It May Take a Very Long Time
On the Flu and Flights to Guantanamo
It has been a week of the flu: phlegm, fever dreams, even a fainting spell. The kids got it, too, which has meant early morning cough-induced wake-ups and inconsolable crying. At that hour, only predawn stroller walks up and down the hills of our El Paso neighborhood have calmed our infant. Our neighbors’ barking guard dogs aren’t awake yet, but the scene is far from still: the highway thrums along the border wall and I can imagine the waking prayers of the stuck migrants- those with canceled asylum meetings, empty bank accounts, and home countries who refuse to take them back - rising above the glittering lights and into the heavens.
In sickness I feel disoriented and disengaged. The flow of migrants at the shelter keeps getting slower; there were just four guests at breakfast on Friday. If Trump turned off the migration spigot on Jan 20th, it’s taken a few weeks but the pipes are now nearly empty with folks flowing in. Meanwhile I read this week that the new flights of deportees arriving at Guantanamo are leaving from El Paso. One spigot turns off, and another – manned by military boots and operated in secrecy – opens. The policy seems illegal, expensive, scapegoating, cold-hearted, and likely soul-crushing - for migrants and law enforcement alike. Can anything stop it but the courts? What does “migrant hospitality” mean in a world where migrants are being shipped out on military planes and sheltered behind prison walls?
Given that most of what I have seen this week has been through the fog of the flu, I was tempted to skip posting. But I want to share this prayer that has made it into my heart this week, even through the fog. Bethany and I pray it together before we gather for our regular planning meetings to talk about the unfolding of a Catholic Worker ministry back in New Hampshire. On days like recent ones, when I never imagined that we could feel so far away from completeness or a clear plan, this prayer is both consolation and challenge: waking up from a fainting spell on the bathroom floor, having your ministry work dry up, and your infant awake before dawn doesn’t mean anything is wrong; what’s wrong is thinking that any new thing can be born without this period of instability and that it may take a very long time.
Prayer of Teilhard de Chardin, “Slow Trust”
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. [1]
[1] https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/prayer-of-theilhard-de-chardin/