Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

I just returned from morning Mass. It is quite cold today, 33 degrees F as I write this, but with the wind chill factor it feels like 16 degrees F. Snow flurries greeted us when we began our short drive home from church. The sun is shining brightly into my writing space as I ponder the first reading from today’s Mass. Our pastor, Rev. Paul D. Lee, STD, began his homily by telling us that Isaiah is in three parts, and he shared a personal story to emphasize exactly what Isaiah was talking about in Chapter 41:13-20:

For I am the Lord, your God,

who grasp your right hand;

It is I who say to you, Do not fear,

I will help you.

14Do not fear, you worm Jacob,

you maggot Israel;

I will help you—oracle of the Lord;

the Holy One of Israel is your redeemer.^*

15I will make of you a threshing sledge,

sharp, new, full of teeth,

To thresh the mountains and crush them,

to make the hills like chaff.

16When you winnow them, the wind shall carry them off,

the storm shall scatter them.

But you shall rejoice in the Lord;

in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory.

17The afflicted and the needy seek water in vain,

their tongues are parched with thirst.

I, the Lord, will answer them;

I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.

18I will open up rivers on the bare heights,

and fountains in the broad valleys;

I will turn the wilderness into a marshland,

and the dry ground into springs of water.

19In the wilderness I will plant the cedar,

acacia, myrtle, and olive;

In the wasteland I will set the cypress,

together with the plane tree and the pine,

20That all may see and know,

observe and understand,

That the hand of the Lord has done this,

the Holy One of Israel has created it.

Fr. Lee’s family fled North Korea at the start of the Korean War, first settling in South Korea where Fr. Lee was born. His father and oldest brother came to the States first. Eventually his whole family was together here in Maryland, and Fr. Lee went on to become a priest, serving our parish twice, first as his first assignment after ordination, and now, as our pastor since 2012.

Fr. Lee compared his family’s exile from their home in North Korea, leaving everything behind except for the family crucifix, to the Israelites that Isaiah is counseling in this passage. Isaiah is telling the Israelites that God will help them, that he will make paradise out of the desert.

Fr. Lee frequently speaks on the issue of immigration and how we as Christians are called to treat immigrants with compassion and care. I left small-town Louisiana to live in a suburb of Washington, DC, and the diversity I experience in my daily life is incredible. The Shrine of St. Jude Catholic Church, my parish, is home to something like 50 different nationalities, faithful Catholics from many different countries in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and of course, still some Irish and Italian American Catholics who founded our parish.

Thinking of the Israelites as immigrants searching for a new home, searching for safety, for peace, puts the current immigration crisis in America in perspective.

In his homily, Fr. Lee elaborated on the plight of the Israelites, exiled from their home, taken against their will into slavery, families broken apart and sold to different people, sometimes not knowing what has become of the rest of the family.

I couldn’t help but think of my parents, forced from their home by an impending storm, a hurricane that would go on to break all sorts of meteorological records in its destruction and death toll. My father, who could read a weather radar map tracking a hurricane as well as I read novels by my favorite authors, knew this was one to be afraid of. My mother, lying ill on the sofa, called out to him things she wanted him to pack in the car. They got out in plenty of time, going first to Baton Rouge, but fearing that wasn’t far enough, traveling on to Houston. Sometime after the storm, I was finally able to reach my mother on their shared cellphone. She couldn’t tell me where she was, saying she couldn’t pronounce it, but she was in a motel and safe. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and located them, in a La Quinta motel in the Woodlands, a planned community outside of Houston.

Like the Israelites, and also like Fr. Lee’s family, they left with very little, some treasured photo albums, my mother’s small jewelry box (mostly costume jewelry but all pieces she loved), and whatever clothing my father had packed for them. Along with the stressful news that their house was gone—not just flooded or damaged but actually not on its foundation—my mother discovered my father’s poor packing of her clothes, unmatched pairs of shoes and unmatched pantsuits. For someone who took such care in her daily dress even long after she had retired, even when she was so ill from heart and kidney disease, what she had available to dress in each day in that motel further added to her distress.

Eventually my parents returned to Louisiana, staying first with my brother in his home, and then in a FEMA trailer in my brother’s backyard, and finally in one side of a duplex they rented. It was a very nice home, three bedrooms and two full baths, large living room, eat-in kitchen and a nice patio, but it wasn’t home, it wasn’t theirs. My mother called it “the apartment” as though it was a four-letter word. She was never the same, her health continued to worsen, and within two years, almost to the date of Katrina’s anniversary of landfall in Louisiana, she was gone.

Today’s reading from Isaiah brought all of this to the surface once again, just as each August my thoughts turn to that frightening time when we waited and waited for news that my parents were safe, they had shelter and basic needs, if not a home of their own. Today’s reading from Isaiah brings to mind the plight of all immigrants, searching for shelter, peace, and a new start, where they can make paradise out of the desert of their lives.