“Project Oak Tree: the Reasonableness of Virtue

    Project Oak Tree, is a Las Cruces based project which demonstrates the virtue of “hospitality” to the lost, the forgotten, the immigrant fleeing from violence and poverty in their homelands. The project gets its name from the story in the book of Genesis where Abraham hospitably welcomes three strangers. He had no idea who they really were. They could have been angels, the Holy Trinity, men from outer space, or whatever appeals to you if you are a Scientologist.  He welcomes them by the “shade of an oak tree” and decides to set up tents for each of them. He asks his wife, Sara, to bring them refreshment as they must have come a long way in the sandy desert.  In this sense Bishop Cantu’s overture in behalf of the Church is not a political statement, but rather a recognition of the God created dignity of all human beings. Borders do not attenuate dignity. Poverty does not attenuate dignity. And our country can claim it’s overabundance not by our own efforts to acquire or grasp at prosperity, but rather to afford the fruited plain and purple mountains’ majesty to “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!" Those great words by Emma Lazarus etched on Ellis Island’s statue of Liberty (not statue of immigration) document the basis of our greatness. The words reflected a welcome to the unsolicited masses coming with all their poverty, their anxiety, and also their potential. Those words reflected a respect for that cry from the declaration of Independence which said “all men were created equal with the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The forefathers wrote this down so it would not be forgotten that this was not a “law” endowed right but a God given right. 

     On the social and in the printed media there are stories of resentment and vitriol over the manner in which our government has dealt with the challenge of dealing with the mass movement of peoples northward. Perhaps it is God’s way of making up for the damage we have created in the wholesale support of aborting our future leaders in the denial of their right to life. This is sending us into what has been termed “demographic winter” wherein there will not be enough of a work force in 50 to 70 years to pay the taxes to support the need when the “boomers” get to retirement age. That saga has already begun.

     Let me say that if anything has proven the ineffectiveness of the ridiculous wall built to insulate us from this phenomenon, this mass movement of peoples is proof enough.  Demolish the wall and use the steel to build homes and factories instead. But I digress.

     I keep hearing: “These people are breaking the law. We can’t pick and choose.” Well some laws are based upon unjust causes, deriving their powers, instead, from “light and transient causes.”  Alexis deTocqueville writes: “I sought for the key to the greatness and the genius of America in her harbors … in her fertile fields and boundless forests … in her public school system and institutions of learning … in her democratic Congress and in her matchless constitution. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

     Bishop Cantu, Lonnie Briseno, and Ruben Garcia and the interfaith community of Las Cruces, New Mexico, are making America good again. Our greatness will be a foregone conclusion. Anything less will result in our own demise. In the latter 5^th Century, Bishop Augustine of Hippo knew this well as the Vandals sought to defeat a Roman Empire which had deteriorated to a nation of unjust laws based upon “light and transient causes.” And still Augustine preferred terms for peace among reasonable men of good will. Reason and Virtue must be the basis of policy, laws, and social action. Project Oak Tree is indeed reasonable and virtuous.