Wednesday October 22, 2008
The faceless ones
Highway 401, running across the north of Toronto, is probably Canada\’s busiest highway. It\’s certainly the widest. In places, 16 lanes. Plus merge lanes for exit and entry.
In the infinite wisdom of engineers somewhere, the eight lanes in each direction have been split into two bands, each four lanes wide – four Express lanes, four Collector lanes.
Someone once asked a radio show host why they were called “Collector” lanes. He replied that “collector” was a lot shorter than “get on\’em and get off\’em lanes.”
But that\’s a valid description of their purpose. With a few exceptions where major highways intersect, if you want to get off Highway 401 you have to transfer from the Express lanes into the Collector lanes before you can reach an exit ramp.
So imagine my frustration, one evening, driving home from a wearying and inconclusive meeting, to find that my transfer point had been barricaded for road repairs. I couldn\’t get off the Express lanes! I had to drive ten miles further down the highway to find a place where I could get off and wriggle back through grid-locked city traffic.
“You\’re late,” Joan commiserated when I finally got home.
“They blocked off the Connector lanes,” I raged.
“Who\’s \’they\’?” Joan asked.
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Mary Jo Leddy, writing in Northern Lights, a recently published anthology of contemporary Christian writing, comments that in some medieval paintings, the devil “is depicted as the faceless one.”
We don\’t often talk about “the devil” any more. Perhaps we\’ve rationalized him/her out of existence. Instead, we talk about an anonymous, uncaring, faceless “they” – usually distant bureaucrats – who have done something to “us.”
For the last 18 years, Mary Jo has worked with refugees at Toronto\’s Romero House. She helps desperate people navigate through the minefields of the immigration process.
Sometimes the process grinds through successfully. Other times, a letter decrees, “You have not been determined to be a legitimate Convention Refugee.” Case closed.
The letter comes from a bureaucrat who has never come face-to-face with the claimant, who knows this person only as a file filled with paper. In this situation, Mary Jo writes, “It is all too easy to demonize people who are supposedly in charge of a system that churns out such cruelty. It\’s tempting to caricature the struggle as \’us\’ against \’them\’…”
Much of Mary Jo\’s work attempts to crack open that caricature – to put faces on the claimants, and on the administrators who sign the papers.
“In the systems that hold the power of life and death over refugees,” Mary Jo continues, “it often seems that nobody is responsible. Some refugees who arrive in Canada learn what happens when nobody is responsible. Nobody can kill you – just as anybody or somebody could…”
Maybe those medieval artists were right. Whether it\’s a personified devil, or a distant bureaucrat, or a trembling applicant for refugee status, the problem is facelessness.
Face to face, most humans prefer to be compassionate. We need to find ways to reduce faceless encounters.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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