Proclaim061712
God Needs No Passport
Melanie and I are off to Canada on Monday; our destination is Northern Nova Scotia,
Cape Breton to be exact. We haven’t been in several years and we can’t wait to once
again experience its beauty, experience the almost nightly fiddle performances that
Melanie claims all sound alike, and have another tour of the only single malt whiskey
distillery in North America.
But besides vacation, we’ve also got a family assignment, i.e., to find my dad’s birth
certificate. My dad died unsure of just who his father was and he spent years searching
for his birth certificate but came up empty. My oldest brother renewed the search and was
about to give up when he accessed the 1910 census in Boston and found dad listed as 1
year old Joseph, born in English-speaking Canada! There is nothing of his birth in the
National records but a woman from the heritage Museum in the county he was likely
born suggested that we personally visit one more cite while we are in the area.
I can’t totally explain it, but this question of roots has always been important to me. I
knew I had some Canadian roots through one grandparent, maybe two; now through my
dad. Beyond Canada, I have documents about several great-grandparents from Ireland.
And having spent about a year and ½ in Peru accumulated over four trips, I actually feel a
little Peruvian, even if I don’t sound like one or look like one or have any familial roots.
Regarding Ireland, I called the Irish Consul some weeks back with all my great
grandparents’ documentation, hoping to be able to apply for a passport, implying
citizenship, but, alas, only grandparents count; I’m one generation too late; my dream has
been shattered to actually have dual citizenship. As some of you have heard over the
years, I actually believe if we all had dual citizenship somewhere else in the world, it
would do wonders for international cooperation and world peace.
All of this is on my mind for a couple of reasons today. The more immediate reason has
to do with the ongoing struggle in this country over the question of immigration,
especially the dilemma of those who are here with documentation, without legal status.
As many know, Friday the President made an executive decision to temporarily allow
young immigrants who came at early ages with parents and are without documents to stay
and avoid deportation; a decision cheered by many and decried by many others.
At the same time this is happening, thousands of Unitarian Universalists are headed to
Arizona next week to participate in our denomination’s annual General Assembly. Our
very own Rev. Kate Wilkinson is going and will represent our congregation as a voting
delegate. This will be a particularly interesting GA because a good bit of it will actually
be a protest on our denomination’s part of very strict Immigration legislation passed by
the state of Arizona a few years back. Actually, two years ago at our General Assembly,
fellow UUs passed a resolution protesting the Arizona law and came close to making a
decision to boycott Arizona and cancel this year’s GA. Instead, our leadership decided to
have the GA in Arizona and use part of the time to stage public protests against the
current immigration policy. In fact, the UUA has a four year study underway on
immigration and has suggested that individual congregations look seriously at the issue
on a national level and become active in pursuit of fairness and justice for recent,
undocumented immigrants. The study is entitled: “Immigration is a Moral Issue” and the
core statement reads like this: “The dignity of all the world’s people is core to Unitarian
Universalist principles and values. Given the justice-oriented nature of UU faith, UUS are
called to be leaders in the struggle for immigrant and refugee rights, and to view
immigration not only as a legal issue but also moral issue.”
As most of us know, immigration and immigration policies are currently in debate worldwide and certainly here in the U.S. And there are clearly strong feelings on different sides
of the debate. One thing I suspect almost all of us agree with is that we need serious and
comprehensive immigration reform legislation. The problem is that we have not been
able to address this as a people, so a fractured policy exists and individual states are
passing laws on their own, some of which conflict with federal laws.
But an interesting dilemma has occurred in those states that have passed the most
restrictive and harsh legislation, e.g. Arizona, Alabama Georgia and Mississippi, to name
4. Seems that harsh laws have driven undocumented immigrants underground or to other
states leaving many large farmers with no laborers to pick their crops and crops are
rotting as we speak. So, in a situation evidently unforeseen, the legislation is backfiring
and hurting the economies of all of these states. What’s great about this dilemma, though,
is that it is a demonstration of how vital new immigrants are to our national economy and
our food supply. And it is making us all look at how we have dealt with immigrants and
depended upon them, yet, at the same time, often mistreated them and made them seem
invisible, as Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee” describes so painfully; a moment of deep
honesty, perhaps?
To shed a bit of light on this challenging issue, I’ve been reading a wonderful book on the
meaning of immigration patterns by a woman who writes about religion and society, and
who teaches at Wellesley College; Peggy Levitt. The book is entitled: God Needs No
Passport: Immigrants and the Changing Religious Landscape. It’s not so much a book
about what might be the best moral approach to the question, although she certainly has a
viewpoint, but it’s more a sociological study of the reality of people’s lives in the 21st
century worldwide. And a key point she wants to make is that individuals are
increasingly what she calls “transnational,” i.e., people who have their loyalties in two
different countries. For example, many recent or even not so recent immigrants may be
located here in the U.S., but they are constantly thinking about family members in their
countries of origin who have not come here; grandparents, mothers, fathers, siblings,
even children. Furthermore, they are in touch with these loved ones constantly and often
send money back home to help support their families. Increasingly, she suggests, the
nation-state and exaggerated nationalism are anachronisms. We are increasingly a
multicultural and transnational people.
Dawitt, our Ethiopian friend, who hasn’t seen his aging mom in years, is trying to figure
out how to make a visit in the next year. Melanie’s co-worker from a few years back,
Dulce, a native of the Dominican Republic, who has been here 30 years, visits her family
every year for 3 weeks. I met a worker at the Beverly golf course a few weeks back who
spends 9 months here with his kids, and three months in the D.R. with the rest of his
family. Some Dominicans we know still vote in elections down there. According to
Peggy Levitt, such dual loyalties are increasing all of the time. It is the world we live in.
And many of these people come here with deep religious beliefs and continue to shape
their lives around such beliefs. And despite the fact that such beliefs often are or can be
very divisive, Dr. Levitt believes religion is and can also be a force for good; it can help
us all cross borders and bring down barriers because faith and religion and, if you will,
God, recognize no borders. The key is, of course, that if religious views are to play a
positive role in society persons of faith must learn to be pluralists, that is, believers must
humbly admit they do not possess all truth, and that many religions have important
beliefs and practices that deserve respect. And, she argues, maybe to the chagrin of many,
religion is not withering away; it is alive and vibrant and has deep impact on the lives of
most people wherever they live. Our task is to work with people of all faiths, to learn
respect and to dialogue across differences.
In fact, Peggy Levitt believes that “People who live transnational lives are uniquely
suited to contribute to such dialogues…to negotiate multiple worlds. Transnational actors
are natural religious diplomats,” she suggests. In fact she ends her book by quoting one
such transnational, Arjun, from India:
“I know that some people think the U.S. should be very homogeneous and that there are
people talking of building walls. Well…it shouldn’t happen…We live in an integrated
labor economy. The people who complain about jobs going overseas are the same ones
who don’t have any problem patronizing Wall-Mart and buying all this cheap stuff that’s
produced in China... we must start thinking in Global terms…I spent twenty years of my
life in India, I think about it a lot …isolation is no help to any of us…people like me, who
have one foot in both doors…are the wave of the future because we can function here and
there, and build bridges between them…And who can do that better than someone like
me?”
Truly, God has no passport. We need to figure out how to see immigrants as new found
gifts in this potentially rich mosaic. We need to fulfill our original destiny as a place for
all of us. In this not very large congregation, we have any number of immigrants and
even more of us, who have multiple loyalties (name who is in the congregation that day
with overseas connections). And we are part of a religious tradition that truly has a
Universalist perspective – UUs are pluralists by definition. We can be wonderful
ambassadors from breaking down religious walls and barriers, but also national walls and
barriers, as our fellow UUs will try to do by bringing our message to Arizona.
While in Nova Scotia next week, I’ll tell all the locals I can that I have roots through my
dad and two grandparents in Beaver River and Antigonish. I’ve come home, I’ll say, even
if only for a short time. And I’ll make believe my family never left. I’ll try to pick up the
local Nova Scotian twang. I have a pretty good ear. But I’ll also be trying to get news
about the States; what are the Red Sox doing? What’s the Massachusetts final budget
look like? What happened at GA in Arizona? How was church attendance? While sipping
on some Hennessey’s brandy, on the beautiful coast of Cape Breton, NS, I’ll think of
Ireland, and Peru, and Salem Harbor, and be grateful I have a foot in different parts of
this expansive world we all call home. One World, like the Coffee House. Indeed God
needs no passport. Maybe someday neither will we.