It is what it is.
Those words have been ringing in my head this week since reading a story from the Religion News Service regarding a letter sent to the Department of Homeland Security. The letter alleges that immigrants—Muslim immigrants—being detained at a privately run center in Florida have been given a choice of eating either expired halal food or pork, which is forbidden for them.
The words above came, the letter alleges, from a chaplain at the center. When approached by the detainees for their help, the chaplain told them that “It is what it is.”
These are the same words the President of this country used earlier this month in an interview. When asked about the over one-thousand people a day that were dying in the U.S., the President responded, “It is what it is.”
I want so badly to be angry at those words. I want to write about how antithetical this statement is to a life lived in relationship to Jesus Christ. But, draft after draft, I reach a point where I stop, convicted.
The truth is, I know what lies behind these words. It is a sense that things cannot get any better. It is the feeling that there is nothing I can do that would matter. Any action is just a drop of water disappearing into a deep, dark ocean. It is despair.
I have spent the past few days wanting to be angry that a chaplain—a minister in the dark places—would give voice to this hopelessness. But, I find myself wondering if they did because that is how that person feels. Maybe they have tried to change things: argued for better treatment, advocated for better food, attempted to have these people’s faith respected. And, again and again, they have been met with a world that refuses to change, to be transformed.
I understand. With every day’s bad news about the pandemic, the inequities, the environment I feel as though this world doesn’t want to change. And nothing I do makes any difference.
When asked about the end of all things, Jesus told three different stories. In the third one, he told about when people would stand before him and many would be surprised when they were told how by feeding the hungry, giving drink to those who thirst, they were serving Christ.
Such small things and for years and years I have seen this story as a call to tend to those around me as if they were Jesus himself. But I wonder if I have missed another meaning, something that dares to contradict the idea that anything “is what it is.”
Each act that Jesus describes is small: feeding, visiting, clothing. They touch only one person. But that one is enough to change what is. It’s enough to transform one portion of Creation into what God Dreams for it to be.
With that action, it is what it will be.