By Michele Kueter Petersen
SAU Theological Perspective
To see a flock of Canada geese take flight in the azure, blue autumnal sky is to witness to the beauty of their geometric formation and a seemingly creaturely self-possession characterized by the sheer freedom of existence, as they soar upward and journey toward the heavens. Would that human migration be so beautiful, innocent, and uncomplicated. The harsh reality of this ordeal, however, is that often human migration is a direct result of the tragedy of poverty, war, and violence — especially violence perpetrated against women and children — inflicted by the “powerful” on the “powerless.” This reality, an egregious violation of the dignity of the human person, creates a relentless cycle of victims and perpetrators, and leads not only to unmet material need, but also unmet physical, psychological, social and ethico-spiritual relational need as well.
Human migration is mired in what the philosopher, Simone Weil, refers to as “a history of force,” that we inherit by virtue of our being born into a world characterized by structural violence. She started out as a pacifist, yet she came to understand how force characterizes human life and that we must learn how to contend with it. A. Rowlands, who writes on Catholic social thought in her provocative text, “Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times,” discusses how Weil points to the danger of uprootedness that resides deep inside our modern psyche, which is made visible structurally not only through migration, but through our work, governance, and in the markets and capital.
Everyday relationships are just as important as physical place for forming a multifaceted rootedness capable of sustaining us. The monk, priest, and spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, tried to balance his contemplative life with witnessing to social justice during the Vietnam War era. He recounts in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” how German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during the years of National Socialism in Germany said, “In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all….” The only way that faith continues to be possible in these circumstances, Father Merton explains, is because a person is told to believe.
This tension characterized by the struggle between doubt and duty, allows us to “prove ourselves ‘good’ and ‘right’ by judging and condemning evil and error in those who are unlike ourselves.” We should, however, look within for the insatiable aspiration to come to know the living God for ourselves. Self-reflection, self-reflexivity, and coming to know ourselves in and through coming to know our participation in the life of the tripersonal God can deepen our capacity for the life of God within.
On the contrary, however, what flows out of our separation from living relationship with God and our own alienation from ourselves, is an inability to accept and open to another person, which keeps us even more alienated and isolated from authentic relationship, and therefore, closed in upon our false sense of self. Jesus is able to accomplish an openness and acceptance because he is empty of everything, save his relationship with his father.
Father Merton believed that implicit in our witness to God’s life in the world is an inner journey that we must, in the end, make alone to unite with the world in the “secret beauty of [the] hearts…of the human race.” He exclaims, “There are no strangers!”
We are all, therefore, on the move together in this life with each other. If we can discern what I would call an original beauty, by learning to move through this beautiful world with joy and hope, while also acknowledging that we all carry deep anguish and suffering, it is possible to disclose a new relationship with reality and to unfold its ethico-spiritual dimension through shared life in common. Together we can reimbue human life with meaning and purpose, which young and old alike yearn for today.
When we are relationally aware, we participate in the structure of reality; Jesus is a master teacher of this awareness. However, our relatedness and connectedness must be discovered in freedom, or it is not real. Would that human migration become a new story of soaring to the heights of our humanity amid our capacity for transformation born out of the depths of darkness and despair, but human and therefore incarnational just the same.
(Michele Kueter Petersen, is a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and Theology at St. Ambrose University in Davenport.)
