Immigration and the triumph of bad faith

One of the most striking features of the nation’s immigration debate is the intensity of the rhetoric. It simply hasn’t been a “discussion” of the subject until someone has been called a xenophobic Nazi and somebody else an America-hating commie.

That’s puzzling, when you think about it. It’s perfectly possible to think that national security and the laws of the land are worth enforcing without despising human dignity or being a racist. And it’s perfectly possible to recognize the terrible plight of many immigrant families and call for leniency without wanting to turn the southwest United States into a Mexican province or hating the rule of law.

Not only are those views both possible, I think they are common. In fact, for decent, thoughtful people, it’s not only possible but required to value national security, the rule of law, the desirability of assimilation and the human dignity of immigrants in dire poverty all at the same time. Given the many facets of immigration policy, one can apply those principles to the complicated facts and come to different conclusions in relative good faith.

But that’s not the debate we’re having. People do not assume basic decency on the part of those who disagree with them, let alone go one more step to recognizing their opponents are standing for worthy principles worth defending.

The more cynical side of me is tempted to think it’s because both sides are actually right about the other, and this really is a battle between racists who hate Mexicans and commies who hate America, with the rest of us caught in the middle. But I don’t really think that’s it.

Part of it is because the stakes are so high, and because so many people on both sides are affected so directly. (Full disclosure: I’m about as insulated from this issue as one could possibly be.)

But at heart I think it’s simply the triumph of bad faith. We don’t have a rational discussion of it because we no longer have the patience to think through complicated things, so we oversimplify. We are so thoroughly polarized that we rarely hear a thoughtful opposing view anyway, but rather get it filtered through a partisan media tailored already to our sympathies. The caricature is formed before we even engage the enemy, assuring yet another delightful battle of talking points. The crowd gathers and shout inflammatory things. The most outrageous are repeated in the opposing press. Then the other side gathers to shout its inflammatory things. Rinse. Repeat.

Illegal immigration is a big problem. But I think the debate itself exposes an even bigger problem.

Ten Commandments as coloring book

In a previous line of work, and in some ways a previous life, I was a poetry critic, and one of my favorite local poets was Connie Wanek. As you can see, she’s a local artist made good with credits in Poetry and The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere, with books and awards to her credit, named alongside some pretty famous poets, at least as modern poets go.

I think this is richly deserved. What I admire about her poetry is the “noble simplicity,” if I may borrow that term, of her language, and her clear images and metaphors. It was a joy, then, to see one of her poems pop up on Poetry Daily.

In some ways, “Coloring Book” is vintage Wanek: a poem with a single, simple image at its heart, a purity of language that still allows some music to flow (“heartbreakingly banal” in the opening line).

But I want to take up the argument I see implicit in it.

Consider these lines:

A coloring book’s authority is derived
from its heavy black lines
as unalterable as the Ten Commandments
within which minor decisions are possible:
the dog black and white,
the kitten gray.

Well.

Rembrandt depicts Moses and the Ten Commandments. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The Ten Commandments are an interesting choice of metaphor. In looking at just these lines, it would be possible to imagine the comparison being made in passing, but just a few lines later, she is comparing the short phrases found under coloring book images to Psalms and sermons.

In such an accomplished writer, this is not an accident. It’s a poem about biblical religion, then, and not a flattering one. Biblical religion is the cheap, “heartbreakingly banal” thing she’s talking about, with its hard lines allowing only “minor decisions.” (Note that the colors in Wanek’s coloring book are black, white and gray.)

I take up this discussion not to single out a poet whose skill I admire but because I think the view expressed there is a very common one. It relates to the divorce of contemporary culture from the Christian culture which built it, not just among secularized intellectuals but even among average Christians in the pew, who often do not know Augustine, Aquinas or Chesterton – or even their Bibles.

As for the Psalms, it’s enough to say that anyone not long estranged from them knows they are among the most profound works in world literature, sounding the depths of the human experience, even considered apart from their divine origin. If they are banal, I would like to see what isn’t.

The more potent salvo is at the Ten Commandments. Isn’t that part simply obvious fact? That those unalterable lines in the Mount Sinai sand, and all that follows from them, restrict our freedom and leave us only “minor decisions” and vanilla, cookie-cutter lives written in black and white?

That’s what most people think, unthinkingly, I would contend. The more specifically one looks, the less plausible that idea becomes. The Ten Commandments forbid idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, theft, lying and coveting.

Is it the case that you cannot be free, that you can only make “minor decisions,” if you cannot revile the sacred, embrace unjust violence, betray the spouse to whom you have made solemn oaths, be consumed desiring and finally taking that which is not yours, and deceive those around you? That’s silly.

I am not free to betray my spouse by leaping into bed with someone else, but if that law is observed I am free to trust her, raise children with her, grow old with her when I’m long past being desirable to anyone. I am not free to murder my enemies, but if that law is observed I am free to walk down the street and even express unpopular views in relative safety. I am not free to lie, but if that law is observed I am free to trust a business partner, a friend, a repairman, an eyewitness. I am not free to blaspheme what is holy, but if that law is observed I am free to worship, to wonder, to reverence that which is greater than me, and aspire to be better.

A just and good order is the foundation of freedom, the foundation of peace. Anarchy looks free but is instead a tyranny of competing wills governed by force and by fear. One who flouts the laws of physics is free to do many foolish and self-destructive but not to build a bicycle. Similarly, one who flouts the Ten Commandments is free to self-destruct but is correspondingly less free to live a good and happy life.

I think this is actually bound up in Wanek’s own metaphor. In the closing lines we see what freedom has supposedly been denied by those hard black lines of the coloring book: a blank page upon which we scribble when we are “tired and sad” and can “bear no more.”

But coloring books are for children, to teach them line and form and rudimentary hand-eye coordination so they may progress to more advanced forms of art. A six-month-old or even a monkey can scribble on a blank piece of paper without any instruction or practice. An older child who has worked through a few coloring books can begin drawing stick men and some day, perhaps, with great training and discipline, the Mona Lisa.

Which is more free, the monkey or the master?

New technology, old books

“Silence is the door-keeper of the interior life.” – St. Josemaria Escriva

I have some weird competing inclinations.

Take this pairing: Part of me loves computers and gadgets and making them tick, which led me, as a kid at the dawn of the home computer age, to buy a two computers with my saved-up money and write my own word processing program to do school papers. The other is a deep love of silence and solitude coupled with strong temptation to go off the grid (one of my favorite books growing up was Walden), living in a hermitage somewhere and never looking at another glowing screen. The quote from St. Josemaria Escriva sums it up well. I consider zoning into the Internet for hours (or more rarely a TV) among my worst habits precisely for this reason.

I have had both inclinations since childhood, and still have them both. Being half Geek and half Luddite is often uncomfortable.

Image licensed under a Creative Commons license. Photo by Jon 'ShakataGaNai' Davis.

But I think I’ve found the perfect technology for me in the Amazon Kindle.

I’ve had my eye on them for a couple of years now, and this Christmas, my (much) better half bought me one. I was, and remain, thrilled.

The great benefits of the new generation of e-book readers, of which the Kindle is only the most famous, are the vastly improved reading experience (comparable to ink on paper) and the availability of  more stuff, especially new releases and periodicals. I have bought several books through the Amazon store, and I have read several issues of a variety of different newspapers on it. Both experiences have been good. I may have more to say about newspapers on Kindle in another essay.

But neither is why I wanted a Kindle. I wanted one so I could read old books comfortably and for free. Possibly the greatest thing about the Internet is that it has thousands upon thousands of great old books that are now in the public domain. There’s great literature there — Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Hopkins — alongside old Westerns to read just for fun. You can find the writings of the saints. You can find the writings of the world’s great thinkers who have shaped the world (for good and for ill). With Google Books even the mediocrity of the ages is available.

Even taking the very best of the ages and building a library in paper would cost thousands of dollars and take up a room in the house. (Just ask my wife!) But now you can get it for free and hold it in the palm of your hand. The only major drawback has been the horrible experience of reading on a computer screen, now solved with the e-book reader.

I think I have done more serious reading since Christmas than I had since the previous Christmas. Stepping away from the digital fire hose of my RSS feed, my Twitter account, my Facebook page and so on has become a regular habit that refreshes the soul.

It’s true that you can log on to the Internet from your Kindle, but it’s not a great browsing experience, so it’s no great temptation. And it’s true you can browse the bookstore 24/7 from the comfort of your couch. That’s a real temptation. But it’s been easily solved by simply turning the wireless service off, which has the added bonus of extending the already long battery life even more.

So there it is. For once, high tech has served to increase, rather than diminish, silence, solitude and the interior life. Luddite and Geek shall meet, high tech and old books shall kiss, and now I only  have to discipline myself to stop reading and go to bed at night.

40 Days: Appearances

Last night at the vigil, I had an interesting encounter. It was a rainy, cool Sunday night, the liquor store closed, so we had relatively little foot traffic past us. But one guy came walking past while my friend and I were talking. I said “hello,” and he didn’t even acknowledge us. That happens sometimes, and I made the usual assumption, that he disagreed with our purpose and wanted to express that opinion without risking a discussion.

So you say a prayer and let it go.

However, just a minute or so later, he was back, and he wanted a favor. “Either of you guys got jumper cables?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. It’s always awkward when you get those kinds of requests down there. There are good safety reasons to be reluctant to go off in the dark night with a stranger. After a moment of internal debate, I said that I did, and asked my friend if he was OK alone for a few minutes while I went to help this man get his car started. Then I was asking the guy into my vehicle to give him a ride to his car a couple of blocks away.

It was a short distance. We pulled up, jumped out, and set to work on our respective hoods. Mine opened, and his didn’t. Turned out it was a friend’s car, and there was a trick to the hood. The man began to explain he’d been having a terrible week, and a terrible day. Everything had gone wrong. He was cold. He was only in town for a funeral. Now this.

After a quick call to the car’s owner, we figured out the hood and got the car going easily. The young man was profusely grateful, to me, but I think more for just having something finally go right.

I thought later about my first impression, that the guy was hostile, and how I was probably completely wrong. Whether or not he agrees with the vigil, I suspect he was simply pre-occupied with his woes. Suffering can narrow our existential horizons until we can barely lift our eyes to see anything beyond our misery.

Reflecting on it still more, I begin to think that this is profoundly connected to the vigil itself, and why the merchants for the Culture of Death are so deadly effective in their work. Many of the people seeking abortions are in just such a place of suffering, of fear, even of despair. Everything has gone wrong, and now this. When someone offers them what appears as an easy, mechanical solution, it is easy to see why it’s attractive.

In the face of this, the strongest, truest arguments don’t get very far. Although the arguments are necessary, what is really needed is love.

Pope John Paul II, in his apostolic letter “Salvifici Doloris” (“On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering” is the English title) says this:

Assuming then that throughout his earthly life man walks in one manner or another on the long path of suffering, it is precisely on this path that the Church at all times … should meet man. Born of the mystery of Redemption in the Cross of Christ, the Church has to try to meet man in a special way on the path of his suffering. In this meeting man “becomes the way for the Church,” and this way is one of the most important ones.

It is necessary but not sufficient to demand changes to make the laws more just. It is necessary but not sufficient to meet the Culture of Death’s lies on the battlefield of reason and public discourse. Only in walking with the suffering in true love and solidarity can we lift the eyes of those seduced by the Culture of Death beyond their present fears toward true hope, which is not found in works of death but in the gift of life.

That walk sometimes means overcoming our own fears, too.

Mute Math

One of the band members from Mute Math writes a blog. Here’s his take on the First Avenue show I was able to attend last weekend — which was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

Here’s one of their great songs:

Anna’s birthday Thursday

Anna's gravestone

They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength, they will soar as with eagles’ wings; They will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint. – Isaiah 40:31

Sometimes God takes His time renewing our strength. Approaching Anna’s third birthday Thursday, I have been reminded of just how much healing is yet to take place in my heart. It’s funny how things can crop up.

I miss her. Little Maria looks like her, feels like her with that newborn low muscle tone, although I suspect now she has better head control than Anna did for most of her life. Often I’m asked about Maria. “How’s she doing?” I wonder what is meant. Is it simply the normal, “How’s the baby?” Or is it a subtle way of asking, “Does she have what Anna had?”

Either way, it’s OK. I have always said I don’t want Anna to be some forgotten part of our life. Whenever I’m asked about children, I say that I have three.

The truth is that Maria seems great. So did Anna, at first. I really have no idea whether Maria has a mitochondrial disorder or not, and so we operate on the assumption she doesn’t. Every little baby occasionally does weird stuff as they learn how to use their hands and legs and eyes, and I try (and often fail) not to read trouble into them. That’s not fair to her. On the other hand, she’s meeting her milestones and growing like mad and smiling and trying to talk to us, which are all good signs, but I can’t take them as assurance that everything’s super.

I’ve written before that we would welcome Anna again and again, wouldn’t trade her life for anything. Still true. I’ve written that I’m grateful for her life, that even the pain of her death is blessing all the way down, because it is the cost of love, a cost I am glad to pay for Anna. Still true.

But it’s the cross, and the cross is real and it hurts.

I hate the thought of forgetting, of moving on, and yet in so many ways that’s easy to do. In that light, too, the hurting heart is a blessing. It brings a memory of the past into my present.

Over the past few weeks, I have spent more than 30 hours praying in front of the abortion mill in Duluth, and speaking to the “locals” who may be addicted, mentally ill and homeless. The babies inside, the outcast outside – how easy and how terrible it is for people to be forgotten. But Jesus never forgets them.

God has revealed to us that all things work for good for those who love Him, and as we know, “all things” includes sometimes having your child die at 14 months and having a heart in need of healing over a year later.

Sometimes my heart is in utter confusion about why God made things this way. What I know is that He did make them that way. Maybe part of the good working through this is that He’s calling me to trust Him even when His ways are beyond my ken.

Meanwhile, we love in Christ where there finally is no loss.

Sweet St. Anna, pray for us.

Cross posted.

Very funny

I always find it amusing when a blogger initiates a friendly debate, loses the debate and then proceeds to edit the comments on the blog in such a way as to leave the impression of victory, when in fact the person has shown shocking ignorance of basic points and not engaged opposing arguments, with only sneers and gratuitous assertions in his or her favor.

So be forewarned that a blogger has done that to me here and here, deleting rebuttals such as the one in which I pointed out that St. Thomas Aquinas, writing from the mainstream of Christian thought before and after him, had clearly taught that the literal sense of Scripture was the foundation of all other senses of Scripture, contrary to the blogger’s opinion that no major theologian thought this before Moody in 1906. Apparently she was also unconcerned that St. Ignatius of Antioch, whose letters have been authenticated by historians, and who was probably ordained by Peter and taught the faith by John, clearly taught a bodily resurrection and gladly died for the spectacle of the Roman masses confessing that belief. (Well, duh. So did the rest of the Church Fathers.)

No, those salient facts were deleted from the site, while the blogger has now posted a sneer about how irrational and impervious to evidence us “religionists” are. So beware that whatever appears on that particular site does not reflect the actual discussion but includes some less than scrupulous editing.

Hey, that’s me!

I wrote a column for Living Stones News, a local Christian publication that did a profile on me some time back, about 40 Days for Life. You can read the column here. (The profile is here.)

An excerpt of the column:

This is a leap of faith. Bearing witness where people may yell obscenities at you is hard. Jesus said we are blessed when we are cursed for the sake of His name. Standing out in the elements and in the dark of night is hard. But remember Jesus once asked His disciples on a dark night, “Could you not watch with Me for one hour?” He was frequently known to spend all night in prayer in a desert place, and First Street is that at times.

We pray in pairs. One great way to get involved is to get a prayer partner who will join you at the vigil. Each of you could sign up for the same hour each week. In a similar way, a men’s group, youth group or Bible study could find eight people and fill four hours a week. Men are particularly needed for the overnight hours.

From apostolic times until the middle of the 20th century, Christians unanimously bore witness to the evil of abortion and similar practices. Early Christians were distinguished in part by their refusal to “expose” unwanted babies. We now often feel powerless, waiting on God to act. It reminds me of the disciples who met Jesus after His Transfiguration and told Him they could not cast out a demon. He answered, “This kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting.”

I’m up to 20 hours after two last night with a couple of good friends. It’s often amazing to me how respecting the dignity of the homeless and addicted at this site is part of what the apostolate of 40 Days for Life is in Duluth.

What if 600 babies here died from hunger …

Up to 18 hours now.

Early Saturday morning, for my 16th and 17th hours, I was blessed to spend another couple of hours at the vigil with a deacon friend. He had also invited a guy in deacon formation. Another 40 Days regular, Protestant pastor “D,” also came for one of the hours. The four of us prayed morning prayer together, as best we could, in the cold wind and partial light, those thin little breviary pages constantly threatening to flip away.

Before “D” arrived, we talked about events earlier in the week, when several women came for abortions, and there were sidewalk counselors rushing up to try to stop them. I have not been there during abortion days, but my deacon friend was there last week, and it shook him, first of all the terrible reality of what was happening in that building but also the chaos of the sidewalk. The 40 Days for Life vigil is not generally involved in that kind of work; on Tuesday, the 40 Days people remained standing and praying in the midst of it all.

We talked a little about the other approach. All of us in the conversation were a little uncomfortable with it. There are different calls in pro-life work, of course, as in so many parts of life. But I got to thinking later that a lot of people proclaim themselves pro-life and are uncomfortable with the quiet, peaceful, prayerful, non-graphic witness we’re giving too, and not because they lack the ability to stand out in the cold for an hour and pray. Even that, some would say, is too “confrontational.”

In the conversation, I spoke a conviction that grew on me during the last 40 Days. Last year, 600 babies died in that building. And I try to imagine what the response would be if 600 children died any other way in our small city. What if 600 kids died because of water pollution, or secondhand smoke, or gang violence, or hunger, or war? What would our community be doing about that? Would we struggle to find people to fill vigil hours to pray to end it? Would we be so afraid of appearing confrontational in trying to stop it? Would the daily newspaper find occasion to mention the fact that it was happening?

40 Days: Check out Roger’s blog

Roger has written about Tuesday night. Well worth a read. I largely agree with him about being there in the light versus the dark. Sometime the light is scarier.

You can tell from Roger’s deep faith why he is such a blessing to 40 Days for Life and to his family and friends.