We are disturbed more each day by the increasingly vitriolic, xenophobic verbal and physical attacks on Mexican migrants in the United States. More and more, politicians of both parties make demagogic appeals to a frightened electorate, trying to prove their “patriotism” by voicing their determination to “defend the nation’s security” from an “invasion” of “illegal,” and therefore, “criminal” “aliens” from across a border that ought to be “sealed” in order to prevent “the destruction of American exceptionality.”
We ponder: What is it that drives these attacks against people from our neighboring land? Why do we human beings make these other human beings into enemy aliens? This question haunts all of our history. Why did we make the native residents of this land into “savages”? Why did we make Africans into “slaves”? Why did we make Germans, Irish, Chinese, Jews, Italians, Poles and other people into “perils” who were going to “undermine the American way of life”? Why do we now make Mexicans into “illegal, criminal aliens”?
We come to the following conclusion: We turn these “others” into enemies because we do not want to see them as fellow human beings, or, as Mexicans say, “semejantes” (similar ones) or “prójimos” (adjacent ones, that is, neighbors). If we see the other as we see our self – or better, if we see our self as we see the other - we face two stark and compelling realities. First, we see that our neighbor is a mirror image of our self. His actual condition is my possible condition. This then means that his vulnerability, his naked need, could well be my own. When we see the other as neighbor, we see what Adam and Eve saw after they ate the forbidden fruit of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” In the other we see our naked humanity, our mortality before the powers of the universe.
When Jesus - as the Gospel of Luke (10: 25-37) tells the story - was asked by one of the Pharisees, the legalists of his culture and religion, what one needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus asked in return what the Torah says. The Pharisee responded by quoting two commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Deuteronomy 6:5); and, “Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18)." Jesus replied, “Do this and you will live.”
But the Pharisee, wanting to find a loophole around these stringent requirements, then asked the fateful question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied by telling the tale of the Good Samaritan. With this story, Jesus turned around the Pharisee’s question. He transformed the question from an attempt to put distance between self and “other” - by establishing criteria for evaluating who qualifies, or does not qualify, as “my neighbor” - to one of identifying with the other, thus becoming a neighbor. Jesus’ answer to the question lay in the action of the outcast Samaritan, “the one who had mercy” on the robbery victim. By recognizing the victim as his fellow human being, the Samaritan made himself the other’s neighbor.
Jesus (Matthew 25:31-46) points to this same identification with the other when he says that in recognizing and responding to the need of the other – the sick, imprisoned, destitute, “the least of these” – we are recognizing and responding to Him. That is, we are recognizing the sacredness of being human. All of us are one in our vulnerable humanity and that oneness is the primary reality of our existence that needs to be honored.
But to acknowledge this communality, that our neighbor is a reflection of our self, that “there, but for the grace of God, go I,” requires that we face our own weakness. We are forced to face the random powers of the universe that both establish and limit who we are and the opportunities given us. We are forced to face our needs and the threats to our own survival. Perhaps most frightening of all, we are forced to face the destructive powers within our self. These are the dangers that terrify us. This is what we seek to deny and therefore project upon our needy neighbor, making him or her into the “other,” an “alien.”
Through our projections onto the “other,” we are alienating our self from the terror of being human. We strive to make our self secure within a delusion of omnipotence, the fantasy that we can make ourselves invulnerable. We caste out the “demons” of our nightmares, reassuring our self that there is no danger within our world or, most of all, from within our self. To see the other as our “semejante,” our “prójimo,” our neighbor, is to be called by our empathy to have mercy. This makes it impossible to maintain that defense, that lie, that self-delusion. To see our neighbor in the other is to open our eyes and our heart to know our self and our neighbor in all our shared humanity - good, “bad” and otherwise – and, thus, to be called to have mercy for both of us.
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