The Window Cleaners

They arrived on the dot of eight. A group of young Mexicans, polite and high-spirited, were organised by their boss to clean the windows and gutters. Two hours later the house was filled with unfiltered light and the energy of their good work. In my book called ‘Good Work’, I described it as whatever kind of work brings out the best in the worker and provides real benefits for others.[1]

As is usual in this country the temporary employer does not ask to see the workers’ immigration papers although five percent of all workers lack them. Despite the slanders levelled at them by those pledged to deport all thirteen million of them, undocumented households paid $76 billion in taxes last year. The sudden loss of this strong labour force is estimated at reducing GDP by four to six percent.[2] The darkly comic Californian film ‘A Day Without a Mexican’ expresses a widely-held consensus on the need and value of their presence here The sheer financial cost of mass deportation is.. a lot. The human atrocity is incalculable.

Maybe the politicians who have pledged this inhuman and impractical scheme are, like most people I have spoken with about it, highly sceptical that it could ever happen on the scale promised. But on the darker side of the psyche, something in us collectively relishes giving vent to extreme negativity as with the anti-semitic propaganda in Nazi Germany, however false, however out of touch with reality it is, however many conspiracy theories it needs to conceal its falsehood. The sense of the unreal seeping into our world today is intensifying. It encroaches on the real world just as Russian forces encroach on Ukraine. It’s really unreal.

Diadochus of Photiki was a 5th century Greek mystical teacher whose insight into the origin of evil is the most concise and accurate I know. ‘Evil does not exist by nature, nor is any person naturally evil, for God made nothing that was not good. When in the desire of his heart someone conceives and gives form to what in reality has no existence, then what he desires begins to exist.’ In other words, fantasies can become real-life monsters. The remedy Diadochus proposes is as clear as the diagnosis: ‘We should therefore turn our attention away from the inclination to evil and concentrate it on the remembrance of God; for good, which exists by nature, is more powerful than our inclination to evil. The one has existence while the other has not, except when we give it existence through our actions’.[3] Be wary of what you promise to win votes as you may find yourself doing it. Step by step, the force of illusion increases and the potential for evil takes form.

Concentrate on the remembrance of God. Not the God we claim for our own dark side. But simply God, the real, the I AM, the all-merciful and compassionate.

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[1] Good Work, Laurence Freeman, Medio Media, 2021

[2] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/

[3] Diadochus of Photiki, On Spiritual Discernment and Discrimination1,One Hundred Texts, Philokalia, Vol 1, ed Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, Faber and Faber, 1977