Cosmic Return and the Victims of ICE
On Not Turning Away
[Photo: The Merlos family, currently held in ICE and CBP custody].
Yesterday, my wife and I attended services at St. George’s Round Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The celebrant, Fr. Gary Thorne, has been for my wife and I what the literature of the desert would call a “spiritual father.”
Fr. Thorne, as he often does, directed our attention to what the Church is teaching us through the lectionary, namely the logic of our conversion. Among the readings for last Sunday (following the traditional Anglican lectionary) are St. Paul’s reflections on the groaning of creation (Rom. 8) and Christ’s remarks on the “beam” we must remove from our own eye before removing the speck from our brother’s (Luke 6).
The Church, in the cunning of the Spirit contained in the church year’s sequence, ever and always accomplishes conversion—if by grace we allow it to do so.
But what is this conversion, this turning? It is, Fr. Thorne tells us, following Richard Hooker and behind him Dionysius the Areopagite, the procession of the entire cosmos from its divine source and its return back into God. It is not merely “we” who accomplish this turning, in receding from “the changes and chances of this fleeting world,” although it is this as well.
The world itself is caught up in this turning; indeed, this turning is what the world is, which is why it currently groans.
We must not merely convert—or “turn”—we must learn to interpret this turning properly. Or better, the turn and the proper standpoint upon it are one and the same.
Our return to God is a turn towards the world, and never away from it. It is learning to see all things transfigured by divine glory, as they become what from all eternity they are. But it is equally the unflinching gaze which does not turn away from the sufferings of our neighbors. This gaze, and the work of God which turns this suffering into God’s own, is our salvation.
If we turn from the world, we do not turn at all. Or, we turn inward upon ourselves (incurvatus in se). We will not find God in the sublimity of the heavens, as Martin Luther reminds us in his reflections on Christmas, but in the cries of an infant in a cradle.
What does this turning mean for us, today? From what, or whom, must our gaze not look away? Where is the procession and return of all things obscured and controverted by our turning away, the “beam” in our eye? This very spot will also be the place where the Spirit, in Christ’s body, is most profoundly accomplishing in spite of ourselves this return, which is God’s self-return.
Fr. Thorne offers several excellent answers, including the countless thousands of starving children in Gaza.
But as an American, my mind turns to something slightly nearer to home. Where does creation groan? Where are we the blind led by the blind? From what can we not turn away, for in it lies our sin and our salvation?
My thoughts turn to the actions of ICE in cities across the nation.
Or more specifically, to the Merlos family from Portland, Oregon. On June 28, Kenia Jackeline (Jackie) Merlos and her four children (all four children are US citizens) were detained while attempting to enter Canada along with Kenia’s mother. Her husband Carlos was taken into ICE custody. But Jackie and her four children have been held in a Customs and Border Patrol facility without being charged and without communication to anyone outside the facility, including legal counsel.
Upon learning of their plight from anxious friends and family, it took a member of Congress, Rep. Maxine Dexter, two days to even learn where the Merlos family was detained.
Jackie is the worship director at her local church. Her children go to Christian school.
We cannot turn away from the groaning of creation. We cannot, blinded by the “beam” in our eyes, allow ourselves to be led by the blind.
Our sin and our salvation, the procession and return of all things, lie before us in the actions of ICE, the sufferings it inflicts, and the redemption which transfigures this suffering into resistance and freedom.