7 June

Graduation Day At Bishop Maginn: The Faces Of America

by Jon Katz

You will not see it on the news tonight, but there was a big story in Albany, N.Y., at the Bishop Maginn Class of 2019 graduation. Twenty of these faces were refugees, who had come a long way and been through a great deal to graduate from an American High School.

Many of them spent most of their lives in  refugee camps in Africa or Asia, torn from their friends, homes, even families. Almost all of the have endured real and grinding hardships and heartbreak in the promised land, whose streets were once believed by refugees to be paved with gold.

I have spoken with a lot of parents of refugee children in the past few years, and every one of them says the same thing: they say the came here for their children, they are happy to sacrifice everything they had to see their children live in a free land, in safety and with opportunity.

I know there were not many dry eyes at this graduation. I would like to congratulate this children, and also congratulate Bishop Maginn High School, a struggling and battered Catholic High School in a poor urban neighborhood that seems to have remembered the great calling of faith: to help the needy and the vulnerable.

They didn’t just talk the talk, they practice empathy and compassion every day.

For all the troubles of the Catholic Church, this school  has delivered and keeps on delivering. I am very happy and proud to have found them and to lead this glorious army of ours to try to support them in every way possible and feasible.

We don’t work miracles and change the trajectory of lives, we fill the holes and commit small acts of great kindness.

I am the child of first generation Americans and the grandchild of refugees, and I know how great their sacrifice was so that I could live and have a better life than they ever had. To do this, they gave up their dreams and comfort and community.

George Washington crossing the Delaware is one face of America, so is Abraham Lincoln on his statue in Washington, and so are these children, beaming with pride and optimism.

They are Americans in every sense of the world, part of a timeless chain that goes back hundreds of years, and is embedded into the national DNA.

Thanks to our wonderful country, they have a future, and they are working hard to make it fulfilling and proud, for them, for their families, and for the many loved ones they left behind.

There is something powerfully raw and vivid about the refugees, they come out of a world of darkness into the unknown.

The great moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote beautifully of the refugee experience after she fled Nazi Germany to come to America. When I read her famous and powerful essay, I think of these refugee children and their mothers and fathers, many of whom I have been fortunate enough to have met and written about.

Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves,” Arendt wrote in We Refugees. “The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.”

A lot of the refugee children I know could have written this very same essay, just the locations and the murderers and predators would be different. Congratulations to Bishop Maginn High School for meaning what they day, and doing what they mean.

They have become a refuge of last resort for many refugee children in their community, they don’t give speeches about diversity, they are diverse. They are a great hope for the refugee children in a difficult time.

Godspeed to these children many of whom will attend college in America in the fall.

For me, born a Jew turned Quaker, and a lifelong admirer of the real Jesus Christ, this is really what faith is all about. This is what it means to me to be a patriot.

2 Comments

  1. Hello!
    I connect with “we fill the holes and commit small acts of great kindness”. In your blog post today. Also what gave me hope is your message in prior post about doing things small. The world being so complex, and the choice you make to go ahead without the layers of a foundation, auction, or board.

    1. Thanks, the small way also makes it easier for people without a lot of money to be able to contribute…I get a lot of $5 donations, and they are precious to me..

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