The following remarks were made on Monday, Feb. 16, by my friend and fellow clergymember Chris Bollegar, in downtown Denver, as part of a collective direct action organized by Together Colorado and other immigrant- and human-rights organizations. The purpose of the action was to exhort and challenge Highlands Real Estate Investment Trust, which owns residential apartment buildings across the country (including in Denver), not to continue negotiating a $50 million annual contract with ICE to lease a vacant, 1,200-person-capacity detention center in nearby Hudson, Colo. I was honored to attend and participate in the action.
”Hello. My name is Chris Bollegar, and I have been a resident of Weld County for 23 years and a pastor in the neighboring county of Broomfield for 17 years. First, I want to thank my fellow Weld County clergy and colleagues, Together Colorado, and all of you who have gathered here today. I am intensely aware of the prophetic and pastoral work many of you have been doing personally and vocationally around the areas related to immigrant justice. Thank you. I am honored to join you in this cause. Thank you for your leadership!
As I reflected on our gathering here today, each of us coming from our varied locations in and around the city, I was reminded of the vision that the ancient prophet Isaiah had with respect to his own day, a day in which his people were entangled with the imperial powers, seeking to ward off invasion. Isaiah saw through that to another day. A day in which people would come from all nations to learn the ways of God: He saw a day of releasing the captives and breaking every yoke, of the sharing of bread with the hungry and the welcoming of the unhoused into one’s home, of clothing the naked, and of the forgiveness of debt. It’s a day that reveals the kind of justice that renders the weapons of war and mechanisms of “law enforcement” obsolete. For in this vision, lions lie down with lambs, and the innocent child can play with snakes—for nothing shall harm in this place! As Julian of Norwich stated so beautifully, All shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.
I see something of this today in the gathering of this group. Drawn together by the three-fold cord of faith, hope, and love.
Though there are no doubt many and diverse confessions of faith represented here—a beautiful diversity!—there is one spirit. As James the brother of Jesus said in his letter, works are to faith what the spirit is to the body—that which gives Life! That which animates it to action! And just as the body is dead without the spirit, so is faith without works. And though the bodies (or confessional identities) of our faiths may differ, our gathering here today in solidarity testifies to the common spirit that animates us!
And woven together with this faith that works is a hope that surpasses all the empty optimisms on offer in our culture. In the words of the great Jesuit and friend of Daniel Berrigan, William Lynch defines hope as the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out, that we as human persons can somehow handle and manage internal and external reality…in its most general terms, [hope is] a sense of the possible. He goes on to identify three essential characteristics of the life of hope: what we hope for we do not yet have or see; it may be difficult; but we can have and see that for which we hope—it is possible! God’s will CAN be done on earth as it is in heaven!
And the final thread that binds this cord in unbreakable union is love. This love, much like the popular reality TV show is blind. Blind to self-interest, self-pursuit, and self-promotion. This love blinds by the bright light of the common good—the common good that orders our more personal and individual goods. This is the love that calls us, like it did the three disciples taken to the top of the mountain to see Jesus transfigured there, to abandon our efforts of building dwellings so as to secure our own personal blessings and spiritual ecstasies, and to descend the mountain back into the world of demons and dark powers to be salt and light.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for your spirited faith. Thank you for your embrace of the possibility of a new world in which justice and peace find their home. Thank you for your love that brings you shoulder to shoulder with your neighbor—treating them as yourself. May God bless you and keep you. And may God bless and keep this cause alive in our hearts. Amen.”
