Pilgrimage

Final Report

Nick Mele and Lee Langdon met with our pastor, Fr. Scott Connolly and pastoral associate, Dr. Kathy Ernst, to present a report on the pilgrimage, which you can Download Pilgrimage report Sept 09.  Their support made this pilgrimage possible and we are grateful. (posted by Mary Mele)

What's Next?

As we walked closer to our goal, more and more people asked us what we would do next.  One answer is that all of us, walkers and non-walkers, have each to take the next step to welcome our sisters and brothers, although each of us must discern what that step might be for us.  For we who walked, the pilgrimage changed us and opened our eyes wider to the hardships and hostility that immigrants from all over the world tell us they experience.  We are still digesting the things we have experienced and heard, and trying to clarify for ourselves how we have changed. 

Which is to say that the next steps are not crystal clear.  We have been invited to come to churches, schools and local diversity commissions to talk about our walk, and we will do some of that.  We may write articles and opinion pieces about our pilgrimage and justice for immigrants.  We may do more prayer vigils, perhaps more pilgrimages for immigration reform.  The one sure thing is that we will continue to work for justice until the five elements of immigration reform are made into law:

a path to permanent residency for undocumented persons;
protections for all workers, U.S. or foreign born;
reduced waiting times for family reunification (which currently can take decades);
restoration of due process protection for immigrants; and
policies that address the root causes of migration.

We continue to pray, to inform ourselves and others, and to advocate on behalf of the strangers among us as we welcome them.

posted by Nick

Day Fifteen: The Pilgrimage Ends, the Walk Continues

Yesterday morning, a bit later than usual, about 56 people joined us to walk the last miles from St. Martin of Tours to the Northwest Detention Center.  There were newcomers, some from Tacoma, some from much farther away than Bellingham; some had walked on other days, welcome companions who jogged my memories of each day of the journey.

When we arrived at the Detention Center, another 30 or so people joined us so that 80 people prayed the Stations of the Cross of the Migrant Jesus and then a lovely call-and-response set of prayers that Lee, who has been such a stalwart since we began planning, had created from various sources.  We prayed in both English and Spanish, and in the background were private security people watching warily, and families of people detained within kept coming out after visiting their loved ones.  The landscape around the center is stark, freight spurs, a propane depot, anonymous buildings with indecipherable names like CODEL, which I learned from its website is a maker of "entry systems," better known as "doors."

May the doors of the Detention Center in Tacoma, and of all the Detention Centers, open soon to release all those held within.  And may our hearts also be opened to welcome those who want to build new lives in the United States!

posted by Nick

Day Fifteen: This Particular Pilgrimage Has Ended

At 10 AM, at St. Martin of Tours, we began with introductions—and home churches—from the group of 50 people. Jim Bloss, who sent out press advisories and coordinated his parish's participation, was there; Jim Thomas and JL Drouhard from the archdiocese with their wives were there; Danny and I drove Miguel and his grandson Kevin from Mt. Vernon; the Unitarians; some of the unchurched. Recent immigrants joined with those of us who immigrated a generation or four ago; there were people from St. Leo’s parish, nuns from various places, and a contingent from St. Patrick’s, supporting Sami Malkandi, the Iraqi detainee whose wife Mali we have all met and loved.

The walk was a gentle one…leaving Fife, walking by Costco and a Mercedes dealership, across the I-5 and into the very industrial Port of Tacoma.

We began our prayer vigil with the Stations of the Cross of the Migrant Jesus…alternating English and Spanish reflections, with James from St. Leo’s leading us in singing “The Lord Hears The Cry Of The Poor.” Jose Ortiz brought the 14 wooden crosses, each with a traditional picture of Christ’s last hours as well as a modern photo of immigrants living through the challenges of their lives. Fourteen pilgrims took turns reading the reflections and prayers…Jose’s daughter Kati introduced each station. The crosses were made by a young man as a part of his Eagle Boy Scout Project, after participating in the Youth Migrant Project in middle school.

It is hard to capture the deep emotion of following a Catholic Good Friday ritual on a grassy field in front of the Northwest Detention Center, which is a private immigration prison located on the tide flats of the Port of Tacoma in Tacoma, Washington. The detention center opened in 2004 by Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) under a contract with the US Department of Homeland Security and in 2005 CSC was purchased by the GEO Group, another private organization. A contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement crowded the facility's housing capacity to 1,000 detainees, making it the largest detention center owned by GEO Group on the West Coast...and thus highly profitable to them, paid for by our tax dollars.

We paused a while, chatted with some of the families coming to visit their loved ones, networked with JustFaith graduates, or got to know pilgrims we had met along the way a little more. The last hour we spent together praying litanies, prayers, and scripture, put together with help from Celeste and JustFaith, using antiphons and responsorials in English and Spanish. Cesar Chavez’s Meditation for Farm Workers, with alternating Spanish and English, followed by “We Shall Overcome” closed our vigil at the Detention Center praying for Comprehensive Immigration Reform!

Some might think that we had enough prayer, but at 5 PM more than 20 pilgrims attended St. Leo’s 5 PM Mass. We took white crosses that the Youth Migrant Project had painted and written on to remind us all of the death toll that migration takes on peoples everywhere. Fr. Jim introduced the pilgrims to the church; we brought the artifacts we had carried with us from church to church to remind us of the reason for the pilgrimage and placed them before the ambo.

But the homily, which set the great challenges of our time in the context of our faith, served as a high point for me. While Father Jim related personal stories from a death penalty sit-in, and the controversies surrounding health care, he made all so simple: we, as Christians, must stand for life. And that is why we walked this pilgrimage…to support life in our United States, to ensure the right to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to reduce the deaths of people so desperate for work that they risk their lives to come to our country. We need a life-supporting immigration system…we need a miracle.

There was a lovely meal prepared by the very welcoming parishioners of St. Leo’s…but I’ll let another writer address those final hours of the Pilgrimage for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

posted by Lee

Day Fourteen: Accompaniment

This morning, Enjolie and Mirya cooked me a great breakfast, the best I have had in weeks, and then at Mass Fr. Bill McKee asked me to say a few words about the pilgrimage, which was a blessing and led at least two people to ask me for more information. Our good friend Leanne, whose husband Paul walked with me yesterday, walked with me today.  Mirya said she would walk a little bit of the way with us and walked for about three-quarters of the way to the Church of St. Martin of Tours in Fife, our last stop before we reach the ICE Northwest Detention Center tomorrow. 

Walking with companions strengthens my resolve and encourages me when my energy and/or enthusiasm is low.  There really is a difference when two or three are gathered to pray, I feel it.  After the day's walk ended, I received a phone call from Silvario, who had walked quite a way with us earlier but who was unable to continue for medical reasons.  He has been calling almost every day to let us know he is praying with us even though he is not walking with us.  The knowledge of his spiritual companionship is almost as good an energizer as his physical presence.  Which is to say that accompaniment can be physical or not but that what really counts is heartfelt and expressed concern for others.

Tomorrow, Saturday, August 15, we walk the last four miles from St. Martin of Tours Church to the ICE Northwest Detention Center, where we will pray the Stations of the Cross and other prayers on behalf of immigrants, whether detained there or not.  Please join us at 10:00 am in Fife--look for the white cross!  Or later at the Detention Center in Tacoma.  

posted by Nick

Day Thirteen: Addenda

J.L Drouhard stopped by to lend a camera to me, so I will be able to post some photos with tomorrow's update. The folks at St. Vincent de Paul made a lot of food for the pilgrims, but of course I am the only one to eat it with them, so I tried to eat for two or three but could not. The hospitality we have received at every parish impresses me as I look back now, near the end of the pilgrimage. They have truly welcomed us strangers, and as I pray in thanksgiving for such graciousness, I hope it is a sign that we will all welcome the immigrants and sojourners among us. And so to bed...

posted by Nick

Day Thirteen: Commercial Landscape

Most of today's walk was along Highway 99, past SeaTac Airport.  All of it was through airport parking lots, airport hotels, and strip malls, a commercial no-man's land.  Had the pastor, staff and parishioners of St. Thomas not been so gracious to me, I would not have had the stamina to walk as far and as fast as I did.  I was also very glad for the company of my good friend Paul Fiorini, who drove up from Olympia to walk with me.  His presence and companionship sustained me over the miles.

Once we got past SeaTac Airport, the commercial properties alternated among new looking strip malls filled with national franchises, rundown-looking local businesses and vacant properties and lots.  The vacant stores all seemed to be locally-owned businesses that had not been able to compete with the franchises.  The immigrants we saw were all working hard, from auto-mechanics to  beauticians and barbers to a Korean-American bagel baker. (We stopped there to eat lunch and the Korean bagels were very good!)

The night before, at dinner, I had met a Tukwila City Councilwoman who is much concerned for the dignity of every human being in her city.  Like so many other Americans, wherever their family origins, she and her husband had worked hard and achieved positions from which they contributed to the common good.  At St. Vincent de Paul Church in Federal Way, a gentleman who was waiting in the office asked me about the cross and what I was doing when I arrived.  I explained, and he said that not all immigrants come with the right motives and those should not be allowed in.  This struck me as a striking contrast to the attitude of the couple in Tukwila.  I had no chance to ask him which immigrants come with the wrong motives, but I wonder who he had in mind. 

We use words like "criminal" and "illegal" which lump the overwhelming majority of honest, hard-working immigrants with the few who truly are criminal, drug lords and the like.  The true undesirable people everyone seems to worry about have not been evident on this pilgrimage.  How strange that the poor are so invisible unless we see them as criminals, while the real criminals, and our complicity in their poverty, are so easy to ignore.

I dropped the camera last night, so no photos of today's walk. 

Tomorrow, we are leaving St. Vincent de Paul in Federal Way at about 9:30 am, after the morning Mass at 9:00 am.  Please come join us for the walk to St. Martin of Tours in Fife, about an eight mile walk.

posted by Nick

The Pilgrimage ends on Saturday, August 15

The Pilgrimage ends on Saturday, August 15

NW Detention Center: 12 to 3 PM

Walking from Fife, if you can...

Celebration and Mass at St Leo's

We will leave St. Martin of Tours at 10:00 a.m. for the 5 mile mile walk to the Northwest Detention Center. We will be vigiling at the Detention Center (and we do have a permit to do so) from 12:00 noon until 3 p.m.  This will include a variety of prayer, including Stations of the Cross for the Migrant Jesus, and music and singing. We will conclude by walking to St. Leo's for Mass at 5 p.m., followed by dinner, graciously and generously provided by St. Leo's. Please let them know if you are coming. 

Special note: food and water will not be available at the detention center.  Bring your own...bring some to share.  There are no bathroom facilities.  We are not able to make accommodations for those who are physically challenged.  We will be on a large (dead-end) street, with a grassy space. We have a prayer service devoted to the plight of immigrants planned.  If you can sing and lead hymns we will have song sheets available, but we need your help in this.  There is no budget for a sound system.  We will have a bull horn.  The pilgrimage is a 143-mile prayer  for a miracle: Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  help us to end with a long and soulful prayer.

Reflection: Hope and Despair

Yesterday, a man wearing a black t-shirt asked me what I was doing. When I told him I was on pilgrimage to pray for immigration reform, he replied, “Good luck with that! It'll never happen.” I said that I believe it will take a miracle but that I believe God can and does work in the world. He repeated that it will never happen and walked away.

This brief dialogue has been on my mind and that man has been in my prayers. His attitude was respectful of my faith but certain that God does not answer prayers or perform miracles anymore. His body language told me I was very naïve and wasting my energy. This is a very different kind of obstacle to the anger and fear that is usually evident in the few people we are encountering who are opposed to immigration reform. One of the two or three we have met shouted “Your friends are criminals. The term is illegal immigrants. Illegal!” from his car before zooming away from us in his car. That anger requires conversion, a breaking open of a locked heart and an imprisoned point of view whether it leads the person to support reform or not.

The doubt that anything can be done, however, also requires a conversion, and the attitude of the man in the black shirt is very close to that of a neighbor who agreed that our immigration system is broken and must be fixed but did not think it is up to us to do it. Both the man and our neighbor feel powerless and they and the countless others like them deserve to experience their own power to make a difference not just in the private sphere of their lives but in the public square where, after all, we all live. It is common at this point to quote Gandhi or Martin Niemoller but I think Jesus has more to say to both kinds of fear, of the alien and of using our power.

Jesus' story of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25 teaches that small acts make a difference, and that when we welcome a stranger or feed a hungry person, we are loving God. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus tells and shows us that God loves us. When we see that the universe enfolds us in God's love, we know it is possible to take the risk of loving someone different or speaking out for justice toward the poor, the marginalized, the different. That is another lesson of this pilgrimage, that God's love is evident if we will only open ourselves to perceive it.

posted by Nick

A Reflection, after Day 11

Being on a pilgrimage, someone said, would change you inside.  The pilgrimage…even in the few segments I have been able to participate in, have changed me.

 

Out-of-towners decided to join the pilgrimage by walking to St. James Cathedral from the Whole Foods at Denny and Westlake.  Therese called at the precise moment I was trying to figure out how to arrange such an additional stop.  Then on Wednesday, I was in a panic about the map and the route…and I saw JL from the cathedral…and I knew we were in safe hands.

 

There were about 41 people who joined together—almost magically—there on Denny. Middle school students from Kirkland (members of the Youth Migrant Project), whom we had met on Day 3, were there with some students from Seattle U and a few people who had been at a conference for Salvadorian Immigrants.  The walk was a little more than a mile, but up some very hilly hills!

 

Mass at the Cathedral included a blessing on the pilgrims from the priest…and a deeply resounding  hallelujah (and other music as well)…stunning in its beauty because of the acoustics of the Cathedral.  It made me appreciate the skill and talent of architects and designers all over again.

 

A mile or so more to St. Mary’s Church….along the streets of Seattle.  By this time we were 60 people and another 25 welcomed us.  Rita and her crew at St. Mary’s had assured me they could accommodate any size crowd…and they did.  The potluck included a cilantro stew from Peru, guacamole, bean casseroles, spiced peaches and wonderful, wonderful hamburgers!

 

And then the gathering after the meal occurred spontaneously!  We built on an idea that we all introduce ourselves, where we were from and why we were interested in the pilgrimage…to having a member of each group speak.  I didn’t take notes, but remember One America was there, an Indonesian Lutheran group, The Sanctuary Church, St. Mary’s staff and members, Cathedral staff and parishioners, the Unitarian Fellowship, St. John Vianney in Kirkland, Assumption and Sacred Heart from Bellingham, and a number graduates of JustFaith, and two immigrants who spoke so eloquently: one reminded us that immigrants from Mexico would be glad to go home regularly if they could come back here to work and another talked about the disruption to the LOVE of family that current laws create.

 

Some people have wondered about the “success” of the pilgrimage when we sometimes have just one or two people actually walking from church to church.  The pilgrimage is a phenomenon that is part of the process of opening people’s hearts and minds to the broken-ness of a system we are paying mega-bucks in taxes for. The blog gets hundreds of hits a day; parishioners come together to cook and pray; priests have joined us and asked their parishioners to walk.  Articles have been written in newspapers; websites have taken and posted our information.  People have decided to take a day off work to join us…dialogue has begun on what’s next.

 

The Pilgrimage for Comprehensive Immigration Reform will end on Saturday August 15.  But the journey will continue for months…even years.  We have been praying for a miracle…little miracles have occurred along the way.  The big one, well…in its own time….

posted by Lee