Dear Friends,
Last week someone (thanks Betsey!) texted me a TED talk by Johann Hari, an author whose books really make me think. In the talk Mr. Hari says “the opposite of addiction is connection.” He makes a compelling argument that healing in addiction is more successful if we find ways to connect to each other.
Dr. King says, “we are all tied together in an inescapable network of mutuality” – something so obvious it might seem like – “duh.” Here is the thing, for example, one might say (okay, okay, I might say) – the immigration issue roiling our nation right now (and for a long while – not only in recent history, but throughout the long history of our nation) is a question of who is welcome and who is not. Who believes we are tied together and who believes we are not.
The whole Bible is an argument about who is in and who is out if you get right down to it. There is never a time in the whole history of the prophets in the Bible where God says, “I’m really angry at y’all, because you are just too welcoming of the stranger!” Not once. God says over and over again to the people who escaped slavery in Egypt “remember you were once strangers in this land.”
A good thing for us all to remember. Even every day.
And this is not only about immigrants. No, no, no. We have difficult times in communities AND churches welcoming people who are different from us by ethnicity, economics, gender fluidity, language, etc.…. And we have a really difficult, difficult time admitting it while we like to point fingers at those who aren’t as welcoming to our favorite groups.
AND, it is absolutely true immigration issues are not simple things (nor any of the others I mention above); they are quite complex and require real nuance, thought, intelligence, and wise policy. I want us to be a place where those things can happen.
Human kindness is an excellent place to begin. And those of us in the faith community, in the Christian community, ought to be the first to say it, the first to critique ourselves about it, the first to highlight new practices leading us to see one another more clearly, honestly, and joyfully.
Late last summer, Destiny Bort and Max Miller welcomed their child Enzo into the world. (I got to see him the day he was born.) Cam and Duncan Hutchins’s child may be born by the time you receive this email. More connections joining us all the time…isn’t this how we hope the world will receive these children?
Keep tellin’ the Story,
Mike
Enjoy the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus singing a song of welcome “Home.”
This week’s takeaway: We are all tied together in an inescapable network of mutuality.