We feasted St. John the Apostle and Evangelist first with Morning Prayer that Robin led and then with a well-attended breakfast. A few of the guys were waiting in and around the parish hall even before I got over there.
Tony has been joining us just about every morning, and he’s very much at ease in this environment. A former Roman Catholic (can you ever really be “former” Catholic?) he spent years in Washington and Baltimore working with the poor, living in a monastic community and discerning a call to become a Franciscan. He’s got a great spirit and its fun having him around.
We went through a pot and a half of coffee right away (which always makes me happy for some reason). As we all settled into our raisin bran, grits-chicken-cheese-egg casserole thing or regular scrambled eggs, Glenn, who lives in a tent nearby and begs at the freeway exit ramp, asked me if I watched any good football yesterday. “Nope, did anything interesting happen?” “I dunno,” he replied, “my TV in the woods doesn’t work so well.”
Skeet proceeded as usual to construct his scrambled egg sandwich. I’ve seen him eat two of those things plus cereal. We have this brand new toaster that actually beeps when the toast is done like a washing machine or something. It’s a good idea except that nobody ever realizes what the noise is until the toast is cold. Toasters popping are supposed to sound like “ching ching”, someone commented, not like a truck backing up. When Skeet realized that Sammie’s chin wasn’t perched on his lap looking cute in the hopes of a handout he looked around asking “Where’s my girl? You aren’t mad at me is you?”
Monday, December 28, 2009
Breakfast: Feast of St. John
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Criticism of Churches Feeding the Homeless
Here's an interesting piece of coverage from CNN.com. If we're not careful, we'll make the news...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Rome & Canterbury in Recent Economic News
Coincidentally, both His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Rowan Williams made speeches last Monday (November 16, 2009) regarding economics and public policy. The former addressed the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization during the World Summit on Food Security and the latter spoke to the Trades Union Congress at their economics conference in London. After reading the text of the Pope's speech here and the Archbishop of Canterbury's keynote address here, I wonder what we, the de pauperum collective, think of the two speeches, their similarities and divergences, and the theology/theologies of economics they reflect. Any and all insights, comments, and rightfully chastened critiques are welcome. At the very least, in these dark and troubling days of savage global capitalism the path(s) that these two leading lights of today's Church catholic are trying to illumine would seem to require our sober and prayerful attention. Happy reading!
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Learning From Our Sisters
PBS recently ran a story on monasticism, taking the communal life and practices of the (Benedictine) sisters of Mount St. Scholastica as the centerpiece. Given our collective interests and concerns here at de pauperum, I thought it might be helpful to pass the article on, sisters such as these clearly serving both as examples and as reminders of the kind of cruciform holiness for which we stutteringly strive in our extra-monastic context. Thank God for the witness of religious. For the link to the original story, click here.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Dean Sam Wells: Open for questions
Sam Wells, Dean of Duke Chapel, will be interviewed live on Duke's website (at http://www.ustream.tv/DukeUniversity) on Friday, October 23 during the lunch hour (noon-1pm) concerning his role at Duke and in Durham. Viewers can email/tweet/facebook questions into the interview in real time. So, if you have questions for Sam, he'll be a captive audience.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
MacIntyrian Personalism; or Another Reason Macy Equals Concrete
In Dependent Rational Animals Alasdair MacIntyre gives an Aristotelian account of human development. It has often struck me that even those of us who seek to understand ourselves and others in the church’s terms nevertheless have no choice but to rely on the received accounts of the same in what are basically post-Freudian terms. The possibility therefore of a sort of Thomist psychoanalysis is intriguing. But more exciting still is the fact that MacIntyre’s account helps us understand what we are doing with the Guys by implying that a personalist ethics is the condition of the possibility of pursuit of the good. In other words, he links, in a way that modern psychology does not, the capacity of the human being for virtue with her upbringing and experiences.
MacIntyre notes that as the child first develops the first goods it pursues are entirely in terms of the satisfaction of its own immediate sensual desires for which it is entirely dependent upon its parents. A key aspect of the moral development of the child is to come to choose and eventually desire things that are not the simple satisfaction of their infantile passions. In other words, they have to come to reason that there is some good that is to be pursued and chosen because it is better than the good of the satisfaction of its elementary desires. So first the child learns that pleasing one’s parents and not simply crying is to be chosen in order to get food or praise. From this intermediate stage the parents will have to teach the child not to act so to please them but to act for what is truly better. Once the child has become sufficiently detached from both her own desires and the influence of others he becomes slowly for the first time a mature practical reasoner. The qualities that are cultivated in this transformation of desire, motivation and action are called virtues, and so a lack of virtue simply names the reason that one fails to attain what is good and best for them (see pp.83-9).
But what is needed in the first place for any such development to take place is unconditional acceptance in a situation of trust and security. This is usually provided by the parents, who teach the child that their commitment to him is not threatened by the child’s failures or by circumstance such as illness or retardation. In such an atmosphere the child is free to playfully test his experience and explore his world, knowledge of which is necessary for practical reasoning. The child is also free to take his first actions toward distancing herself from her desires and choosing a higher good for its own sake and so form the virtues. Absent such a situation of “trust based on experience” (85), however, the process will be significantly stunted. The child may become isolated from both parents and others, since the former does not provide support and the latter is a threat.
As a result, of course, the child is unable to develop the virtues necessary to judge and attain the good. He will remain focused on his own immediate desires and will develop the habit of fighting back against any who might threaten them. An inability to deal with conflict may result, since conflict is not conceived as disagreement over and reasoning about the good but as protection of the vulnerable self. Because this person has not developed practical reasoning and its attendant virtues which allow him to practice the good in a variety of situations he will often resort to either strident rule following or anti-nomianism. Both result from the inability to see or do the good in the contingent.
This account, while most influential in childhood, is also applicable across a lifetime. In other words, people need other people who love them and who refuse to leave them in order to become good.
While a catholic Christian account of such development would need to be filled out in several directions, MacIntyre's account sheds considerable light on what we have been drawn into at St. Joseph’s. Living on the street, or even as semi-homeless can be and more often than not is a dangerous, isolating experience. Faced with such insecurity, it is no wonder the satisfaction of elementary desires for comfort are pursued by binge drinking, sex and drugs. It is no wonder violence is common. But equally it is unsurprising that there continues to be a presence on the Hill, not just of individuals, but of a group of friends, at least one of whom refuses to leave the others alone. Many of these have lived their entire lives, from childhood, and continue to live, with inadequate resources of trust that would allow us to expect them to behave differently than they do.
So undeniably there is a sense in which our job is to be like parents. But this is far from meaning that we must be judgmental and strict and exacting. Being like parents does not mean being paternalistic. Like good parents, it means that we have to take what God has given us and love it and work with it at all costs and because that is our person. Like good parents, it means that we love these unconditionally, and at whatever cost to us. We simply are not free to behave otherwise, and it would be nonsensical to what limit we should set on the goods we give to our children. In this mode, being like parents simply means providing that context of unconditional love that is necessary for the development of the virtues and the attainment of the good life. Being parents, in other words, looks a lot like being friends. This is something that institutions, however compassionate, cannot provide.
MacIntyre’s account, that is, implies a sort of personalism by pointing to the fact that the development of virtuous people requires the same loving relationships that parents try to provide for their children. This is another reason why it does not make sense to ask if sending the homeless guys to Urban Ministries is not more effective for them and for as a use of our money. We should thank God for Urban Ministries and the necessary services that they provide. But, on this account, institutional solutions that treat homelessness or alcoholism or drug addiction by the imposition of external controls such as demanding sobriety before giving a bed or a meal are in a serious way putting the cart before the horse and in many instances expecting the impossible. It is no wonder that most of our Guys say they simply cannot go there.
The only “treatment program” that is going to “work” in other words, is not a treatment program at all. It is to enter into real friendships. And if this is the goal and if friendship becomes a reality, then the relationship by definition loses its nature as one person trying to “fix” another. Rather, we discover that precisely in treating each other as an end rather than a means, and by making each others' goods are own (the definition of friendship), we develop the virtues necessary to say that we are living well.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
When Not Caring For the Poor or Reading High-Brow Theology...
... you might find my compatriots attempting to get closer to God through various additional means as well. The pursuit of holiness never ends.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A Parent’s Reflection on Welcoming the Stranger - or - Macy Equals Concrete
Those who follow this blog with any regularity might have noticed that it has been awhile since I have posted anything of substance in contribution to the discussions we have here (of course, it is surely debatable that anything substantive has made the trip from my PC to cyberspace via de pauperum). Similarly, those whose lives are variously shaped by the rhythms and flow of the Daily Office community at St. Joseph’s may likewise have become cognizant of my recent absence there as well or, at least, the irregularity of my current, very limited participation. And while I might in part attribute my diminished involvement in both communities to the weeks spent in travel over the last few months, the real culprit for my lack of presence is probably best identified as my newborn daughter, Macy (with whom my wife and I were blessed mid-June of this year). For since my wife has newly returned to her job as a full-time elementary school teacher, and given that I am presently in a state of academic limbo this year with respect to my pursuit of a Ph.D., I have had the great privilege of having my time commandeered by both our children – but especially Macy – as I don the cap of the stay-at-home dad. And though I would have most likely been able to maintain more consistent involvement with de pauperum and St. Joseph’s if I were staying at home with my 4 year-old son alone, it is the mysterious gift that is our daughter which makes such fuller participation virtually impossible.
I must admit, however, that Macy’s (in concert with her brother’s) demands on my time are often hard for me to recognize as the gift that they are. Indeed, given the number of hours I was able to spend both in communal prayer and in being with “the guys” at St. Joseph’s last year, the adjustment to a much more muted involvement has been fairly difficult for me. I miss getting to see and pray with JR and Colin twice a day. I miss the adventures that always seemed to come with eating breakfast with “the guys” on the hill. I often feel like an outsider and am envious when I here my compatriots sharing stories or making references to events at St. Joe’s about which I now know little to nothing. In fact, I frequently feel guilty and perhaps even judged for my seeming abandonment of the communal life at St. Joseph’s in exchange for the demands of a more active domestic life.
What I am struggling to learn, however, is that the charge to pursue hospitality with respect to one’s children – who, let’s face it, are as demanding, trying and needy a bunch as any – is no less noble a charge, no less important a mission, no less necessary a calling for those so located as is the call to care for the poor and needy outside the shared walls of our family’s apartment. As our friend and teacher, Stanley Hauerwas, has often stated, the role of parent is very much one in which one is presented with the need to welcome in the stranger who comes in the form of children (cf. Stanley Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching. [Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009], 126.). But, of course, it doesn’t provide nearly as gratifying or proud a feeling for someone to acknowledge my role in the pursuance of holiness with respect to the ecclesia domestica as it is for my back to be patted (if even by myself) for time spent sharing meals with the homeless or in a quasi-monastic prayer life. It’s not just that trying to be a good dad isn’t nearly as sexy as spending time with the poor; it’s that the former often feels as if it were a lesser calling or an excuse to avoid the responsibilities of the latter. I am reminded of a bit from comedian, Chris Rock (edited, with faux apologies to Stanley, for the sake of our wider readership):“You know the worst thing about [some people]? [Some people] always want credit for some @#*% they supposed to do. [Some people] will brag about some @#*% a normal man just does. [They] will say some @#*% like, "I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb @#*$%! What kind of ignorant @#*% is that? "I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having @#*$%!” (Chris Rock, Bring the Pain, [HBO, 1996])
Surely, as the joke attempts to highlight, the meeting of one’s parental responsibilities is something that is simply expected of the parent, requiring no at-a-boys, recognition, or public expressions of honor for its ongoing pursuit. Caring for the needs of one’s children is just what one is “supposed to” do and, thus, tempts one into thinking it is less worthy an enterprise or allocation of one’s time than is feeding the poor in the quest for holiness. What I am learning from the experience, however, is that my responsibilities and role in the capacity of parent is ultimately no different a job than were/are my attempts to care for “the guys” on the hill. Indeed, I am discovering that sharing meals with the homeless and changing the diapers of one’s newborn daughter are, in fact, two species of the same genus, namely, the cruciform reception and serving of “the other” as “self” in charity. The recognition of this means both that I should feel no sense of shame for my forced time away from our homeless friends at St. Joseph’s and that those (especially at St. Joseph’s) not so familially blessed have as weighty – indeed, as equal! – a responsibility to care for “the guys” as I do as a parent in caring for my kids.
Further still, it means that no demarcating line can be claimed to exist between me and my need to care for my children, on the one hand, and the communicated at St. Joe’s and their/my need to care for the poor on the hill, on the other. Said differently, the privileged responsibility to care for either group cannot be divided up by any absolute boundaries. The biological structures of families and the social spaces in which we all variously move may suggest certain functional roles with respect to primacy regarding who cares for whom (e.g., it makes more sense for Megan and I, as Macy’s parents, to be the primary persons assigned to her care), but the call to welcome the stranger that both Macy and “the guys” comprise is universal to the Christian Church and her members. When it comes to the disciple’s call to follow Jesus in welcoming the stranger, Macy and Concrete are the same.
In short, embarrassingly obvious as it sounds to me now, I have no reason to feel my charge as a parent is less noble a devotion of my time than is, say, filling a prescription for a homeless friend; and I have every reason to believe that the failure to meet our responsibilities in welcoming the stranger, however said responsibilities are distributed sapientally within the Body, is a reprehensible and destructive denial of virtue and the good (e.g., the failure of any of us at St. Joe’s to meet the needs of the strangers daily presented to us in whatever form is as disgusting and roundly debilitating a sin as is parental abdication or the abuse that is fraternal negligence).
Perhaps my recent arrival at these insights is late in coming. And I wouldn’t argue with the charge that they are more than a little self-serving or are a demonstration of my moral obtuseness. I simply offer them in penitence as a reflection of my need for progression in the virtues, an exhibit of my selfishness and need for accountability. And I offer them in hopes that we might all do a better job in spurring each other on in good works, however the opportunities present themselves.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Review of Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of Saint Benedict
[I had to write this for class, but figured discussing monasticism is always good.]
A book like Esther de Waal’s Seeking God is difficult to summarize precisely because it is not so much an argument as an introduction to the Rule of Saint Benedict and Benedictine practice. If deWaal does have a thesis she is pressing it is to show through a tour of the Rule that it and the monastic life have many things to say to and many critiques to level against the insanity of life in a modern industrial state. So I will take a bit of liberty with my assignment and, instead of racing through an inadequate summary, offer in turn a tour of this little book with the aim of providing both a view of the gist of her project and a modest assessment thereof.
The book is often brilliant and even prophetic in its interpretation to us of the (sometimes) strange life of the monastery. At these times de Waal’s strength is an appreciation of the way that we have lost the ability to make monkish virtues intelligible in a culture that will tolerate just about anything but the austere and one-minded. In this sense she cracks open to view the deep way that St. Benedict’s Rule holds forth a remedy for which many Christians today are longing, but for which they have been taught only to reach for ever more and more when what they really needed was less and less. Thus she makes a necessary first step to beginning to “translate” the language of this strange old world of stability, conversion, obedience, austerity, denial, humility, silence, virtue and vice for a world that speaks only in terms of impulsiveness, authenticity, self-determination, satisfaction, comfort, self-esteem, entertainment, rules and requirements.
De Waal is perhaps at her best in her chapter on the Benedictine vow of stability. This may not be surprising since such a vow goes to the heart of a fundamental characteristic of the cloister, and that is its commitment to place. In a world where people shop around for the city in which they want to live, not to mention the church where they want to worship God, it is no wonder that Christians are uncommitted to their communities in the face of disagreement or difficulty (to say nothing of the parish-system). But such a commitment to place and people is the presumption of so much that to us seems un-realistic about the Gospel. Why is it so important to forgive my neighbor and to deal with it quickly when I don’t know her very well, only see her once a week and at any rate can always go to the church down the road? DeWaal’s answer is that Benedict says very simply that this not the way God wants us to live. The Rule shows that “monastic stability means accepting this particular community, this place and these people, this and no other, as the way to God” (57, my italics). In other words, part of where we have to get to in the church is being able to say “I’m not going anywhere. You can hurt me, I can hurt you. We can laugh and cry, forgive, yell, hope, live and die, even dislike each other, but we will do this together, loving each other, and we’ll both be here for it all.” We have to say that “there is no need to seek God elsewhere since, if I can’t find God here, I shan’t find him anywhere” (62).
Part of being in one place is a willingness to be one of the flock, and this is in fact essential for meeting God. Thus deWall tells us that at one point Henri Nouwen “knew that he wanted to be different, to attract attention, to do something special, to make some new contribution. Yet the monastic situation was calling him to be same, and more of the same. Only after we have given up the desire to be different and admit that we deserve no special attention is there space to encounter God” (61). What she so incisively has put her finger on is Benedict’s proscription of our contemporary obsession with cultivating personal identity. However valuable such cultivation may be in its place, says the Rule, the vow of stability means that it will always be defined, and decisively so, in relation to this place and these people.
And so, only in relation to stability, to this place and these people, and only as I am a member of them and not something over and against them, does it really makes Christian sense to talk of change. Thus deWaal places her chapter on the vow of conversatio morum directly after that on stability. She gives the vow a biting characterization as “a recognition of God’s unpredictability, which confronts our own love of coziness or safety. It means that we have to live provisionally, ready to respond to whatever and however that might appear. There is no security here, no clinging to past certainties. Rather we must expect to see our chosen idols successively broken” (70). This, I take it, is the vow of saying “be it unto me according to they word” when faced with the prospect of the total reconfiguration of our plans for our selves, our lives, our careers, and what is often harder: our days, our afternoons, our lunch breaks.
There are some things to quibble about in the book.
The first worry is about the status of monasticism in the divine economy. Is it a more faithful life or just a different one? At times deWaal seems to speak of what is “realistic” to expect, but from what vantage does she make this judgment? (I almost get the impression the middle-class English life is what is really “reasonable.”) And she even appears to imply here and there that it would be bad for all Christians to live like this. But this does not deal with the (at least implicit) claim of something like the Rule itself that it holds out a better and higher way to live than the ordinary parish Christian. This is, after all, why the first monks wandered off into the desert. Such a claim is especially unpopular today in the face what Charles Taylor has famously called “affirmation of ordinary life.” Part and parcel of such a phenomenon is in fact the rejection (at first mostly by the reformers) of the monkish higher vocation and the here is often implied a negative evaluation of “heroism” in general. The latter concern is certainly shared by deWaal, as she associates it variously with unsustainability of lifestyle and guilt (105) and even a sort of Pelagian tendency (in terms what God “demands”; ibid). Rather, the Rule “is mundane...day-to-day living that revolves around Christ” (30-1), and we find in it “the stark reality of the humdrum” (99).
In one sense of course this is just a good reading of the Rule, and it attests to a (I suspect) relatively new affiliation of monasticism and ordinary life: what we can call the heroism of the ordinary (prime example is someone like St. Teresa of Lisieux). But here we must be cautious because it is all too tempting to conflate our humdrum and Benedict’s and say that we can all be monks in or out of the monastery. DeWaal is by turns on guard against this move (“[The Rule] will not be impossibly tough but it will without doubt be tough...there is humanity here but there is nothing tepid…there can be no doubt about the rigorous demands on those who enter the monastic life” (34, 41 )), but it is her lack of a definitive evaluation of the sanctity of the religious compared to the lay that leaves open the domestication of the radicalism of Benedict’s call to us all.
This is closely related to a second point that involves de Waal’s hermeneutical appropriation of the Rule for the laity. She says that “the Rule of St. Benedict is neither rule book nor code; it points a way” (30). Again, one of the things I worry about in this sort of “metaphorical” reading of the Rule is that it can lose its convicting force for us. It is of course completely valid to look to the Rule for Benedict’s wisdom and for the Gospel therein; but the temptation is that once we have decided that we are not going to follow the rule literally, we forget that Benedict’s implicit claim is that it takes something like this rule to live faithfully. The function of a Christian Rule of life is to say concretely and literally how one is going act out the Gospel (so deWaal: “The Rule is simply an aid for us to live by the Scriptures” (32)), however literally or metaphorically we take the latter’s various claims. But to make then a Rule itself something further to be interpreted not as a code but by the way it points, is to risk sliding into an ever-deferred response to the Gospel. The Rule tells us to do things that have their value in the doing, not in the “principle’ behind them. I am skeptical of being able to abstract such principles from the Rule’s concrete prescriptions. Indeed the latter are merely instrumental to the end of virtue and salvation, but we must not be too quick to think that we can find other things to do the same trick. Fasting is indeed merely a means to temperance, but one who only fasts metaphorically risks having no temperance at all.
In this regard we can take her treatment of poverty in her chapter on “material things.” She says that for Benedictines “[n]either poverty nor affluence are desirable” (100). DeWaal in this chapter unfortunately gives the impression of wanting to show from the Rule why poverty is not necessary for Christian faithfulness. In this she is of course going to have issues with most other forms of religious life (including some Benedictines!). Her dismissal of St. Francis betrays her otherwise prophetic voice: “St. Benedict equips his monk with all that is needed for a decent standard of living….Poverty is not undertaken as one of the Benedictine vows, and there is nothing here of the ideal of absolute poverty as the friars present it. Instead we find an attitude toward possessions which speaks more realistically to many of us as we try to face of the question of destitution and poverty in the world today. For most of us the Franciscan way is not a practicable starting point.” But she is not playing altogether fairly here. She has said already that poverty is not desirable, not that it is not a practicable starting point. The latter is entirely understandable. But to deny that poverty (not destitution) in its various guises is part of what it means to follow Christ appears to me to be too blatant a denial of the Scriptures, the tradition, and broadly the monasticism which she elsewhere so elegantly affirms. As with fasting so with poverty: it is but a means to the goal is indeed spiritual poverty, but those who have only spiritual poverty risk having no poverty at all.
Finally, there is an individualism in this book that needs to be corrected. DeWaal at one point says that the rule of Benedict seeks to answer the question of how “we grow and fulfill our true selves” (29), which is hardly a question that Benedict could even have fathomed (not least because there is no word in his Latin that corresponds to the grammar of our word “self”). The Rule, moreover, is the “basis on which each individual is to grow and develop” (31). This means, apparently, that Benedict “does not confuse ends and means. The good order and stability of the community is the means: the end is that the individual must have space and time to enter into dialogue with God.” She says again that “the community exists for the sake of the individual, and not visa-versa” (116).
My claim would be that this is exactly the opposite of the truth the Gospel holds out for us, and the opposite of the ethical priorities the ancient world held out as a whole. Aristotle’s polis, Cicero’s Res Publica, St. Paul’s soma Christou, and Augustine’s Civitas Dei was the end about which all activity and all virtue was to be ordered. This was Benedict’s theology, and this was Benedict’s world. When personal development becomes an end in itself that is not ordered to a divine end beyond oneself then it becomes self-absorbed and paralyzing. It is only when the ultimate end of the beautific vision is intended through (and only through!) the proximate end of the edification of the church, and this by losing one “self” in service and giving that the nature of the person as created (Augustine’s natura) is gracefully completed.
This does not mean of course that we are allowed then to treat people as means in a sort of utilitarian calculus. But the path between such a thing and individualism is exactly the sort of “Christian personalism” that the Rule actually spells out: each person is Christ (especially the stranger) (120). DeWaal herself clearly realizes this, even if she does not integrate it into a holistic picture of the Rule: “St. Benedict would probably have appreciated Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s aphorism ‘He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community’. So he begins with the brethren, with people as people, and there is no distinction of persons” (139). Only when community itself, in the abstract, becomes the focus with principles like “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” do people start to be treated as means instead of ends. I think de Waal would agree that such a radical mysticism of the other as Christ is close to the heart of Benedict’s vision. Without it, there is little left of enduring value. But with it, a door opens to a strange but wonder-filled new world which, far from being rose-colored, slowly but surely, teaches us to see ourselves and others the way we really are.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Our Story: St. Joseph's Hospitality
This is one version of a story of getting to know a group of homeless men at St. Joseph's Episcopal Church in Durham, NC.
It all starts with prayer. In 2006, I came to Duke University for doctoral studies in theology, and decided to start praying Morning and Evening Prayer at St. Joseph’s with whomever I could get to come. We were a tiny little struggling church, so this seemed prudent. For a while no one showed up, except occasionally my wife Lisa. After a while an Independent Catholic priest named Chris started attending here and there. Then JR Rigby came by for EP one day, and he came back in the morning, and then in the evening, and so on, until I expected him. (JR is a Ph.D. student in engineering at Duke). We quickly became friends,
praying the Office and chatting together consistently throughout the week. Since then we’ve established several other regular and semi-regular attendees, the majority of whom are members of other Episcopal parishes in the area.
Fairly quickly we discovered that, since we were around the church a lot, we were slowly getting to know a group of homeless men taking refuge on the church grounds (which we found out they called “the Hill”). This was and is a semi-permanent community of homeless men (that we creatively named “the Guys”), the core of which consists of about five guys in addition to a rotating squad of about a 12-15 people, any number of which may be found in the group on a given day. From time to time the police would pay our friends a visit and we’d have to repeat in other words our priest Mother Rhonda’s dictum that as long as she was the head of our church the poor would be as welcome as anyone else. She had to tell the police more than once that they were not welcome to run the Guys off the church grounds.
So at first JR and I would just stop by the Hill to chat for a few minutes while walking to and from the church for prayer. Eventually we decided that those conversations in passing were not really making us into a community, the goal to which we figured the Gospel called us. Rather, we were just a couple of Duke students that these folks happened to know better than your average middle-class fellows. So, we decided to eat breakfast at the church, after Morning Prayer, five days a week. Nothing special. Cereal. Sometimes bacon and eggs. We invited anyone around to join us. Then a couple of ladies at Blacknall Presbyterian said they wanted to do something for the homeless but they didn’t know what. They offered to make us a breakfast casserole each week. Whether the Guys showed up or not, we'd be there eating breakfast. Some slept through it, some came to the table, some preferred a glass of juice or the rest of last night’s beer. Sometimes they would even come to prayer. It didn’t matter. We just made friends.
And so we did things that friends would do. We’ve bought bus tickets for guys passing through, and we have intervened when a young homeless woman fell into the company of our friends. We sometimes buy cigarettes for our friend called Concrete and (through him) for other guys (he’s scrupulously communistic), as well as food, clothes, blankets, and other odds and ends. We’ve helped them apply for social services or get into rehab programs. We've visited them in the hospital, and tried to track them down in jail. On the other hand, we've been lied to, cheated, scammed, cursed, and made fun of. We’ve seen drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, violence, hatred, self-destruction, and despair.
This basic relationship with the Guys, trying to be a community, continues and evolves to this day. Saint Joseph’s body itself, including its clergy and vestry, has over the last three years labored long and hard at its response to the Guys and at knowing how exactly they fit into the mission of the church.
About a year or so after starting the breakfast fellowship, I started asking Lisa if she would ever be comfortable letting someone like Concrete (“Crete” for short) sleep in our spare room. This was especially pressing in the winter when it was cold. These were, in some way, our friends after all. Her initial reaction was that she’d have to work on it. So she too spent some time hanging out in the parking lot, coming to breakfast, with the goal of making friends. At the same time JR finally cajoled his friend Adam (also a graduate student in theology) into coming to the Office and breakfast. Sucked in by holy pestering, he rather quickly found his place on the Hill. Adam’s wife Megan and son Kale (3y/o), and JR’s wife Hannah, have also become regular faces. One day at breakfast Kale demanded, rather frustrated, “Where is Mr. Concrete?!”
This man who calls himself Concrete deserves comment. His constant presence and notable virtue meant that over time we became quite close to him. This man sounds like a lunatic, has been involuntarily committed to an insane asylum at least twice, but might just be the closest thing to a prophet that any of us will ever see. It takes a while of listening to him and learning his language to realize that he is far from crazy, quite cogent, and has a radical vision of people’s hearts and the forces of evil that enslave them. After a while he’d sleep most nights in the back seat of my car. If JR, Adam or I missed a day or two from saying the Office, he would walk to our houses to visit and check on us. He’d drop in for dinner, or join us at Adam’s pad for a basketball game and a beer. Slowly, very slowly, Lisa and I decided that we could offer him our spare room. Then, even more slowly, he began showing signs of taking us up on our offer. He’d come in about 9pm and leave about 7am. His room was always scrupulously clean and he is the most polite and considerate person in our house by far.
Then one night our landlords saw Crete in our apartment. They emailed and said that while its fine for him to sleep in the car, there is absolutely no way that he could be allowed in the apartment. They cited him as a safety hazard. This forced Lisa and I to move out in order to live in a place where Crete was welcome. So we rented a bigger house in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham (where its cheaper). There’s plenty of space, an extra bathroom, a gigantic kitchen, and a fenced yard for our dog Samantha. Crete has his own room that is of course the cleanest in the house. Many of us celebrated the move with a house blessing and Eucharist.
Barely a week after moving, I walked back to the Hill from the church to find another of our closer homeless friends, William, stumbling back towards the Parish Hall holding his face. He’d been punched and knocked out. So after a hospital visit, JR dropped him off and my place to recover for a couple of days. Will and Crete got along very well together and so eventually we decided to put another bed in a spare room for him. Having two guys is actually somewhat easier than having one. They take care of each other. They cook, clean, buy each other smokes, and keep each other company. They both still make daily trips up to the Hill and see their other friends.
And that’s where we are now. There’s still a steady flow of guys up on the Hill. We meet new people as they come through, and we keep up our friendships with the regulars. Lisa and I offer nightly beds and daily shelter to two of those regulars that we know from praying and ministering at St. Joseph’s. But things, as ever, continue and, we trust, will continue to evolve. Recently Lisa, Sammie and I have taken a separate apartment to make some much-needed space for ourselves, while continuing to rent the Walltown house for our guests. This means that Will and Crete gain a bit more independence. We frequent this house of hospitality on a daily basis, but we also hope to involve other members of the church. One short-term goal is of finding one or two single divinity school students who are looking for a cheap room or a communal living situation to live-in and “man the place.” To fund this hospitality house we are entirely dependent on the generosity of others, and we do not yet know where the money is going to come from. We will beg and we will pray.
Several of us keep up a steady conversation about the rationale for our actions. We agree that the goal is communion (both social and sacramental sorts), and we spend a lot of theological contemplation (theoretical and practical) on what the barriers are and how they should be overcome. Our inspiration and guidance has come largely from Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, John Chrysostom, William Stringfellow, St. Francis, Teresa of Lisieux and Mother Teresa of Calcutta - to name a few of those often on our minds. We’ve sought help and camaraderie at Catholic Worker Houses and New Monastic communities and there found holy souls far wiser than we. Stanley Hauerwas is a generous friend who continually points us to his guides (Aquinas, Barth, MacIntyre, Yoder, Wittgenstein), and with whose theology in many ways this whole venture started. With these Saints past and present, we struggle against the notion that interacting with the poor should be done primarily through institutional giving - that the congregation should give money to the shelter rather than invite the guys to a meal. We balk at embracing the Guys in any way that preserves some safe distance, be it spatial or socio-economic or institutional. It seems clear to us that the Gospel does not leave us the luxury for that distance. We are guarded against the temptation to paternalism, and especially any patronizing urge to help our friends to become middle class. We seek (and often fail terribly!) to make ourselves vulnerable to them as we would to any friend. We try to venture into new territory (often not having any clue what exactly we are really doing) consistent with the Gospel. Our most basic conviction is that in the poor we find Jesus himself in his distressing disguise, since “in as much as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
At St. Joseph's we're not trying to become a rescue mission, or a homeless shelter. Skeptics have occasionally objected to Vicar Rhonda by saying “But we’re not a shelter!” “That’s right!” she says. We are the church trying to bear witness to Christ by receiving the gifts that we have been given. Those of us who pray the Office see those gifts as being very much embodied in the group of men that live at the church. We believe that these men and women (Concrete, William, Reuben, Leroy, Mike, Greg, Charlie, Red, KT, Traver, Terry, Paul, Mike, Billy, Robin, Yasmin, and Jimmy among others) have legitimate claims on our lives, that their requests for a ride or a meal, or just spending time with them, are not optional do-goodery.
Those of us who regularly seek this fellowship have had our lives changed and deepened. But we're still plodding along, trying to make sense of it all, always looking for any friend who might offer some insight.
May the Lord Jesus guide us as we grope around in the dark trying to do his will.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Pearls Before Swine
"Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you." Matt. 7:6
This verse has been interpreted in many ways, the only common principle seeming to be that the verse stands independent of those surrounding. It is read as a statement on the reception of the tenets of faith by unbelievers, and thus the care (and ensuing protectionism) that should be practiced by evangelists and apologists - the inherent contradiction with the whole notion of evangelism notwithstanding.
That contradiction should not be passed over. In fact, I think it is sufficient reason in itself to reject that interpretation of the passage. If the Good News is not the string of pearls that the swine trample, then what is? Let's first recognize that the passage contains two images rather than one. That one effect is sought by the example of the two images should not lead to a confusion of the two images. For I think that the distinction of the two images focuses Jesus's point.
First we have "do not give what is holy to dogs".
Without offering a scholarly citation, it strikes me that "what is holy" refers specifically to the sacrifice in the temple. This is in contrast to reading "what is holy" to be vaguely "the gospel". This passage is intended to be a striking piece of imagery that would be shockingly profane to any Jew: the temple sacrifice thrown to the dogs. The clear implication is that things that are offered to God should not then be profaned by removing them from their sacrificial role. Once consecrated, "what is holy" must be treated as such. It cannot be thrown to the dogs!
The second image has two parts. First, "do not throw your pearls before swine". In essence, I think this half is intended to echo the preceding image, but specifically highlighting what is of value (that which is consecrated). This is to say that value is determined by orientation toward God, the contrite heart and the sacrifice of thanksgiving. This command is subordinated to "do not give what is holy to dogs" because it reminds us that "what is holy" is what is valuable. The two commands together suggest that "what is holy" is the heart of our value and that we should remain oriented to "what is holy", i.e., that we should not confuse things by turning away from what is holy, casting the pearls before swine.
In the latter half, Jesus says, "or they will trample them underfoot and turn and maul you." The swine now have agency in the story. We might read this to mean that the unbelievers to whom we have spoken the good news will turned on us in ridicule. In this way, we might read this as a sociological point about the coming persecution and the dangers of preaching holiness in a fallen world. But reading this in such a way forgets Jesus's other, and clearer, teachings on persecution which do not imply restraint for fear of consequences. Again, I find this sufficient reason to reject such a reading.
Instead, I think we must read this as a statement about losing our orientation. Again, Jesus prompts us with the image of the dogs so that we are in a frame of mind taking holiness for granted. With the swine now, he suggests that by losing our sense of value, of holiness, we will only provoke destruction for "the way of the wicked is doomed."
Thus, we should not read this as an "us and them" passage in which we are the believers and they are the unbelievers (swine). Rather, I think this passage reminds us that there is such a thing as the "holy" and that this is the very heart of value. And further, it is our orientation. In Paul's writings this will be manifest again,
"Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship" (Romans 12:1).
So that if our bodies are "what is holy" we then "die to sin". We are consecrated to a life of holiness. Our orientation is always toward that sacrifice of holiness. To confuse that orientation is to throw "what is holy" to dogs, for in so doing we sacrifice ourselves to the world, to money, to selfish glory, anything but God. We take what is a sacrifice to God and throw it to the dogs.
That is one half of the story about this passage. If in fact the passage stood on its own as an aphorism, this might be sufficient. However, Matt. 7:6 happens to come just after verses 7:1-5 and just before verses 7:7-29. I hope it is no intellectual leap to suggest that this is more than a coincidental fact!
The situation of this passage is that of following the passage on commanding that we "judge not, lest you be judged." This passage too has an interesting interpretation. Without launching into the particulars, let me just claim rather dogmatically that this passage does NOT mean primarily that we should not name the faults in our neighbor. It may also mean that. However, I think the context of this passage implies a different primary meaning that is more bound up in a practical scenario. Note that Matt 6:19-34 is overwhelming concerned with "economic" considerations, i.e., possessions, their procurement, and their use. I claim that all of chapter 7 continues this theme.
At the end of Ch. 6 Jesus has just concluded his exhortation not to worry about tomorrow (lillies of the field, etc.). Now Ch. 7 starts off with "judge not...". Surely, you say, this is a new thought entirely? Perhaps, or perhaps Jesus has just launched into the particulars of how such a society must work. Notice the passage, "and the measure you give will be the measure you get." We often read this to mean we will be forgiven in proportion to our forgiveness. Again, this is not out of line with Jesus's teaching. But in this context perhaps it is another form of "it is better to give than receive." Maybe Jesus intends the literal exchange of physical goods. Why? If he is in fact still talking about economic matters, then perhaps he is attacking the practice of witholding alms (or witholding from anyone who asks) based on the perceived virtue of the one begging. This seems to be in keeping with "give to everyone who begs of you" from 5:42.
Furthermore, the "ask, and it will be given" passage can (and should?) be read as an injunction to ask for necessities without reservation. Ask your neighbor, for God works also through men! But what of "Do not give what is holy to dogs..." surely there is no reasonable economic interpretation to this? In a way, no. I think that this passage belongs in continuity with the judgment passage.
When Jesus tells us not to give what is holy to dogs, we must hear this on the heels of "No one can serve two masters...". What is holy is put in the exclusive service of God. God is its one master. Jesus then exhorts us not to worry about tomorrow, not to store up for ourselves treasures on earth, BECAUSE we are in the service of the Holy One. We are the consecrated sacrifice. Jesus then outlines a temptation not to give to those in need (7:1-5) because we see in them failures of virtue. At this point he snaps us back to attention by reminding us who we serve. We are "what is holy", we have been called to this "neediness", and yet we use the occaision of our neighbor's neediness to sin against him. This is to give the devil victory in what should be a holy encounter. Rather than serve our neighbor, we judge him.
Herein lies a crucial point of the sermon: we are not holy because we have no possessions, but because we love one another. Do not use what has been offered for holiness as an occaision to sin. Do not throw an invitation to love your neighbor to the dogs.
This passage stands out, rightly, because Jesus is trying to snap us to attention. He is not talking about what is not practical. He is talking about the intersection of the practical and the transcendent. He is talking about the meeting of God and man which is the sacrifice of our bodies so that we might die to sin and live in Christ. This passage is, in a thick way, about the incarnation because we must understand what the incarnation means for terms like "practical". For the supernatural has usurped the practical by the very nature of Christ. We have been given bodily entrance to the kingdom, and the means to help build it. This passage is a reminder of this depth in the midst of Jesus teaching on the very "practicalities" of the kingdom.
So, let us be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.
Amen.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friendship and Voluntary Poverty
Poverty is such a hard council! Jesus says to the rich man to sell everything that he has and follow him. He tells us to live off of begging and not to worry about tomorrow, and to give to whomever asks us. John Chrysostom said that there is nothing wrong with wealth as long as it is all given to the poor. St. Francis devoted himself to “Lady Poverty” and poverty is virtuous for the Franciscans in and of itself. St. Thomas thought that poverty was not itself a virtue, but embraced it as a means to other virtues. John Wesley said that the only reason to make as much money as you can is to give it all away, since heaven depended on it.
But it seems such a waste! Even for those of us who are convinced that poverty is indeed the way that God would have us live, even for those of us who have slowly come to reject the quest for comfort and the ideal of acquisitiveness to which we are habituated, poverty seems a council so far away. It is simply the case that very few of us, even when turned to face Lady Poverty, will do what Jesus said and simply sell everything we have worked so hard for and live as paupers.
There seems even to be a nagging query whether this is really the way God would have us live. Poverty - how foolish! How idealistic! Utopian! Wouldn’t it be better if we kept up a decent standard of living and gave much away? Think of all the suffering we could help stop. We must be “responsible” with what we are given after all. And yet the entire tradition and Our Lord at its head continually and patiently beacons us beyond.
So, all right, things are hard to give up. Comfort. Possessions. Privacy! It takes a gigantic soul to make a sudden move like St. Francis to abruptly sell and give all. For most of us the ascent to Lady Poverty will be gradual if at all. But God draws us along and one way he does this is by giving us friends. One thing we all know about friends is that they lean on each other. One’s abundance supplies another’s lack. Now one in one way, later the other in another – not keeping accounts or counting losses, since a friend’s good can never be my loss. This is an integral part of friendship. We all know of relationships that feel more like contracts, and these we do not really call our friends.
And so God helps us along especially by giving us friends who are materially poor. This is a true way to holy poverty. But I still mean friendships in a deep sense. I do not mean that all the poor should be our friends and so we should give to them. True as that may be, that is not much more likely than St. Francis’ conversion. And its not sufficiently personal. I mean friends that are really friends in the normal sense. Folks we’ve gotten to know over a long period of time. Whose back-stories, likes, dislikes, temperaments, loves, hates, vices and virtues we know. Whom we like to eat with, drink with, laugh and cry with.
The prospect of making a new friend is much less daunting than giving up everything I have. It is gentle, slow, joyful, familiar, open-ended. And, of course, as we make friends, if our friends are poor materially, then our goods will supply their lack. A friend may need food or shelter or clothing. These I have and these I will of course provide without a second thought, since her good is my own good. I may need a talk, a laugh, or a cry, and these she will give not keeping cost.
And slowly I begin to see emerge vaguely the nascent pattern of my own material poverty. This month I ate beans and rice everyday, took every free meal I could, tried not to eat between meals to save money on groceries. I couldn’t drive cause I was out of gas. I couldn’t eat out or go to the bar. I begged for some rent money from my parish. These trivial sacrifices are joyfully made since they allow me to supply my friends’ lack – to give a room, to make a pot of soup. They in their turn – not of course as repayment, but as my friends - keep up the house, pet the dog, bring home food when they have it, offer me a beer, keep an eye my bike, share their life-philosophies. None of us count the costs. “Cost” is, in fact, a strange way of putting it.
Thereby God is making us poor. He’s taking our superfluous stuff. It’s the same end as St. Francis attained after church that day by selling and giving, but the means are different. I could never call this a waste. It’d be hard for anyone who has ever had a friend, or a child, or a parent for that matter, to call this irresponsible. This is just what’s in our bones to do.
And of course all of this is just to say what Aristotle knew 2300 years ago, that friends are the key to virtue, which St. Thomas would later translate into St. Augustine’s terms: the path to holiness begins and ends with loving one’s neighbor.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Roundtable: Prudent Finances
A roundtable discussion I would like to have in the near future would discuss the question: What is it to be Christianly prudent with our money?
[In general, I think having discussions like this when there is nothing immediately pressing (except salvation) is a good way for it to be fun and lively and for none to feel too pressed. We are not talking about what we have to do tomorrow, but for the clarification of thought. Then when the rubber meets the road we already have something under our belts.]
In this case I offer two exhibits around which maybe we could center discussion.
First, the Sermon on the Mount, and especially Matthew 6:19-7:29. If we assume that this has a lot to do with our finances, or even that Jesus is actually talking about money the whole time, where do we go with it?
The second could be seen as one possible practical interpretation of Jesus’ teaching – an excerpt from Dorothy’s House of Hospitality.
What are the strengths and weaknesses this early Catholic Worker model?
We were looking over our last accounting which we sent out to our friends last September and we noted that not only has our circulation doubled, but the number of people being fed has quintupled. This means that the printing bill is $450 a month, and that the food bill for the Charles Street place and the country place combined is about fifty a week, or $200 a month. That includes fifteen quarts of milk a day, and it isn't we hale and hearty ones who drink it, but the children and invalids, of which latter there are always about four.
And lest this large grocery bill, which our readers pay after all, staggers them, let us count ourselves up.
Down in the country there are ten children right now, aged six to fourteen, and their appetites increase and multiply with the days at the seashore. (During the summer we took care of fifty children altogether.) Then there are seven adults, which makes seventeen people sitting down to a meal three times a day, or fifty-one meals served a day--3,060 for the months of July and August. (But there are more than that, often fifty people over the weekends.) Of course, the midday meal is not rightly a meal, but just sandwiches, peanut butter or tomato, and either cocoa or milk, and you should see the bread and butter fly.
As for the Charles Street quarters, there are sixteen people living there and they've been on a long fast during the summer. Those who come back from the country tell of delicious lemon meringue pies, not to speak of ordinary food, and city workers lick their chops (especially Big Dan, whose large bulk is hard to satisfy on oatmeal in the morning, sandwiches, and not too many of them, at noon, and vegetable stew in the evening).
In addition to the sixteen living in the house, there are the two married couples living in little apartments and eating at home, whose rents and grocery bills, gas and electric, must also be paid. Also there are half a dozen coming in to eat at the office who do not live here. Rents total $150, whereas last year they were $62, and the combined gas and electricity amount to $25; laundry, $15; telephones, $ 18; mailing and express, $75. And as this month's paper comes out there is another printing bill of $450, and the rent goes on and so do the groceries. Disregarding the latter two items, we are faced with our large bills (there are other little ones) of $1,403 and nothing in the bank to pay them.
This, then, is the holy poverty we are always talking about. This is the insecurity which we do most firmly believe it is good for us to have.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
NY Times Blog Challenges the Market!
The New York Times has posted a video blog entry in the Opinion section by author Douglas Rushkoff that discusses some differences between Medieval monetary systems and our own. Click here.
The blog entry is basically a plug for his new book Life, Inc. (June, 2009) which also looks very interesting as it seems to cover a lot of the same ground as some of our favorite people (Bell, Franks, Long, Milbank, and of course the sources: Aquinas and Jesus). I think it is telling that the book gets a poor review from Publishers Weekly (displayed on the Amazon.com page) that includes the line:
"His unsupported and flawed assumption that societal interdependence is a natural or even preferable state for all people, everywhere, his disdain for filthy lucre and joyless recasting of independence as selfishness will leave readers weary long before the end." [my italics]
Need I say more about its overlap with St. Thomas?
We should probably read this book, as it is probably going to have a far wider readership that St. Thomas.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
St. Thomas Aquinas' Prayer to Acquire the Virtues
For numerous reasons I thought that now might be an appropriate time to post this beautiful and timeless prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274 A.D.) for the acquisition of the virtues. For those who regularly visit or contribute to our blog, I would encourage you to join me in committing to pray this prayer along with St. Thomas daily through the end of June. And, just so that no one misses it, be sure to click on "Read More" for the whole thing. Peace to you all and may we, like St. Thomas, learn what it means to be more fully conformed to the image of Christ through lives virtuously lived.
A Prayer to Acquire the Virtues
“O God, all-powerful and all-knowing, without beginning and without end, You Who are the source, the sustainer, and the rewarder of all virtues,
Grant that [we] may abide on the firm ground of faith, be sheltered by an impregnable shield of hope, and be adorned in the bridal garment of charity.
Grant that [we] may through justice be subject to You, through prudence avoid the beguilements of the devil, through temperance exercise restraint, and through fortitude endure adversity with patience.
Grant that whatever good things [we] have, [we] may share generously with those who have not and that whatever good things [we] do not have, [we] may request humbly from those who do.
Grant that [we] may judge rightly the evil of the wrongs [we] have done and bear calmly the punishments [we] have brought upon [ourselves], and that [we] may never envy [our] neighbor’s possessions and ever give thanks for Your good things.
Grant that [we] may always observe modesty in the way [we] dress, the way [we] walk, and the gestures [we] use, restrain [our] tongue[s] from frivolous talk, prevent [our] feet from leading [us] astray, keep [our] eyes from wandering glances, shelter [our] ears from rumors, lower [our] gaze in humility, lift [our] mind[s] to thoughts of heaven, contemn all that will pass away, and love You only.
Grant that [we] may subdue [our] flesh and cleanse [our] conscience, honor the saints and praise You worthily, advance in goodness, and end a life of good works with a holy death.
Plant deep in [us], Lord, all the virtues, that [we] might be devout in divine matters, discerning in human affairs, and burdensome to no one in fulfilling [our] own bodily needs.
Grant to [us], Lord, fervent contrition, pure confession, and complete reparation.
Order [us] inwardly through a good life, that [we] might do what is right and what will be meritorious for [us] and a good example for others.
Grant that [we] may never crave to do things impulsively, nor disdain to do what is burdensome, lest [we] begin things before [we] should or abandon them before finishing.”
Amen.
Aquinas, Thomas. The Aquinas Prayer Book: The Prayers and Hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas. ed. Robert Anderson and Johann Moser. (Manchester: Sophia Institute Press, 2000), 33-40.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
The following article comes from William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar. To access it in full, click here. I have included the first part of it for the blog as I think it is tangentially relevant to our interests at de pauperum in numerous ways (e.g., it addresses issues of ambition, wealth and class; it is apropos to we three Dukies who maintain the blog; etc.). The remaining portion I will leave the reader to look up and review for herself, as it largely and unfortunately devolves into individualistic drivel from that point onward (some of which is minimally forecast in what I have cited below). At any rate, I commend the excised section below to your contemplation and personal application.
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.
The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.
What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.
At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”
The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.
That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.
Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.
Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.
If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?
Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.
But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
The Economy
I keep hearing about how bad the economy is. Unemployment is around 10%. Not quite as bad as the 25% of the Great Depression, but significant nonetheless. I’ve heard lots of people talk about the way that it is affecting them. I’ve heard Christians say that God can use this terrible situation for something good. I’ve heard people pray for the economy.
But I’m not convinced that Christians should be worried about the economy. I’m not convinced that the church has a stake in “fixing” it. And I’m not convinced that fixing it is in the interest of the common good of man either.
If anything, I suspect that what is happening is an opportunity God is giving to church to renew is practices of mercy and to be holy.
Unemployment is up, homelessness is up, evictions are climbing. But we ought not despair, for its not that there is not enough to go around. We still have plenty of food and plenty of beds for all these people. That is not the issue. The problem is not scarcity. The problem is the way that people act, the way that people decide to allocate resources in their control. Fixing a mechanism will not fix the problem. Let me say that again. We have all the goods we need.
The problem is greed, fear, selfishness, pride. The problem is sin. What else can explain that we have more than enough and yet so many go without?
And what this means is that everyone crying about the terrible state of things is really crying about themselves. The rich are crying about taking huge losses to their portfolios - losses will never really threaten their immediate needs. The middle class is crying because that house they thought would make them secure has been taken away from them.
Many are indignant that the economy is taking a toll on the poor. But why be indignant? We have everything we need. If there is crying to do, it is crying because our economy was so good to us. It let us believe that the best way to help everybody, the best way to serve the poor, was to be greedy. There is crying because it is looking less and less like that is going to work. It is looking less and less like any kind of system is going to work. For we have more than enough.
But there is no way to give it to the poor, except to give it to the poor. We are crying because we can no longer be indignant about the poor without being hypocritical. For we can no longer support the system, since the system is broken. If we cry about the plight of the poor we are struck by the fact that we have some of that everything needed to help the poor, so not to give is tantamount to stealing. At the very least, it is hard to be indignant and well-off without being hypocritical.
Is your goal to end poverty? The simplest and quickest way to do that, requiring basically zero changes in infrastructure, would be to take a poor person into your home and feed them. One less homeless person. If everyone with the means to do so did that, we would wipe out poverty and homelessness. Period. And you don’t even have to take in complete strangers. Some might be strong enough or brave enough to do that. I am not yet. The homeless man living with me is my friend. I got to know him for two years before he moved in. And you’d be wrong to think that was because I didn’t trust him before then. It was more that he didn’t trust me. The rich are scared of the poor (why?) and the poor are scared of the rich (why?).
This simple solution gets down to the heart about arguments about performing the works of mercy. It is often objected that they are simply impractical for solving our society’s problems. They are a palliative, a bandaid. The real way to change the world is to get involved in politics, to write letters to congressmen, to vote the right candidates into office. To this the church should rightly reply in the first instance that it is not a club or a government whose job is to work on solving society’s problems. I joined the church whose mission is to follow Jesus, and he told me to perform the works of mercy and give up my possessions and so I do it. He told me to. That’s it. Even if its not efficient.
But then slowly it begins to dawn on me just how deeply practical and efficient the works of mercy are. They provide the remedy for societal ills not by reforming a bureaucratic system but by transforming people. They offer, right now, the most efficient way to end poverty. They say that the way that you help people is, well, by helping them. What we need is a revolution of the heart.
And this shows that it is not the works of mercy that are the palliative. The state and its institutions are the palliative. They, no matter how reformed, are the morphine for the cancer. They, no matter how just, strike at the weed but leave the root. They, no matter how large or small, are inefficient.
And so I don’t think that I have a stake in the economy. It is, after all, really the state’s economy, and the economy’s state. But this is not because I just want to “let it burn” – although that might not be a bad idea. Rather, I don’t think that the state of the economy is a bad thing for the church because I don’t think the economy is the problem in the first place. The way that the changed economy shifts around materials in a different way just gives us a different view of the effects of sin.
The state of the economy gives the church a chance to be the church. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless.
