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‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.’ (Matthew 5:7)
They are people of the light, and there are tens of
thousands of them. They are in the streets and classrooms and neighborhoods and
behind store counters and a thousand other places.
We must see them, hear them and feel their hearts. For they can
save our souls … and the soul of the nation.
Perhaps no single story, in the saga of MAGA vs. the State
of Minnesota, reveals the beauty of these hearts as clearly or as poignantly as
the plight of a little boy named, Liam, and the students and leaders at his
school, Valley View Elementary.
After Liam was illegally carried off by immigration enforcement
agents, clad in his bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, leaders at his school
mobilized the most potent salvo yet in the battle for human decency amid the
great indecency the Trump administration is exacting on the nation.
Their actions, like those of their fellow Minnesotans, have upended
the administration’s devout conviction that virtue is rare, that people don’t
really care about injustice or the struggle and suffering of their neighbors, just
so long as they are comfortable.
In this case, the virtue in evidence is profoundly
spiritual, certainly for Christians, Muslims and Jews. ‘Blessed are the merciful
for they will receive mercy,’ many Christians read or heard on this Sunday in
the season of Epiphany.
The merciful receive mercy because their hearts are already carried
in the current of love that is God’s living presence in human hearts and amid
human affairs, a living flow of mercy.
Any whose eyes and ears and hearts have not been shuttered
by hate, apathy or political ideology can see the beauty of mercy at Valley
View school, especially when viewed against the dark and brutal background of
what ICE and Homeland Security are doing in their community.
It was unmistakable as a principal at Valley View Elementary,
his voice wavering, walked a reporter through a school room to see Liam’s desk
and his cubby, with a bin of school supplies, his water bottle and a stuffed,
green dinosaur.
Leaving that room, bags of groceries and supplies lined the hallways
for families too scared to come out of their homes. Twenty-five parents of
Valley View students have been carried off by ICE, and now … two more students,
a second and fifth grader.
Students have written letters to ICE and recorded them,
sharing what they are seeing and the fear and sadness they are feeling. But
there is also this letter from an African American girl, ‘I believe there are birds
whose songs of love aren’t heard by people who need to care.’
A living mercy flows through the beautiful, young heart who
gave voice to those words. They are a prayer, a hope that mercy and simple
human kindness will soften stony hearts, evaporate apathy and carry us all away
in the stream of mercy flowing through the halls of Valley View school.
For there are more children languishing in ICE gulags. There
are more shattered families longing to touch and hold their beloved. There are
thousands carried off for no reason beyond the nihilism of power for power’s sake
… and many, many more living in fear.
But there are victories in the struggle. Liam and his father
are home, and all because an army of light has appeared in the mercy of those
who care … and in judges who know the difference between the darkness of lies
and the light of truth.
