A joke: Fr. O’Malley gave a homily at Mass on the day of the Feast of the Holy Innocents in which he praised children as being pure and good models of faith. The next day he was having a cement driveway poured, and, as kids will do, some of the parish children began writing things in the wet cement.
When the good father saw what they were doing, he stormed out of the rectory, cursing and swearing at the frightened children.
When a parishioner observed what happened she chastised her pastor saying, “Father, yesterday you spoke so glowingly about children and today you are screaming at them.”
To which Fr. O’Malley replied, “I love children in the abstract, but I can’t stand them in the concrete!”
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We live in a very progressive, blue part of the country in which we love liberal ideals in the abstract. We verbally condemn xenophobia and see ourselves as welcoming migrants, especially those seeking asylum.
Yet, lately I read in Wednesday Journal, “Less than a month after Oak Park’s village board allocated $500,000 in unspent American Rescue Plan Act funding to aid asylum-seekers, the village’s Emergency Operations Center has outlined protocols to send any new arrivals away.
“The Dec. 7 memorandum states that any asylum seekers who arrive in Oak Park will not be allowed to disembark from a bus and will be advised that local shelters are at capacity. The driver will be directed to continue to the city of Chicago landing zone,”
One of my friends, who is a member of an Oak Park church that is hosting migrants, tells me his congregation is having trouble finding volunteers to staff the outreach ministry.
A member of my own congregation here in Forest Park is homeless, but we decided to not let him sleep in the church because he caused trouble during a previous stay and because we couldn’t get anyone to volunteer to stay overnight and monitor his behavior.
For four years my wife and I have been helping with money and friendship a formerly homeless couple now living in an apartment subsidized by Housing Forward, and it’s really starting to wear on us. Virtually everyone we know tells us that we shouldn’t be giving them money.
A staff member of L’Arche here in town told me that the assistants who live with their developmentally disabled core members often begin their time in the program with idealistic enthusiasm, but they last only a year or two.
We live in a progressive lifestyle enclave. We are liberal politically. Over four out of five of us voted for Biden. We are liberal in our charitable giving. In 2022 our local CROP Hunger Walk raised $127,000, ranking us number 5 of 661 CROP Walks in the nation. We are liberal in our acceptance of diverse faith communities and racial/ethnic groups.
And yet our encounter with migrant groups has been a gauge of the depth of our commitment to the values we espouse.
We are generous with our time and treasure, up to the point where it affects our lifestyle.
Here’s a thought-provoking question: What if we as individual citizens, when creating our budgets, decided on the percentage of our annual income we wanted to spend on what I will call charities first before determining the amount for their own food, utilities, mortgage, car payments?
I mean, what if we determined that before we bought a car or a house. For example, the average household income in Forest Park is $72,827. Let’s say I decided to give 10% of my income away to causes I value. That comes to $7,300, right? And that leaves roughly $65,000 for everything else.
Now the median annual rent in Forest Park is around $1,200 a month or $14,400 a year. So $65,000 minus $14,400, if I’ve done my math right, leaves $50,600 for food, taxes, family trips, clothes, car payments, etc. Is that enough?
My wife and I know what charity fatigue feels like. We’ve been giving money, time and above all emotional energy to our homeless couple for a long time, and it has forced us to decide what we really value.
The same is true on a community-wide basis. The influx of migrants is forcing us to determine what we really value, not just in the abstract as we debate politics after church or in the local diner, but in terms of our wallets and free time.
The campaign season is upon us. We will wax eloquently and passionately about what we value and who will best turn those values into policies, In addition to expressing our fears regarding what might happen and arguing about how to fix the immigration system, how many hours and dollars are we willing to spend on writing postcards, and door to door canvassing?
The influx of migrants to our area is forcing us to face how deep the commitment to our values really goes.
So will this upcoming campaign season.
Tom Holmes, a resident of Forest Park, writes a regular column for the Forest Park Review, a Growing Community Media publication.
