A world made for each other

A Reflection for Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter

Find today’s readings here.

Last week I ended up at the funeral of my beloved college history professor, Mark Fernandez, who was a scholar of Woody Guthrie and American folk music, among other specialties. I no longer remember if I took one class with Mark or two, but I will forever remember that long after I left, he read all of my America articles and, I’m told, even got a copy of my book as he was fighting the brain cancer that would kill him. (I trust if he read it, he had some critiques: He once pulled me into his office and, looking at me through the narrow space between his thick tortoiseshell frames and his low eyebrows, said sternly, “Colleen, you are a good writer.” After a pregnant pause: “You could be a great writer.” He handed me my term paper, covered in red ink. I hope he’s not critiquing this reflection too harshly from the Great Beyond.)

Mark was Catholic in the way a lot of New Orleanians are—in the “it’s just in the water here” way. He went to Catholic school, taught at a Catholic university, but didn’t talk much about religion and definitely didn’t want a funeral Mass, though he got one. Still, each month at the driftwood-paneled Neutral Ground Coffeehouse, Mark would break my heart with one of his folk songs, “Letters to St. Jude.” (Forgive me if I’ve gotten this title wrong; I’ve long since lost the CD he pushed into my hand, and he was too antiestablishment to ever list his stuff on Spotify.)

On the back of his funeral card were the lesser-known last three verses of Woody’s “This Land is Your Land,” verses he taught in his classes.

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

Today in Acts we hear that the early Christians “had everything in common.” They sold their possessions and the proceeds were distributed among the community, according to their need. Their community seems like a kind of utopia—one that didn’t quite collapse, like the many short-lived American Utopias we studied in Mark’s “Idea of America” class, but now looks very different from how it started. That original sharing has evolved into a system of Catholic social teaching that still espouses a “universal destination of goods” and has led to the last two popes, at least, being dismissed by some as Marxists, despite the fundamental differences between the materialist and incarnational-spiritual worldviews.

The thing is, most people aren’t concerned with espousing one or another complete, coherent system. When it comes to seeing people in the relief line, like Woody does, or needy in the early Christian community like the author of Acts does, the common thread is seeing one another as “our” people—people whom we have a responsibility to welcome and share with as our own.

Woody doesn’t say where his freedom highway is leading. He doesn’t say who made this land for you and me. But I imagine that at the end of the road, we’ll find out—maybe Mark’s already found out—what it could look like if we all acted like this world was made for each other.

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