IMMIGRANTS

What to do about our latest wave of immigrants?
Our elected leaders don’t seem to know what to do.
Jay Leno in his usual pandering humor asked, “How can we round up all these thousands of immigrants and send them back to Mexico?”
He answered, saying that Mexico had no trouble rounding them up and sending them here.
Being anti-immigrant is not new to our nation.
Recall the signs, “Irish Need Not Apply.”
It’s so interesting that all of us, except for Native Americans, can trace ourselves back
to immigrants, yet there are so many of us who want to stop the new immigration.
Of course, the argument is that so many of these immigrants are illegal.
But what to do with illegal immigrants is precisely what our elected officials should
be making decisions about. (But they were busy taking two weeks off for the Easter holiday).
In Mt. Carmel, PA where I grew up, there were seven churches: a Lithuanian, a Slovak, an Italian, two Polish, one for Russian Poles and one for Polish Poles, a Greek Uniate and
the so-called Irish parish. This in a town of approximately 17,000 + in the '40s and '50s.
These parishes continued into recent times before the consolidation of parishes under the heroic effort of Bishop Dattilo.
Shouldn’t our elected leaders be figuring out some way to put our illegal immigrants on the road to legal citizenship? This rather than making it a felony to be illegally here in our nation.
And what about our obligation as followers of Jesus who are supposedly living the gospel ideals.
Should we not, by extension of the Beatitudes, be blessed because Jesus is an immigrant and we welcomed him? (After all, the Beatitudes in the gospel story are just examples).
The question facing us today is this: Is our nation truly a melting pot or is it a powder keg?

An After Easter Thought

Faith

Consciousness is essential in the growth and development of our faith.
When consciousness is renewed and reshaped, we enter into a deeper
dimension of our faith.
Our consciousness reaches up and out. We become more keenly aware
of the gospel values and demands not as options but as imperatives.

We can know a lot about religion and have many pious perspectives
but it is consciousness that makes our faith come alive to the challenges
of our times. For example the challenge to work for peace and justice
which is essential to genuine gospel living.

A more lively consciousness of the God who dwells within us
is acquired through our growing consciousness of one another,
our strengths and weaknesses, our ideals and failures.

When we ponder the gospel stories, our goal should be
an increased faith consciousness. Otherwise we run the risk
of practicing religion on a superficial level rather than living
faith in the deepest recesses of our being and becoming.
It is the difference between being a minimalist and amaximalist.