This is the Ivy League on poverty:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/03/22/opinion/1247467422908/bloggingheads-mental-bandwidth-scarcity.html

Not to be ugly, but we needed a study to tell us that dad is grumpy at home when work is stressful? The scarcity of mental resources is the key concept? At no point do they ask questions like, "Should the workplace be less demanding?" Or maybe we should ask whether we are "educating" people in such a way (Christians would call this "formation") that they have the tools to deal with their own exhaustion. It seems to me that in the air-traffic control study the relevant factors are (1) a high stress job, (2) the presumption that the dad's priority is job performance, and (3) that dad's shortness with the kids is justified by the absolute scarcity of his mental resources. All the video addresses is how to quantify (3). Really? This is the level of intellectual creativity/sophistication dealing with "poverty" coming out of the Ivy League??

Suppose instead we trash (3) altogether by saying first that an absolute scarcity of mental resources is a vacuous category (let's replace it with, say, a degree of virtue -- e.g., whether the dad has developed the habit of patience) and second that shortness with the kids is not justifiable (even if sometimes it is understandable... the difference, clearly, is that understandability has to do with our common experience of temptation while justifiability has to do with justice, or rendering to our kids what is proper, i.e., patience). Now, just trashing (3) it seems to me breaks the whole cycle of nonsense. The dad, recognizing his impatience now has to sit down and figure out (1) how better to respond to his kids and (2) whether he is capable of doing so in the face of the current level of temptation (i.e., exhaustion) generated by his job. If he doesn't have the virtue to deal with that temptation, then flee the temptation!

In a true situation of poverty, things get sticky quickly as for example when dad has no real choices for jobs and is only making enough to get by and, perhaps, on top of everything else is being exploited by the employer. It's a recipe for all sorts of problems, and in this case there is perhaps no "fleeing" the temptation to be impatient with the kids.

My presumptuous impression is that the dad's stress is driven primarily by the sense that there is no where to turn. If the church is being the church, then this shouldn't be the case.

This is where Peter Maurin comes in. The church has to make it easier for people to be good, by serving the poor and by bearing one another's burdens. The kind of poverty in the video is not just material poverty. It's also a poverty of virtue, a lack of the Spirit.

One more thought:

What if the rich become more sinful when the church fails to serve the poor? I wonder if we think about this in the church? We often talk about the communal nature of sin to point out that it is all our sins that generate the destitution and oppression of the poor. But if we are serious about helping our neighbor not to sin, then the failure of the church to serve the poor (a sin in itself) may be visited on the rich in a similar way. Our sin may tempt them/us to greater sin.

Do with it what you will.

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Finding Jesus

[The following sermon I preached at St. Joseph's Episcopal Church, the 5th Sunday of Lent 2010. The Gospel text is John 12:1-12.]

This is the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Next week we follow Jesus into Jerusalem, joyfully proclaiming as king this goofy beggar riding on a donkey, whom we will then proceed to mock, judge, torture and kill during holy week. We are not quite there, however. This week we sit with him in Bethany, continuing our strident and joyful penance, to which Bp. Marble called us anew a couple weeks back.

To what, this week, is our attention drawn? From what vanity are we to turn?

St Augustine says on our Gospel passage: “Anoint
the feet of Jesus: follow Jesus’ feet by living a good life. Wipe them with your hair. What you have beyond what you need, give to the poor, and you have wiped the feet of the Lord…You have something to spare from your abundance: it is excess for you, but necessity for the feet of the Lord. Perhaps on this earth the Lord’s feet are still in need. For of whom but his body parts did he say, “In as much as you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it to me?” You gave what was beyond necessity for you, but you have done a grateful thing to my feet.”

I wish to make just make a couple of simple points.

First, Augustine makes the point that what we lavish upon the poor we lavish upon Jesus. This is simple enough, but hard in practice. It is hard to see Jesus in the drunken, slightly pushy, smelly beggar on 9th St. But, though he is not a saint, he is still our Lord. “You will always have the poor with you.” Jesus says. He also says “I am with you even unto the end of the age” and St. Thomas Aquinas says that we had better read these two saying together: Jesus hangs out with us, dwells among us, in the person of that beggar. Jesus is not being selfless when he says: “Give to him who begs.”

Beggars themselves do this all the time. If you want to see folks unafraid to give, go hang out in our back parking lot. A while back I was taking a couple of these folks to down to Target to get some things they wanted. As we were pulling out of the parking after having done our shopping we stopped at the light where a beggar stood with a sign asking for money. I knew I only had a 20 in my wallet and so I didn’t reach for anything. The two guys dug in their pockets and came up with about four bucks for the beggar. “Whenever you get a chance to help somebody out, do it,” one of them said.

Jesus lives among us in the poor. But this points out that, downright inconveniently, Jesus has not chosen to hang out just everywhere. He does not tell us that we will find him everywhere we look. He does not say “if you want to find me, look at the sun set, look in a child’s eyes, look at the flowers, or the moonlit night.” We might find him in these places, but probably not until we have learned to find him in the places that he has told us specifically that he hangs out. Where else does Jesus say he is going to be found?

Besides the poor, Jesus says that he is present in the corporate prayers of the church. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” Here we learn our Savior’s voice in the daily reading of the scriptures and his prayers in the Psalms. We sing the songs of the church, his body. We read about his saints who embody him, and we beg for his mercy and forgiveness for the ways that we do not. We receive his peace from the hand of our sisters and brothers.

Climactically, of course, Jesus, has promised to be present in the Eucharist. In bread broken and wine poured out, as one saint used to say, we look at Jesus and he looks at us. Here, in this food, we taste and savor our Lord. Our senses are trained to know him, as it were, from the inside out. We know how to see the Lord only after he has told us where he is and what he looks like.

Before we can see Jesus everywhere we have to see him somewhere. So the first step toward seeing Jesus everywhere is to hang out in the places that he has promised us he will be. Learning to see Jesus in our spouses, our children, our labor or the created order must start by seeing him in the Eucharist, in common prayer, and in the poor. For how will we know how to find him in the places where he is hard to see if we haven’t learned from his certain presence in the places he assures us he will be.

But Judas always stands as a temptation to find Jesus wherever we want. “This resource could have been sold and given to the poor.” Such things are allegorical. Judas becomes for us a type of vice, whereby we determine the most effective means of serving Jesus. How many times have we all heard the argument about how inefficient and impractical it is to give directly to the beggar! Jesus says “Give to him who begs and you did it to me.” Judas says “He just wants a beer. I give my money to the shelter and I pay my taxes. That’s what the state and the charities are there for. They make sure the money goes to good use. If I keep giving to him I’m just perpetuating the problem.” The particularly vicious part of this outsourcing of the poor, says St. John’s Gospel, is that thereby we do not actually love the poor. For in not lavishing what we have on Jesus right in front of us, we profit. We might even say that we steal. We keep something for ourselves that belongs to Jesus. If it is not the money, it is security, it is comfort, it is our own schedule, our own healthy boundaries.

So: in this chaotic world with its anxiety and pressures, distractions and temptations, and demands for loyalty on all sides, it is hard to know where to find Jesus. But He gives us a roadmap of sorts. He tells us where we can reliably find Him, where He will always 'show up'. And if He is 'showing up' at the Eucharist, the prayers and among the poor, but we are not, then we must hear again that chilling question asked of Adam in the Fall: 'Where are you?' We are invited back into Eden, to walk in the cool of the evening with God, this is the building of and participation in the Kingdom, and it looks like this: Come to the Table. Gather for common prayer. Anoint and wipe the feet of the Lord while he is with you.

Amen.

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Why I Love My Bike (and hate my car)

The following is an excerpt from Ivan Illich's book Toward a History of Needs

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC

People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors -- most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.

People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality, restricted mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers...

More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.

The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around vehicles rather than around people.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION

Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.

The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, subways, and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport.

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.


DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel -- probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions -- finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.

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Colin D. Miller, Ph.D.

Colin successfully defended his dissertation (which amounted to a theological reading of the book of Romans) yesterday. Congrats, Dr. C.

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Maturing into Vulnerabiltiy

[I'm thinking as I type, so bear with me.]

On Sunday I spoke to a church group on the topic of being a servant. Within the discussion we spent a few minutes on the theme of "vulnerability". The Gospel, I contended, calls us to a form of service to one another that is vulnerable. There is, in contrast, a form of service that is always invulnerable, always keeping some form of structure between the neighbor and oneself. I think there is a parallel between this mundane distance and what they call in psychology/psychiatry "non-transference". In our case it may be either a physical or emotional distance; we might just say that we keep danger "at arm's length". This may be, for example, the relationship that a one-off server at a soup kitchen has with the local homeless: a well-defined relationship of server to served, on opposites sides of a plexi-glass sneeze guard, fulfilling roles for a specified length of time. One of the dangers of this sort of model is that the "good deed" is often just another luxury one may enjoy, the luxury of noblesse oblige, of doing something good for the less fortunate, etc. It's dangerous because it feeds the ego and the ego eats away at the soul.

So, I challenged this group to be vulnerable to their neighbors, rich or poor. Give to him/her who asks of you. Walk the extra mile. It sounds easy and straightforward. I'm just quoting Jesus after all. But what happens when your neighbor asks of you at an inconvenient time? What if befriending a homeless woman makes you late for work a month later because she has now asked you to sit with her at the doctor's office as she gets a test run? When your boss says, "Get your act together" what will you say or do? My impression is that few employers have much sympathy for the uncertain schedules that arise when one is selfless. The assumption of the workplace is, after all, widely recognized as being driven by the capitalist microeconomic mentality which boils down to self-interest. The self-interested employee will follow the instructions of a boss because he can choose between being fired and being promoted (and sometimes perhaps just staying put, but they want you to believe that if you're not on your way up you're on your way out).

We can become very vulnerable very quickly if we act selflessly in some very simple ways. Looking back, Adam raised this issue in a slightly different setting almost exactly a year ago in his post Scarcity and the Gift (Mar 27, 2009). If your family depends on you to bring home a paycheck while a homeless friend depends on you for companionship in the tough times generating a certain unsatisfactory evaluation of your work ethic in the office, what do you do with a finite amount of time? And, as one astute listener posed in our discussion at church, we obviously can't be vulnerable to every person we meet. Emotionally we'll be spent in no time, and it's just impracticable to be "close" to that many people. What do we do?

With regard to the scenario with the unhappy boss, I have heard repeatedly in my time the argument of managing multiple obligations, being a good steward (read "manager") of one's time, etc. All of these, it seems to me, are derivative of an economic view of time in which the central assumption is that time is scarce and thus the problem of "stewardship" is to figure who gets how much of my time and when in such a way as to... ??? well, what determines the optimum??? maybe: in such a way as to maximize the happiness in the world weighted by my emotional attachment to those I am obligated to, or something equivalently convoluted. That's to say, I don't buy the claim that we only have so much time and so we need to spend (time? effort?) becoming more proficient managers of our time all the while leaving the utility function that goes into this proficiency explicitly in the shadows (so that we don't have to admit that this is utilitarian?).

That said, we do have obligations to our bosses. They're paying us for 40 hours of work each week (even if sometimes they unofficially expect more). So, it seems only right that if we're late for work because we were helping a homeless friend we should make up that time somewhere else in the week. Right? But then one's wife begins to get frustrated that time with the homeless person is taken instead of time with the family (scarcity again!). So what to do? Well, why not just give back that time's worth of money to our boss? Seems just to me. The fact is that most of us want the money more than we want the time (that's why we "make up" time elsewhere if we are late to work). While the adage is "Time is money" maybe it should be "Money is better than time". Some will not be able to survive on less money, but that's also what the church is for. But for most of us, I think we can survive on a little less money, and probably a lot less. We just don't want to, and we kid ourselves into thinking we can get all the money that we want and still be selfless when our neighbor asks for our time. In the end, this isn't selflessness, it's just greed and the sin is transferred to one's boss or one's family.

I suppose I should just be up front: I don't think it's a sin for a family to be poor because the parents serve their neighbors. The Gospel assures us that these will be provided for.

Now what about being vulnerable to too many people? We can't be best friends with everyone. Certainly. Vulnerability does not necessarily mean emotional attachment, but it does mean that we feel an obligation to our neighbor, that we suffer when they suffer, we mourn with them, and we laugh with them. It also means that we are willing to bear their burdens, even if it means bearing them AS a burden (see Gal. 6). It seems to me that there are to modes in which we can bear another's burden. We can do so on the back of our ego or we can do so through grace. What's the difference (besides pious language)?

When we bear burdens with our ego we do so under our own power and by our own self will. The fruit of bearing burdens in this way is that we feel empowered, that we have performed a tremendous work for the good of our neighbor. It's the fruit, I think, that so easily identifies this mode. On the other hand, if we bear another's burden on grace, it means that we recognize that we have not born anything by our own power, but that we have been able precisely to move our egos out of the interaction sufficiently that God might carry the neighbor's burden through us. The fruit of this is that we recognize that we have done nothing but be a vehicle of God's grace, that by some effort and training we have held our sinfulness in check that another might experience God. And the work seems almost fleetingly simple because we have had to bear no real weight. The Way is difficult, but the burden is light.

It is here that I want to introduce a notion on which I have not heard anyone else speak but which seems clear to me: there is a very real and practical difference in spiritual maturity among Christians. Call it spiritual maturity or just holiness, it amounts to the same. And the practical difference that I allude to is that those who are holier have had much practice in putting the old man to death and thus are living ever more fully in Christ and Christ in them, and thus they will be able to bear more of the burden of this world than will novices in the faith precisely because it is not them but Christ in them that bears it. The perfect man can bear the whole sin of the world, but He is one and He is Christ. In the holy I think we see the fruit of Christ's work as the burden of sin on a poor soul is shared by another. The holy take up their cross on which hangs the sin of their neighbor.

We cannot be vulnerable to everyone, but the measure to which we can be vulnerable is the measure to which we have combated the evil in our own hearts so that we might be filled with Christ's love. This is why the way is narrow and difficult, because we must train ourselves against sin and combat the evil in our own hearts, not so that we can save ourselves or save our neighbors but so that Christ's love might find a vessel to be filled and so that that vessel might be poured out for the love of neighbor.

If the burden is heavy, then we are bearing too much of it ourselves. We need to pray earnestly and with urgency "Thy will be done". The way is difficult, for we must kneel and pray through temptation, but the burden is light because it is not ours to bear.

We have lost, I fear, a consciousness of maturing in the faith, a consciousness of the immense practicality of that process and the tremendous danger of leaving the novices in the faith without protection and guidance.

We are called not to adopt vulnerability but to mature into it.

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