EVERY NAME, EVERY STORY
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
September 29, 2019
Here is the
story of Mateo, at least as I briefly got to know him. Mateo is a Roman
Catholic deacon, catechist, father of several children, and the de facto leader
of a very remote Christian community in the high mountains of extreme southern
Mexico, in the state of Chiapas. He is a Mayan Indian, as are all of the indigenous
people in that place. I met Mateo about 15 years ago while I was visiting that
area, as the guest of a Dominican priest from a nearby town. The priest only gets to Mateo’s community a
few times a year, and so when he arrives they celebrate all kinds of things in
a single gathering: the priests baptize
babies, they preside over marriages, they mourn those who have died, they hear
confessions, and they celebrate the Eucharist. And they party.
After all
the religious rituals were finished, I accompanied Padre Miguel to Mateo’s
home, where we were required to feast on fresh beef for dinner. The house
consisted of two rooms, both with dirt floors. The men gathered in one of those
rooms, and the women and children were in the other one, where the food was being
prepared. They were overjoyed to welcome the Padre, and me—a complete stranger,
but a guest. On the way back to the town after dinner I remember Padre Miguel
telling me, “Mateo and his family have absolutely nothing, but what they do
have, they give away.” I realized immediately that I don’t live in a world like
that, and in fact I can hardly imagine a world like that. But it exists, not so very far from here.
I remember
Mateo particularly today because, for the second week in a row, we are hearing
from the Gospel of Luke about a “Rich man” who has no name. He is a callous,
self-absorbed person who seems to care about nothing other than his own
well-being. Last week it was the master who hired a dishonest steward, and then
fired him. Today it is that man who spent his life ignoring the poor person who
was right outside his door. And that man had a name: Lazarus. The one whose
sores were licked by the dogs—and the Rich man didn’t notice or care.
Until he
died. It turns out that God remembered them both at their passing.
And suddenly
when he was being punished the Rich man recalled the name of the poor man,
Lazarus. But that wasn’t in order to say “I’m sorry” or “please forgive me.”
No, it was to request that Lazarus wait on him, providing him with cool water
to ease his suffering in the flames. That’s what poor people are here to do,
right? That Rich man just didn’t get it—even in death. Nobody is a throw-away
person. Nobody is without a name, a story, a sacred connection with God and
everyone else. The day that we begin to de-humanize people is the day that we
forget their names, or refuse to learn them in the first place. The day that we
start to become hateful and intolerant is the day that we use descriptions in
sentences like, “those Mexicans, those Indians, those Jews and Muslins and
Migrants” and whatever other collective we like to use as the reason for our
failure to care.
I vividly
remember the first time after I was the guest in the home of Mateo and his
family, and I was driving on Lake Street in Minneapolis, passing an obviously
poor Mexican man on the sidewalk. I remember wondering how anybody could hold a
person like that in contempt, without knowing anything about the circumstances
from which he came, without knowing his name or his story, or what had made him
flee from home.
In God’s
eyes every one of us is first and foremost a somebody, a name, a human being
deserving of love and dignity, long before we are sorted out by race and status
and citizenship and moral purity and legal classification. To get that wrong is
to begin to dehumanize both ourselves and the subjects of our disdain. Luke’s
gospel today does not tell us anything about Lazarus’ past, or how he got to be
poor. Maybe he had been a good man who fell on hardship. Or maybe he was
foolish in his life choices. Or maybe he was a bad actor who was now getting
what he deserved in this world. It just doesn’t matter. For Jesus, when the
destitute person presents him/herself at your door, you help them. It’s just
that simple. God can sort out all the judgment later. And the Rich man in this
parable failed to understand that too—trying to correct Father Abraham for the
way that he was treating people in the afterlife, and never having a clue about
what ignorance and presumption that represented.
This weekend
Pope Francis had dedicated to what he has called “World Day of Migrants and
Refugees.” Here is a part of what he has written about it:
“In a word,
it is not only the cause of migrants that is at stake; it is not just about
them, but about all of us, and about the present and future of the human
family. Migrants, especially those who are most vulnerable, help us to read the
“signs of the times.” Through them, the Lord is calling us to conversion, to be
set free from exclusivity, indifference and the throw-away culture. Through
them, the Lord invites us to embrace fully our Christian life and to
contribute, each according to his or her proper vocation, to the building up of
a world that is more and more in accord with God’s plan.”
Like Mateo,
every person—including every immigrant—has a story and a name.
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