As in the case of flux and change, what is crucial are laws and the Lord gave Moses warnings about the treatment of the refugees. God took the side of the orphans, the widows and the poor. And their prayers will be heard by Him.
We may not have open borders but the reality is that we do have those who come from overseas and who have overstayed. Even if they have not broken the law by overstaying we still have a substantial number of foreigners residing in our country. Migration is an economic issue. Even though we can preach that man does not live by bread alone, man still needs bread in order to function, in order to survive.
Today’s commandments given by Christ add to how we can function and they are crucial to how we treat others.
I remember my first encounters with post-communist era Jesuits. They came from the supposedly picture-perfect socialist systems which were designed to uphold the human person’s dignity by ensuring that each man/woman is treated according to what he/she needs. Each according to his or her needs and not his or her wants.
The thing about us, especially, in the West, is that we are accustomed to wearing our hearts on our sleeves. Some of us may remember the 1980s, when images of starving children flooded our living rooms. Since then, the world has been shamed into action, terrified that staying silent would make us look heartless. In fact, some of our actions for good are nothing more than virtue-signalling. For example, I read that Ed Sheeran’s silence with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has hurt his popularity. This is yet another example of virtue-signalling imposed by the prevailing orthodoxy.
The idea of loving God and neighbour has to move beyond this need for performative virtue-signalling. To help the poor on a short-term basis is easy in the sense that we can always provide food. Readily we give out rations etc to help the poor tide over their economic crunch. Long term, the situation might be different. It is not easy.
Our inspiration can be drawn from the Cross which is made up of the horizontal and vertical beams. The vertical beam denotes our love for God, our worship, our prayer and our longing for union with Him. The horizontal beam denotes our relationship with each other. It is the love and honour we owe to each other because each one of us is made in the image and likeness of God.
In the context of the practice of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, whether out of the need to virtue-signal or not, the thing is that we are strong on emphasising the horizontal aspect of our relationship. Otherwise, can we explain why there is this need refute the usual claim that the Catholic Church is cold.
When one of my Jesuit confreres from the western world used to stress the idea social justice and the need to make sure that all be treated equally and etc, another Jesuit confrere, from Eastern Europe said something which has remained with me till this day. He said, “You preach social justice. We live social justice. We queued up for two hours for a loaf of bread”.
When I visited Poland, I was intrigued by the fact that going to Church for most Polish Catholics was a matter of expressing their relationship with God. They are strong on the vertical dimension of the Cross and when it came to “Let us offer each other a sign of peace”, they were not entirely bothered to turn around to exchange a sign of peace.
It was interesting. Both emphases are one-sided in the sense that a focus solely on the vertical dimension or a focus on the horizontal dimension will lead to an impoverishment of our faith. But I wager that there is a need, not just for a balance of the two emphases but also to respect a kind of priority in terms of the which emphasis comes first.
If we look at Jesus, we realise that He reached out to all those marginalised because He had a right relationship with His Father. A right relationship with God always leads us to love our brothers and sisters. All the great missionaries were driven to leave everything because they were in loved with their God. In fact, our hospitals were all founded on the idea that our love of God led us to care for His brothers and sisters. This is usually what we hear “How can you love God whom you cannot see if you do not love the brother whom you can see”. It is usually the guilty pitch that goads us into action. The truth is that we do not need to love God to love our neighbour because philanthropy does it. Philanthropy is the love for humanity. The desire for action must flow from God to neighbour. It means like the saints, when we love God, the fruit of that love for God will be our love for our neighbour.
