing here in solidarity with you as the wall is being built.”

When I asked her why, she explained: “For as long as I can remember, we in Mexico have envied you in the United States because of your government’s commitment to principles like democratic transparency and environmental stewardship. Now, when finally we are making some progress on these matters in Mexico, your government seems to be headed in the opposite direction.”

Perhaps Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon showered a similar kind of gentle sympathy on President Obama when the topic came up at their recent summit.

After all, “doubling down” on Bush-era strategies of border enforcement may be a necessary political predicate to comprehensive immigration reform legislation, sure to offer permanent residency to millions of Mexicans now living without documents in the United States. President Calderon knows that many U.S. politicians will need to be able to justify their votes for immigration reform by saying to their constituents, “See, we are cracking down on the border so no more ‘illegals’ will get in.”

But perhaps President Calderon was more assertive. After all, he knows as well as President Obama does that the border wall offers no real solution to the complex problems facing the two nations. Even on the limited question of reducing illegal immigration, the wall has proven singularly ineffective. (As a senior advisor to a U.S. Senator leading the charge for immigration reform told me in a recent conversation, “it’s not about what works, it’s about what sells.”)

“Since it doesn’t work,” Calderon might have asked his American counterpart, “does your administration really want to embrace the wall as a symbol of U.S. foreign policy? Or are you, Mr. President, opposed to the building of walls everywhere around the globe except on your own nation’s southern border?”

Here Come the Brides (Sermon)

2009-05-31T12:13:00.000-07:00

Preached at La Jolla United Methodist Church, May 31, 2009

I had not spoken to Sidney Turner, the younger sister of a close childhood friend, for almost thirty years. But when she e-mailed to ask if I would consider presiding at her wedding, I didn’t miss a beat. “You bet,” I e-mailed back. “Let’s get together and talk.”

It wasn’t mere courtesy that prompted me to respond so quickly. I also felt a little nudge that – dare I say it? – felt like the call of God. Sidney was making preparations to marry her partner, Diane.

Through my work with a social justice foundation here in San Diego, I have been outspoken in my support of same-sex marriage – more outspoken than I could have been if I had pastoral responsibility for a congregation. For me one of the great joys of ministry beyond the local church has been the freedom to engage in matters of controversy without fear of backlash from parishioners who do not share my views.

Last year I joined a coalition of clergy to advocate publicly against Proposition 8, the California ballot measure amending the state constitution to limit marriage to “one man and one woman.” I spoke at rallies, helped organize a clergy phone-bank for the No on 8 campaign, and e-mailed aggressively to my distribution lists.

Despite extensive opposition, Proposition 8 was approved by 52 percent of California voters in November, bringing an end to a “summer of love” which saw the state grant marriage licenses to some 18,000 same-sex couples. A May 2008 ruling by the California State Supreme Court had opened the door to same-sex marriage for Californians. The passage of Proposition 8 slammed the door shut.

In my fight against Proposition 8 I found myself in good company – along with countless clergy from other traditions, hundreds of my United Methodist colleagues actively support marriage equality for same-sex couples, and there is nothing that prevents us from doing so. Still, we remain a decided minority in the denomination, and at the church’s 2008 General Conference, United Methodist delegates voted to reaffirm – and in fact strengthen – the rules barring their clergy from presiding at same-sex weddings. United Methodist pastors who fail to obey the ban are subject to sanction, and, potentially, the loss of their orders.

As I embraced my very public role as an opponent of Proposition 8, I knew the day would come when a gay or lesbian couple would ask me to preside at their wedding, and I would be forced to make a decision. When Sidney sent me that e-mail, I felt like I was being called to account for my ministry.

Having declared so publicly my belief that gay and lesbian people are no less deserving than heterosexuals of celebrating God’s blessing through the rite of marriage, I decided I could not in good conscience say “no” to Sidney and Diane. My meetings with them in the months leading up to the wedding only increased my resolve.
Sidney and Diane met at an April Fool’s Day party in 2006. They began dating the next day and have been devoted partners ever since. They weren’t quite ready to get married in the summer of 2008, when California was granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. They told me they hadn’t wanted to get married “just because they could,” and while they were (of course) opposed to Proposition 8, they weren’t looking to make a political statement with their nuptials.

By year-end 2008, however, Sidney and Diane had reached a decision. They loved each other. They wanted to spend their lives together. They knew that the State of California wouldn’t give them a marriage license but they wanted to get married anyway. They wanted a wedding for their families, for their friends, for each other.

As I sat with Sidney and Diane through our pre-marital sessions, I saw the tenderness and respect with which they treated each other, the true delight they took in each other’s company, and their mutual determination to share in life’s struggles together.

Time and again through these conversations, I was reassured of my decision. What Sidney and Diane had asked of me rang true with my sense of justice, with my pastoral calling and with my understanding of God’s love as made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. I could not refuse.

When I arrived on site the day of the wedding, I checked in with Sidney and Diane. They were in separate rooms, each having chosen their own traditional white wedding dress that the other had never seen. After people settled into their chairs, the prelude started – K.D. Lang’s “Simple” – and I took my place at the front of the outdoor patio.

As I had agreed with Sidney and Diane, I stuck very close to a traditional wedding liturgy, substituting only a few words here and there, and using the phrase “partner in marriage” in place of “husband” and “wife.”

The crowd was not very churched and so for my wedding message I chose to share one of the oldest three-point sermons in the book. I explained that the ancient Greeks spoke about three kinds of love – filos (brotherly love), eros (erotic love), and agape. “Agape,” I explained, “is a self-sacrificing love that wants the very best for the other, is willing to give all for the other, and is offered without precondition. We experience agape in the form of God’s love and when we find this kind of love we celebrate it as a gift from God. Marriage presents to us perhaps the most celebrated opportunity to put this kind of love into practice in our own lives.”

I went on to tell people that I have a hard time explaining agape, or even describing it … but, I said, “I know it when I see it.” I turned to Sidney and Diane, and told them the truth: that I was honored that they had asked me to perform their wedding.

As I looked around the patio I saw many people at the edge of tears, among them several gay and lesbian couples holding hands. After the wedding, when these couples greeted me enthusiastically and thanked me for my words, I was reminded how much a blessing from the church can mean even to those who are estranged from it.
If I was pleasantly surprised that God “showed up” so decisively at the wedding ceremony, I found myself overcome by unadulterated joy as a spirit of celebration took hold of people at the reception.

A slideshow documenting “Diane before Sidney” and “Sidney before Diane” culminated with a series of photos entitled “And then they met.” As the two families laughed and ooohed and aaahed, it dawned on me that this was the first time that many had seen the depths of the couple’s three-year romance.

After Sidney and Diane danced a well-executed ballroom number for their first dance, their fathers were invited to the floor. As was everyone else in attendance, I was swept away with delight at the sight of the two brides, in full white dresses, twirling in their father’s arms, to a song I suspect may became an anthem in the movement for marriage equality, the Beatles’ All You Need is Love. By the end of the song almost everyone in the reception hall was singing the chorus in unison: “All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need. Love is all you need.”

I don’t know what will be the consequences of my choosing to preside at the wedding of Sidney and Diane. Perhaps with the publication of this article, someone somewhere will feel obligated to file charges against me. So be it.

I am so glad I said “yes” to a couple like Sidney and Diane, and I can’t help but wish that all pastors were at liberty to do the same, according to the conscience of each. I wish more of my colleagues could share in the experience of presiding at a wedding that felt at once so revolutionary, and at the same time so simple and true, without putting their ministries at risk.

Whatever may result from acts of ecclesiastical disobedience like mine, this much is clear: in the years ahead, the brides will keep coming, and the grooms will, too, and sometimes they will come walking down the aisle with a partner of the same gender.

And as young heterosexuals attend the weddings of their gay and lesbian friends, they will more and more think of religious institutions who look askance at homosexuality as irrelevant, and rightly so. An entire generation of young Americans appears ready to march right past the church, and the church’s stance on homosexuality is among the reasons why.

As they often do, the toasts at the reception delivered the coup de grace. Sidney’s best man, a gay man, broke down in tears as he offered his toast to the newlyweds. Diane’s sister, her maid of honor, called her “the best big sister in the world.”
A string of heterosexual couples sang Diane’s praises as a nanny, her chosen profession. One mother, surrounded by four teenage daughters, thanked Diane “for being such a wonderful role-model for my girls.”

Then members of Sidney’s family – have I mentioned that Sidney is African-American? – stood to extend their best wishes. A cousin summed it up with a few simple words, addressed directly to Diane: “Welcome to the family.”

Finally, it was Diane’s father’s turn. I have to admit that my first thought, when I saw him get to his feet, was that perhaps he had had too much to drink.

But as he walked over to stand beside his daughter and her bride, it was clear that he was overcome by emotion, not alcohol. “Diane, my darling daughter,” he said. “I haven’t always understood what was best for you, but I have always wished you happiness. Now I understand. And it gives me great joy to know that you have found someone who makes you so happy.” Then, lifting his glass to the crowd, he declared, “To Diane and Sidney!”

I can’t wait for the day when my church will offer a wedding toast like this to her gay and lesbian sons and daughters.

This is Not a Wall (Essay)

2009-03-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

Distributed to the Friends of Friendship Park, March, 2009

My new friend, who works for the Border Patrol, resists my use of the word “wall” to describe the vast system of barriers being erected along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. He would prefer that I – and others who oppose current U.S. border policy – talk about the barriers by referring to them as “tactical infrastructure.”

Here is a picture of Jill Holslin standing in front of the second barrier that cuts across several miles of the San Diego-Tijuana urban corridor.

PLEASE NOTE: This is Not a Wall

And here is a picture, taken from the top of the metal fence that marks the international boundary, of the second barrier that now spans the western-most 3.5 miles of the border. This barrier cuts through the Tijuana Estuary and Border Field State Park at a distance ranging from 150 feet to 800 feet north of the border:

PLEASE NOTE: This is Not a Wall

Finally, here is a line of vehicles and Border Patrol agents that now prevent public access to Friendship Park, the historic border park where for generations people from San Diego and Tijuana have gathered to visit with friends and family through the border fence:

PLEASE NOTE: This is Not a Wall

When people try to access the border fence, this is what they come up against:

PLEASE NOTE: This is Not a Wall

On February 21 Dan Watman and I were detained and then released for contesting this barrier. (Watch the 6-minute video.) On March 1 we met with a similar fate and a Border Patrol agent threatened Nick Correte, a member of our group who happened to be on crutches, with a blast from a pepper-spray gun. (Watch the 2-minute video.) On recent Sunday afternoons, informal gatherings of people on the beach near Friendship Park have been met in a similar fashion.

So what are we to make of this? Clearly, the policy of prohibiting public access to the border fence is now in full effect. The U.S. land adjacent to the border – all 1,969 miles of it – has now been federalized and declared off limits to U.S. citizens. Any who would try to access the borderlands from the north are now met with the same strategies that Border Patrol agents use to prevent Mexican nationals (and others) from crossing the border from the south. (I don’t blame the agents for this – they are now being asked to carry out work which is outside their true mission and for which they have not been properly trained.)

What we are witnessing is another epochal transformation of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the early 20th century, what was once wide-open “frontier” was marked with a “line.” In the second half of the 20th century, this line had a “fence” built on it. And now, in the early decades of the 21st century, north of the border fence, a “wall” is being erected.

Oops! Sorry, I forgot: THIS IS NOT A WALL.

How to Commit Assault With a Tortilla (Essay)

2009-02-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

Posted to Friends of Friendship Park, Monday, Feb 23, 2009

On Saturday I was almost arrested for committing assault with a tortilla. Or was it my communion cup that Customs and Border Protection agents perceived to be a threat to the national security of the United States?

The setting was Friendship Park, a historic venue on the U.S.-Mexico border, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. For generations people from the two nations have met at this location to visit with friends and family through the border fence.

As part of its commitment to build 670 miles of double and triple barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security is building a second wall across Friendship Park. On December 23, 2008, Customs and Border Protection declared the site a construction zone. On January 6, 2009 CBP released final design plans for the park and announced that these plans would allow for no public access to this unique site.

We, who are aficionados of the park, were stunned by the announcement. We knew DHS had decided to build a wall across the park, and we knew Customs and Border Protection agents had concerns about drug-smuggling and illegal border-crossings at the location. Still, we had assumed that the totality of law enforcement strategy for Friendship Park would not be predicated on the illegal conduct of a few. After all, drugs and criminal activity are problems in thousands of parks across the United States, and law enforcement agencies don’t respond by simply shutting them down.

We had assumed that some accommodation would be made for the vast majority of visitors to the park, who respect and honor the park’s intended purpose. Locals don’t call it “Friendship Park” for nothing, after all. Surely, we thought, there must be some room for friendship in the complex formula of U.S. border policy.

As the news of our government’s plans to close the park sunk in, we began to wonder when CBP would begin to enforce the ban on public access. The answer, it turns out, was this past Saturday, February 22. And I guess I have the ignominious distinction of being the first U.S. citizen to be forcibly prevented from approaching the border fence at Friendship Park.

All I was trying to do was serve communion. For the past eight months I have gone to Friendship Park each Sunday afternoon and served communion to people on both sides of the border fence. I have done so out of solidarity with the many people who meet their loved ones there. People have been breaking bread at this location for a long, long time. It seemed to me only fitting that Friendship Park should host the sacrament of communion, too.

This past week, we moved our communion celebration to Saturday. The reason for this was something that any pastor can understand: we wanted to make the choir happy. A fabulous choir, composed of singers from both countries, wanted to perform at Friendship Park. Most of the singers have standing obligations on Sunday, so they asked for the event to be held on Saturday. We were quick to oblige.

As we approached the border on Saturday, we were met by a wall of CBP officers, who told us we could go no further than about 45 feet from the border fence. The choir set up shop and sang the Faure Requiem, the music blasting from a sound system set up by our friends in Tijuana. The choir performed admirably, despite having to compete with whistles, shouts and bullhorn blasts from a small group of anti-immigrant protestors who tried to hi-jack the gathering. Their inimitable combination of ignorance, hatred and incivility was no match for the choir, which included a stunning soprano solo – the Pie Jesu, “at the feet of Jesus” – sung from a distance in Tijuana.

After the requiem and a few prayers, I shared a brief message with the congregation. I recalled the gospel story in which Jesus goes to a mountaintop with his closest disciples. After Jesus is transfigured in dazzling light, Peter proposes that they erect tents atop the mountain and simply stay put. I drew the analogy to the love that so many of us feel for the United States, the land our forebears called “a shining city on a hill.” But can a city on a hill still truly shine if it has walls built around it? This is the great temptation of patriotism – the love of country is so quickly turned into hostility toward “the other.” The desire to protect our own wealth and privilege from the intrusion of foreigners is akin to Peter’s desire to stay up on the mountaintop with Jesus. As the Bible story makes clear, God has other things in mind for Jesus and those who find in him a kindred spirit. Jesus came down off the mountaintop and set out on his journey to Jerusalem, resisting at every step along the way all human efforts to build walls between God and God’s people.

Having concluded my brief sermon, I then offered communion to the 150 or so who had gathered in the United States. I then turned to the south, intending to serve the many people who were assembled in Tijuana for this same purpose.

My way was blocked by a Border Patrol agent, who was determined to make an impression. “You don’t want to do this,” he shouted at me, unsnapping several compartments on his uniform – to handcuffs, I presume, or perhaps mace.

I told him that all I wanted to do was serve communion, and another agent nearby shouted, “Go to Tijuana if you want to serve communion. You’re supposed to be a man of God. Then obey the law!”

I decided that this was not the time to conduct a teach-in on the historic Christian practice of civil disobedience, and instead tried to step forward. “I just want to serve communion,” I said.

The lead agent stepped in front of me, holding out his hand. “If you bump into me,” he shouted, “you’ll be charged with assaulting an officer.”

I’ve since learned from a lawyer that my actions did not come anywhere near the threshold for constituting assault, but in the moment I didn’t know that this was the case.

“So if I try to walk past you, and I bump into you, I’ll be charged with assault?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said.

“OK,” I replied, “then I guess you’ll have to arrest me, because I’m going to serve communion.”

“OK, I will,” he said. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

I did as I was told – this may have been a tactical mistake on my part – and the lead agent then instructed a colleague to remove me from the premises. “Take him out of the park,” he said, “but don’t arrest him.”

In retrospect I should have asked if I was being detained, but it seemed an almost silly question. After all I was being dragged away by a man in uniform, wearing a gun.

As we climbed the hillside that overlooks the beach at Friendship Park, the agent and I began to exchange pleasantries. “If it weren’t for all this mess, it really would be a beautiful day, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “What did you have to go and do all that for?”

“I didn’t mean any disrespect to you or your colleagues,” I explained. “Our problem isn’t with you guys, we know you are just following orders. Our problem is with the policy, with the decision by your higher-ups to shut down the park.”

“The ones who ruin it,” the agent replied, “are the bad guys who pass all kinds of crap through the fence.”

“I understand that,” I said, “but this is exactly the problem with all our border policies. We’ve got to figure out a better way to distinguish between the bad guys and the good guys.”

The agent shrugged.

We sat atop the mesa, the agent and I, looking down on the beach. Later I learned that another of my friends, Dan Watman, was also removed from the beach by Border Patrol. After that the CBP agents put up a solid wall in front of our group and threatened them with assault charges if they stepped forward. The leaders of our group decided to stand down.

I am pleased with the decisions we made on Saturday – my decision to be marched off even though I wasn’t being arrested; my friends’ decision to refrain from taking one more step forward and coming into physical contact with the CBP agents.

But two days later I am left with a bad taste in my mouth. I find it unpalatable that I was not permitted to serve communion. There is a young homeless man, Adrian, who lives on the beach right there in Tijuana. He is there every Sunday and I saw him this last Saturday, too. Was he less worthy of communion that day than I was? What about Oscar, who was deported eight months ago and is separated from his wife and children, still living in the United States? He was there, too, just looking for a little human contact. Had I been allowed to offer him a piece of tortilla and a swig of juice, would that have compromised our nation’s security, or our nation’s nobler principles?

Questions like these point to a larger one: What is to become of our nation’s southern border? Is this strip of land – over 1,850 miles long – to be turned over to the Department of Homeland Security and converted into nothing more than a “zone of enforcement,” straddled by walls?

I cannot abide it. I cannot abide it because I know the border can be an altogether different place than this. Like millions of others whose lives and relationships straddle the international boundary, I know the border can be a place where human beings meet, a place of friendship, a place of communion.

And that’s why I’ll be going back to Friendship Park next Sunday afternoon, to try once more to serve communion.

POSTSCRIPT: Public access to Friendship Park is now being negotiated with Border Patrol officials.

Border Crossing: Communion at Friendship Park (Essay)

2008-10-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

Published in The Christian Century, October 7, 2008

NOTE: This article was recognized by the Associated Church Press with its 2008 Award of Merit, the citation reading: “In this well-written article, the author uses the lens of his experience to focus on the larger issue of U.S.-Mexico border policy. A compelling and challenging look at a highly charged issue.”

Among the least recognized yet most lasting legacies of the Bush administration's "war on terror" has been a dramatic transformation of the U.S.-Mexico border. This transformation is about to reach its symbolic and geographic culmination at Friendship Park, a plaza atop a seaside bluff south of San Diego.

For generations residents of San Diego and Tijuana have gathered at Friendship Park to visit with family and friends through the border fence. In coming months the Department of Homeland Security will erect a secondary fence across the park, eliminating public access to this historic meeting place. Until then, I will serve Communion at Friendship Park each Sunday afternoon, distributing the elements through the border fence.

Moves toward destroying Friendship Park began in the aftermath of 9/11, when Republicans in Congress, many of whom had long championed cracking down on illegal immigration, decided that control of the southwest border was a matter of national security. Never mind that the men who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did not enter the U.S. from Mexico. Never mind that no known terrorist ever has. The psychic needs of an aggrieved nation matched nicely with the desire to limit Mexican migration to the U.S.—a desire shared to varying degrees by many Americans for many different reasons. Post-9/11, the idea that the nation's security depends on "securing the border" became axiomatic for politicians of all ideological persuasions.

The Bush administration institutionalized the axiom in 2003, when the newly created Department of Homeland Security took operational control of the Border Patrol and other immigration-related agencies. The result was more than mere bureaucratic reshuffling: with all matters pertaining to life on the border now cast in the light of national security, the strategies of heightened vigilance, beefed-up enforcement and increased militarization came to trump all others in U.S. border policy. What was once the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was reorganized as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The sound of the acronyms reflected a deep shift in organizational culture. As a friend of mine once put it: "We used to offer services for immigration and naturalization; now we give a cold shoulder."

This recasting of the border as a battleground in the war on terror has dramatically altered the physical and social landscape. By the end of the Bush administration, over one third of the 2,000 miles of border with Mexico will be covered by double or triple layers of fence. Vehicle and pedestrian waits at border-crossings have doubled and tripled too. Border Patrol staffing in the region has increased more than 50 percent since 2004, a figure which does not include periodic reinforcements from the National Guard and other branches of the armed services.

Rates of Mexican migration have not significantly diminished, but the pattern of this migration has been profoundly altered. The cost of entering the U.S. illegally—as measured by the price of a "coyote" on the streets of Tijuana—has increased tenfold in the past eight years, a fact that entails a host of unintended consequences. Because there is now real money to be made in immigrant-smuggling, the enterprise is more and more dominated by the forces of organized crime, which also traffic in illegal drugs.

With illegal entry so much more costly and difficult, Mexicans committed to bettering their families' circumstances have been creative—in some cases desperate—in seeking alternative ways of entry. An estimated 30 to 40 percent of undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. did not cross the border illegally; rather, they crossed the border legally on student or tourist visas and then stayed illegally. Immigration officials refer to these people as "visa overstayers." The black market in falsified documents has exploded, as have cases of Border Patrol corruption. Poor Mexicans unable to afford these more sophisticated means of entering the U.S. have assumed greater and greater risks by attempting to cross on foot through the borderlands' remote mountains and deserts, and thousands have died trying.

Because the cost of reentering the U.S. is now so high, more Mexican immigrants than ever are making commitments to stay long-term in the U.S., commitments which often include arrangements for family members to come and join them. This is the most ironic consequence of increased border enforcement: what for generations was a pattern of two-way migration (from Mexico to the U.S. and back again) has been turned into a one-way street.

The transformation of the border from a filter through which people flowed slowly, steadily and freely in both directions to a less permeable barrier characterized by long waits for regulated crossings has imposed a deep toll on people who live in the region. People unfamiliar with fronterizo culture may have a hard time understanding it, but millions of border residents think of themselves and their families as living on both sides of the line. Of the region's 13 million people, over 9.5 million are of Mexican ancestry, 6 million of these living on the Mexican side and 3.5 million living in the U.S. (Outside of San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, the region's population is over 90 percent Mexican or Mexican-American.) Most border residents have kinship ties that span the international boundary, which means that U.S. policy is drawing a sharp line of division across millions of family trees.

Champions of "gaining control of the border" achieved a significant breakthrough in 2005 when Congress attached a rider to the Real ID Act granting to Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff the authority to waive any and all laws as he deemed necessary to expedite construction of supplemental fencing along the border. While many consider the Real ID Act an abdication of Congress's constitutional responsibility to exercise oversight of the executive branch, it has withstood legal challenges in the courts and retains the force of law.

On April 1 Chertoff exercised the authority granted to him by Congress and waived over 35 federal, state and local laws and regulations. In announcing the waivers, Chertoff made clear that he believes the executive branch has carte blanche to do whatever it pleases to complete construction of the fence. "I reserve the authority," Chertoff wrote, "to make further waivers from time to time as I may determine to be necessary."

In San Diego, the pace of construction has accelerated dramatically in the wake of the April 1 waivers. The urban corridor connecting San Diego and Tijuana had already been double-fenced, and DHS is now pursuing the construction of triple-fencing along the western-most 3.5 miles of the border, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

To meet the stated goal of completing the project by year-end, DHS has condemned over 150 acres of land (without adequate compensation of county and state governments). A $48 million "design-build" contract has been awarded to the Kiewit Corporation, which will design the project and build it on a timetable allowing no room for public review of any kind. Cutting into the mesa tops and filling the canyons as they work their way to the coast, Kiewit will be relocating some 3 to 4 million cubic yards of earth, transforming what are now alternating canyons and mesa tops into rolling hills.

After reinforcing the existing border fence, Kiewit contractors will erect a second fence that is 20 feet high, made of concrete pylons with steel mesh angled at the top. Between these two barriers they will lay a patrol road made of decomposed granite, allowing for rapid movement of Border Patrol vehicles along the border. A third barrier—this one a chain-link fence—will be built north of the secondary fence, with a maintenance road in between. The final price tag on the project is expected to exceed $70 million, making it one of the largest public works projects in recent San Diego County history.

The project has been condemned roundly by human rights, interfaith and environmental organizations. Even mainstream groups like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society have registered formal complaints, the Sierra Club joining a recent lawsuit contesting the constitutionality of the DHS waiver authority. In May the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the case.

For some of us in San Diego, the destruction of Friendship Park is a desecration. The park was constructed with the aim of promoting friendly relations between the peoples of the two nations. In its earliest days, the international boundary inside the park sported no fence at all but was marked by a single, low-hanging chain, allowing people to move freely from one side to the other. When the first fence at the park was erected in the 1970s it was made of chain link with the intent of preserving clear views of the other side and of promoting transnational gatherings.

I have been visiting the park for years, often to participate in an annual Christimas event called La Posada Sin Fronteras. La Posada is an ancient Mexican ritual in which participants reenact the search of Mary and Joseph for a dwelling place (posada, in Spanish) on the night of Jesus' birth. Each December, a large interfaith crowd assembles at Friendship Park. People on the Mexican side sing a traditional song, "Pidiendo Posada," asking for a place to stay. People on the U.S. side play the role of the innkeeper, declaring that "there is no room in the inn."

Last December I was honored to preside at La Posada Sin Fronteras, and since then I have taken to visiting the park more frequently, sometimes weekly. Along the way I have gotten to know people who have been visiting the park for decades, and a not insignificant number who consider the border fence their spiritual home.

I have witnessed people kiss through the fence, cry together through the fence, buy and sell tamales through the fence and say goodbye to dying loved ones through the fence. I know one young man, a U.S. citizen, who visits the fence regularly to see his Mexican novia, the mother of his two small children. A recovering drug addict, he can't convince his girlfriend to marry him, and he says he doesn't blame her because of the way he's treated her in the past. He can't believe that public access to Friendship Park will soon be eliminated. It is the only place he gets to see his children. The last time I saw him, I gave him my phone number and told him that if he and his novia decide to get married at Friendship Park, he should give me a call.

The tradition of serving Communion at Friendship Park began with a vigil on June 1. For this event we planned to share a "love feast," rather than enter into the complicated liturgical issues of how to share Communion with the spectacularly ecumenical crowd that turns out for our border gatherings. As we made our preparations, we were told by Border Patrol agents—for the first time ever in our years of gathering at this location—that we were not to pass anything through the fence. Doing so, we were told, would constitute a "customs violation." On that day we decided to adhere to this new restriction, and in an act of lament, those of us in the United States ate our bread in silence, as we looked through the fence at our friends and compadres in Mexico, who went without.

Two months later, on August 3, we gathered again, and this time I couldn't bring myself to tolerate what seems to me a farcical prohibition. "What have we come to as a nation," I asked the crowd assembled, "when the simplest and most common act of human solidarity and fellowship is named an illegal act?"

This time I was determined to celebrate the sacrament. I consecrated the bread and juice and passed them through the fence to a Methodist colleague from a church in Tijuana. People formed into two lines, one in each country, and came forward solemnly to receive Communion. People were given the choice of receiving the elements from either celebrant, the people on the U.S. side having been forewarned that the act of taking a small piece of bread through the fence might be considered by some an act of civil disobedience.

I have never taken so much pleasure in not serving Communion. One by one, my friends on the U.S. side shook their heads at me as they approached the serving station and reached out their hands to receive the body of Christ through the fence. I sat silently with tortilla in hand, as my colleague from Tijuana, separated from me by 18 inches and an international boundary, served the entire congregation.

I am committed to serving Communion at Friendship Park each Sunday afternoon until border authorities prevent me from doing so. For at least a few more weeks, Friendship Park will remain a most humanizing place along an increasingly dehumanized border.

In Defense of Friendship Park (Opinion)

2008-08-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, August 16, 2008

The Department of Homeland Security will soon erect a secondary fence across Friendship Park, eliminating public access to a historic place where for generations people from San Diego and Tijuana have gathered to visit through the border fence.

The seeds of Friendship Park's destruction were planted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Never mind that the 9/11 terrorists did not enter the United States illegally from Mexico. The psychic needs of an aggrieved nation matched nicely with the desire to limit undocumented Mexican immigration. Post-9/11, the idea that “securing the border” was a matter of national security became axiomatic for politicians of all ideological persuasions.

The Bush administration institutionalized the axiom in 2003, when the newly created Department of Homeland Security took operational control of the Border Patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a host of other border-related agencies. With life on the border now cast in the light of national security, the strategy of militarizing the region came to trump all others in U.S. border policy.

This recasting of the border as a battleground in the war on terror has dramatically altered the physical and social landscape of the region. By the end of the Bush administration, over one-third of the border's 2,000 miles will be covered by double or triple layers of fence. Vehicle and pedestrian waits at border crossings have doubled and tripled, too. Border Patrol staffing in the region has increased more than 50 percent since 2004, a figure that does not include periodic reinforcements from the National Guard and other branches of the armed services.

Heightened security has not significantly reduced rates of Mexican migration to the United States, but it has profoundly altered the patterns that characterize this migration. The cost of entering the United States illegally – as measured by the price of a coyote on the streets of Tijuana – has increased tenfold in the past eight years, a simple fact that has brought a whole host of unintended consequences.

Because there is now real money to be made in immigrant smuggling, the enterprise is more and more dominated by the forces of organized crime. The black market in falsified documents has exploded, as have cases of Border Patrol corruption. Poor Mexicans unable to afford more sophisticated means of entering the United States have assumed greater and greater risks by attempting to cross on foot through the borderlands' remote mountains and deserts. Thousands have died trying.

Most ironic of all, more Mexican immigrants than ever are making commitments to stay long-term in the United States because the cost of re-entry is now so high. What for generations was a pattern of two-way migration has been turned into a one-way street into the United States.

Champions of “gaining control of the border” achieved a significant breakthrough in 2005 when Congress attached a rider to the “Real ID Act,” granting to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff the authority to waive any and all laws he deemed necessary to expedite construction of supplemental fencing along the border.

On April 1 of this year, Chertoff took Congress up on the offer and waived over 35 federal, state and local laws and regulations. The Department of Homeland Security is now aggressively pursuing the construction of triple-fencing along the westernmost 3.5 miles of the border. To complete the triple-fencing project through the borderlands' canyons and mesas, DHS has condemned over 150 acres of public land and is engaged in one of the largest public-works projects in recent San Diego County history. The project will conclude with the fencing off of Friendship Park.

The transformation of the U.S.-Mexico border region has imposed a deep psychic toll on people who live near the international boundary, millions of whom live in extended families that span both nations.

This toll is most evident at Friendship Park, which many locals consider their spiritual home. I have witnessed people kiss through the fence, cry together through the fence, share meals through the fence, say goodbye to dying loved ones through the fence.

Unless something is done soon to save Friendship Park, these kinds of visits will be no more – a sad and telling commentary on the state of life along the increasingly dehumanized U.S.-Mexico border.

Of Jeremiah and Jeremiads (Opinion)

2008-04-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Barack Obama’s home church on the south side of Chicago, knows a thing or two about preaching. It’s clear the aptly-named Reverend Wright understands there is a place in the pulpit for righteous anger.

A “jeremiad” is a spoken or written work lamenting the state of society and cautioning the powers that be to change their ways. The name is derived from the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, who foretold the collapse of the Kingdom of Judah for having broken covenant with God.

Reverend Wright has come under attack for two jeremiads in particular. In a 2003 sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright preached this: “The government gives them drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God bless America.’ No, no, no, not God bless America. God damn America, that’s in the Bible, for killing innocent Americans. God damn American for treating our citizens as less than human.”

Critics – white critics, to be more precise – are expressing shock (shock!) that a black preacher would describe America’s treatment of poor black men as damnable. Presumably the good Reverend should have been more nuanced in his expression.

I am sure the critics would not dispute the facts. America was built on the backs of African and African-American slaves. The struggles for abolition and civil rights cost inordinate amounts of blood. Racism remains a persistent feature of the American cultural landscape.

But the critics would have had Jeremiah Wright preach that these things are … what? Regrettable? Unfortunate? The gall of the man, to say that American racism is damnable.

The other jeremiad for which Reverend Wright is being pilloried is one in which he asserted that the 9/11 attacks on New York represented American “chickens coming home to roost.”

Perhaps the metaphor is too complex for Reverend Wright’s critics to understand?

Americans may like to pretend that they are a peace-loving people, but the historical record is clear. Throughout its history the United States has sought military solutions to international problems. (For a 90-second video summarizing the history of American military involvements see www.mapsofwar.com.)

Should a nation which routinely intervenes in the affairs of other nations expect never to come under attack itself?

Reverend Wright is guilty of good “exegesis.” He takes Biblical passages, extracts from them their essence, and applies them creatively to contemporary problems. That he does so sometimes in the context of a “jeremiad” is not to be condemned. It is to be commended.

Most preachers are afraid to say frankly what they really think the Bible says. They are afraid because they know that if they say what they really think the Bible says, they will catch hell from churchgoers who disagree with them. What results is “least common denominator” preaching, preaching which never gives anyone offense.

Some churches – some black churches, especially – have done a better job than others of maintaining a tradition known as “freedom of the pulpit.” The idea is that when it comes to the Sunday sermon, preachers should feel free to call things as they see them. Through prayer and study and self-discipline preachers can hope that the way they see things comes into line with the way God sees things.

Do preachers always get it right? Of course not.

But here is one vote for hoping that preachers across America don’t stop trying. And here’s one vote for hoping that the current controversy that swirls around Reverend Wright doesn’t forever banish jeremiads from American pulpits.

God forbid that America’s preachers end up sounding like her politicians.

Life on the Line (Sermon)

2007-10-21T06:44:00.000-07:00

Preached at National City United Methodist Church, October 21, 2007

John 14:1-11

1 Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 2 In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going." 5 Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" 6 Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." 8 Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us." 9 Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? 10 Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.

To begin today I want to present to you two different ways of thinking about God – two different ways of thinking about the relationship between God and humankind. I’m interested to see what you think.

In the first view, God is completely and utterly set apart from humankind. God is completely other. God’s nature is absolutely bounded, “hard,” if you will, like a bowling ball – without the holes, of course. The “stuff” that God was made of could not be shared with anything; all other things in creation had to be made of an essence completely alien from God.

In the second view, God is completely engaged, governing the every smallest bit of creation. God controls every human decision and determines ahead of time the implication of every human act. A common metaphor to describe this understanding of God is that God was the all-knowing “author” of human history, and had as much control over every twist and turn in the tale as was a playwright in control of the outcome of the characters in a play.

This debate is seen in the debates that emerged in the early church over the nature of Jesus:
1) Jesus was completely human; because God is “wholly other,” Jesus had to be a creation, a mere creature. He was the “Son of God” only in name, an honorific title, and was really no more divine than any other human being.
2) Jesus was completely divine, the very equivalent of God, and therefore could not have undergone the trials and travails of human living in any real or meaningful sense.

So which is it? For Christians, the historic answer is “neither.” You knew that intuitively, I know. The first view clashes with our experience as people of faith. Few people arrive at religious faith through rational inquiry. The vast majority are awakened to an awareness of God, an awareness whereby they come to know that God is engaged with their lives in some profound and mysterious way. This is why, across the course of the history of the church, Christians have rejected this first view, this view that God is completely “other.” They could observe God at work in the course of human affairs; they simply could not rid themselves of this faith that God was involved in their lives.

The second view presented a huge problem to people, as well, namely what to do about the experience of evil and human suffering. Just this week I saw this argument played out in the Los Angeles Times. A man who narrowly escaped death in a factory fire attributed his survival to God, saying, “God was watching out for me; that’s the only reason I’m alive.” To which someone, predictably, replied in a letter to the editor: “And what about the other people in the factory? Why wasn’t God “watching out” for them, too?” This simple, logical question is why extreme forms of “predestination” have always remained minority views in the history of the church.

The orthodox Christian view – the winning view in the trajectory of the church’s history – is that God is engaged with creation, engaged with human history, but in such a way that does not do away with human freedom. God gave humankind the gift of free will; and it is out of love for humankind that God refuses to take back that gift, even when it is abused and misused by these sinful creatures, by us. Human history thus becomes “salvation history,” the story of God trying to save humanity from itself. And in this view, as the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig puts it, “God is responsible for only the nice part of human history.”

Two heresies: The first heresy is called “arianism,”after the fourth century Christian priest Arius of Alexandria, whose views were denounced by the early church as a major heresy. The second heresy is called “

And what of Jesus? The early church split this difference, too, and settled on a doctrine which is, on the surface, nonsensical and contradictory. They resolved this debate by understanding that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This doctrine of the incarnation suggested that God was indeed the “maker of heaven and earth, the world and all that is in it,” but that this all-encompassing God “chose to relate to the creation in self-imposed humility.”

In the words of the Nicene Creed:

“We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.

What does all this mean? Not a matter of wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Ours is a God who chooses to be in relationship with us, and whose relationship with us is a very part of the inner life of God. God does not choose to be rid of us, but God chooses to persevere with us, to work with us, even as we struggle to live up to the fullness of our stature as God’s children. God’s intentions are nothing but good for us. The evil that exists in the creation is not the handiwork of God – to the contrary God is at work in the world resisting the work of evil, but refusing to eradicate it by merely banishing human freedom.

One of the first people I met when I moved to the border town of Calexico, California, was a woman named Elena Canez. When I asked her if she preferred to speak in English or in Spanish, she replied, "Would you prefer iced tea or lemonade?" I thought she had misunderstood and tried to reiterate my question. "No, no," Elena said, "I understood you perfectly. For me it's the same kind of question: iced tea or lemonade, English or Spanish, I like them both. I am 100 percent Mexican and 100 percent American." To some people this would sound like nonsense, but not to Elena Canez.

We are not meant to understand the mystery of God’s creation in Jesus Christ. We are meant to participate in it. We are called to partake of it. In Baptism we are immersed in water … in communion we partake of the body of Christ … and in some way we are transformed ever more closely into the image of the divine.

I’ve always liked the way that Athanasius put it: “God became human so that humans might understand how a human can become divine.” He also said this: “If we follow Jesus closely we can stand on the threshold of the heavenly Jerusalem.”

I know that it can be very difficult, this life of faith. I know it can seem scary and risky and it can, at times, cause us to express opinions and points of view that may give offense or create distance between ourselves and those we love.

But I am convinced that there is nothing so wonderful, nothing so hopeful as this life of trying to follow Jesus closely, so that we can stand on the threshold of the heavenly Jerusalem.

After all, we are followers of Jesus Christ and our lives are on the line.

Where the Jobs Are: NAFTA and Mexican Immigration (Essay)

2007-09-18T21:29:00.000-07:00

Published in The Christian Century, September 18, 2007

ON JUNE 28, President Bush's grand bargain with Congress over immigration reform legislation collapsed. The event is best understood not as a failure of short-term political leadership, but rather as an inevitable long-term consequence of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the historic overhaul of hemispheric economic policies initiated by the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1994.

NAFTA's architects allowed themselves one false assumption. They believed that as goods and services began to flow in unprecedented volume throughout the world's largest free market, one commodity--low-wage labor--would remain largely fixed.

Unfortunately, when NAFTA unleashed the forces of the free market, those forces did exactly what they should have been expected to do: they uprooted longstanding social and economic arrangements in Mexico and caused the already meager economic opportunities, especially in the rural parts of the country, to evaporate. Millions of Mexican people--the bearers of cheap labor--were compelled as if by Adam Smith's invisible hand to seek out their most rational reallocation.

Most American analysts overlook this "push" side of the equation when they try to make sense of Mexican immigration to the United States. The forces of the free market have caused Mexicans to flood to the north--witness the explosive growth in cities on the country's northern border. Millions have been able to make a living in cities like Tijuana, Mexicali and Matamoros, and millions more have resigned themselves to living in these cities although they are barely able to make ends meet. Millions of others have used these cities as launching pads from which to respond to the "pull" of U.S. jobs.

This unprecedented northward migration of the Mexican population has swamped political and legislative instruments that were crafted by U.S. legislators in less dynamic economic times.

Take the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), passed by Congress in 1986. In the wake of the recent efforts at immigration reform, the failures of this legislation are now familiar to most Americans--most notably, the failure to enforce sanctions on employers who hire workers not authorized to work in the United States. Yet these failures were not overwhelmingly apparent until the full effects of NAFTA kicked in.

Had migration from Mexico held steady at its early-1980s levels (an estimated 100,000 per year), Americans might not have cared much about employers winking knowingly at falsified documents when they hired Mexicans (and other foreign nationals) on the cheap, and IRCA might have been heralded as a success. Instead, thanks to the combined effects of NAFTA and IRCA, by the late 1990s undocumented workers were taking up illegal residence in the United States at the rate of half a million per year. Gifted with hindsight, observers couldn't believe that the architects of U.S. immigration policy had been so naive.

In the wake of the most recent failed attempt to reform immigration policy, some are stepping up their argument for taking the genie of NAFTA's free-market forces and attempting to put it back in the bottle. Close the border, these people say. Deport as many "illegal aliens" as possible, reserve American jobs for American workers, and use carrots and sticks with American corporations to keep as many jobs as possible at home. Of course, this would cause a rise in the price of goods and services, one argument goes, as higher labor costs would be passed on to consumers. But once freed from the unfair competition of undocumented workers, Americans working in the lower strata of the labor market would see their wages rise and their purchasing power increase.

Far more logical, in my view, is the proposal floated in 2000 by Vicente Fox, then the president of Mexico. Fox proposed that the free flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border be considered a second phase of NAFTA, to be implemented by joint negotiation over ten years. The terrorist attacks of 2001 put an end to this kind of talk, but perhaps now the idea can be put back on the table.

While it sounds oddly radical given the conservative tenor of the recent immigration debate, moving to permit dramatically increased levels of legal immigration from Mexico would have a number of salutary effects. First, it would allow the U.S. to dedicate its law-enforcement efforts on the border to the interdiction of terrorists, drug dealers and other criminals. This would make for an inordinately wiser investment of resources than the current policy, which is dedicated to deporting economic migrants only to have them cross the border again.

Second, such a change of policy would test the claims of the many Americans who insist that they are not against immigration, but only illegal immigration. ("What is it about the word 'illegal' that you don't understand?" says the bumper sticker.) These people have invested great emotional and political energy into trying to limit immigration. If law-breaking is really what they find so bothersome, why not work to eliminate the laws that make economic migration illegal in the first place?

Third, the change would serve to acknowledge a lesson we have seen reinforced again and again: there are no legislative solutions to what are, at root, macroeconomic and demographic challenges of historic proportions.

In patching together the immigration reform legislation that died in the Senate, President Bush and his fellow bargainers were pretending that we can have the best of both worlds. Sure, let Mexicans (and others) fill the gaps in the U.S. labor market, these people tried to argue, but let them do so through a guest worker program so we can send them home when we are through with them. This middle ground proved unsatisfactory to both anti-immigration hawks--who think that there are too many Mexicans coming to the United States in the first place--and to immigrant-rights advocates who think that hard-working immigrants deserve a fair shot at permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship.

In the wake of this legislative failure, the time has come to acknowledge that with NAFTA Americans got a whole lot more than they were bargaining for. The free-market arrangement has produced much good--radically increased trade, higher rates of economic growth and an ever-increasing interdependence of the three participant countries.

But NAFTA has also produced bitter fruit. With their rush to the north, Mexicans have made one thing abundantly clear: they will not stay put to work the fields of diminished economic opportunity while people living in the U.S. enjoy ever more goods and services at ever lower prices.

Unshakable (Sermon)

2007-08-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

Preached at La Jolla United Methodist Church, August 26, 2007

Hebrews 12:25-29

25 See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven? 26 At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." 27 The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken--that is, created things--so that what cannot be shaken may remain. 28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, 29 for our "God is a consuming fire."

Luke 14:7-14

7 When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: 8 "When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. 9 If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. 10 But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. 11 For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." 12 Then Jesus said to his host, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

I suppose I suspected from the first time that I met him that Lorenzo Salgado must be gay. He was wearing a shock of colored hair – purple, pink or red, I can’t remember which because every few weeks the color would change. He was obsessed with Madonna – an obsession which seemed as out-of-the-blue as any obsession possibly could in a place like Calexico, so far removed from American popular culture. And every so often Lorenzo would strike a dramatic pose, or affect an accent of one kind or another, as if there was a part of him that was trying to escape – which, of course, there was.

… even through these early years he knew he was gay. “In the second grade,” he told me, “I literally found the definition in a book, so I knew there was a label for it and that’s what I was, at which point I would pray on a nightly basis for God to either change me or to kill me, so that things would change, and I could get out of that trap.”

Around fourth grade, stories of AIDS began to circulate in the popular media, and Lorenzo, thinking as a small child, thought, “so is this some kind of genetic thing, where it’s like at a certain point in your life, because you’re gay, something just sort of turns on inside of you and you get sick?” He explained: “They didn’t know what caused the disease … they just knew that all these gay men were dying. So I was really freaked out that that would happen to me. It was terrifying.”
I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Lorenzo to grow up gay in the conservative culture of the border, so dominated by Mexican machismo and Catholic and Christian homophobia. There was no chapter of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) at Calexico High School, as there were at so many other high school campuses in Southern California. In fact there were no openly homosexual youth at all in town – as Lorenzo put it, “to be ‘out’ in Calexico would be to subject yourself to extreme harassment or worse.”

Lorenzo describes himself as “basically friendless” from about 7th grade until his senior year in high school: Then one day … Ken asked Lorenzo a bunch of questions. Lorenzo remembers, “Out of the 20 questions, I had like 18 of the symptoms. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve been living inside my head.’

*****

When I arrived in Calexico in the summer of 1992, Lorenzo was just beginning to show the signs of emerging from his profound depression, but it was still exceedingly rare to see him smile. He would wisecrack and sneer and poke fun, but from the way he walked and the way he talked, from the way he looked and the way he hung his head, it was obvious that Lorenzo was carrying a heavy, heavy load.

One day after youth group, Lorenzo asked if he could talk to me, and as we sat in my office, he said the words out loud for the first time: “I’m gay.” I don’t know why, but in response to his telling me, I told Lorenzo about one of my best friends, Wade Buchanan, who had stayed in the closet through our years together as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University – only upon our return to the United States had Wade had come out to me.

Years later Lorenzo told me: So you were really the first person in my life who I ever told. I was freaked out … like “OH MY GOD!” And I remember you telling me about your friend, “Big Wade.” And I was like: “If this big burly guy from Colorado can be gay, maybe I can be, too.” And that you weren’t judgmental, or freaked-out by it – well, that really kind of set the tone for how I decided people should take it, or if it was really going to matter to me. Because I was like, “If a man of God is not troubled by it, you know what, I’m not going to freak out about it either.”
There are, of course, a great many Christians who believe that erotic same-sex relationships are intrinsically sinful. I find this position entirely inconsistent with my own experience.

My experience teaches me that God gives varying gifts of sexuality to human beings. Most are gifted with a heterosexual orientation, but some are gifted with a homosexual orientation, perhaps something akin to left-handedness. An even smaller minority are gifted with a sexuality that can be called bisexual – think of people who are intrinsically ambidextrous – and similarly a small minority of people seem to have been gifted with the sexuality of celibacy.

The question for people of faith – no matter what their sexual orientation – is “how can I best use the gift of my sexuality? How can I exercise this gift in some way that it serves God’s larger purposes?” Historically the church has counseled those not gifted with celibacy that marriage is the most responsible exercise of the gift of sexuality. It is precisely because I believe in the institution of marriage that I am hoping for and working for and praying for the day that the church will allow its pastors to bless the marriages of gay and lesbian people.

*****

Lorenzo was one of the last people to speak with me before I left Calexico. He stayed at church after youth group that last Sunday, and we sat in silence in the Sanctuary for a good long while.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” I asked. Lorenzo waited a little while to respond.

“You probably saved my life.”

There was no air of pretense in his voice – no drama, no edge. Such a simple statement, so plainly said. It shook me to my roots.

What had I done, I thought, that Lorenzo might think that perhaps I had saved his life? After that one, revealing conversation, I had not talked with him at any great length about his sexual orientation. I had never agitated, nor indoctrinated, nor exhorted, nor done any existential “counseling” with him.

I remember remarking in the moment how much Lorenzo had grown up in the four years I had known him. He had passed through adolescence, a time that is for so many people the hardest time of life. But Lorenzo’ adolescence had been marked by a challenge that most people will never know: the challenge of accepting God’s love while surrounded by voices suggesting that you are, in your very being, beyond its reach.
It dawned on me what had happened in my relationship with Lorenzo. I had loved him for who he was – a kind, gentle, generous, sensitive, courageous and gay young man. And cloaked – as I was, for him – in the authority of my position as the pastor of the church, my loving him had felt to him something akin to the love of God.

“Hmmmm,” I said, nodding my head. “It’s been a joy for me to have gotten to know you at this time in your life.”

I looked at Lorenzo sitting next to me in the pew. His head was down, but I could tell he was smiling. I couldn’t tell, at first, if it was the ironic smile I had sometimes seen, the smile he used when he was goofing off with his friends. But when he lifted his face to catch my eye, I could see it was a different kind of smile. I remember thinking that it was a profoundly human smile.

I didn’t say anything more to Lorenzo in that moment of his confessing to me how desperate he once had been. I didn’t give him a lesson in theology, and I didn’t mount a defense of homosexuality. I remembered what a wise mentor had one time advised as an effective counseling strategy: “Don’t just say something. Sit there.”

That’s what we did, Lorenzo and I. We just sat there, the two of us, our heads lowered as if in prayer. We just sat there, smiling.

An Unexpected Baptism (Sermon)

2007-06-17T10:21:00.000-07:00

Preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, June 17, 2007

Luke 7:36-49

36 Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 37 When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, 38 and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. 39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is--that she is a sinner." 40 Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you." "Tell me, teacher," he said. 41 "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?" 43 Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled." "You have judged correctly," Jesus said. 44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven--for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little." 48 Then Jesus said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." 49 The other guests began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" 50 Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

I once heard a professor of New Testament insist that two questions dominate the gospels: “Who is this guy … and what does he think he’s doing?” This professor suggested that the best image to hold in mind of Jesus as you read the gospels is of a man who is constantly rolling his eyes and banging his forehead in exasperation at his own disciples’ inability to understand what he is trying to tell them about himself.

In the gospel of Luke these questions of who Jesus is and what on earth he thinks he is doing are played out in dialogue with John the Baptist. Remember how the gospel starts with John telling all the people coming to him for baptism that there is someone coming after him. John says this one coming after “is mightier than I” and his “sandal strap I am not worthy to loose.” When John baptizes Jesus the skies open and a voice from heaven proclaims, “You are my beloved,” the voice says to Jesus, “with you I am well pleased.” You’d think this would have settled the matter, but just a few chapters later John is sending messengers to Jesus, expressing his confusion and doubt. “Are you the Coming One,” John has his followers query Jesus, “or do we look for another?”

This expression of doubt from John the Baptist immediately precedes the scene of Jesus dining with Simon the Pharisee, presented to us in this morning’s gospel lesson. An unnamed group of people – presumably other members of the Pharisaic sect of Judaism – are gathered for a meal at Simon’s house, when the meal is interrupted by a woman, a known sinner, who sets herself to washing Jesus’ feet with her tears, drying them with her hair and anointing them with fragrant oil.

Once again the central drama of the story is that of people – Simon and his dinner guests, in this case – trying to figure out who Jesus is. Note that after he allows the woman to wash his feet, Simon concludes that Jesus “must not be a Prophet, or he would know who this is who is touching him.” He next addresses Jesus as “Teacher.” By the end of the exchange, though, Jesus turned the tables on Simon, demonstrating that he knows exactly what Simon is thinking and arguing him back into a position of wondering whether Jesus really is a prophet after all. Jesus then declares to the woman “Your sins are forgiven” and Simon and the others are now completely flabbergasted. “Who is this who even forgives sins?” they ask.

“Who is this guy anyway? And what does he think he’s doing?”

*******

If you are like me, you will labor many years under the illusion that the answer to these questions can be found through intellectual inquiry.

I so identify with the New Testament Scholar Richard Hays, who says that after years of scholarship he would love to be able to travel back in time to learn exactly what the earliest gentile Christians understood themselves to be confessing when they declared that Jesus was the Christ.

Hays has written that for early Jewish Christians to declare that Jesus was the Messiah makes some sense because as Hebrew speakers they would have had some context for what the confession meant. The Hebrew word messiah means “anointed,” and it carries the connotation of King. Jesus was meant to be a King of some kind, though of course there was all kinds of debate about what kind of King he should be expected to be.

Now some Greek-speaking gentiles would have been familiar with the Hebrew scriptures, and they might know enough to know about the history of Israel and to know about this tradition of anointing Kings. But some Greek-speaking gentiles would have been entirely unfamiliar with this Hebrew tradition, so for them the Greek word for “anointed,” cristos, didn’t carry any specific connotation. So when Greek-speakers called Jesus “the Christ” – when they declared that he was “anointed” or “the anointed One,” what exactly did they mean?

I love this kind of historical inquiry, but at the end of the day I find it frustrating.

Another part of me has found the better answer to this question – the question of faith – by seeking out people who are commonly ignored and/or despised and/or overlooked by the rich and powerful. Jesus called them “the least of these,” and I have always loved the way that Spanish-speakers talk of them – los marginados, “the marginalized.”

Again and again I have found that when I allow myself to draw close to people living on the margins I learn something from them. All my years working as a pastor and the people I ended up enjoying the most were the people who were dying. Again and again I found that I learned something about living when I visited someone who was preparing to die.

And out of all the churches I served, including several fancy churches in nice neighborhoods, the one I enjoyed the most was the one in Calexico, where almost all of my parishioners were very poor, many barely literate. With all my education, again and again I found myself learning from these people, most of whom were barely high-school educated, some barely literate.

In my new work with the San Diego Foundation for Change I have the opportunity to work on giving small grants to grassroots groups that are working on the margins of society here in San Diego and Tijuana. Just last month I was privileged to visit with a group of women, sex-workers, who have organized themselves into a union in Tijuana’s red light district. They call themselves “El Proyecto Maria Magdalena,” and as the name suggests, they think of themselves as religious women, and they are committed to imbuing their work with a sense of morality. They will not wear certain kinds of clothes. They will not take clients after certain hours. They will not accept clients who are drunk, or who are down to their last dime, or who are known to have disrespected one of their companeras. They call themselves las Magdalenas.

I was most struck by one of the Magdalenas – I didn’t get her name – she wasn’t the youngest, but she couldn’t have been much older than 20. She was eager to speak, to tell those of us who were visiting about her life – how she was raised in a good family, how she came to Tijuana looking for work, how she chose this work because it paid better than the maquiladoras and because her family needed the money.

I was so struck by this young woman. What was most clear is that she was trying to do the best she could with her life. She was playing her hand as best she could with the cards that life had given her. She wasn’t presumptuous or haughty or arrogant, but neither was she apologetic or ashamed or beaten down.

I can’t help but wonder what this young woman would do if she heard that Jesus himself were dining in my fine house nearby. I imagine she would do exactly what the woman in the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel chose to do. I imagine she would not hesitate to intrude on my pharisaic feast. I also imagine she would show far more to Jesus than she did to me of the pain and suffering that I know must be a part of her life.

I see her bending down before Jesus, offering him the very best of what she has to offer. I see her washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. I see her taking precious oil – how much of her wages did she spend on it? – and I see her pouring out a small fortune to honor someone who is worthy of being honored.

And then – as I bring the story to life and imagine the woman as a real live human being with hopes and hurts as real as anybody else’s –then a very curious thing happens. It dawns on me suddenly what the notorious woman in Luke’s seventh chapter is actually doing – she is re-enacting the ritual of Jesus baptism. She bathes Jesus with the water of her tears, she lays hands on him and also her hair, and she anoints him with fragrant oil.

Without speaking a word she is declaring to the Pharisees that what they have heard about from John the Baptist’s people is true. Who is this man … and what does he think he’s doing? “Jesus is the anointed one. Jesus is the Messiah.” While the Pharisees sit around debating the finer points of prophethood and the legalities of forgiving sins, the woman gets down on her knees and washes Jesus’ feet. The woman gets it.

*****

And then I think of myself, and what I have to offer. There are times it doesn’t seem like much. But it dawns on me that if this woman can do this – if she can take the best of what she has, the best of who she is, and offer it in service to Jesus … why then I can, too. Can’t I? Can’t you?

We can lay down our lives for others because others have laid down their lives for us. This is what the woman is teaching Simon, is teaching me, is teaching you. She is teaching us that we can be a blessing to others. We can give the best of what we have, the best of who we are, in service to others.

It also dawns on me then that if we will do this, why then Jesus will accept our offerings as sure as he accepted hers. And it dawns on me that the words that Jesus spoke to her, I can also hear him speaking to me. Can you hear him speaking these words to you?

“Your sins are forgiven.”

Graveside Hope: A Passion for Funeral Ministry (Essay)

2007-03-06T21:34:00.000-08:00

Published in The Christian Century, March 6, 2007

WHEN I TELL OTHER PASTORS that I hate weddings and love funerals, they smile knowingly. Of course, the dark humor rings true with them--every pastor I know can tell a "wedding from hell" story, and all pastors can think of a few funerals at which they'd love to preside. In my colleagues' smiles I also see an understanding, born from firsthand experience, that funerals--and the events that precede and follow them--present some of the most meaningful opportunities for pastors to witness to the grace and love of God.

My passion for funerals has led me to research the historic Christian practices of marking the arrival of death. Since so many generations of Christians lived before dying people were confined to hospitals, they spent their entire lives surrounded by death and dying. As pastors we can draw on their wisdom in ministering to modern people, who struggle so mightily when confronted with the reality of death.

As a shorthand expression for an authentic Christian ministry at the end of life, I have come to embrace familiar fines from the fifth verse of Charles Wesley's "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!"

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
"The cross" speaks to me of ministry with the dying and their loved ones; "the grave," of ministry with those who gather for funerals; "the skies," of ministry with those who must live on after losing a loved one to death.

Hospice physician Ira Byock, author of Dying Well and The Four Things That Matter Most, observes that in the modern medical worldview death is considered obscene. This understanding has a hold on the hearts and minds of most Americans, but a number of developments have begun to loosen its grip--most notably the spread of the hospice movement, but also the public spectacle made of deaths like that of Terry Schiavo, the Florida woman who lived for 15 years on a ventilator before dying in 2005. More and more Americans are realizing, even if they cannot articulate their reasons, that the prolonging of biological existence is not in and of itself an adequate goal for decision making near the end of life.

Christians have an important witness to make in the midst of this conversation. The idea that deaths can be inspirational--even redemptive--almost never enters modern conversations about death, yet this understanding lies at the core of the Christian gospel. For two millennia, across cultures and generations, Christians pondering the end of life have looked for guidance and inspiration to Jesus, who went willingly to his death on a cross because he perceived that by doing so he could become an instrument of blessing for others.

The idea that a "good death" can be a blessing to others suggests that a primary goal for Christian ministry at the end of life is to foster encounters between those who are preparing to die and those who love them. Christian pastors can remind parishioners that as they ate preparing to die, they are in some mysterious way being joined spiritually to Christ, who also suffered and died. Without burdening them with expectations, pastors can also tell parishioners that even as they are dying they can still be instruments of God's grace for others. Once their pain is controlled (as it can and should be through palliative care), I tell the dying, "Even as your body is failing you, you can still fulfill what Jesus said was the greatest commandment in the law: you can still love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength, and you can still love your neighbor as yourself."

Pastors can also teach this to the friends and families of the dying. As they gather around the deathbed they are being given the opportunity to become more like Christ's disciples, who also had to learn what it is like to follow a loved one to his death. By seeing to it that these encounters are marked by the rituals of the church--the reading of familiar scriptures, the singing of favorite hymns, the praying of well-known prayers--pastors can help lead the family and friends of the dying down the path that leads to the cross of Christ's redemption. When someone asks me what they should do when they visit a dying friend, I offer simple instructions. "Take your Bible and hymnal with you," I tell them, "and turn off the television."

ON A RECENT swing through New England I stopped at a bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, for a beer. I began talking with a man there, and when he learned of my interest in death and dying, he asked if I had ever heard of a woman named Bathsheba Wallace.

Wallace, who lived from 1752 to 1831, is a legendary figure in the history of East Thetford, New Hampshire, and neighboring towns. She is credited with attending some 1,666 births throughout 42 years of practice as a midwife. When Wallace was dying, the people in East Thetford shut down the shops and schools and gathered with their children around her bed to send her off with scripture, song and prayer. She died surrounded by a large gathering of people, the majority of whom she herself had ushered into the world.

I love this story because it demonstrates that our ancestors knew intuitively that being born and dying are somehow related. None of us is alone in our being born. Neither are we alone in our dying; no matter how desperate the circumstances, God's spirit is always present. As the story of Bathsheba Wallace beautifully illustrates, and as every pastor knows, the presence of God is felt most powerfully when the whole company of disciples is gathered at the foot of the cross.

The circle of people who gather around the deathbed will almost always grow in the days after death (sometimes dramatically). Whether the Christian funeral takes place in a viewing at home, a wake at the mortuary, a memorial service in the sanctuary, a gathering at the cemetery--or any of these in combination--it is an assembly of Christ's entire company at the side of the grave. Across cultures and generations, our Christian ancestors understood that three things must happen during this time: the deceased must be honored, the reality of death must be recognized, and the praises and promises of God must be sung.

At the heart of most Protestant funerals is a time of eulogy, when the deceased is named and honored by family and friends. Inspired eulogies often come easily, even joyfully, at the funerals of those who lived full and faithful Christian lives. There is something natural and fitting about honoring people whose lives have witnessed to the love of God; in fact, this practice of eulogizing the dead (with both spoken and written word) is among the most ancient of Christian practices. From the early church's tales of martyrdom to the hagiography of Roman Catholicism, Christians have understood that the stories of people who lived faithful lives and died faithful deaths offer instruction and inspiration to those who live on.

The reality of death must also be acknowledged. I find dramatic representations of burial most persuasive in this regard. Whether in the funeral home or at the front of the chancel, I prefer an open casket (people choose whether or not to approach the casket), and when it's time to close the casket, I prefer that it be done with great respect and solemnity. I also like to make it possible for people to stay at the cemetery if they wish to see the casket lowered into the grave. As scriptures are read and prayers are said, I place a handful of dirt on the casket, concluding with that most frank of prayers: "This body we commit to the elements--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

HAVING ACKNOWLEDGED the power of death, the pastor's next job is to present the ancient Christian understanding that this power can be and will be defeated. This work is especially important when there is someone present who has never heard a compassionate Christian message (a common occurrence). Even regular churchgoers are more inclined to self-examination during a funeral, and more open to the possibility of amending their lives than they are on a typical Sunday morning.

The most persuasive argument against the power of death is one that draws plausible connections between eulogy--good words about the deceased--and doxology--good words in praise of God. At the graveside people will be reflecting on the ways in which their lives have been touched by the life of the deceased--the pastor's job is to help them see that in this their lives have been touched by God. By rehearsing the great and mighty acts of God in salvation history, the pastor can assure people that God will remain active in their lives, too. This is the heart of the gospel--in Jesus Christ, God has chosen to act decisively for the redemption of God's people in history. Those gathered at the graveside should be reminded that this promise of God's redemption does not expire with the end of any single human life.

When the graveside service is over--and in the days and weeks and months that follow--pastors can invite those who live on to lift their eyes to God's horizons. The first "sky" the grieving are called to consider is the sky that Christians have always called heaven. The second is the sky of future possibilities.

Most modern American Christians--especially educated ones--have great trouble acknowledging that heaven might even exist. Most are shaped by a thoroughly materialist understanding of the universe and will resist simplistic portrayals of heaven. But many can still find some comfort in symbolic representations, especially those that refer to God's created universe. As Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang conclude in their magisterial Heaven: A History, "There is a long tradition in Christian history which acknowledges that glimpses of heaven can be experienced on earth."

Rather than trying to steer clear of the topic and accede to the dominant reservations of the modern mind, pastors should openly acknowledge people's doubts and uncertainties and then invite them to engage their hearts and imaginations. Most often--in the course of planning the funeral, if not from a prior pastoral relationship--the pastor can easily discover those places in the world that the deceased considered most sacred--the beach, the forest, the river, the mountain. Conjuring up images of these favorite places can lead into a conversation about eternal life. But instead of saying, for example, "Rick must be up in heaven surfing"--leaving some people to think that the pastor is naive--the pastor might say something like, "I don't know what heaven is like, but today let's pretend it's like the ocean," and then challenge the mourners to engage their own imaginations: "If you can imagine that in your mind's eye, I bet you can catch sight of Rick, riding a big wave." This kind of talk will not win over radical skeptics, but it will invite thoughtful Christians and others with open minds to ponder the mysterious possibility of an eternal life.

The work of finding what I call "the sky of future possibilities" takes time--in some cases even years--but it is right and good to name this goal as the gathered company prepares to disperse. What moves us toward the goal is grief work, of course, and pastors must take care not to pretend that the clouds darkening a mourner's skies can be wished away. Good pastors know that after the hustle and bustle of funeral time, the skies can seem to close in around the grieving.

SOME WONDERFUL resources exist for helping people through their grief--too many to name--and a deep discussion of grief is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that this is one place I cherish contemporary wisdom as much as if not more than the wisdom of the ancients. Across the ages many Christians have been so fixed on heaven, and on the expectation of their own deaths, that they failed to develop a theology of possibilities for life on earth. Christians from earlier generations sometimes became so heavenly minded that they overlooked the possibilities for doing earthly good. That said, we should re member how privileged we are: living in the "first world" in the 21st century, we have good reason to hope for a long life. Few of our Christian ancestors could claim this hope. Perhaps it is easier for us to recognize that the loss of a loved one need not cause us to give up on this life.

The work of a pastor is especially difficult amid the experience of declining membership. Many pastors I know preside at more funerals each year than they do at weddings or baptisms. In the midst of working for congregational renewal, they face the daunting task of keeping spirits up--their own and their parishioners'. One way to do this is to embrace the church's ministry with the dying, and to recognize it as a source of great potential blessing. Without being heavy-handed or manipulative, pastors can minister to families whose loved ones are nearing the end of life in ways that invite the living to lead lives of deeper faith and more faithful practice.

Personal experience has taught me that a funeral can be an instrument of great blessing. My grandfather, Harry Smith, worked at a Texaco service station in the small town of El Dorado, Kansas, for almost 40 years. At his funeral the pastor told a story that I still remember vividly. The story was about how one Sunday as my grandfather walked out of church, he mentioned to the pastor that the license-plate frame on the back of the pastor's car was loose and jangling. The pastor laughed and told my grandfather that he had known about it for some time and that he kept intending to fix it but didn't have the right sized screw. My grandfather chuckled and wished him a good day.

That afternoon, as the pastor sat eating his Sunday afternoon meal, he heard a noise outside his house. Getting up from his kitchen table he looked out the window to see my grandfather bent down on one knee, putting a new screw into the license-plate frame on his car. By the time the pastor got his shoes on and went out to thank him, my grandfather was gone.

Years later I remember this image, planted in my distracted, 18-year-old heart and mind by a pastor who was simply going about his business, doing ministry at a funeral. I cherish the image, and blend it routinely with other images I hold clear. As I close my eyes I see my grandfather kneeling in a driveway turning a screw with a screwdriver. I also see my wife as a young mother, bending over to pick up our fallen child. I see Jesus, squatting and washing his disciples' feet. I see a pastor at the altar clasping the hands of two people who have just exchanged wedding vows. And yes, among these other images, I see one more: a pastor reaching down to pick up a handful of dirt and throw it into a grave.

The Freying of the Memoir (Essay)

2007-01-26T21:51:00.000-08:00

An early version of this article was named a finalist in the 2006 Editor's Prize competition of the Missouri Review.

One year ago today Oprah Winfrey summoned James Frey to appear live on her Oprah television show to discuss revelations that he had lied about his personal history in writing his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. At first Winfrey had tried to dismiss the accusations against Frey– first made on January 8, 2006 in the on-line journal The Smoking Gun – even calling in to CNN’s Larry King Live show on January 11 to declare her faith in the “underlying message” of the book she had turned into a best-seller by making it the September, 2005 selection of her celebrated book club.

Now, two weeks later, she was withdrawing her blessing. If Frey thought this process would be painless, Winfrey disabused him of this notion quickly, renouncing her earlier defense of him in a devastating monologue and then turning on him as he sat stiff on her studio sofa. Conflating her own feelings with those of her viewers, she told Frey, “I feel that you conned us all.”

As did millions of others, I sat transfixed watching James Frey receive his oh-so-public scolding. My attention was riveted, though, for a very specific reason: my own work of non-fiction, Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death, was due for release the next month by Doubleday – the same division of Random House that published A Million Little Pieces. In my book I had blended history and memoir, taking the stories of dying people I had known in my work as a United Methodist pastor and casting them against the backdrop of an ancient Christian way of dying that earlier generations in both England and America called “the happy death.” The flame of James Frey’s on-air crash-and-burn seemed to cast my work in a new light, and I found myself squirming in a way that Frey – inexplicably – didn’t. Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death was about to go to press, and I couldn’t help but imagine what might happen if the stories I had written were to be investigated by The Smoking Gun. Were my memoirs going to be “Freyed”?

*****

On the face of it my methodology had been straight-forward. After recalling the memory of someone who died with dignity and grace, I opened an electronic file and jotted down my most vivid recollections of the person’s life and death. Over time I fleshed the story out, beginning first by looking through my pastoral archives for papers that might prove helpful – copies of the printed program distributed for the funeral; obituaries published in local newspapers; printed copies of the eulogies I had delivered; or notes I had jotted down after talking with family and friends. Next I checked my memory and archival records against the memories and knowledge of others. I contacted surviving family members by phone and e-mail and asked their help in reconstructing the events about which I was writing. I also compared notes with people I had worked with in caring for the dying person – other pastors, medical personnel, church staff.

If the process described above sounds neat and orderly, it does so only because I have chosen to make it sound that way. In fact I found the work of writing these stories to be messy and complex. Only in a few instances did I find a coherent archival record – my records were usually spotty. I often found it difficult – and in a few cases impossible – to track down the families and friends of the people I was writing about, and even apparently reliable sources were not always consistent with one another. At times even my own memory seemed uncertain: I was writing about some people who had died ten or fifteen years earlier; my relationships with others had spanned many years and I found my memories of them intermingled with the memories of other people I had known and loved. In short the sources for my memoirs were uneven and open to interpretation. My work became a mixture of inconsistent reportage and necessarily selective memory. Remembering and writing became one.

I understand well the limitations of the genre. No one remembers the past perfectly or completely, and most of us remember in ways that fit the larger – and usually self-serving – narrative patterns out of which we construct our own personal senses of self-understanding. Without doubt I fell prey to this temptation. And yet, as I surfed the edges of my memory, I felt in my gut that I was writing honestly about my past. My methods were nowhere near as rigorous as a reporter’s would have been, but I was not just making things up as I wrote. In fact my book is filled with passages that combine details I was able to verify with details I reconstructed from memory. In my own mind – after years of working on this project – I now find it difficult to untangle the two.

Reading over the bound galley of Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death on that day of James Frey’s implosion, I felt reassured: I had exercised much greater self-control in writing my book than did James Frey in writing A Million Little Pieces. Frey did not merely do a poor job of remembering; he willfully, intentionally made things up – big things, things that stood at the core of his story. Frey succumbed to the great temptation of the memoirist – he took the natural and inevitable limitations of the genre and he used them as a cover to alter and exaggerate what he knew to be the facts in order to heighten the dramatic impact of his story. To cite just the most egregious example, he did not spend 87 days in jail, but only a few hours. By lying about himself and about what in fact he truly remembered, he laid waste to the very foundation of good memoir.

Still, on that day of his public whipping, I found myself sympathizing with James Frey. A few months earlier – somewhere in the midst of endlessly re-writing Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death – I had come across a quote from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The quote had made me laugh and I had taped it immediately to the top of my laptop. “It’s easy to write one’s memoirs,” Schnitzler said, “when one has a terrible memory.”

*****

Oprah Winfrey was in no laughing mood on the day she fried James Frey on her nationally-televised hot-seat. Her defense of Frey on Larry King Live had caused her great embarrassment and she was unequivocal in retracting it: “I regret that phone call,” she said, “ … and so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth: you are absolutely right.” In tones of righteous indignation she extracted from Frey admissions of guilt to The Smoking Gun’s accusations.

Across the hour-long program, Winfrey’s many guests joined her in taking James Frey to task. Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist, counseled publishers to hire fact-checkers, suggesting that someone at Doubleday “could have done what The Smoking Gun did” before A Million Little Pieces went to press. The New York Times’ Frank Rich suggested Frey’s dissembling was just “the tip of the iceberg” in a culture dominated by corporate tax evasion and government spin and reality-based television – a culture in which “anyone can sort of put something out that sort of looks true, smells a little bit like truth but, in fact, is in some way fictionalized.” And Roy Peter Clark, journalism professor at the Poynter Institute, quoted Frey himself – who wrote in A Million Little Pieces, “Remember the truth. It’s all that matters.” Clark observed, “That’s such a powerful, powerful statement in addiction, in recovery, in journalism, in race relations, and personal relations.”

All this makes so much sense … and yet I find myself wanting to protest. The art of writing memoir is fundamentally different from that of reporting the news or even writing history. Memoirists are not reporters “embedded” in their own experience, and when they write after-the-fact about that experience they should not aspire to become historians investigating their own past. Memoirists should be expected to lose their objectivity, sometimes in large measure – this lack of objectivity is at times precisely what gives the art of memoir such poignancy and power. The trick to this kind of writing is to write in a spirit of humility, to write in a way that acknowledges the limits of one’s own self-perception. When they write in this spirit, memoirists invite their readers to join them in a journey of self-discovery, they take their readers with them as they uncover greater understandings of what has happened in their pasts, including those parts of their pasts – the interior, the emotional, the spiritual, the subjective – that would be impossible for the best reporter or best historian to pin down. This is the beauty of writing memoir: when we reflect in writing on our own pasts we are challenged to write in search of truths that cannot be fact-checked.

Of course my protestations are not inconsistent with the recommendations of the experts on Oprah’s panel. In writing their own life-stories writers can be more careful and honest and forthright in recounting what they know to have taken place, and they can more clearly acknowledge the limits of what they remember. Agents and editors can be more cautious about choosing to represent and publish what they do. And publishers can make sure that book titles, subtitles and front matter make clear what kind of work is being published, hiring fact-checkers if something asserted to be factual seems too over the top.

Many people have stepped up efforts like these in the aftermath of the Frey fiasco, and this can only be for the good. Still, looking back on the whole debacle one year later, I find myself worried about the fate of the memoir. Frey’s notoriety has cast shadows of doubt on an entire genre of literature, and his critics have left the impression that the remedy is for memoirists to simply “tell the truth.” My experience is that things are much more complicated than this counsel would make them seem. I can forswear outright lies and renounce fabrications by design, but I will still face difficult choices in my efforts to write truthful memoir.

I worry that we, who are writers of memoir, are now expected to write only what we have contemporaneously documented, or can demonstrably prove, or can remember with crystal clarity. And I worry that we are now expected to apologize continually for our limited powers of recall, or to litter our works with notes of reservation and qualification. I worry, in short, that have allowed the art of writing good memoir to be forever “Freyed” in the fat of journalists’ expectations.

If we allow these expectations to prevail we will suffer a number of costly consequences. First, our writings will prove uninteresting and uninspired, not to mention very short. Second, the rhythm and beauty of the stories we tell will be greatly undermined. Finally, and most costly of all, we will all miss out on those deeper truths that can be served only when honest writers set out to explore honestly their own flawed memories.

Art Buchwald -- Cracking a Cultural Consensus About Death (Opinion)

2007-01-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

The humorist Art Buchwald died on Thursday, having spent the last year of his life wisecracking about his impending death – often live on television. “I hope I see you next week,” he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week on March 12, 2006. “We’ll say, ‘Something’s wrong with the camera – he’s still going!’”

But Art Buchwald cracked more than jokes as he died – he also put a few more cracks in a crumbling cultural consensus about how we should prepare for death.

The death-watch began last January when Buchwald made the unorthodox decision to forego the kidney dialysis that his doctors told him could prolong his life. “It was a tough decision,” he told Diane Rehm of National Public Radio that same month. “But I don’t want pain. I don’t want to be kept alive for the sake of living. I don’t want Alzheimer’s. I don’t want cancer.” And he added: “I’m very happy with my choices.”

Even more striking was the emotional posture that Mr. Buchwald assumed after making his decision. As he put it in a March 7, 2006 column printed in newspapers across the country, “I’m having a swell time – the time of my life.”

Art Buchwald gained national attention and admiration because he was not doing what most Americans presumed that dying people do. Our common expectations for the dying are largely shaped by the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose landmark 1969 book, On Death and Dying, observed that most who are terminally ill need to work through a number of emotional stages – denial, anger, bargaining and depression – to overcome their fear of death. Eventually, Kübler-Ross suggested, the dying reach a final stage called “acceptance.”

In recent decades Kübler-Ross (who died in 2004) and her many protégés have added great nuance to her early work. Still, the talk of “stages” became enshrined in the popular consciousness as a kind of universal code. Most Americans simply assume that the fear of death is a necessary point of departure for those faced with a terminal diagnosis. And most assume that the journey to death will be marked inevitably by great emotional anguish. These assumptions can’t account for an important minority of people – people like Art Buchwald.

As anyone who works with the dying can attest, some people have come to grips with their own mortality long before they face imminent death. Some even feel oddly liberated by the prospect of dying, “freed up” to exercise in unique – sometimes spectacular – ways the same gifts of love and laughter and concern for others that have always made them who they are.

This way of dying is nothing new. Across the history of western civilization inspiring deaths have been celebrated in both oral tradition and in literature of every imaginable kind – from children’s books to popular magazines to religious anthologies. Our ancestors loved to tell the stories of what they called “good deaths” or “happy deaths,” deaths in which the person dying enjoyed profound experiences of grace and succeeded in communicating this grace to others. They believed these uplifting tales from the deathbed could inspire those who lived on to consider more deeply all that is good in life.

Perhaps the attention paid to Art Buchwald across the last year of his life is a sign that we are ready to reclaim this more mature way of thinking about death and dying. The continuing spread of the hospice movement, coupled with advances in the medical practice of palliative care, hold out hope that more and more Americans will be able to exercise greater control over the physical and emotional processes of dying. Instead of focusing on the ways that “most people” die, we would be wise to pay more attention, as our ancestors did, to that minority of people who finish their lives exceptionally well.

So here’s an early nomination for the Best Death of the 21st Century: Art Buchwald. By embracing his own death with such remarkable good humor, Mr. Buchwald reminded us of two ancient truths: death isn’t always such a terrible thing; and ordinary people can be an inspiration to others as they die.

Ted Haggard -- Confessions of a Fallen Pastor

2006-11-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

To many the work of a pastor may appear easy – even some church-going people seem to think that preaching on Sunday is all the job requires. In fact pastors must exercise many skills, from fundraising to counseling, from public relations to office administration. Pastors, I have heard it said, are the last generalists in a largely specialized professional world.

What makes professional church work most difficult, though, are the people. At a gathering of pastors I once heard a colleague wisecrack, “You put that many people together in one place and they’re bound to stink after a while.” The rest of us laughed and shot each other knowing glances. Good pastors know that sometimes they stink up the joint, too.

Last Thursday a Denver man, Mike Jones, announced on a Colorado talk-radio program that Ted Haggard, the lead pastor of New Life Church, a 14,000-member church in Colorado Springs, paid him for sex and used methamphetamines across the course of a three-year relationship. Jones said he chose to expose Haggard because Haggard was supporting publicly a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution banning same-sex marriage. (On election day Colorado voters approved the constitutional amendment and, in a separate action, voted against a referendum that would have granted homosexual couples legal status as “domestic partnerships.”)

Immediately after Jones went public, Haggard resigned from his pastorate and from his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals. Last Sunday, in a letter read from the pulpit by Ross Parsley, New Life Church’s acting senior pastor, Haggard confessed to sexual immorality, writing that while not all the accusations against him were true, “enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry.”

As a strong advocate for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in church and society, I find a part of me wanting to delight at the sight of Ted Haggard twisting in the winds of his own hypocrisy.

But there is another part of me – the pastoral part, I guess you could call it – that feels great compassion for Haggard. I can only imagine the stresses and strains he knew as the pastor of such a large church and as the president of an organization that declares to be sinful a sexual orientation that Haggard, at some level, had to know was his.

Not that Haggard is likely, in the short run, to “come out” as gay. According to Parsley, Haggard has “willingly and humbly submitted to the authority of the board of overseers” of the church. These men will not strive to help Haggard discover his true sexual orientation, whatever that may be. Instead they will encourage him to seek spiritual “healing” and the “transformation” of his same-sex desires.

However grave my misgivings about this kind of counsel, I wish the New Life overseers well. Above all I hope they will remember that, according to the gospels, when Jesus found hypocrites in the crowds that followed him he did not cast them out, but instead challenged all his disciples to “judge not lest ye be judged.”

And what if, someday, Ted Haggard should admit to himself that he is gay? Who knows? Maybe then he will see himself for who, it would appear, he has been all along – a lonely gay man who worked for years as the pastor of a very large Christian church.

America at (Holy) War (Opinion)

2006-09-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

Five years after the only September 11 that will ever seem to matter, the world is awakening to the potential consequences of the Bush Administration’s apocalyptic reaction to the events of that most horrible day. Public opinion in Europe and the United States is growing toward consensus: President Bush’s all-or-nothing “war on terror” is itself a grave threat to global stability in the 21st century.

The 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were so horrifying the early tone of absolutism adopted by the Bush Administration seemed natural enough. Nobody blanched when on September 14, 2001 President Bush intoned, “every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” In his greatest fit of hyperbole, President Bush declared that the aim of America’s war on terror was to “to rid the world of evildoers”?

This desire is understandable, even admirable, as a visceral reaction to the events of September 11. Who wouldn’t want to rid the world of people capable of such atrocities?

As an objective of government policy, however, this declaration of intent invites tragedy. This is not the language of military war; it is the language of religious apocalypse. Never mind whether great nations are capable of serving as global police; President Bush has tried to ordain the United States the world’s avenging angel.

By portraying the 9-11 terrorists not as political extremists employing barbaric tactics, but instead, quite simply, as “evildoers,” the Administration has framed the matter so that any who would oppose American foreign policy invite the accusation of accommodating evil. Afghanistan’s Taliban regime fit this bill nicely, of course, as does Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – and the United States is obviously capable of winning wars against regimes such as these.

But these kinds of military victories merely underscore the deeper question: how can any nation win a “war” on terror? What would constitute victory in this so-called war? The overthrow of the Taliban regime has not brought an end to terrorism. Neither has the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Would a change of regime in Saudi Arabia? Or in Libya? Or in Iran? Or in North Korea? Or in Cuba? Or in all the nations allegedly comprising the so-called “axis of evil”?

The cold, cruel fact is that terrorism would not end if the United States overthrew every regime tied in any way to all groups using terror as a political tactic. Nations and quasi-national militia are not the only practitioners of terror, so vanquishing nations and militia – the realistic objective of war – cannot vanquish terrorism. The Bush Administration can “preempt” all the “potential aggressors” it wants. Still there will be terrorists in the world.

Some will say the phrase, “war on terrorism” is a metaphor – like the war on drugs, or the war on illiteracy. But the Bush Administration apparently believes it can really wage this war through a series of military campaigns. Rhetorically it has linked its military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to an ill-defined war for which there is no plausible end-game and to an apocalyptic aspiration to cleanse the world of evil. As President Bush put it on November 6, 2001: “[we are] at the beginning of our efforts in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is the beginning of our efforts in the world.”

This is the hard and bitter truth of America’s reaction to the nightmarish events of September 11, 2001: President Bush took Osama Bin Laden’s bait. His administration has responded to a heinous act of jihad by declaring an American crusade.

Throughout the Arab world militants and fanatics are convinced (and are working hard to convince their compatriots) that the two wars are flip sides of the same coin. Administration protestations to the contrary cannot outweigh the weight of evidence proffered by U.S. foreign policy.

Things might have been different had the Administration presented its military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq as limited wars and necessary means to disabling specific and credible threats. Putting an end to terrorism writ large could have been identified as a goal to be achieved only, if ever, in the maddeningly imperfect realm of international politics. And the presumptuous goal of ridding the world of evil could have been left in the hands of God.

But by failing to frame these larger challenges as complicated matters of geopolitics and cosmic morality, and by pretending instead that American military power can somehow magically resolve them, the Bush Administration has joined a fight that could endure for years, perhaps generations, to come.

It may not be too late to escape this fate. Saddled with the absolutes of good and evil, the American “war on terror” is beginning to sink in the swamp of geopolitical realities.

Perhaps on a September 11 in the not-too-distant future an American President will have the courage to jettison the “Bush doctrine” which divides the world into opposing camps and forces our allies and friends and potential friends to chose between “us” and “them.” Perhaps on this new day an American President will declare to the family of nations: “America is not at holy war. America does not want a holy war. To a holy war there is no end.”

Why Maria Crossed Over: One Family's Bi-national Life (Essay)

2006-08-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

Published in The Christian Century, August 8, 2006

Last summer I was invited by a hospice chaplain to accompany him on a visit to the family of Maria Durand de Perez, a Mexican woman who had died a few weeks earlier in the border town of San Ysidro, California, at the astonishing age of 111. Knowing that I had once worked as the pastor of a Spanish-language church, the chaplain, whose name is Andy, thought that my presence might prove helpful to Angela, Maria's 78-year-old daughter, who was mourning the loss of her mother deeply.

In his previous visits, Andy, who spoke only English, and Angela, who spoke only Spanish, had depended for translation on Yrma, Angela's bilingual daughter and the owner of the San Ysidro home. Andy suspected (rightly, it turned out) that Angela was longing to have a more in-depth conversation about her mother's remarkable life.
At first it seemed absurd that Angela's grief was so pronounced. It was not as if she had had insufficient time to prepare for her mother's death. Maria Durand de Perez had been one of the oldest people alive on the face of the earth, recognized officially by the Gerontology Research Group as a "supercentenarian" for having lived past the age of 110. The more Angela talked, however, the more I came to understand her sense of loss and dislocation. She had lived her entire life under the same roof as her mother. Her days would never again be the same.

As Angela described the many twists and turns of her mother's life, it dawned on me that Maria's life reflected the social and political transformations that defined life along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 20th century. Spanish-speakers living along the border call it la linea, "the line." I began to wonder: How did Maria Durand de Perez come to die on this side of the line?

Maria Durand was born in 1893 in Fresnillos, a small town in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes. Her paternal grandfather was a Frenchman who married an indigenous Mexican woman, giving rise to what his great-granddaughter Angela would describe a century and a half later as a typical Mexican family—de sangre muy mezcada, "of very mixed blood."

In 1911, at the age of 18, Maria married Raul Perez, a man three years her senior, and soon after their wedding the couple came to California. By this time the pattern of Mexican migration to the Southwest U.S. was well established. In the second half of the 19th century tens of thousands of Mexicans—called braceros, a term deriving from brazo, the Spanish word for "arm"—had moved to the U.S. to work in agriculture, mining and light industry. This migratory flow had increased dramatically around the turn of the century, with the construction of the transcontinental railroads and the All-American Canal.

Not until the 1940s would the U.S. attempt to regulate this movement of laborers. From 1942 to 1964, under the bracero program, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service issued over 4 million temporary work visas to Mexicans. For all the current controversy about Mexican immigration, this much is a matter of historical record: the U.S. has always needed hard-working arms, and large numbers of Mexicans have always been ready to provide them.

Raul Perez worked in the Los Angeles public works department for almost 20 years, but he lost his job when the Depression hit in 1929. The next year Raul and Maria decided to return to Aguascalientes. The decision was not an easy one. They had started a family in Los Angeles, and their two children were U.S. citizens by virtue of birth. The elder, a son named Francisco ("Frankie"), was already well into his teens and didn't want to leave the only country he had ever known.

Frankie Perez never felt at home in Mexico, so immediately after finishing his secondary education in Aguascalientes he returned to the U.S. Without any particular intent or design, Raul and Maria had given birth to a profoundly binational family—a family, like millions of others, with relationships stretched irreversibly across the line.

Back in southern California, Frankie Perez married a Tijuana woman, Sofia Vergara, and together they raised a family in San Diego. Their four children attended high school and college in California, married and had children of their own—an all-American story.

But Frankie's younger sister, Angela, followed a different course. She was a small child when her parents returned to Aguascalientes, and though she retained her U.S. citizenship she never learned to speak English. She married a Mexican national, Jorge Vazquez, and gave birth to three children in Aguascalientes. In the 1950s, when Raul and Maria decided to move to Tijuana to be closer to Frankie and his family, Angela and Jorge and their youngest daughter, Yrma, moved with them.

For the last 50 years of her life, Maria Durand de Perez was the matriarch of an extended family that straddled the international boundary. Frankie and his extended family lived in San Diego; Angela and her extended family lived in Tijuana. Members of the family's many households visited each other frequently, crossing the line as a matter of course. Angela did so as a U.S. citizen, having been born in Los Angeles. Maria crossed the line using a "local passport," the document issued by the INS to Mexican citizens who could prove their permanent residence in Mexico.

Local passports, valid for ten years, allowed their bearers an unlimited number of entrances into the United States, provided that they remained within 25 miles of the border and stayed for no more than 72 hours at a time. When, in 2004, the Department of Homeland Security replaced the local passport with a high-tech "laser visa"—and at the same time extended the period of stay to 30 days in the border area—an estimated 7 million Mexicans were rightful owners of these documents, also called "border-crossing cards."

Like millions of Mexicans, Maria Durand de Perez used her border-crossing card to conduct an entirely binational way of life. (In 2004 DHS recorded 104 million laser-visa admissions to the U.S.) Her residence was still very much in Tijuana, where she shared a house with Angela and Jorge, but often she would spend several days at a time with members of Frankie's family in the U.S. Crossing the line became for Maria as ordinary as crossing the street.

The binational character of the Durand-Perez family took an American turn in 1984 when Angela's daughter Yrma, who had been widowed two years earlier while living in Tijuana, married a U.S. citizen, John Valles, and moved with her two children to San Ysidro. Together Yrma and John added another child, a daughter, to their family. By a process spanning not just years or decades but generations, the Durand-Perez family was becoming more and more American.

Their Americanization notwithstanding, the Durand-Perez family retained a number of features typical of every border family I know: pride in the Mexican culture and heritage; a deep and abiding religious faith; a love for both the Spanish and English languages (with family members having different degrees of competence in each); and a special esteem for the family's youngest and oldest members.

As Andy and I visited with Angela and Yrma that day in San Ysidro, the respect the family had for Maria was palpable. Angela took great pride in describing how Maria had remained muy pendiente ("very much on top of things") until just a few months before her death. As far as her daughter was concerned, the fact that Maria had lived to such a remarkable age was a sign of God's abundant blessing on the family.

As Angela began to reach the later chapters in the story of her mother's life, Yrma began to interject in both English and Spanish, determined that Andy and I should understand how it came to pass that Maria died not in Tijuana, but in Yrma's San Ysidro home. When Angela's husband died in 1998, Angela and Maria found themselves living all alone. Angela was getting older herself, and the strain of caring for Maria—growing ever more feeble in her old, old age—was becoming too much for her to handle. Years earlier Yrma and John had purchased a modest three-bedroom house in San Ysidro, and now, with their children grown and gone, the extra rooms seemed to just be sitting there. There was no reason for the family to incur the continued expense of maintaining both homes. So Maria and Angela moved in with Yrma and John in San Ysidro, Maria continuing to make occasional day trips to Tijuana until her local passport expired in 2002. From that point on she stayed exclusively in the U.S.

The decision to have Maria stay in the U.S. illegally after years of crossing the border legally made life easier and happier for the entire Durand-Perez family. With Maria's home base now clearly established in San Ysidro, Angela and Yrma were able to share the work of caring for her. Yrma had been paying for years to include her mother and grandmother in her company's medical plan, and now Maria's medical services—like the services provided by Andy's hospice company—were more readily accessible.

This, then, is how Maria Durand de Perez became an "illegal alien." She did not wade through California's putrid border waterway, the New River; she did not hop the fence that separates Tijuana from San Ysidro; and she did not cross the desert east of San Diego. Rather, she simply violated the terms of the local visa she had been using legally for decades. In the vernacular of the U.S. Border Patrol, Maria was neither a "wetback" nor a "border jumper" but a "visa overstayer." In this she was like millions of others—the INS estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of the 11 to 14 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. established permanent residence here by this kind of "visa abuse."

Families like that of Maria Durand de Perez almost never figure in the contemporary conversation about immigration. Rather than consider how people actually cross the border, anti-immigrant politicians prefer to offer manly sounding talk about building walls and moralizing talk about "closing the back door to the United States" and sending illegal aliens "to the back of the line."

I doubt that any manner of legislative reform will dramatically alter the flow of Mexican immigration to the U.S. The forces spurring immigration are more demographic and cultural than political or legal. These forces are the stuff of everyday life: rates of birth higher for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans than for most other ethnic groups; a chain of entirely legal immigration, as Mexican-Americans bestow residency and citizenship on their spouses, children and parents; and a practice of illegal immigration that is, in the vast majority of instances, born from ordinary people exercising common sense.

This is the moral of the story of Maria's death. As she continued to live into her incredible old age, Maria's family was faced with a series of crucial decisions. Making the best that they could of difficult circumstances, they based their decisions on logic and on their love and concern for their family's oldest member. For the word oldest in this last sentence you can substitute any of a number of other words—youngest or sickest or poorest or hungriest or most disabled or most pregnant or most employable—and there you have in stark terms the inexorable logic of Mexican immigration, both legal and illegal, to the U.S.

Near the end of our visit, Yrma showed me a photograph of her grandmother, taken the year before, when Maria was 110 years old. In my mind's eye I can still see that picture, and as I do I cannot help thinking of the members of Congress now debating competing pieces of immigration reform legislation. Perhaps a visit with the family of Maria Durand de Perez would convince the politicians that their task is not that of "closing the back door" on people who they feel have rudely intruded on our homes, nor that of "sending people to the back" of some imaginary, single-file line at U.S. ports of entry.

The task facing Congress is that of deciding how much to expand the legal and physical barriers that stretch across land that millions of Mexicans have been traveling for generations. There may be valid political reasons for seeking to expand these barriers, but it strikes me as futile (if not shameful) to expect that people whose families naturally span the international boundary should refrain from crossing it when logic, compassion and common decency—and dare I say, family values—cry out that they should.

As we left the house in San Ysidro, I said to Yrma, "What a binational family you have!" Her reply was matter-of-fact. "Oh, yes," she said, "just like all the families around here." She then counted her way around her neighborhood, concluding that all the families except one on her street were of Mexican ancestry.

"There's just one gringo family," Yrma said, pointing to the house on the corner. "They're very nice. They wave and say 'Buenos dias!' when we see them in the morning."

Life on the Line: One HIV-positive Woman's Story (Essay)

2006-08-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

Published in A & U Magazine, October, 2006

Life on the Line
One HIV-positive woman’s account of crossing the U.S.–Mexico border in search of healthcare
by John Fanestil

Last summer I worked for a week in the mountains east of San Diego, as the volunteer chaplain at a camp for people with HIV/AIDS. There I met Lourdes Sanchez (not her real name), a twenty-four-year-old Tijuana woman who laughed when I asked her where she was from.

“Yo vivo en la línea,” said Lourdes, smiling and using the Spanish slang for “border.” I live on the line.
I picked up the conversation in Spanish: “Así que vives en San Diego o Tijuana?” So do you live in San Diego or Tijuana?

“Los dos,” Lourdes said. Both. She went on to explain to me that she maintained residences in both Tijuana and San Ysidro, San Diego County’s border town.

I found the idea fascinating, and so I asked Lourdes to sit down and tell me about herself, and to explain how it came to pass that she lived on both sides of the line.

Lourdes Sanchez was born in Guadalajara, but her parents moved to Tijuana when she was six years old. “I have very few memories from Guadalajara,” she said.

Her upbringing in Tijuana was in many ways typically Mexican. The third of seven siblings, she grew up in a large and loving extended family, which celebrated with her in 1999 when she graduated from preparatoria (the Mexican equivalent of high school) and married a boy from the neighborhood, Rafael Zaragoza. The couple’s first son, Rodrigo, was born in 2000 and their second, Paulito, in 2002.

With plans for further studies she aspired to someday become a secretary—Lourdes never imagined herself moving to the United States. All that changed, though, in September 2003, when she discovered that Rafael had infected her with HIV.

Rafael had never been a very good husband, Lourdes told me, but still he was devastated to learn that he had given the virus to his wife. “I don’t know how he contracted the virus,” Lourdes said. “He never told me…who knows if even he really knew how he got it or from whom.” The way Lourdes remembers what happened next, Rafael “just gave up.” He died of AIDS in April, 2004.

Facing a moment of profound crisis, Lourdes determined that she would not just passively accept this same fate. Relieved to learn that neither Rodrigo nor Paulito were HIV-positive, she decided to fight the virus in her body.

“I believe in being here for my children,” she explained.

It did not take Lourdes long to discover that in Tijuana she would be unable to access the medical care she needed. A clinic supported by the government of the Mexican state of Baja California Norte provides services and prescriptions to some 300 people living with HIV/AIDS. The waiting list for this program is several years long—Tijuana is a city of over two million people and researchers at the University of California, San Diego, conservatively estimate Tijuana’s adult HIV-positive population at over 5,000.

With adequate medical care unavailable to her in Mexico, Lourdes made the entirely reasonable decision to establish a residence in San Ysidro, the California town that is, for practical intents and purposes, both the southern-most suburb of San Diego and the northern-most suburb of Tijuana. There she signed on with San Ysidro Health Center, a community clinic offering a range of medical, psychiatric, and social services to families affected by HIV/AIDS.

Setting herself up in the United States was a big deal for Lourdes, but it was not difficult to do. She was already the rightful owner of a “border-crossing card,” a document issued by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that grants an unlimited number of entries into the United States, provided its bearer remain within twenty-five miles of the border and stay for no more than thirty days at a time. Over seven million Mexican citizens possess a border-crossing card—also called “el pasaporte local” or the local passport.

According to Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., “the program is really no more than an expensive and fancy honor system, because land border inspectors only rarely do name-checks and even more rarely try to authenticate the identity of the card-holder.” In 2004 the Department of Homeland Security upgraded the border-crossing cards, converting them into new, high-tech “laser visas” that can be scanned using infrared technology. The Department is now aggressively pursuing plans to tighten controls on this system: Its stated goal is to submit all laser visa users to electronically-scanned fingerprint identification.

As have millions of other Mexicans, Lourdes Sanchez converted her local passport into an entirely binational way of life. (In 2004 DHS recorded 114 million laser visa entries into the United States.) She retained her apartment in Tijuana, the receipts from the rent providing ample evidence for those occasions when U.S. Border Patrol officers asked for proof of her residence in Mexico. And in the summer of 2004 she moved with a friend into a two-bedroom apartment in San Ysidro, using the utility bills to sign up with organizations like San Ysidro Health Center that offer services, irrespective of nationality, to all residents of the United States.

Lourdes became an “illegal alien,” but not in the traditional sense. In the vernacular of the Border Patrol, she became a “visa abuser.” Her older son, Rodrigo, continued to live in Tijuana with Lourdes’ mother. Her younger son, Paulito, moved with Lourdes and her friend into the San Ysidro apartment. She began to cross the border regularly—the way she talked about it made it sound like crossing the street.

Near the end of our conversation, Lourdes shared with me some big news. She had met a wonderful man from Tijuana—a man named Ivan who was close to finishing his architectural studies—and they were making plans to marry.

I asked if her fiancé knew she was HIV-positive.

“Yes, he knows,” Lourdes said, “but his family doesn’t. I told him when he first proposed that we start dating. He took it well.” Lourdes smiled.

As happy as she was about this new relationship, Lourdes also recognized that it presented her with a grand dilemma. Ivan’s architectural degree would do him no good in the United States—his friends, his family and his future were in Tijuana. Lourdes said she’d prefer that her future be in Tijuana, too.

“I consider myself a Tijuanense,” she explained, “but now I live in San Ysidro. I consider it a temporary thing—I would prefer to be over there. But I feel like if I go back to Tijuana full-time, I’ll be moving backward. I feel like I’d be going back to where I was before.” She sighed. “It’s a jumble. You take a risk to win and you only end up losing.”

The conversation continued this way for quite some time, with Lourdes weighing the costs and benefits that come with living on each side of the line. In all probability, she concluded, she would have to keep her residence in San Ysidro, no matter what happened with her life in Tijuana. She would have to do whatever it takes to retain access to the medical services available to her in the United States.

Lourdes was becoming more and more honest with me as we continued to talk. Finally she told me she was pregnant.

“See,” she said, “The doctors say I have to take medicine so that the baby won’t get the virus. And Ivan is negative so I have to be careful not to infect him.”

I looked at Lourdes and I smiled. Twenty-four-years-old, she was young and vibrant and vivacious. Literally and figuratively, she was so full of life.

As our conversation reached its end, Lourdes arrived at a final conclusion:“The real goal is to stay healthy for my family,” she said. “If I stay strong—mentally, physically, spiritually—I can last many years without going downhill, without the virus knocking me down.”

Log on to www.syhc.org/hiv.html to learn more about the HIV/AIDS services at San Ysidro Health Center.

Terry Schiavo -- In Search of an American Way of Death (Opinion)

2006-03-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

Terry Schiavo died one year ago this Friday, thirteen days after the removal of the feeding tube that had sustained her since 1990 in what her doctors diagnosed as a “persistent vegetative state.”

As all but the most media-averse will remember, Schiavo’s husband, Mark, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, disagreed bitterly about removing the feeding tube. Their dispute – which had been played out in the Florida legal system for over a decade – exploded in the court of public opinion last spring, when finally the Schindlers’ appeals were exhausted, and Mark Schiavo was granted legal authority to order the tube removed.

The plight of Terry Schiavo and her family sent shivers of recognition across America – almost everyone could imagine their own family torn over what to do if a young loved one were cut down by illness or accident before having spelled out explicit end-of-life instructions.

Schiavo’s tragedy also captured the public imagination because her family’s differences of opinion seemed representative of the larger cultural divide on which the mainstream media was increasingly focused in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election.

Politicians, pundits and religious leaders weighed in on both sides of what became a national debate. Some aligned themselves with the Schindlers, deploring Mark Schiavo’s decision to unhook the feeding tube as a heartless violation of his wife’s “right to life.” Others saw the decision as a tragic but entirely commonsensical – even compassionate – choice, given the reality of Terry’s condition. In her dying days, Terry Schiavo became a political football.
One year later, the memory of Terry Schiavo presents us with a fundamental challenge: can we envision an American way of death that would bring us together as families and as a nation?

To talk about an “American way of death” may, at first, sound puzzling to the modern ear. But for most of western history a good death or “happy death” – in which the dying were perceived to be spiritually prepared to die – was understood to be the crowning achievement of a life well-lived.

The search for a happy death led our ancestors to prepare themselves – practically, emotionally and spiritually – to die. For this reason – and not just because they had fewer medical options to choose from – they struggled much less than we do with decisions at the end of life.

A broad-scale conversation about what constitutes a good death in the 21st century might not eliminate entirely the tensions and competing concerns that so often present themselves at life’s end.

Such a conversation would, however, encourage people to be pro-active throughout their lives in communicating what they hoped for in their dying days. In doing so it would dramatically reduce the number of people who end up in Terry Schiavo’s predicament.

A renewed search for an American way of death would lead us all to do more than merely lament the agonizing choices faced by families like Terry Schiavo’s. Instead this search would challenge us to ask and answer questions like these:

What kind of death do I aspire to? What kind of death do I desire for those I love? What can we learn about dying from people who finish their lives with grace and dignity? And what can we begin doing now that will prepare us to die the kinds of deaths that will make our families – and our country – proud?

Some day we may look back upon Terry Schiavo as the harbinger of things that were simply destined to come. The first baby-boomers turn 60 this year. With advances in modern medical technology continuing unabated, it is easy to imagine a future in which legions of older Americans live for decades hooked up to breathing machines and feeding tubes, while their families fight over their fates in hospital corridors and courts of law and the halls of state and federal legislatures.

I believe that few Americans want to see this future come to pass. If we are to avoid it, we have some hard talking to do.

A Eulogy in Three Volumes (Sermon)

2006-03-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

Based on the eulogy I delivered at the funeral of my grandmother, Marian Smith, in March, 2006. I dedicated my first book, Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death, to my grandmother. She died the day before it first appeared in bookstores.

This is a tale of three books, the first being the spiral-bound Spiderman notebook that belongs to Jacob, my four year-old son. The night before I left town to go to my grandmother’s funeral, I grabbed the notebook and a pencil as Jacob climbed into his bed, and I asked him if he wanted to write a note to his great-grandmother, whom he has always called “Gigi.”

Jacob thought for just a minute, then motioned for me to bend over so he could whisper in my ear.

“I love you,” he said. “I miss you. I want to visit with you in heaven.”

Jacob giggled and sat up straight in his bed as I read his words back to him. Then, with a curious smile and a nod of his head, he said to me confidently, almost smugly, “You show her that. I think she will like what I wrote.”

Indeed his Gigi would have liked what Jacob wrote.

My grandmother, Marian Alice Sliker, was born in Howard, Kansas on September 18, 1909. Raised by devout Methodist parents, she thought in her teenage years of becoming a foreign missionary – a common thought among Christian women of her generation. Then one day it occurred to her that she could be a missionary right there in Kansas. In fact that is what she did with her life, dedicating herself to family and friends, neighbors and church, and a life of service to others.

Across the course of her life my grandmother proved especially devoted to the religious practice of “visitation.” For decades she served as one of her church’s parish visitors, making appointed rounds to see the sick and hospitalized and shut-in. By all accounts she was an extraordinarily good visitor, as comfortable praying for those who couldn’t speak as she was in gabbing it up with those who were starved for conversation.

My Grammy met Jacob in person only once – last Thanksgiving, three months before she died. Jacob was already four years old by then, but I had filled the years since his birth with many things (important things, I’m sure) and so had failed to bring Jacob from California for a visit.

On Thanksgiving Day my father brought my grandmother home from the convalescent home where she spent the last six months of her life. My mother prepared a turkey dinner and there in her kitchen Gigi met her youngest great-grandson. I don’t know exactly what my grandmother said to Jacob when she introduced herself – she spoke softly, as she always did when speaking to children, and I was on the other side of the kitchen at the time. Whatever she said, I could tell Jacob was delighted by it. He’s normally a squirmy little guy, but for that conversation he sat transfixed, smiling.

Of course the sight reminded me of my own childhood. I have built a life on the sense of spiritual confidence that my grandmother imparted to me when I was young. “With Grammy on my side,” I have always thought, “who can be against me?” (The allusion is scriptural, of course, as will soon be made explicit.)

This is what I saw in Jacob’s face last Thanksgiving – a sudden and overwhelming realization that this woman was for him. The impression she made was sufficiently strong that three months later, when the time came for Jacob to write his farewell note, he knew just what words to choose.

*****

I will pretend that Jacob’s Spiderman notebook folds neatly inside the second book in this story, a very old, leather-bound book I found in a wooden chest in my grandmother’s garage during a visit I made to El Dorado about a month before she died. The book’s title page looked unlike most contemporary title pages in that it was filled with text, unfolding from top to bottom in ever-smaller fonts, the lines centered on the page. The largest words, in all caps, were “ACT, DECLARATION AND TESTIMONY …” giving the impression of a title. In fact, though, these words were just the beginning of an elaborate sentence that continued: “… for the whole of our covenanted Reformation, as attained to and established in Britain and Ireland; particularly betwixt the years 1638 and 1649, inclusive; as also against all the steps of deception from said reformation, whether in former or later times, since the overthrow of that glorious work, down to this present day.” At the foot of the page was this: “EDINBURGH, Printed in the Year MDCCLXXVII.” The book had been printed in 1777.

I was amazed by the book’s age and bemused by its language, but I was positively shocked to find it in my grandmother’s treasure-chest. I was shocked because the book was Presbyterian. It’s opening pages included a ringing damnation of John Wesley’s Methodists who, it asserted, “have over-run the whole kingdom propagating everywhere the doctrine of Arminianism, together with the most unaccountable licentious principles anent Christian and church communion ever known.”

Trusting that confession is good for the soul, I will confess to a certain prejudice against Presbyterians. While few still cling to the pre-modern doctrine of predestination (the doctrine which gave the movement rise), today’s Presbyterians still tend to emphasize the sovereignty of God and the absoluteness of God’s will. In the Presbyterian view of the world (I have always liked to say), life consists entirely of God saying, “jump!” and us mortals saying, “how high?” Presbyterians are quick to remind us that we never jump high enough, forcing us to acknowledge – if we are honest with ourselves – that we always fall back onto the ground of God’s grace.

Methodists, by contrast, have always liked to conjure a more enthusiastic and sympathetic God. I have always loved the story of the little boy who says to his mother, “Let’s play darts – I’ll throw and you say, ‘wonderful!’” Methodists acknowledge that we rarely hit the bull’s-eye in this life (I am reminded that in Hebrew the word most commonly used for “sin” means simply to “miss the mark”), but we like to think that God applauds our efforts nonetheless. We Methodists like to think that we can be confident of our eternal salvation.

I can’t tell you how unsettling it was for me to discover a Presbyterian book in my grandmother’s treasure chest. The book was inscribed by my grandmother’s mother and had clearly belonged to one of her ancestors. There was no reason for me to come to any other conclusion: my Methodist family tree springs in part from a Presbyterian root.

*****

The third book to tell you about is my grandmother’s Bible, as of course it would have to be in a nostalgic piece like this. It has come completely undone at the seams, and so all the other books in my world fit comfortably between its covers. In the midst of our January visit, my grandmother had asked me to read a passage from her Bible, directing me to the last verses from Isaiah’s fortieth chapter, and then saying, “You can remember these, can’t you?” I took it to be a request that the verses be read at her funeral, a request that I honored gladly:

O Israel, how can you say the LORD does not see your troubles? How can you say God refuses to hear your case? Have you never heard or understood? Don't you know that the LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of all the earth? He never grows faint or weary. No one can measure the depths of his understanding. He gives power to those who are tired and worn out; he offers strength to the weak. Even youths will become exhausted, and young men will give up. But those who wait on the LORD will find new strength. They will fly high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40: 27-30, New Living Translation)

The verses satisfied my Methodist spirit, suggesting a faith that faces down troubles with a supreme (and serene) confidence. As I read them at her funeral, though, it occurred to me that the verses would have satisfied my Presbyterian ancestors, too (whoever they are). Isaiah makes clear that the only reliable ground for such confidence is the “everlasting God, the creator of all the earth.”

My Grammy’s favorite passage connected nicely to my own, a passage seared into my consciousness from my reading it at funerals and graveside services in my fifteen years as a parish pastor. At the funeral I quoted them from memory:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39, New Revised Standard Version)

The words, of course, are Paul’s, written to the early Christians in Rome.
As I prepared to close my eulogy, it occurred to me that my grandmother had assembled her family and friends for a final visit. Of course the art of a good visit includes knowing when to say good-bye.

I descended the church’s chancel steps, placed my hand on her coffin and stepped in to the conclusion of my eulogy:

There is a certain arc to the life of faith, an arc that eventually comes full-circle. And I can describe the shape of this arc in words that come ringing down the generations of this family.* When we are born God says “I love you.” When we go astray God says “I miss you.” When we hit the bull’s eye in life, God shouts “wonderful!” When we miss the mark God says, “Nothing can separate us … we always come back together.” And when we die? Why, then God comes and knocks on our door and pays us a visit. “Come, my friend,” God says. “Let us sit and talk for a good long little while. I would like to visit with you in heaven.”

*NOTE TO READER: Perhaps you will find words similar to these ringing down the generations in your family, too.