Migrants walk after crossing the Bravo River at the borderline between Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso in Texas, U.S., as seen from Ciudad Juarez, May 9, 2019. (CNS photo/Jose Luis Gonzalez, Reuters)
VIEW FROM THE PEW
There was a piquant hint of exotic cultural flavor adding nuance to heavier undertones of current events that made our feast the successful fusion sought by its creative chefs. Oops, I was trying to mock the pretentious tone of a trendy foodie reviewer but that didn’t work.
I should just say there was a whole lot of food for thought in our Eucharistic celebration on Cinco de Mayo.
Oh, did you think the observance of the third Sunday of Easter had nothing to do with the May 5 secular celebration, which continued with food, drink and music elsewhere for the rest of the day? I didn’t either until I got to church.
But then, during Communion, we sang the bilingual song about receiving the bread of life, “Pan de Vida.” If we didn’t understand the Spanish, we get the English
“We are the dwelling of God, fragile and wounded and weak; we are the body of Christ, called to be the compassion of God.” Composers Bob Hurd and Pia Moriarty wove profound theology with exuberant Latino rhythm in this one of their post-Vatican II songs. Fifty years after that revolutionary church council, we are past being amazed and thrilled that we get to affirm our faith in our own languages.
I don’t know of many Spanish speakers in our Kaimuki congregation, but I know there are Spanish language Masses under-way in a few other Hawaii locations, and uncountable churches in the United States where God is being praised in Spanish. Tucked in our cozy pews surrounded by the familiar, we don’t always experience what “catholic” and universal church actually mean. So a moment like this gives me chicken skin, I admit.
I can’t help but wonder how many Spanish-speaking Catholics were not able to mark the third Sunday of Easter in church at all. Seeking safe haven but crowded in camps south of the United States border, families separated and incarcerated; for so many, their urgent need is to just get food to survive. Rejected and ejected and facing bigotry on an institutional scale … hard to focus on God, not much to sing about.
Meanwhile, our hymn goes on, all the more wonderful because it’s sung by Hawaii’s typical congregation of immigrants’ descendants of many hues and origins:
“There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no woman or man, only heirs to the promise of God.” Those words are from St. Paul, who was trying to make Christ’s teaching about God’s love of all people understandable to the Galatians, about whom we know very little all these many centuries later.
The message didn’t end with the song. When we got to the Prayer of the Faithful, here’s what we heard, among the many intentions: “For immigrants whose traditions from their native cultures enrich the tapestry of the nation they now call home, that they may always be made to feel welcome to their adopted country … let us pray to the Lord.” That is from “Pastoral Patterns,” a church publication that provides a guide for priests and lectors to express the liturgy of the day, the concerns of the times.
I applaud the priest and music minister who chose these reflections so significant in timing.
I wish I thought those expressions had registered with more people. Maybe I’m underestimating my pewmates. Maybe it’s just that my comment about it after Mass to someone near me got a response of
“Huh?”
Then I got past my holier-than-thou moment, realizing that I didn’t know what Cinco de Mayo is really about, aside from the all-American pattern of embracing any excuse for a party and any good theme to sell booze and food.
May 5 is not the Mexican version of July 4. They celebrate Sept. 16 as independence day, their successful overthrow of Spanish colonization after a struggle from 1810 to 1821. Cinco de Mayo marks the bloody resistance 40 years later in which they drove out the French army attempting to extend France’s empire to the western hemisphere. Historians point out that that was the last time a European country attempted to conquer territory in all the Americas, which is reason enough for us norteamericanos to embrace the holiday. It has become a commemoration of freedom and democracy, Mexican heritage and pride.
Prayer that resounds
Even if some of the congregation missed the subtle texts that day, there is one Mass intention that we all understand. We have an ongoing prayer that the U.S. government will issue a green card to our associate pastor. A citizen of India, he is stuck in line under U.S. immigration and visa limits. Considering that nearly half of the priests serving in Hawaii parishes these days are here on loan from the Philippines, India and other countries, it is a prayer which resounds in parishes other than mine.
What a world, huh? Hardly a day goes by without seeing images of people being turned away from borders. Oh yeah, I know the official arguments, that the richest country in the world cannot afford to provide the housing and social services refugees need, the fear that they’ll take work from Americans, the slanderous accusations that they are a horde of criminals. But truly, isn’t it really because they are different? Fear of those who are “different” is a shameful facet of our history as a nation.
America doesn’t own that attitude alone. And it’s not really breaking news, to be realistic. St. Paul was trying to make those old Galatians get over their prejudices against the “others.”
The Hawaiian kingdom was infected, too. Under the influence of early Protestant missionaries, it ejected the first Catholic missionaries, closing our border for 10 years until the French government intervened on their behalf and King Kamehameha III issued an edict of tolerance in 1839. What would our diocese be like, I wondered, if that virtual wall had not been removed, opening up the islands as mission territory for the French and Belgian priests of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. We were still hearing their accented English from the pulpits just a decade or two ago.
Had the alii enforced the same fear of foreigners that became rampant in the United States in the 19th Century, what might have happened to the unique society that Hawaii is today? If the waves of immigrant workers from China, Japan, Philippines, Portugal, Korea, Germany hadn’t been recruited by the plantations, we would not be the model of society that we are, at our best.
Talking with folks at the hospitality hour after Mass, a parishioner talked about our shared Polish immigrant ancestry and also her mother’s origins in Central Ameri-ca. Another gal told about her young nephew who is distraught that his childhood pal is gone suddenly from their Leeward Oahu school. His parents, with good jobs but not the right papers, were sought out and deported along with their children.
Seriously, don’t we have room? If we could just have charity on a nationwide scale, redirect the energy from hating and fearing, restructure the wall-building budget into community-strengthening. That’s what I was thinking of listening to a Hawaii Public Radio feature a couple of days after that consciousness-raising Mass. It was a historical perspective on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which opened the western half of the country to settlement but led to one of this country’s darkest hours in terms of bigotry and racism. Immigrants from China began arriving in the mid-1800s, joining many nationalities lured by the California gold rush. By the time the transcontinental railroads were being built, Chinese workers made up almost a third of the workers and were paid less than half what other workers earned, according to the radio program. Fear of the “others,” competition for jobs, antipathy against integration led to a California ban against Chinese entering the state, which was rejected by the state court.
By 1882, Congress reflected the rampant racism of the day by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned immigration and denied citizenship to Chinese already in the United States. The law was upheld and enhanced and not repealed until 1943. It was the only time the U.S. government passed a law against immigration and naturalization on the basis of race.
The many other chapters of immigration law are a virtual history of bigotry and fear of strangers. It started soon after the country was established with a 1790 law that only people of Caucasian ancestry were eligible for naturalization. The anti-Chinese exclusion was expanded to other Asians. In 1924, Congress set quotas for all countries in the eastern hemisphere, and proponents had no shame in admitting the aim of blocking impoverished Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe. Ironically, at that time in history, our fellow residents of the western hemisphere weren’t the targets of exclusion. And the powers that be didn’t even know enough about Muslims to single them out for hatred and fear … yet.
Not a comfortable account
What a world, indeed. What a temptation to shut it out and be comfortable in our cozy pews. Just lull the senses by reading the Scriptures and minding my own business. Here we are, at the high point of our Christian beliefs still celebrating Christ’s resurrection from the dead, salvation from our sinful lives, washed clean. It’s hallelujah time.
But the May 5 reading from Acts of the Apostles was not comfortable, an account of the first Christians being scolded by Jew-ish leaders of their time for preaching what Jesus taught. Peter and the other disciples left the confrontation rejoicing that they were found “worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.” It was just the beginning of years of harassment and persecution and martyrdom for being outsiders.
We’re grooving with triumphant music as we celebrate the Easter season. And on the secular, political scene, expect a lot of the same as we approach the summer patriotic holidays, not to mention, oh dread, the looming 2020 presidential election.
You’ll hear a lot of “God Bless America” in the speeches and we’ll likely sing it in church.
I’d like to put the speakers, one and all, to a test involving another patriotic anthem, “America the Beautiful.” What do these verses mean, I’d ask ‘em.
“America, America, God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
“America, America, God mend thy every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
What do they mean to you?
