A TRIBUTE TO JIM CORBETT: continued
Part II
It was Corbett's intimate familiarity with the Arizona-Mexico
border country that made him invaluable in the early days of what was to become the
Sanctuary movement. Indeed, it made him the movement's founder, as much as anyone. And it
was the religious encounters he had then, while working to help Salvadoran and Guatemalan
refugees crossing the Arizona border to escape from the bloody wars raging there in those
years which brought about another major personal turnaround for him.
Fleeing imprisonment, torture and death in their homelands, the
refugees all too often faced imprisonment, torture and death in the Mexican underworld, or
prisons there and in the U.S.–not to mention the prospect of deportation back into
the hands of bloodthirsty military governments from which they had fled.
As the refugees kept coming, Corbett kept working with them. Soon he
traveled anonymously through Mexico and into Guatemala, tracking hunted exiles. More than
once he narrowly escaped capture by hostile authorities. In these journeys he came to know
not only the victims, but also people from many different churches who were dedicated to
aiding them.
Once he joined a priest in a visit to refugees in a filthy Mexican
prison. The priest introduced Corbett as "Padre Jaime," and explained that the
gringo's non-clerical language and gestures were characteristic of his peculiar order, La
Sociedad de los Amigos. Later the priest even introduced him to an archbishop as un
quákero muy católico–a description which Robert Barclay would likely have approved.
It was among such people of faith within outwardly quite different
sects that Corbett began to sense the presence of something beyond the visible
denominational structures–what he called "the church." And not just any
church, but the "Catholic" church:
"During recent weeks," he wrote in a letter to friends in
mid-1981, "I've been discovering this catholic church that is a people rather than
creed or rite, a living church of many cultures that must be met to be known.
"I've been discovering the Catholic Church, not by studying
Catholicism but by meeting Catholics. Whatever our creedal differences, we meet as one
people by virtue of our allegiance to one kingdom. And my discovery is that the church is
truly catholic, a people of peoples that incorporates not only a multiplicity of nations
and cultures but also divergent beliefs, rites and perspectives...."
Still, one outcome of this discovery, he noted, was that "After
having been Quaker for almost two decades, I decided to seek formal membership in my
meeting, in order to join the church....Until I began discovering the church, I had no
intention of becoming a member, because I thought of denominational membership as
separative rather than unitive.... [But] Just as there's no generic form of marriage that
transcends and precludes marriage to someone in particular, there's no generic form of
membership in the church I'd come to know."
His experience of the Church both resembled and differed from that laid
out in Robert Barclay's classic Quaker theological treatise, The Apology. It is
similar in its indifference to institutional boundaries, and the shift from capital to
small "C". For Barclay, the church
"is nothing other than the society, gathering, or company of those
whom God has called out of the world and the worldly spirit, to walk in his light and life
....There may be members of this catholic church ot only among all the several sorts of
Christians, but also among pagans, Turks [Muslims], and Jews."
Corbett differed from Barclay on one major point, in that for him
the church is not primarily a collection of individuals, but rather "a people of
peoples." It is an organic network of persons working from within traditional
structures that are meaningful to them, with people in other faith groups, for common
purposes, or in a common pilgrimage in response to a common call. Perhaps a useful
metaphor for this might be a patch of wildflowers, variegated in color and form, yet all
leaning parallel under the breath of the same invisible wind.
Corbett doubted that this notion of church can be adequately expressed
intellectually: "This is the kind of meaning one discovers only in meeting those who
share it, much the way a language lives among a people rather than in a dictionary's
afterthoughts."
Many another eminent Friend would have understood what he was driving
at, I think. And as to what or who it is that animates and moves them, what lies behind
the word "God," Corbett paraphrased Job (38:2), "This is where words darken
counsel and all names are blasphemy."
Yet if words are hazardous, we are not without images. The model for
this process also comes from the Bible, in the molding of the heterogenous Hebrew tribes
into the people Israel at Sinai by their response to the divine calling mediated by Moses.
This models the committed community, cutting across lines of culture, denomination and
philosophy, which constitutes "the church," Corbett concluded.
Furthermore, his explorations in the Bible, particularly in the
prophets and the Book of Job, began to make plain to him that the experience and community
of the Church, as reflected there, was one which could "bridge differences of creed,
rite and culture. It even transcends the division between believers and unbelievers."
Unbelievers, he added, like himself.
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