“It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks.” --Dina Nayeri, author who fled Iran as a refugee and settled in Oklahoma
Can we as Americans agree upon anything these days!? Well…just maybe…yes.
With the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban after our “forever war” finally concluded on August 31, hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees have fled that nation, with 50,000 and maybe more, already in the United States, or on the way. Every single one of those fellow human beings, at some level, are traumatized and heartbroken at having to leave their homes and homeland. They are about to land in a new place where the language will be unfamiliar and the customs and the culture and just about everything else too. They will be arriving with not much more to claim as their own save the clothes on their backs. They will need housing and jobs and language teachers and guides to help them acclimate to their strange new world.
They need our help. Now.
And in something just short of a miracle, tens of thousands of Americans are responding with welcome and generosity and mercy and doing so across political and social and religious divides. Just ten days ago I put the word out in the part of Massachusetts I call home, and asked on a community online bulletin board: can anyone help? Within 48 hours more than 100 folks had volunteered to lend a hand and reach out to people they’ve yet to meet.
The folks who volunteered, who heard about what me and the church I serve are trying to organize—welcoming refugees—they came from every walk of life and every corner of this part of the world. I’ve heard from fellow Christians and my Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters. Connected with my Catholic neighbors through Catholic Charities, who will be shouldering a big part of the load. I’ve been contacted by churchgoers and non-churchgoers, and an elderly man with time to give and a single Mom barely making it on her own, but so wanting to help. And these folks hail from cities and towns and villages. Different political parties, I’d bet, too
The same phenomenon is happening nationwide. As one refugee settlement worker said in a recent New York Times article, “We have never seen anything like it.” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah is the chief executive of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a faith-based agency with offices in 22 states. She and others like her find the work even harder now because of the hundreds of refugee resettlement agencies in the United States that have closed their doors or severely cut services for lack of government funding and support, in the past five years.
The last Presidential administration was not the biggest proponent of embracing refugees or welcoming the oppressed and downtrodden from other countries. But seemingly overnight (or at least it feels that way) America is once again rolling up its sleeves and laying out the welcome mat for these strangers from afar. It was only generation ago at the end of another long war, that 140,000 Vietnamese refugees found a place here.
Why is this happening now?
Maybe we as a nation are waking up again to the truth that so many of us are heirs of a past immigrant, or refugee experience. The Irish who fled their homeland because of the potato famine, a humanitarian disaster in the mid-1800’s. Jews fled here because of persecution. Others came for economic opportunity. We are in large part, a country of immigrants, and at our best we dare to lift the torch of freedom for all the world to see. When we remember that so many of us are from somewhere else, it teaches us that opens hand and open hearts are what mark the best of humanity, not high border walls, or closed doors.
So too, many of those volunteering to give assistance to our Afghan friends, are doing so out of a moral impulse whose roots are found in most faith traditions. At their best, people of God know, absolutely, that to welcome the stranger, and to give refuge to the vulnerable: it is among the most noble thing that we can do as the children of a merciful God. And regardless of faith, deep down in our hearts as humans, I think we all know what the decent and right thing is to do when it comes to people in need, such desperate need.
Just help. Help.
Perhaps it’s time to polish off the engraved plaque that adorns the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and remember the stirring words that welcomed so many people to our shores, penned in 1883 by the poet Emma Lazarus. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Now that is a welcome!
(If you’d like to help, I recommend contacting your local offices of Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, or other refugee resettlement agencies near you that are coordinating this massive effort. Contact your congressional representatives as well.)
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