Border Wire and the Corporal Works of Mercy by Jeff Callaway

Border Wire and the Corporal Works of Mercy

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"For I was a stranger, and you took me in: naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me." — Matthew 25:35-36, Douay-Rheims Bible

Lord, I have seen the wire.

Not the wire of crown and thorns You wore into Jerusalem when the crowd screamed for blood and the politicians washed their hands — no, I mean the concertina wire they've coiled along the Rio Grande like a rosary of cruelty, like a fence around Eden that says: you were not born on the right side of grace, therefore you do not deserve it.

I have seen the children in the river. I have seen the women in the desert sun, lips cracked, feet bleeding, arms stretched outward not in surrender but in supplication — the same arms You carved into crucifixes and hung above our altars so we would not forget what mercy looks like in a body.

Tell me, Lord — when did we decide that the Corporal Works of Mercy had a zip code?

Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Visit the sick. Visit the imprisoned. Bury the dead.

Seven commands You did not preface with: unless they crossed the wrong river, unless they speak a language that makes us nervous, unless they were born in the wrong country, unless they look like someone the cable news told you to fear.

The Church teaches it plain — every soul bears the imago Dei, the image of God pressed into flesh before the first breath, before the first border, before the first flag was ever sewn by someone who decided that lines drawn in blood and conquest were sacred enough to let people die on the wrong side of them.

There is no asterisk in Matthew 25. There is no footnote carved into the Beatitudes. There is no fine print that exempts us from mercy when mercy becomes politically inconvenient.

But Lord, I am not just angry at wire.

I am angry at the architects of chaos — the generals and the war merchants, the arms dealers with cufflinks that cost more than a Salvadoran family earns in a decade, the oil barons who torch the Middle East for quarterly profit margins, the presidents and prime ministers of every party who sign the orders and then attend the prayer breakfast and shake the bishop's hand on Sunday and Monday morning light the match that burns another village to the ground and sends another wave of the desperate stumbling toward our wire.

You made them, Lord. You made them and they made the refugees and then they built the fence.

I need You to see that. I need You to hold that truth the way You hold all truth — without flinching, without polling it first, without checking which way the wind blows on the Sunday morning shows.

The same boot that kicks the migrant at the checkpoint is the boot that started the war that displaced him. The same hand that slaps the child in the processing center is the hand that emptied the treasury of his country through a trade deal and an IMF loan and a coup dressed up as liberation.

The elites hoard the wealth of nations like Dives at his table — purple and fine linen, feasting sumptuously every day — while Lazarus bleeds at every border crossing and the dogs of bureaucracy lick his wounds and call it due process.

Destroy these governments, Lord, that manufacture the misery they pretend to manage. Bring low the nations that profit from displacement and then criminalize the displaced. You are still the God who brought down Pharaoh. You are still the God who humbled Nebuchadnezzar. You scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts once and the proud have not grown more humble.

And the people —

God, the people —

who sit in the pews on Sunday and nod along to the Gospel and drive home and log on and cheer for the deportation, cheer for the wire, cheer for the cruelty as if cruelty were a policy platform and not a sin catalogued and condemned in the very Catechism on the shelf they have not cracked open since their confirmation.

I am ashamed for them. I am ashamed for my country and for the Christians in it who traded the Gospel for a bumper sticker and a cable news personality and a political identity that has eaten their theology alive and left nothing behind but fear dressed up as patriotism and rage dressed up as faith.

You cannot love the crucified Christ and applaud the crucifixion of His image in the stranger at your door. These two things cannot occupy the same soul at the same time. Pick one. The Church has already told you which one.

So I come to You the way David came — not clean, not righteous on my own terms, not carrying a press release or a policy paper, but face down in the dirt with nothing to offer but grief and the stubborn conviction that You are still paying attention even when every institution that claims to speak for You has sold its voice to the highest political bidder.

I come to You as a man who was himself found in a ditch of his own making and lifted out by a mercy he did not earn — and that is the only credential I have to speak these words:

do not let us become the priest and the Levite. Do not let us walk to the other side of the road. Do not let the wire stand as our generation's final testimony before the throne of the God who was Himself carried across a border in the dark by parents fleeing a king who wanted Him dead.

He was a refugee. The Son of God was a refugee. You remember that. I wonder sometimes if we do.

Let every government that grows fat on war be shaken until the profit falls out.

Let every elite who hoards the common wealth — who sits atop mountains of idle gold while the widow works three jobs and the migrant buries his child in foreign dirt with no priest and no marker and no one to say his name — let them be stripped of every comfort they purchased with another man's desperation.

Let the corridors of power fill with the sound of every cry they muffled with policy language and committee hearings and carefully worded cruelties delivered in measured tones from behind a podium draped in a flag.

You brought down the mighty from their seat once. The seat has been refilled with the same pride. Bring them down again.

And to every soul on the road tonight — every family sleeping under nothing between the country that failed them and the country that does not want them —

the Church knows your name even when the checkpoint does not.

You carry God's image in that exhausted body, in that frightened child on your hip, in those hands that have done nothing but reach for bread and safety and a roof and a night that does not end in sirens.

You are not a crisis to be managed. You are not an invasion to be repelled. You are a person the Lord of all creation died for and the only crisis here is our failure to act like it.

Lord, build what we have refused to build.

Give shelter where we have given wire. Give dignity where we have given contempt. Give welcome where we have given fear. Give bread where we have given detention forms and fluorescent lights and a floor.

Do not let our laws outlast our mercy. Do not let our flags outlast our faith. Do not let the kingdoms of this world — with their walls and their wire and their quarterly earnings and their generals with their clean hands and their economists who have never been hungry theorizing about the cost of the poor —

do not let them have the last word over a single soul You made.

Every man. Every woman. Every child. Every body that crossed a line we drew in the sand and then called sacred.

They are Yours. The earth is Yours. The fullness thereof is Yours.

And on the last day, when the wire comes down and the nations pass into silence and every border dissolves in the fire of Your return —

there will be only one question asked.

And God of the homeless and the hunted, God of the refugee and the long road, God who was Himself a stranger in Egypt before He was a king above every king —

let our answer be mercy.

Lord, let our answer be mercy.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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