Even without this added challenge, Mother’s Day can be tricky for some. For as many women who will bask in their children’s love, there are others who will mourn this day due to the loss of a child or the longing for one. Others will face the day having lost their own mothers, myself included.

In this month’s issue, we address both Mother’s Day and the coronavirus pandemic in the spirit of bringing hope to all. In her article “Selfless Love: Adoption & Foster Care,” author Shannon Evans writes about the important and very needed ministry of parenting through adoption and caring for children in the foster care system.

And Father Mark Soehner, OFM, offers words of wisdom and comfort to deal with the health challenges currently facing the world. He reminds us to turn to Christ in our time of need. Let us also look to his mother to hold us in her loving embrace.

It passed from hand to hand, through thick and thin.

I’ll tell you a story about one rosary and let it stand for so very many of these lovely, silent, haunting companions in our pockets and cars and purses and drawers and under pillows and wrapped around the hands of the dead.

This rosary was made 80 years ago by a boy in the woods of Oregon. He was a timber feller working so deep in the woods there were no roads, and the men and boys rode into camp on mules. He was 17 years old that summer and very lonely.

One evening he began to carve rosary beads from cedar splits otherwise destined for the fire. He tried to carve a bead a night sitting by the fire. With each bead he would try to remember the story of the bead as his mother had told him. There were the joyful mysteries of good news and visiting cousins and new babies and christenings and finding children whom you feared were lost utterly.

There were the sorrowful mysteries of men weeping in the dark and men beating men and men jeering and taunting men and men torturing men and men murdering men under the aegis of the law. There were the glorious mysteries of life defeating death and light returning against epic darkness and epiphanies arriving when no doors or windows seemed open to admit them and love defeating death and the victory of that we know to be true against all evidence that it is not.

When he had cut a bead for each of these stories he was finished, for there were at that time no luminous mysteries on which to ponder and pray. He threaded thin copper wire through each of the beads, setting the mysteries apart with a larger bead cut from yew, and he carved a cross from the shinbone of an elk.

He thought about trying to carve a Christ also, but the thought of carving Christ made him uncomfortable. Anyway, he did not think he had the skill, and he did not want to ask one of the older men, some of whom were superb carvers, so he left the cross unadorned, as he said, and put the rosary in his pocket. He carried it with him every day the rest of his life.

The rosary went with him through Italy and North Africa in the war, and into the wheat fields of Oregon, and back into the woods where he again cut timber for a while, and then all through his travels as a journalist on every blessed muddy road from Canada to California, as he said, and through his brief, but very happy, years in retirement by the sea, where his rosary acquired a patina of salt from the mother of all oceans, as he said.

He had the rosary in his pocket the day he was on his knees in his garden and leaned forward and placed his face upon the earth and died, almost 70 years after he finished carving the rosary in the deep woods as a boy. His wife carried the rosary in her pocket for the next two years until the morning she died in her bed, smiling at the prospect of seeing her husband by evening, as she told their son.

The son carried the rosary in his pocket for the next three days until the moment when he and I were walking out of the church, laughing at one of his father’s thousand salty stories of life in the woods and in the war and in the fields and on the road and by the sea, at which point the son handed it to me and said, “Dad wanted you to have it,” and hustled away to attend to his wife and children and brothers and nieces and nephews. I wept.

I have the rosary in my pocket now. I hope to carry it every day the rest of my life, and jingle it absentmindedly, and pray it here and there when I have a moment in the sun, and place it ever so carefully and gently on a shelf every night before I go to bed, touching the elk-bone cross with a smile in memory of my friend George, until the morning of my own death, when I pray for a last few moments of grace in which to hand it to my son, and then close my eyes and go to see the One for whom it was made, who made us. Amen.

When you are a parent, it can be frustrating to revisit the same moment again and again with your kids. You find yourself continuously reminding them at dinner to keep their elbows off the table or to close their mouths when they chew. You might even catch yourself thinking: I just told them this. Why aren’t they listening?

You want it to be like a switch: You flip it, and they get it. But it never works like that.

That’s why working on this in tandem with my son is so helpful. You see, at the dinner table, I might think he’s the only one who needs to work on things. But giving him permission, even encouragement, to call me out on my magazine piles and unread mail helps to keep me humble.

It’s not a one-way street. We’re in it together.

Biblical Challenge

Lately I’ve been reading the Gospel of Matthew, and I got stuck on the beatitudes, right there in chapter 5. In particular, I got stuck on the eighth verse: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.”

Hearing that verse with modern ears can be a tough pill to swallow. I mean, I live with myself. I know how messed up the inner recesses of my heart can be.

And worse, there are other versions of the Bible that render the verse, “Blessed are the pure of heart.” That is frankly terrifying. Keeping my heart clean is hard enough, but pure seems impossible and simply unattainable. It feels as though the verse is asking me to flip a switch, and I am fumbling along the wall in the dark, trying to find it.

As I’ve been meditating on this verse, I dug back into the Greek I learned when I was at seminary. The word that we are translating as “clean” or “pure” is the primitive Greek word katharoi. When it shows up in the Bible, the word is often associated with actions like pruning vines or burning off dross with fire.

But more importantly for me, that word is closely associated with the root from which we get the modern word catharsis. In psychology, catharsis is the act of confronting deep emotions associated with events from the past that have never been adequately expressed. And that helps.

Journeying Together

You see, in the ancient world, nothing ever showed up in its pure form. If you wanted salt, for example, it meant you had to work to dry out saltwater. And there were no washing machines, which meant you couldn’t just press a button and clean your clothes. If you wanted them clean, it took effort.

With katharoi, it’s a process, not a switch.

So what I’ve learned in this process with my son, when I get impatient with reminding him to clean his room for the umpteenth time, is that he’s working on it. And then he points at my piles of mail and magazines and reminds me that I’m working on it too.

There is no switch. It’s hard work. It’s heart work. But we’re getting there—together.

The inspiring words of these biblical songs helped me navigate some of life’s biggest challenges.

As a writer, I believe not just in the power of words but also in their necessity and beauty. I think one of the main aspects of Catholicism that has kept me coming back is the lushness, the intensity, and the fervor of how language is used within the faith. Not just in the liturgy of a daily or Sunday Mass, but especially in the sacraments.

There are few words that have ever meant as much to me as the wedding vows that I spoke; for over 23 years as a wife and mother, I built a life upon those promises.

And then, suddenly, it seemed—though it was not really sudden—my husband no longer lived in our home.

Lost in the Wilderness

I believed if I prayed as hard as I could, I could pray our marriage into finding a new beginning. It seemed to me that, since Jesus was with us on that altar when we became husband and wife, he was with us still and would do everything to help us mend the ever-widening tatters. I myself was tattered—a recent struggle with cancer spurred me on to keep fighting for my life with my husband and two children, the only adult life I had known.

I figured that if I went back to all the words spoken at our ceremony, I could find the golden thread and begin the repair. So in the bare space where my husband’s dresser once stood, I placed an old bookshelf, a lamp, and a rug, and on the wall I thumbtacked a jewel-toned postcard of a beloved Blessed Mother painting by Lippi. I set an intention that each dawn I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and read 1 Corinthians 13:4, the timeless passage about love. I lit a candle and begged God for more hope and more patience.

But what happened is that the paperback I was using—my fat New English Bible from college—was so old, the glue so stiff and dried out, that the spine broke apart. It permanently opened right to Book 1 of the Psalms. Psalm 23, to be exact.

Despite my openness to the power and beauty of words, I initially resisted the most famous psalm because of how popular it is. If this “greatest hit” appealed to common people, how could it possibly apply to my particular circumstances? How ridiculous my arrogant suspicion was: I decided to read it out loud and could hardly see the verses through my tears as my voice wavered. He makes me lie down in green pastures: How exhausted I was, how alone and in need of care, suffering each night with insomnia. Even though I walk through a valley dark as death: I was terrified of having to enter the courthouse to face a judge with our separate lawyers. Dwell in the house of the Lord: I could no longer afford our home; where would I go? Did I already have a place of shelter with God?

When the closing sentence used the words love unfailing, something shifted in me. I’d never considered God’s love as abiding. Lasting. Unshakable. So, even though I was still unable to admit that my marriage was lost, my eyes were drawn to this new pairing of words.

My concentration skills were weak then, so I read lines in wild, random order. Psalm 140, then 91, back to 6, skipping to 144, thumbing backward and forward, from the bottom of the pages to the top. Those words kept popping out, sometimes reversed as unfailing love. I was just an ordinary, heartbroken woman whose life took two parallel, contemporary turns—divorce and cancer. I was in over my head, and I knew it. My once-solid world was now—to use Psalm imagery—swept away in a flood. But there was something about these poems penned over 2,500 years ago, confidently trusting in the embankment of this enduring love, that kept me from going under.

A New Look at Ancient Words

How had I never found their artistry before? In my lifetime of sitting at Mass, I’d listened to sopranos sing them from the lectern and then lift their open palms inviting me to join in the response. More often than not, I had stayed silent. I began to think about all the women who sang the Psalms to me. I pictured their pantsuits, the pastel beads of their necklaces, hair fixed up nicely, swept back from their faces.

How earnestly they worked to enunciate all the words so we would hear them fully and clearly: deer, water, broken, rescue me. I thought of the way they waited for their cues by gazing back at the choir loft and all the long moments of watching them walk down the side aisles of the church, always shy and humble with their three-ring music binders clutched in their hands. When at last I discovered the Psalms, I think it was those gifted cantors who led me on that path with their soulful, motherly voices filling the rafters, the pews vibrating with long, sustained notes. They had shown me those words are meant to be sung.

So, as the divorce drew near, I made a new promise to read one psalm aloud as the very first thing I did each morning. I did not check my e-mail, read the newspaper, or speak on the phone until I had spent time in contemplation.

Instead of just reading the Psalms in my head, I found that my emotions flowed when I spoke the words, ensuring I did not rush. Speaking them all alone in my bedroom was a form of simple singing. I had no lute, harp, or lyre; I was without a pipe organ or a grand piano. I had only my wavering voice accompanied by the rustle of the tissue-thin pages.

What startled me over and over in so many of the psalms was the emotional contrast. First there’s a lament, not minimized or sugarcoated, not swept away or judged. Instead, the suffering is eloquently described. For example, the early lines of Psalm 69: “I am wearied with crying out, my throat is sore.” Guilt, shame, reproach, and bitterness follow. Then, a but appears. “But I lift up this prayer to thee.” Over and over I found these sudden reversals. How did they make sense?

After a few months of this daily morning practice, I understood the pattern. I would read many lines of anguish. Once the painful truths are expressed in detail, not rushed, there’s a sense of being deeply heard and listened to—heard by God. Once that internal, intimate ache is honored, we find space in our heavy hearts to move around. We can take that leap of faith and trust, again and again. What the Psalms taught me is to stay true to my human grief, to articulate it, to bring the fear and frustration straight to God. By doing that, faith will appear, often suddenly, always the balm we have been seeking.

Because I was going through such a raw time, I often found passages about disgrace. I will simply say that I was thunderstruck by the events that unfurled. Sometimes I underlined words that might have once seemed archaic but now rang true: enemies, lowly, ambush, abyss. Yes, I was ashamed. On the page with Psalm 25, my deep blue ink jumps out: shame, shame, shame. Other, more hopeful words impacted me. In particular, refuge became the most medicinal word of all. Flip those pages back and forth; there is refuge throughout.

A Time for Everything

My life moved on. To say I never wanted to be a divorced Catholic is not just an understatement, but also, I’m surmising, how almost all divorced Catholics feel. I freely admit that I’d once judged people who got divorced as not working hard enough, not fighting for it, not going the distance. It was quite the humbling wake-up call to realize I was entering a category of people whom I used to look down on.

There’s a good chance that I have been judged the way I once felt superior to others. Did you try everything to save your marriage? In my heart I know I did. There were factors far beyond my control. As another year went by, I continued with the daily practice of reading the Psalms. In Psalm 56, I read, “I have bound myself with vows to thee. ” Was it possible for me to focus on a new vow? I believed that it was. I was alone, but I was alive. “For thou has rescued me from death/to walk in thy presence, in the light of life.”

As the darkness in my life receded, I began to see the lighter aspects of the Psalms. Like the opening of Psalm 116, “I love the Lord, for he has heard me,” there is so much joy, praise, and celebration. Admittedly, it has been a long road. When I was first separated, a very good friend of mine, who is a therapist, said, “It can take five years to heal from this.” I thought, Oh, no, that’s not going to be me.

But I was wrong—it has taken that long. I have been given much grace, including the stamina to continue with this spiritual practice these past five years. I still have a place on the floor of my bedroom and I use my still-falling-apart Bible. I just can’t give that paperback up; it has been with me for so many years, and I still love the soft sound of its pages. Each morning I wake up and try to have a connection to God before doing anything else.

As for the soprano who lifts her hand and invites me in? Yesterday at Mass, after contemplating all this, I decided I should thank the cantor. She does such a stunning job for our very lively inner-city Franciscan church. As she clutched her binder, I started to go up to her, but she stepped toward an elderly man hunched crookedly in a wheelchair near the altar. She greeted him warmly and kissed him on the cheek. He lifted his head, eyes shining, and opened his mouth, ready to sing.

Pope Paul VI wrote succinctly: “Mary is held up as an example to the faithful for the way in which in her own particular life she fully and responsibly accepted the word of God and did it….She is worthy of imitation because she was the first and most perfect of Christ’s disciples.”

“I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38).

She may be the most famous woman who ever lived, and yet there is surprisingly little in the New Testament about her. Mary is featured only in a few Gospel scenes and the first chapter of Acts. Nevertheless, these Marian passages, arranged in a plausible chronological order, illustrate how quickly devotion for the Virgin Mary developed over the centuries.

Mary in Mark

Among the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry, Mark’s is generally considered the oldest. In it Mary appears only once (3:21,31-35) and is referred to once more (6:1-6). The basic scene involves a transition in Jesus’ life: He is moving out of the Nazareth family circle into an active career of teaching and healing centered at Peter’s house in Capernaum.

He is attracting such attention that he does not even get time to eat (3:20). His worried family, thinking his behavior strange (“he is beside himself”), sets out to bring him back home. Mark fills in the time required by their journey down to Capernaum by telling how Jesus dealt with scribes from Jerusalem who also fail to understand him (“he is possessed by Beelzebul” [3:22-30]).

Having answered this second misunderstanding immediately, Jesus answers the first only when the family arrives at the lakeside house (3:31-35). Since he is inside surrounded by a crowd, the word has to be passed in: “Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.” Jesus’ response (“Who are my mother and my brothers?”) raises the issue of who really constitute his family now that the Kingdom of God is being proclaimed. As his natural family stands outside, Jesus looks at those inside and proclaims, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is brother and sister and mother to me.”

This scene, in which Jesus praises a family of disciples that is obedient to God at the expense of a natural family that does not understand him, would not incline readers to develop devotion to Mary. Yet it is regarded by many non-Catholics as the basic Marian text, perhaps in reaction to Catholic elevation of Mary.

The dourness of the Marcan outlook is not alleviated by 6:1-6. The locals at Nazareth are astounded at Jesus’ religious prominence: “Where did this fellow get all this wisdom? Isn’t he a carpenter? Isn’t he the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” In response to the townspeople who have taken offense at the local carpenter-turned-preacher, Jesus compares himself to a prophet who is not honored in his own region, among his own relatives and in his own house. Another discomforting passage for a positive appreciation of Mary!

Mary in Matthew

A significant change in outlook comes about because Matthew has a story of Jesus’ conception and birth that was lacking in Mark. Joseph is married to Mary but has not yet taken her to live with him. A shocking report reaches him that Mary is pregnant, but before he can take action to dissolve the marriage by divorcing her, an angel appears in a dream (Matthew 1:18-25). The angel reveals to Joseph that Mary’s conception is from the Holy Spirit (not from a male); her child to be named Jesus will save his people from their sins and embody God’s presence with us (Emmanuel).

Although Matthew is silent about Mary’s reaction to this intervention by God, the conception creates a context for Matthew’s treatment of Mary in the ministry. Surely this uniquely privileged mother would have understood when Jesus began his ministry of proclaiming God’s kingdom. Accordingly when Matthew draws on Mark 3, he completely omits 3:20-21, in which the family thinks Jesus is beside himself and sets out to bring him home.

When Jesus returns to Nazareth (Matthew 13:54-58), he acknowledges that he is not honored in his own region and in his own house, but makes no mention of being dishonored by his own family. Nevertheless, Matthew 12:46-50 reports virtually unaltered the family-choice scene recounted in Mark 3:31-35: Jesus still gives preference to disciples related to him by doing God’s will.

Mary in Luke/Acts

Contrasted to the portrayal of Mary in Mark and Matthew, which ranges from dark to neutral, this two-volume work paints her in much warmer colors. While the mother of Jesus had only a restricted role in the Matthean infancy narrative, the virgin of Nazareth (Luke 1:26-27) is the principal figure in the Lucan infancy narrative.

Here too (although the situation is indicated only indirectly) she and Joseph have been married but have not yet lived together. In an appearance to Mary (1:30-33) the angel Gabriel, quoting freely from 2 Samuel 7:12-16, announces that she is going to be the mother of the Davidic Messiah. When Mary asks how this is to be since she is a virgin, the angel quotes what Luke’s readers would recognize as the language of Christian preaching: “The holy Spirit will come upon you; the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and so the child will be called holy, the Son of God” (1:34-35).

Paul uses similar imagery (Holy Spirit, power, divine sonship) in Romans 1:3-4 to phrase the gospel of Jesus as Son of David and Son of God. In the same way here, Luke is presenting Mary as the first one to hear the gospel. She responds, “Let it be done unto me according to your word.” Thus she fulfills perfectly the requirement we saw in Mark for the family of disciples: “Whoever does the will of God is…mother to me.”

Next the Lucan Mary acts out her discipleship in two ways. First, she hastens to go to her relative Elizabeth to share the good news. By way of full response to the gospel, Christian disciples do not simply receive and hold on to what God has revealed; they communicate it to others. Mary’s arrival causes Elizabeth, under the influence of John the Baptist in her womb, to prophesy in praise of Mary.

Like the heroic women deliverers of Israel, Jael and Judith (Judges 5:24; Judith 13:18), Mary is titled “blessed among women.” Moses had said that, if Israel heeded the voice of God, the wombs of the Israelite women would be blessed with fruitfulness (Deuteronomy 28:1,4). Elizabeth, recognizing that Mary’s womb is uniquely fruitful, blesses her as the mother of the Lord (Luke 1:41-44).

But Mary’s heeding the word of God in the Annunciation had another dimension beyond that envisioned by Moses—a gospel dimension that Elizabeth recognizes when in 1:45 she blesses Mary a second time for having believed (and thus having met the criterion of discipleship). If all future generations will call Mary blessed (1:48), they will do so in fidelity to Elizabeth’s prophetic recognition of her roles as mother of the Lord and true Christian disciple.

Second, Mary develops discipleship to the fullest by blessing God in the Magnificat (1:46-55). In that hymn Mary interprets the good news she has brought to Elizabeth. The angel told Mary who Jesus is, namely, Messiah and Son of God; but Mary translates this identity in terms of what his coming means.

On the one hand, God’s gift of Jesus shows strength to Israel, exalts the lowly and fills the hungry; on the other hand, it scatters the proud, puts down the mighty and sends the rich away empty. Mary is anticipating the gospel of her son who, though proclaimed by God as Divine Son (3:22), proclaimed himself in terms of blessings for the poor, the hungry and the sorrowful, and woes for the rich, the satisfied and the revelers. More than any other biblical passage, the Magnificat has made Mary an emblem of hope and a sign of God’s care for the oppressed and downtrodden throughout the world.

In the scenes immediately following the birth of Jesus, Matthew (2:11,14, 21) mentions Mary only as a passive object of care. For Luke, next to God she is the major actor. While others are amazed at the glorious news of the birth of the Messiah and Lord, Mary treasures away all these things carefully, interpreting them in her heart (Luke 2:19). This echoes the language of Genesis 37:11, Daniel 4:28 (Greek) and 7:28 in which a visionary reflects on a mysterious revelation, only part of which he has fully understood.

Despite what has been revealed to her, the way that Jesus’ career will work out will be a trial and involve decision even for Mary, as Simeon prophesies figuratively in Luke 2:34-35 in terms of a sword passing though her soul. The last scene of the Lucan infancy narrative, when Jesus reaches age 12, illustrates her difficulty. She and Joseph cannot understand the way he has behaved in the Temple and his response that he must be about his Father’s business (2:49-50). The challenge to accept God’s unfathomable will in faith is ongoing in the life of the disciple.

That Mary met the ongoing challenge is shown in the Lucan form of the basic ministry scene we saw first in Mark. No longer are the mothers and brothers who come looking for Jesus contrasted with the family created by discipleship. Rather, they are the best examples of those who hear the word of God and do it (Luke 8:19-21), the group that are like the parabolic seed in the good soil mentioned a few verses before (8:15), namely, those “who, hearing the word, hold it fast.” Indeed, the mothers and the brothers endure into the beginnings of the Church, for they are counted in Acts 1:13-14, alongside the Twelve and the women, among the believers awaiting the Pentecostal coming of the Spirit.

Mary in John

Although this Gospel has no infancy narrative, it has two ministry scenes involving Mary. In content they differ from the accounts in the first three Gospels, but the basic theological issues are the same.

At Cana, a scene in which Jesus moves from family life to public ministry, his mother and brothers are attending a wedding (John 2:1-12). The mother’s implicit request— “They have no wine”—exerts a family claim on Jesus, similar to the mother and brothers coming to look for Jesus in the basic Marcan scene. The rejection of that claim in terms of “My hour has not yet come” is similar to the Lucan Jesus’ response to his mother’s complaint about his behavior at age 12, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?”

In relation to earthly family both answers give priority to the role assigned to Jesus by the heavenly Father who sent him. Yet the mother of Jesus in John persists with, “Do whatever he tells you,” similar to Mary’s response to the angel in Luke 1:38, “Let it be done to me according to your word.“

The second Johannine scene, which takes place at the foot of the cross (John 19:25-27), confirms that Mary’s final reaction at Cana reflected the obedience characteristic of disciples. The hour has come (13:1); Jesus is finishing the work the Father has given him to do (19:28-30); gathered around him is a group of followers who have remained loyal to the last. Chief among them are two figures whom John has mentioned but whose personal names he never supplies, namely, the mother of Jesus and the disciple whom he loves.

By making the former the mother of that disciple, and the latter his own mother’s son, Jesus is establishing a family of disciples. This is John’s form of dealing with the “Who are my mother and my brothers?” issue. If in Mark and Matthew there was a contrast between two families, one by nature and the other by discipleship, in John (as in Luke) the natural mother is brought into the family of discipleship in a preeminent way, for she now is the mother of the most perfect disciple who becomes Jesus’ brother.

Later theology will recognize that God accorded Mary many privileges, but all of them are derivative from those already found in the sparse New Testament references. She was the mother of God’s Son, the Messiah; she met the requirements of discipleship in an outstanding way. Pope Paul VI wrote: “Mary is held up as an example to the faithful for the way in which in her own particular life she fully and responsibly accepted the word of God and did it….She is worthy of imitation because she was the first and most perfect of Christ’s disciples.”

Learn more about Our Lady!

We often hear people comment that they have no problem with immigration if folks would just come legally. Priests are often criticized for talking about welcoming the stranger in their homilies. They are told that they shouldn’t be talking about political issues at Mass. We debate and argue, accuse and demonize each other. Through it all, we lose sight of the human face of immigration.

Firsthand Experience

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at the US-Mexico border. I stayed with a group of faith leaders from across the country at Holy Cross, a Franciscan retreat center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We experienced the human face of immigration.

At the border, we could reach through the fence to touch hands with and listen to the stories of mothers and their children escaping from violence and rape in their home villages. We met at a church with folks who are trying to help the refugees. We heard a story from one of the workers about a case she was involved with.

A woman from Guatemala, afraid for herself and her daughter, was trying to seek refuge in the United States. She told the worker that if she returned, both she and her daughter would be raped. In fact, she herself had experienced sexual assault. When her hearing came, she was denied asylum and returned to her country. A few weeks later the worker heard that she had been raped and murdered. How much of her blood is on our hands?

We went to court to witness hearings for those recently arrested for trying to enter the United States. They were marched in with handcuffs and ankle chains like hardened criminals. When the judge told them, one by one, to raise their right hands even though they were shackled, I was reminded of pictures I have seen of slaves shackled and chained as they were sold in slave auctions. I was particularly moved by one young woman who had been separated from her two young children. She wanted to know where her children were, but the court could not tell her anything.

A Personal History of Immigration

I am the son of immigrants. My parents came to America in 1950. They landed on Ellis Island with nothing—no money, no education, no real job skills—just a dream that their children could have a better life. My mother would often tell the story of getting off the boat with one baby in her arms and another on the way. When I saw the woman in court asking about her children, I thought of my mother. What would have happened when she got off the boat if the authorities took my brother away from her? I sat in the courtroom with tears in my eyes, thinking about their circumstances.

My parents went on to have six children. Two of their children went on to get PhDs. One served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. One became a cardiac nurse and helped thousands of patients recover from heart attacks; another was a schoolteacher and principal. My parents had 19 grandchildren, four of whom were adopted. One of their grandchildren served two tours in Afghanistan; another did a tour in Iraq and Korea. When my simple, humble mother died, there was a line several blocks long of relatives, friends, and neighbors coming to pay their respects.

I often think about what would have happened if, at the border, they told her she was not welcome, separated her from my brother, or saw that she was pregnant and sent her back immediately. This would have been the case under the recently enacted Trump policy that prevents any woman who might be pregnant from entering the United States.

God’s Law Supersedes Human Law

It’s easy for us to sit back in our space of comfort and say these people are breaking the law. It’s easy to demonize and unjustly classify them as rapists and murderers. It comes naturally when we view people different from us as other, not sister and brother. We can believe immigration is a political issue for politicians to solve. We can hide behind the law without ever seeing the face of God in the refugee or seeing the suffering Jesus in the eyes of a woman whose children are torn from her.

Pope Francis encourages us “to overcome indifference and to counter fears with a generous approach of welcoming those who knock at our doors” (“A Stranger and You Welcomed Me”). He points out that immigration is not a contemporary phenomenon: “The history of mankind is the history of migrations on every latitude; there is no people that has not known the migratory phenomenon.”

In just the first five books of the Bible, welcoming the stranger is mentioned over 50 times. In Matthew 25:35 Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” In the story of Cain and Abel, God asks Cain where his brother is. Cain’s response: “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” We know God’s answer to that. I sometimes think our history is about asking God over and over, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” while hoping that at some point God is going to say, “No, I was only kidding.”

In the middle of the 19th century, slavery was the law of the land. Helping slaves escape was against the law. At that same time, a number of Catholic churches and leaders joined with their evangelical, Quaker, and Protestant sisters and brothers in offering sanctuary as part of the Underground Railroad. These fearless people were not blindly obedient to the law of the land.

In 1928, Adolf Hitler said, “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the idea of Christianity; in fact, our movement is Christian.” But the Holocaust was the law, and helping Jews was against the law. A few years later, a group of young Catholic, Lutheran, and evangelical students formed an underground, nonviolent resistance movement called the White Rose Society. As one of the founders, Sophie Scholl, was being led to her execution, she said, “What does my death matter if, through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

If we truly believe the message of peace and love, and as Jesus taught us, to take up our cross and be one with God, then we need to rewrite our story to one of connectedness, not one of separateness. As people of faith, we must have a story where people are not undocumented immigrants, where families are not separated. Rather, we need a story where we are all brothers and sisters, all part of the one family of God.