de pauperibus

Building Codes and Homelessness

2011-06-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

The building trades are another example of an industry that modern nation-states impose on their societies, thereby modernizing the poverty of their citizens. The legal protection and financial support granted the industry reduces and cancels opportunities for the otherwise much more efficient self-builder. Quite recently Mexico launched a major program with the aim of providing all workers with proper housing. As a first step, new standards were set for the construction of dwelling units. These standards were intended to protect the little man who purchases a house from exploitation by the industry producing it. Paradoxically, these same standards deprived many more people of the traditional opportunity to house themselves. The code specifies minimum requirements that a man who builds his own house in his spare time cannot meet. Besides that, the real rent for industrially built quarters is more than the total income of 80 percent of the people. "Better housing," then, can be occupied only by those who are well-off or by those on whom the law bestows direct rent subsidies.

Once dwellings that fall below industrial standards are defined as improper, public funds are denied to the overwhelming majority of people who cannot buy housing but could "house" themselves. The tax funds meant to improve the living quarters of the poor are monopolized for the building of new towns next to the provincial and regional capitals where government employees, unionized workers, and people with good connections can live. These are all people who are employed in the modern sector of the economy, that is, people who hold jobs. They can be easily distinguished from other Mexicans because they have learned to speak about their trabajo as a noun, while the unemployed or the occasionally employed or those who live near the subsistence level do not use the noun form when they go to work.

These people, who have work, not only get subsidies for the building of their homes; the entire public-service sector is rearranged and developed to serve them. In Mexico City it has been estimated that 10 percent of the people use 50 percent of the household water, and on tire high plain water is very scarce indeed. The building code has standards far below those of rich countries, but by prescribing certain ways in which houses must be built, it creates a rising scarcity of housing. The pretense of a society to provide ever better housing is the same kind of abberation we have met in the pretense of doctors to provide better health and of engineers to provide higher speeds. The setting of abstract impossible goals turns the means by which these are t9 be achieved into ends.

What happened in Mexico happened all over Latin America during the decade of the Alliance for Progress, including Cuba under Castro. It also happened in Massachusetts. In 1945, 32 percent of all one-family housing units in Massachusetts were still self-built: either built by their owners from foundation to roof or constructed under the full responsibility of the owner. By 1970 the proportion had gone down to 11 percent. Meanwhile, housing had been discovered as a major problem. The technological capability to produce tools and materials that favor self-building had increased in the intervening decades, but social arrangements--like unions, codes, mortgage rules, and markets-had turned against this choice.

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Hauerwas' Commentary on Matthew 25:31-46

2011-06-19T16:51:00.000-07:00

"In a wonderful essay entitled "The Scandal of the Works of Mercy," Dorothy Day lists the works of mercy, codified by Thomas Aquinas, based on Matt. 25:

The spiritual works of mercy are to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to council the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead. The corporeal works of mercy are to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead.

Her colleague, Peter Maurin, whom Day identifies as the founder of The Catholic Worker, was, according to Day, as much an apostle to the world as he was to the poor. He did not believe that works of mercy were a strategy to care for the poor until another and more effective social policy could be found. He believed that works of mercy were the social policy that Jesus had given people for the renewal of the world. According to Day, Maurin thought that in order to convince people [of this]

it was necessary to embrace voluntary poverty, to strip yourself, which would give you the means to practice the works of mercy. To reach the man in the street you must go to the street. To reach the workers, you begin to study the philosophy of labor, and to take up manual labor, useful labor, instead of white collar work. To be the least, to be the worker, to be poor, to take the lowest place and thus be the spark which would set afire the love of men towards each other and to God (and we can only show our love for God by our love for our fellows). These were Peter's ideas, and they are indispensable for the performing of the works of mercy.

Day calls this understanding of the works of mercy a scandal because it challenges the assumption that Christians are to do something for the poor by trying to create alternatives to capitalism or socialism. The problem with trying to create such alternatives is that we seduce ourselves into believing that we are working to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, care for the sick and those in prison without knowing anyone who is hungry, naked, thirsty, a stranger, sick or in prison. Day and Maurin knew that attempts to create a "better world" without being a people capable of the works of mercy could not help but betray Jesus' response to his disciples' question what sign will there be of Jesus' coming and the end of the age [Matt 24:3]. The sign is that they have the time to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, care for the sick and those in prison.

Moreover, such work will be offensive to those in power who claim to rule as benefactors of the poor and hungry. A people shaped by the practice of the works of mercy will be a people capable of seeing through those who claim to need power to do good, but in fact just need power. Great injustice is perpetuated in the name of justice. Great evil is done because it is said that time is short and there needs to be a response to this or that crisis. Christians live after the only crisis that matters, which means that Jesus has given us all the time in the world to visit him in the prisons of this world."

Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, 211-12

A "Psalm" of Lament

2011-03-29T18:40:00.000-07:00

A recent assignment in my Psalms class was to write a prayer in the style of a Psalm. This is what I came up with.

A Psalm of Luke, lamenting the derision of the poor.

Lord, you are the God of mercy;

Enact justice for your poor.

How long, O Lord?

How long will your people despise your poor?

A wicked man spits on the traveler

And your people ignore the beggar

They despise the desperate drunk

And fear the frenzied madman.

Your poor trod the thoroughfares,

looking for sanctuary to lay their head,

seeking a place to rest their feet,

but they find no respite and are turned out to the streets.

They pitch their tents among your trees

but the wicked slash or burn them.

They sit in the public places

but are told to move along.

The streets cry out in weariness;

The sidewalks scream in anger.

Is there no place for your poor O Lord?

Must they wander forever?

Soften the hearts of the people O Lord

Open them to your call for kindness

Throw open the doors of their homes

Put their stoves to work making soup

Make their living rooms a place of refuge

Drive them to know and share your hospitality.

Lord, you are the God of mercy;

Enact justice for your poor.

Bonhoeffer on Suffering and the Church

2011-02-08T10:06:00.000-08:00

Suffering must be borne in order for it to pass. Either the world must bear it and be crushed by it, or it falls on Christ and is overcome in him. That is how Christ suffers as vicarious representative for the world. Only his suffering brings salvation. But the church-community itself know now that the world's suffering seeks a bearer. So in following Christ, this suffering falls upon it, and it bears the suffering while being borne by Christ. The community of Jesus Christ vicariously represents the world before God by following Christ under the cross.

-from Discipleship

Saint Chrysostom on Saint Paul

2011-01-25T15:18:00.000-08:00

Paul, more than anyone else, has shown us what man really is, and in what our nobility consists, and of what virtue this particular animal is capable. Each day he aimed ever higher; each day he rose up with greater ardor and faced with new eagerness the dangers that threatened him. He summed up his attitude in the words: "I forget what is behind me and push on to what lies ahead." When he saw death imminent, he bade others share his joy: "Rejoice and be glad with me!" And when danger, injustice and abuse threatened, he said: "I am content with weakness, mistreatment and persecution." These he called the weapons of righteousness, thus telling us that he derived immense profit from them.

Thus, amid the traps set for him by his enemies, with exultant heart he turned their every attack into a victory for himself; constantly beaten, abused and cursed, he boasted of it as though he were celebrating a triumphal procession and taking trophies home, and offered thanks to God for it all: "Thanks be to God who is always victorious in us!" This is why he was far more eager for the shameful abuse that his zeal in preaching brought upon him than we are for the most pleasing honors, more eager for death than we are for life, for poverty than we are for wealth; he yearned for toil far more than others yearn for rest after toil. The one thing he feared, indeed dreaded, was to offend God; nothing else could sway him. Therefore, the only thing he really wanted was always to please God.

-from In Praise of Saint Paul

Lament

2010-12-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

(I wrote this letter to members of St. Joe's after we forced some homeless friends to remove tents from behind the building after we were threatened with fines by the city planning department in October. The church and parking lot are on a rise and are commonly known to the homeless around the Ninth Street area of Durham as "The Hill.")

Lament

10/12/10

Friends,

We worship a God who once saw fit to dwell in a tent. Later He established His dwelling place on a hill. After a time God became incarnate to a virgin in a stable that almost certainly wasn’t zoned for “transient lodging.” Unlike the foxes and the birds, the Christ had nowhere to lay his head and depended entirely on the hospitality of others. This Jesus also said that which we do or don’t do unto the least of those who are members of his family; the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger; we do unto him.

I fear that we evicted our Lord yesterday afternoon.

I know the ecclesial situation; I understand in part the civil situation. I am sympathetic to pragmatic concerns. I am deeply grateful to those who serve St. Joseph’s so faithfully on the behalf of its members, communicants, and ministry partners. I feel a part of St. Joseph’s though I am not a member, which is why I said “we” in the statement above.

I also hear the way in which the poor and homeless are battered by opaque and anonymous systems that criminalize their very existence and keep them from getting the help that has been established for them. A very understandable and justified sense of fatalism develops about the police, correctional system, and social welfare system. That there are rules and standards matters little to those tossed about. These forces are the powers and principalities spoken of by Saint Paul. I’m convinced that the civil and ecclesial forces that used us to wrest our friends from their sanctuary are of that same character and those against which the apostle called us to quarrel.

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure there is one. I’m not looking for a response to this e-mail, nor would I see one until I return from a retreat at the end of the week. I am still unspeakably sad. I will be in prayer for our souls. I will also be meditating on Psalm 15, which savaged me as I was seeking to make sense of this whole thing last night.

Peace,

Luke

Psalm 15

“O LORD, who may abide in your tent?

Who may dwell on your holy hill?

Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,

and speak the truth from their heart;

who do not slander with their tongue,

and do no evil to their friends,

nor take up a reproach against their neighbors;

in whose eyes the wicked are despised,

but who honor those who fear the LORD;

who stand by their oath even to their hurt;

who do not lend money at interest,

and do not take a bribe against the innocent.

Those who do these things shall never be moved.”

Heaven

2010-11-25T18:22:00.000-08:00

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Breakfast 10.6.10

2010-10-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

After MP this morning one of the guys that had noisily walked in during prayer came up to me while I was changing the Psalms on the hymnboard. I was rather defensive expecting to be panhandled for something or another. After I worked my way through my unjustified judgmental-ness I was humiliated to realize that G was in fact telling me that he didn't know how to cross himself properly during the prayers and that he wanted some instruction. After a few minutes he looked alike a pro. "You'll have to give me a quiz later," he said.

Breakfast was well attended - about eight of us, Gail working on the stove. I was especially happy to see one of our regulars who had a court date yesterday. He had told me that he might be in jail today, so his presence meant that all had gone well as expected. E told stories about his time in Europe learning to "winter camp" from the snowboarding students who wandered across Switzerland, a skill he then transferred to winter survival in Boston. T, a young woman who's been with us for some time, joined the conversation and, after some twists and turns, we realized that we both grew up in Minneapolis about 20 miles apart, and that she used to go "Fergus Falls Days" in my wife's hometown. One newcomer, B, was in town to work at the State Fair before going back to Greensboro. "But I know all these guys out here for a while."

"...as the incense..."

2010-10-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on the Feast of St Francis of Assisi we sang a Solemn Evensong at my instigation since, other than simply being the greatest and most beloved Saint of the church after Our Lady, he also has the unenviable honor of praying for me as I contemplate entering his Third Order.

Before the service I told our old and much-written-of friend C that that I needed to go into the church and start the incense for the service. Curious, and known to be incense-loving, he asked, and I showed him the big bag of spiced incense that we use and the coal he instantly recognized as identical to those used to smoke hookah. So I ended up giving him a few coals and a little bag of sweet smelling crystals. Having thought nothing of it at the time, and today having completely forgotten about it, I walked into the hospitality house this afternoon only to find that it now smelled just like the church.

St. Augustine Against Idolatry

2010-10-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω.

"Foolish people think their gifts are given by the demons they worship; indeed they sometimes say to themselves, 'God is necessary for eternal life, for spiritual life, but we need to worship those other powers to make sure of temporal things.' Oh, the empty-headedness of the human race! You set greater store by those advantages for the sake of which you want to worship demons; in fact you think it more important to pay cult to them - well, perhaps I should not say more important, but at any rate equally important. But God does not want to be worshiped along with them, not even if he gets much more worship and they much less. 'What,' you will say, 'aren't those gods necessary too, if we are to secure everyday things?' Absolutely not. 'But we should still be afraid that they may do us harm if they are angered.' They will do no harm unless God allows it. They will always have the will to do harm; they never stop wanting to, even if they are appeased or appealed to, for this is characteristic of their ill-will. What will you achieve, then, by worshiping them, except to displease God? And if he is offended you will be handed over into their power, with the result that those who could do nothing to you when God was well disposed will be able to do whatever they like once he is angry. If any one of you thinks that this sort of worship is necessary to secure temporal well-being, the following example will help you to see the futility of it. Take all those who worship Neptune: are they immune to shipwreck? What about all those who scoff at Neptune: does that mean they never reach harbor? And all those women who worship Juno: do they all give birth successfully? Or do all those who scoff at Juno miscarry? You must understand, beloved, that the men and women bent on worshiping these gods are empty-headed, for if it were necessary to pay cult to them for earthly things, only people who worship them would have these earthly things in plentiful supply. Even if that were the case, we should nonetheless shun such gifts and seek from God only the one thing [namely, to contemplate the Lord's delight], and all the more so because the God who is slighted when such gods are worshiped gives us earthly things too. So let our [former] father leave us, and our [former] mother too; [that is,] let the devil leave us and the city of Babylon leave us. And let the Lord take us into his arms to console us with temporal things, and bless us with the gifts of eternity. [So the Psalmist says,] 'My father and mother have abandoned me; but the Lord has taken me up.'"

Augustine of Hippo. "Exposition 2 of Psalm 26." In Exposition of the Psalms 1-32 (III/15), ed. John E. Rotelle, 15, 274-290. (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2000), 286-287.

Nyssan on Hospitality

2010-05-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

One of my students quoted this pearl in his paper on hospitality. Thanks Brian.

"Words are united to deeds with regard to what is true, and the Lord does not say that salvation consists in words but in deeds which effect salvation (Matthew 7:21). Thus we are responsible to follow his command. Let no one say that it is sufficient to send food to people not involved in our lives. This does not reveal mercy but an outward show in order to remove such persons from our presence. Do not their lives put us to shame and make us like dogs? A hunter does not avoid the lairs of young animals and the farmer knows how to care for calves; many such examples may be offered. Even the traveler washes the feet of his ass, takes care of its wounds, and cleanses its stable of dung. Will we refuse to neglect human beings and their beasts? No, my brothers, no. Let us not have this attitude towards our fellow men."

- From a homily of Gregory of Nyssa, "As You Did It To One Of These"

2010-03-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Finding Jesus

2010-03-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

[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.

Why I Love My Bike (and hate my car)

2010-03-20T16:07:00.001-07:00

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.

Colin D. Miller, Ph.D.

2010-03-19T06:12:00.001-07:00

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

Maturing into Vulnerabiltiy

2010-03-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

[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.

“...BUT BY PRAYER AND FASTING”

2010-02-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

This is a short blurb from Fr. Alexander Schmemann's book The Great Lent. A good piece of instruction before starting the fast tomorrow. Thanks to JR for typing this up.

"There is no Lent without fasting. It seems, however, that many people today either do not take fasting seriously or, if they do, misunderstand its real spiritual goals. For some people, fasting consists in a symbolic “giving up” of something; for some others, it is a scrupulous observance of dietary regulations. But in both cases, seldom is fasting referred to the total lenten effort. Here as elsewhere, therefore, we must first try to understand the Church's teaching about fasting and then ask ourselves: how can we apply this teaching to our life?
Fasting or abstinence from food is not exclusively a Christian practice. It existed and still exists in other religions and even outside religion, as for example in some specific therapies. Today people fast (or abstain) for all kinds of reasons, including sometimes political reasons. It is important, therefore, to discern the uniquely Christian content of fasting. It is first of all revealed to us in the interdependence between two events which we find in the Bible: one at the beginning of the Old testament and the other at the beginning of the New Testament. The first event is the “breaking of the fast” by Adam in Paradise. He ate of the forbidden fruit. This is how man's original sin is revealed to us. Christ, the New Adam-- and this is the second event-- begins by fasting. Adam was tempted and he succumbed to temptation; Christ was tempted and He overcame that temptation. The results of Adam's failure are expulsion from Paradise and death. The fruits of Christ's victory are the destruction of death and our return to Paradise. The lack of space prevents us from giving a detailed explanation of the meaning of this parallelism. It is clear, however, that in this perspective fasting is revealed to us as something decisive and ultimate in its importance. It is not a mere “obligation,” a custom; it is connected with the very mystery of life and death, of salvation and damnation.
In the Orthodox teaching, sin is not only the transgression of a rule leading to punishment; it is always a mutilation of life given to us by God. It is for this reason that the story of the oiginal sin is presented to us as an act of eating. For food is means of life; it is that which keeps us alive. But here lies the whole question: what does tit mean to be alive and what does “life” mean? For us today this term has a primarily biological meaning: life is precisely that which entirely depends on food, and more generally, on the physical world. But for the Holy Scripture and for Christian Tradition, this life “by bread alone” is identified with death because it is mortal life, because death is a principle always at work in it. God, we are told, “created no death.” He is the Giver of Life. How then did life become mortal? Why is death and death alone the only absolute condition of that which exists? The Church answers: because man rejected life as it was offered and given to him by God and preferred a life depending not on God alone but on “bread alone.” Not only did he disobey God for which he was punished; he changed the very relationship between himself and the world. To be sure, the world was given to him by God as “food”-- as means of life; yet life was meant to be communion with God; it had not only its end but its full content in Him. “In Him was Life and the Life was the light of man.” The world and food were thus created as means of communion with God, and only if accepted for God's sake were to give life. In itself food has no life and cannot give life. Only God has Life and is Life. In food itself God-- and not calories-- was the principle of life. Thus to eat, to be alive, to know God and be in communion with Him were on and the same thing. The unfathomable tragedy of Adam is that he ate for its own sake. More that that, he ate “apart from God in order to be independent of Him. And if he did it, it is because he believed that food had life in itself and that he, by partaking of that food, could be like God, i.e., have life in himself. To put it very simply: he believed in food, whereas the only object of belief, of faith, of dependence is God and God alone. World, food, became his gods, the sources and principles of his life. He became their slave. Adam-- in Hebrew-- means “man.” It is my name, our common name. Man is still Adam, still the slave of “food.” He may claim that he receives his life from God but he doesn't live in God and for God. His science, his experience, his self-consciousness are all built on that same principle: “by bread alone.” We eat in order to be alive but we are not alive in God. This is the sin of all sins. This is the verdict of death pronounced on our life.
Christ is the New Adam. He comes to repair the damage inflicted on life by Adam, to restore man to true life, and thus He also begins with fasting. “When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He became hungry” (Matt. 4:2). Hunger is that state in which we realize our dependence on something else-- when we urgently and essentially need food-- showing thus that we have no life in ourselves. It is that limit beyond which I either die from starvation or, having satisfied my body, have again the impression of being alive. It is, in other words, the time when we face the ultimate question: on what does my life depend? And, since the question is not an academic one but is felt with my entire body, it is also the time of temptation. Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is the proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food. And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. He refused to accept that cosmic lie which Satan imposed on the world, making that lie a self-evident truth not even debated any more, the foundation of our entire world view, of science, medicine, and perhaps even of religion. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day.
What then is fasting for us Christians? It is our entrance and participation in that experience of Christ Himself by which He liberates us from the total dependence on food, matter, and the world. By no means is our liberation a full one. Living still in the fallen world, in the world of the Old Adam, being part of it, we still depend on food. But just as our death-- through which we still must pass-- has become by virtue of Christ's Death a passage into life, the food we eat and the life it sustains can be life in God and for God. Part of our food has already become “food of immortality”-- the Body and Blood of Christ Himself. But even the daily bread we receive from God can be in this life and in this world that which strengthens us, our communion with God, rather than that which separates us from God. Yet it is only fasting that can perform that transformation, giving us the existential proof that our dependence on food and matter is not total, not absolute, that united to prayer, grace and adoration, it can itself be spiritual.
All this means that deeply understood, fasting is the only means by which man recovers his true spiritual nature. It is not a theoretical but truly a practical challenge to the great Liar who managed to convince us that we depend on bread alone and built all human knowledge, science, and existence on that lie. Fasting is a denunciation of that lie and also the proof that it is a lie. It is highly significant that it was while fasting that Christ met Satan and that He said later that Satan cannot be overcome “but by fasting and prayer.” fasting is the real fight against the Devil because it is the challenge to that one all-embracing law which makes him the “Prince of this world.” Yet if one is hungry and then discovers that he can truly be independent of that hunger, not be destroyed by it but just on the contrary, can transform it into a source of spiritual power and victory, the nothing remains of that great lie in which we have been living since Adam.
How far we are by now from the usual understanding of fasting as a mere change of diet, as what is permitted and what is forbidden, from all that superficial hypocrisy! Ultimately, to fast means only one thing: to be hungry-- to go to the limit of that human condition which depends entirely on food and, being hungry, to discover that this dependency is not the whole truth about man, that hunger itself is first of all a spiritual state and that it is in its last reality hunger for God. In the early church, fasting always meant total abstinence, a state of hunger, pushing the body to the extreme. It is here, however, that we discover also that fasting as a physical effort is totally meaningless without its spiritual counterpart: “... by fasting and prayer.” This means that without the corresponding spiritual effort, without feeding ourselves with Divine Reality, without discovering our total dependence on God and God alone, physical fasting would indeed be suicide. If Christ Himself was tempted while fasting, we have not a single chance of avoiding that temptation. Physical fasting, essential as it is, is not only meaningless, it is truly dangerous if it is disconnected from the spiritual effort-- from prayer and concentration on God. Fasting is an art fully mastered by Saints; it would be presumptuous and dangerous for us if we attempted that art without discernment and caution. The entire lenten worship is a constant reminder of the difficulties, the obstacles, and the temptations that await those who think that they may depend on their will power and not on God.
It is for this reason that we need first of all a spiritual preparation for the effort of fasting. It consists in asking God for help and also in making our fast God-centered. We should fast for God's sake. We must rediscover our body as the Temple of His Presence. We must recover a religious respect for the body, for food, for the very rhythm of life. All this must be done before the actual fast begins so that when we begin to fast, we would be supplied with spiritual weapons, with a vision, with a spirit of fight and victory.
Then comes the fast itself. In accordance with what has been said above, it should be practiced on two levels: first, as ascetical fast; and second, as total fast. The ascetical fast consists of a drastic reduction of food so that the permanent state of a certain hunger might be lived as a reminder of God and a constant effort to keep our mind on Him. Everyone who has practiced it-- be it only a little-- knows that this ascetical fast rather than weakening us makes us light, concentrated, sober, joyful, pure. One receives food as a real gift of God. One is constantly directed at that inner world which inexplicably becomes a kind of food in its own right. The exact amount of food to be received in this ascetical fasting, its rhythm and its quality, need not be discussed here; they depend on our individual capacities, the external conditions of our lives. Bu the principle is clear: it is a state of half-hunger whose “negative” nature is at all times transformed by prayer, memory, attention, and concentration into a positive power. As to the total fast, it is of necessity to be limited in duration and coordinated with the Eucharist…Whether we fast on that day from early morning or from noon, the main point here is to live through that day as a day of expectation, hope, hunger for God Himself. It is a spiritual concentration on that which comes, on the gift to be received, and for the sake of which one gives up all other gifts.
After all this is said, one must still remember that however limited our fasting, if it is true fasting it will lead to temptation, weakness, doubt, and irritation. In other terms, it will be a real fight and probably we shall fail many times. But the very discovery of Christian life as fight and effort is the essential aspect of fasting. A faith which has not overcome doubts and temptation is seldom a real faith. No progress in Christian life is possible, alas, without the bitter experience of failures. Too many people start fasting with enthusiasm and give up after the first failure. I would say that it is at this first failure that the real test comes. If after having failed and surrendered to our appetites and passions we start all over again and do not give up no matter how many times we fail, sooner or later our fasting will bear its spiritual fruits. Between holiness and disenchanted cynicism lies the great and divine virtue of patience-- patience, first of all with ourselves. There is no short-cut to holiness; for every step we have to pay the full price. Thus it is better and safer to begin at a minimum-- just slightly above our natural possibilities-- and to increase our effort little by little, than to try jumping too high at the beginning and to break a few bones when falling back to earth.
In summary: from a symbolic and nominal fast-- the fast as obligation and custom-- we must return to the real fast. Let it be limited and humble but consistent and serious. Let us honestly face our spiritual and physical capacity and act accordingly-- remembering however that there is no fast without challenging that capacity, without introducing into our life a divine proof that things impossible with men are possible with God."

Amen.

In preparation for Lent

2010-02-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

I borrowed this from the website Monachos.net. The old man's response is fairly lengthy, be sure to click below to read the full response. Enjoy:

A boy once approached his father, ‘Old man, why do you fast?’ The father stood silent, bringing heart and mind together, and then:

‘Beloved boy, I fast to know what it is I lack.
For day by day I sit in abundance, and
all is well before me;
I want not, I suffer not, and I
lack but that for which I invent a need.
But my heart is empty of true joy,
filled, yet overflowing with dry waters.
There is no room left for love.
I have no needs, and so my needs are never met,
no longings, and so my desires are never fulfilled.
Where all the fruits of the earth could dwell, I have
filled the house with dust and clouds;
It is full, so I am content—
But it is empty, and so I weep.

‘Thus I fast, beloved, to know the
dust in which I dwell.
I take not from that which I might take,
for in its absence I am left empty,
and what is empty stands ready to be
filled.
I turn from what I love, for my love is barren,
and by it I curse the earth.
I turn from what I love, that I may purify my loving,
and move from curse to blessing.

‘From my abundance I turn to want,
as the soldier leaves the comfort of home,
of family and love,
to know the barrenness of war.
For it is only amongst the fight, in the
torture of loss, in the fire of battle,
that lies are lost and the blind man
clearly sees.
In hunger of body and mind, I see
the vanity of food,
for I have loved food as food,
and have never been fed.
In weary, waking vigil I see
the vanity of sleep,
for I have embraced sleep as desire,
and have never found rest.
In sorrow, with eyes of tears I see
the vanity of pleasure,
for I have treasured happiness above all,
and have never known joy.

‘I fast, beloved child, to crush the wall
that is my self;
For I am not who I am, just as these passions
are not treasures of gold but of clay.
I fast to die, for it is not the living who are
raised, but the dead.
I fast to crucify my desires, for He who was
crucified was He who lived,
and He who conquered,
and He who lives forever.’

On the Ground in Haiti

2010-01-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

This is an email from Pastor Leon who showed Lisa around when she visited last year.

"...We're doing fine but very concerned for our brothers and sisters who
lived around us. The situation is very critical as most people are
living with lots of fear thinking that the last days are in. Some
people heard on the news that this ordeal would last 'till Friday.
That doesn't help their behavior at all for too many of them are so
emotional and not being able to think for themselves on how to best
live the moment. I'm truly moved with lots of compassion for them.

No one wants to get close to their homes for fear of death, except
crazy guys like me, thinking that their house would fall on them. We
have over three millions people living in Port-au-Prince most of them
have been sleeping on the streets since the warning. I'm sure some of
them would continue to do that even beyond Friday, the supposed last
day of the quake, for fear of death.

Our churches , schools and clinic buildings have all suffered much
damage. Two out of the four churches, Cite Soleil church and
Repatriate churches, are nonfunctional.Those buildings are still
standing up but look very unstable, unsecured for worship. I haven't
been able to visit Ibo Beach yet . I plan to do that today. I will
send more information to you after I visited Ibo Beach.

Cells phone are practically dead except for one company (Haitel) which
I don't do business with for years since the other providers come on
the scene. Gaz is very scared and very expensive. One gallon of gaz
costed as much as $12.50 (U.S. dollars) in some places yesterday.
Some people are taking advantage of the situation to practice black
market. Markets aren't open; food is scared , expensive and rare, gaz
stations aren't open either. Water trucks are not delivering water.
Schools and businesses are closed. It was a very unusual day in Haiti
yesterday. It sounds like what John talked about in Revelation is
begging to be a reality at least for a short time in Haiti.

Yesterday, I was able to visit several families in their homes. Their
situation demands much attention. Many houses are destroyed; some need
major repairs, lots of them need to be totally rebuilt. So far we've
registered five deaths in the three churches that I visited and many
injured people. In the case of the Repatriate church, the quake
started while their were having 278 people showed up for Bible study
and prayer. Many people were injured while trying to ran to save their
lives. It was a sad thing to see. One young boy, about 8 years old,
died from a fallen wall while getting ready to go to church. Several
got injured.

Our church compounds (Cite Soleil and Blanchard) are being used as
places of refuge, away from the danger of any houses and trees that
could fall on the people. Thank God for the soccer field in C/S as
well as the one in Blanchard. Both being used as camping grounds for
the people in the community.

Some of you might remember Boselor, known to some of you as Bosie , he
was found died yesterday inside a class room with several other
students where he used to go to school. Another college student from
Blanchard church was also found dead in a class room in
Port-au-Prince. I heard of couple more from Cite Soleil church but
I've been able to confirm that information yet. Expect to hear more
about from me later on today.

The total people that have been injured and died from the quake
couldn't possibly be known by any one person or agent. I heard
reports anywhere from 50,000 - 100,000. I don't know how many but
I've seen too many dead bodies on the streets of Port - au - Prince
yesterday. It was a very sad and provocative day of my life. I
seriously question our government's ability, specially their
possibility and capability to help with the situation even half way
decent.

We called for an all leaders' meeting for this coming Saturday to find
out together how we're going to be and do church in the months to
come. We have so many needs to meet both physical and spiritual, we
don't know for sure where and how to begging. We don't know for sure
where we're going to meet for worship, specially with the C/S and
Repatriate folks. We recommend that several large and big tents be
sent right away to help momentarily with the situation. In C/S we
normally have between 2,200 -2300 in worship every Sunday. The tents
need to be big enough to hold at least 1,500 people We need two for
C/S church. We need two others that could hold at least 600 and 200
each to use in Repatriate.

We thank God for giving Allen & the Obrians , the inspiration to
build the soccer field in C/S that is now being use as a camp ground,
a refuge place, a place away from any danger of being exposed to
fallen houses and walls. For all practical reason, the soccer field
could be used and a place of worship but we need tents large and big
enough to accommodate the people that we have. Most likely , based on
historical facts, we would have more people coming to know the Lord as
their Savior or coming back to the church as result of this ordeal.
We need to be ready and be prepared to receive and welcome them. The
sooner the better.

We hope to meet together this week end as a group of leaders to find
out what we should do to minister both spiritually and physically to
the people that the Lord has entrusted to us. Needless to say that
your prayers as well as your financial assistance and that of your
friends are needed for your brothers and sisters who are living in
Haiti.

Palms's water project is nonoperational at this time due to the wall
that felt on the building and destroyed some of the installation.
Moreover, the building that the project was in is half destroyed by
the wall that collapsed right on it. It was very sad to see that
yesterday.

We have a situation in C/S and Blanchard where water is coming up from
the ground because of too many splits (cracks) in the ground. The
wells in Repatriate are over flowed with water. Water is coming up
through the pipes into the streets like a spring. It looks very
dangerous.

The only decent building that we now have in C/S is the cafeteria and
the second school building built by Ferdie's group six or seven years
ago. All other buildings in that compound are questionable for future
usage. The wall in C/S and in Repatriate are totally destroyed. Their
is no security whatsoever in those two compounds. The sewing machines
in C/S are all destroyed.

Blanchard's buildings look very good except for a large crack that we
saw between the library building and the hall way that connects the
second floor of that building to the library. I plan to invite couple
engineers, after the situation is over, to see if there is any way we
could restore and secure all of our buildings for good usage in the
future. The situation is called for immediate action both for the
physical and spiritual needs of the people.

Please stay in touch . I would probably have more to share with you
as the situation is developing.

In the service of the King together with you on behalf of our brothers
and sisters in Haiti.

Leon & Jacky Dorleans

St. Therese on Giving to Him Who Begs (Part I)

2010-01-12T16:02:00.000-08:00

I don't think we've posted this before, surprising as that may be. Even if we had, a little repetition never hurt a soul. From her autobiography:

Jesus teaches me: "Give to everyone that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods, ask them not again." It is not so pleasant to give to everyone who asks as it is to offer something freely and spontaneously; and it is easy to give when you are asked nicely, but if we are asked tactlessly, we at once want to refuse unless perfect charity strengthens us. We find a thousand reasons for sayig no, and it is not until we have made the sister aware of her bad manners that we give her what she wants as a favor, or do her a slight service which takes a quarter of the time needed to tell her of the obstacles preventing our doing it or of our fancied rights.

If it is hard to give to anyone who asks, it is very much harder to let what belongs to us be taken without asking for it back. I say that it is hard, but I should really say that is seems hard, for "the yoke of the Lord is sweet and His burden is light." The moment we accept it, we feel how light it is.

I have said that Jesus does not want me to ask for the return of what belongs to me. That seems very right, as nothing really does belong to me. So I should rejoice when I have the chance of experiencing that poverty to which I am solemnly vowed. I used to believe I had no possessiveness about anything; but since I have really grasped what Jesus means, I see how far I am from being perfect. If, for example, I settle down to start painting and find the brushes in a mess, or a ruler or a penknife gone, I very nearly lose my patience and have to hold on to it with both hands to prevent my asking bad-temperedly for them. Of course I can ask for these essential tools and I do not disobey Jesus if I ask humbly. I behave like poor people who hold out their hands for the necessities of life. As no one owes them anything, they are never surprised at being rebuffed. What peace pours over the soul once it soars above natural feelings! There is no joy like that known by the truly poor in spirit. Our Lord's counsel is: "If any man take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him," and these poor in spirit are following this counsel when they ask, with detachment, for some necessary thing and it is refused them and an effort is made to snatch away even what they have. To give up one's coat means to renounce one's last rights and to regard oneself as the servant and the slave of others. Without one's cloak, it is much easier to walk and run, and so Jesus adds: "And whosoever willforce thee one mile, go with him another two." It is not enough for me to give to all who ask me: I must go beyond what they want. I must show how grateful and honoured I am to serve them and if anything I use is taken away, I must appear glad to be rid of it.

(to be continued...)

Breakfast: Feast of St. John

2009-12-28T15:39:00.000-08:00

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?”

J.R. Rigby, Ph.D

2009-12-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Dr. JR for a successful dissertation defense!

Criticism of Churches Feeding the Homeless

2009-11-21T17:17:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting piece of coverage from CNN.com. If we're not careful, we'll make the news...

Rome & Canterbury in Recent Economic News

2009-11-18T14:22:00.000-08:00

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!

A few words from Peter Maurin

2009-11-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

You won't want to miss this. Believed to be the only voice recording of Peter.

Learning From Our Sisters

2009-11-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

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.

Dean Sam Wells: Open for questions

2009-10-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

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.

MacIntyrian Personalism; or Another Reason Macy Equals Concrete

2009-10-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

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.

When Not Caring For the Poor or Reading High-Brow Theology...

2009-09-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

... you might find my compatriots attempting to get closer to God through various additional means as well. The pursuit of holiness never ends.

A Parent’s Reflection on Welcoming the Stranger - or - Macy Equals Concrete

2009-09-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Review of Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of Saint Benedict

2009-09-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

[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.

Picture of the Day

2009-08-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

Picture of the Day

2009-08-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

Our Story: St. Joseph's Hospitality

2009-08-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Pearls Before Swine

2009-07-08T12:07:00.001-07:00

"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.

Friendship and Voluntary Poverty

2009-06-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Roundtable: Prudent Finances

2009-06-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

NY Times Blog Challenges the Market!

2009-06-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

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.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Prayer to Acquire the Virtues

2009-06-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

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.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

2009-06-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

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.

The Economy

2009-05-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Saint Joseph's House: What is it?

2009-05-21T06:35:00.000-07:00

What should SJH be? Here’s my brainstorming. I want to discuss all of this and I’m set on nothing…

A place in which the Miller marriage is able to grow and thrive – however that looks. Perhaps one night a week Lisa and I get to have the place to ourselves.
A place that Crete can call home.
A place that might eventually offer nightly beds to a couple other folk.
A school for training in the gospel.

Ordinary language, roundtable discussions for the clarification of thought – what are we doing and why are we
doing it. Must be accessible to everyone. And probably very practical. But this is not a separate “school” apart from
the church. It is just a different venue probably with a focus on what are the more “radical” parts of the Gospel.
Maybe we could start b discussing the Catholic Worker’s "Aims and Means?"

A place where we are changed by rubbing up against the other.
A place were the poor are served before the rich.
A place where people can take showers.
A place that has a pot of soup or a casserole ready to go those who come in.
A place that takes donations to allow the rich to give to the poor, to do good for goodness’ sake.
A place where we learn how to beg.
A place with a core of committed “associates.” Many hands make lighter work.
A place that is a ministry St. Joe's. and under the authority of its clerics.
A place that other clerics frequent to lead discussions, celebrate the Eucharist, etc.

So:

I suggest that we start with JR’s suggestion of small communal meals with the Guys, as frequent as weekly if we can afford it.
I further suggest that we start roundtable discussions about what SJH should be ASAP.
Anyone's contributions to these are valued.

Breakfast

2009-05-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

A rather full house for Morning Prayer. I think I counted nine total, which is at least a few more than usual. Jenny is a newcomer who dropped in for the second time today. She goes to Watts St Baptist on Sundays but says it so big that it is nice to come by for our prayers during the week and the chance for a little bit of community. Betty was also in attendance, who makes our breakfast egg casseroles. She usually just checks to be sure we have everything we need for the week. It was wonderful to hear such a full choir of voices singing the canticles on a cool Monday morning in May.

We had breakfast outside on the picnic tables. L slept through it, under the covered walkway, as usual. He had set up one of the storage tubs we provide to keep their things dry, making it into a sort of shelter from the sun that shines directly onto his spot. R and C were around as usual, and C came to the tables and said a couple of other guys were going to walk up so maybe we should heat up some more casserole. Adam went in and got to that since I had only prepared a small amount. Kale stayed outside with Lisa, JR and I, quite interested in both staying warm and in a piece of string he had tied to a ribbon spool. I asked him if it was a yoyo and he said matter of factly, “No, its my string.”

Two white men came up following C. I thought I had seen one of them before. They were pleasant and fairly well put together. One of them had been banned from the city of Greenville, they said, since he had gotten into so much trouble for panhandling. I wasn’t sure that cities were in the habit of issuing sentences of exile, but that was the stated reason for coming to Durham. The other guy, whom he said the others called “Cowboy” (they are wont to give such nicknames) I knew I had seen before. I think he may even have been to breakfast once or twice at St Joe’s. They both ate a good chunk of egg and drank a full glass of juice and thanked us kindly. We said what we always say: “W’re here M-F for breakfast. Come by anytime you want.”

Catholic Worker and MDG's: A Provocation

2009-05-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

There's not enough intrigue on this blog ;) So, I'll push some buttons for the sake of discussion: Would Dorothy Day be in support of the Millenium Development Goals? Why or why not? Or, more accessibly, are the MDG's consistent with the vision of the Catholic Worker?

Just to get things going, let's have a statement in favor and one opposed. In favor: Dorothy and Peter were always talking about changing the social order, with rhetoric very clearly influenced by communism and socialism. This seems to favor a commitment to goals of global justice (e.g., access to clean water). In opposition: Dorothy and Peter were equally known for the emphasis on the grass roots, or personalist, approach to these problems with an anarchist tinge. What do anarchists mean when they talk about changing the social order?

So, what do you think?

Mother Teresa on Jesus

2009-05-19T07:40:00.001-07:00

In answer to the question "Who is Jesus to you?" Mother writes,

Who is Jesus to me?
Jesus is the Word made Flesh.
Jesus is the Bread of Life.
Jesus is the Victim offered for our sins on the Cross.
Jesus is the Sacrifice at Holy Mass for the sins of the world and mine.
Jesus is the Word - to be spoken.
Jesus is the Truth - to be told.
Jesus is the Way - to be walked.
Jesus is the Light - to be lit.
Jesus is the Life - to be loved...
Jesus is the Joy - to be shared.
Jesus is the Sacrifice - to be given.
Jesus is the Bread of Life - to be eaten.
Jesus is the Hungry - to be fed.
Jesus is the Thirsty - to be satiated.
Jesus is the Naked - to be clothed.
Jesus is the Homeless - to be taken in.
Jesus is the Sick - to be healed.
Jesus is the Lonely - to be loved.
Jesus is the Unwanted - to be wanted.
Jesus is the Leper - to wash his wounds.
Jesus is the Beggar - to give him a smile.
Jesus is the Drunkard - to listen to him.
Jesus is the Little One - to embrace him.
Jesus is the Dumb - to speak to him.
Jesus is the Crippled - to walk with him.
Jesus is the Drug Addict - to befriend him.
Jesus is the Prostitute - to remove from danger and befriend her.
Jesus is the Prisoner - to be visited.
Jesus is the Old - to be served.

To me --
Jesus is my God,
Jesus is my Spouse,
Jesus is my Life,
Jesus is my only Love,
Jesus is my All in All,
Jesus is my Everything. Amen.

[Each line is poignant, but I have added emphasis with bold type to a few that are particularly pointed for us.]

Dorothy on "The Undeserving"

2009-05-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Undeserving

A friend sent us a dollar yesterday, and with it the remark: "Enclosed is for bread, but not to make bums out of those who should be earning their own." ...

I thought of that this morning when I passed a little group of four who always seem to be hanging around the place, out in front, in the coffee room, in the doorways. Always drunk, sometimes prostrate on the sidewalk, sometimes sitting on the curb, they give a picture of despair or hilarity, according to the mood they are in. And, to the minds of many of our friends, they epitomize the six hundred or so who come here to eat every day.

This morning as I came from Mass, I passed the little vegetable woman around the corner, washing her mustard greens in a huge barrel of cold water. Her hands were raw and cold. It was one of those grey mornings, wet and misty, and the pavement was slimy under foot.

I commiserated with her over her hands, and she said: "What are you going to do? If you dont work, you dont eat."

What a tradition of industry these Italians have--working steadily from morning to night, earning their income by pennies, and educating their children by those same pennies, even putting them through college.

When I passed this same little knot of men in front of the house, whom I had passed on the way to church, I told them about the little Italian woman, and they hung their heads sheepishly and went away. I dont know what can be done--except to pray. Here are the most humiliated of men, the most despised, the evidence of their sins is flagrant and ever present. And as to what brought them to this pass--war and poverty, disease and sorrow--who can tell? Why question? We must see Christ everywhere, even in His most degraded guise.

We take care of men by the tens of thousands during the course of the year, and there is no time to stop and figure who are the worthy or who are the unworthy. We are each of us unprofitable servants. We are guilty of each others sins.

-The Catholic Worker, April 1943

St. Joseph's House

2009-05-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

Formally or informally, St. Joseph's House is now a reality. Yesterday Colin and Lisa moved into a new dwelling with lots of space for hospitality in a neighborhood that will likely take them up on the offer.

So, now the questions become a little more pointed. What should a house of hospitality be, functionally? What practices will be associated with life at the house. Open meals, a place to sleep... How will the house fit into the community? Who will stay there, for how long, with what needs?

Most of these questions will be answered concretely as the answers impose themselves in human form. Still, there is a need for reflection on the challenges that a house of hospitality will face and how to receive those challenges.

So consider the ice broken and the floor prepared for debate/discussion. What is a modern house of hospitality? Who does it serve and how does it serve them?

Sin Insurance

2009-05-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

The Apostle says "let sin not reign in your body" (Rom 6:12).

Chrysostom, in his 11th Homily on Romans, writes regarding this:

It is possible even for one with a mortal body not to sin. Do you see the abundancy of Christ’s grace? For Adam, though as yet he had not a mortal body, fell. But thou, who hast received one even subject to death, canst be crowned. How then, is it that “sin reigns?” he says. It is not from any power of its own, but from thy listlessness. Wherefore after saying, “let it not reign,” he also points out the mode of this reigning, by going on to say “that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.” For it is not honor to concede to it (i.e. to the body) all things at will, nay, it is slavery in the extreme, and the height of dishonor; for when it doth what it listeth, then is it bereft of all liberties; but when it is put under restraints, then it best keeps its own proper rank.

So, for St. Chrysostom, sin is not an evil apocalyptic power with an ontological life of its own, but simply human action that caters to the body’s desires. What he says casts in one more light the slavery that wealth is. For to most, wealth is a good. But what Chrysostom says implies that the great jobs that we seek, the comfortable homes we scratch and claw for, the fine food and drink we consume, the fences we build around our possessions, the insurance policies we take out on everything from our cars to our pets, the prudence we exercise in separating ourselves from any hint of danger – in short, the comfortable, safe and secure life we are so lauded for at least trying to provide for ourselves in the name of prudence and foresight - this life is all built up to protect the desires of the body, as John says to “willingly concede all things to it." And it is simply slavery to the passions. For this is a life spent ensuring the gratification of the very body of sin that God sent his son to condemn (Rom 8:3). Houses, cars, security, privacy, bank accounts, insurance, tenure – all these castles we spend our lives building function only to secure the continued satisfaction of that from which our Savior died to deliver us.

But we keep insisting, in the name of responsibility, on such dying.

We keep insisting on purchasing such sin insurance.

“But see the abundance of Christ’s grace!”

“For if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you shall live.” (Rom 8:13)

Origen on Conversion

2009-05-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

A little while ago your feet were running off to the temples of the demons; now let them run off to the Church of God. Previously they were running off to shed blood; now let them run out to save it. Earlier your hands were stretched forth to plunder the property of others; now stretch them forth to lavish your own goods upon others. Previously your eyes were looking around for a woman or some property to lust after; now let them look around for the poor, the weak, the needy, in order to show them mercy.

-Commentary on Romans 6.4.2

Breakfast

2009-05-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

Today at Morning Prayer we celebrated the feast of St. Gregory Nazianzus. The Collect for his day references his episcopate and his Trinitarian theology. What it does not mention is his tireless work for the poor. Pray for us, Father Gregory.

J came in about half way through the Office and took his seat in the back. After sharing the Peace he asked JR to go and take care of some business with him that JR had already told him would have to wait until Tuesday. No harm in one more try.

Its raining this morning so there were a few folks gathered under the covered walkway that leads from the nave to the parish hall. We went inside and put the new casserole in the microwave and sat down - T, Adam, Kale, JR and I. (It strikes me that we do this same thing just about every day and I really have never thought that I am technically the only one who is actually a member of the parish).

Two guys followed in in the next few minutes. One went straight to the back room where we keep the clothes and toiletries to see if there was anything new in there (he checks just about every day).

There wasn't, so he asked me for some deodorant. This guy is one of our more unsavory fellows, and I told him that if there wasn't any back there we were out. JR, who had just gotten back from the gas station next door with a pack of smokes for one of the guys looked at me and said rhetorically, "You know, they might have some at the gas station." Of course we both knew they did. His suggestion was a gentile rebuke to my dislike for this fellow which was getting in the way of charity. I looked at JR, hung my head a little, and remembering what Benedict said about accepting rebuke cheerfully and immediately, decided against punching him in the face, and walked out the door to the gas station (but not before I was instructed by J to "get two, and the powder kind cause my armpits are sensitive".).

When I got back a couple minutes later I asked R and C if they wanted any breakfast and went in to collect their orders. I found we were out of hot sauce, a must for some of the folk. So out I went again, this time to Whole Foods. But again, before I could vacate, the same dude instructed me to "get some new milk cause your boys are out in there." When I got back with the milk and hot sauce I found we were not, in fact, out of milk.

I got C a cup of coffee and brought it out to him since he had gone ahead and eaten his eggs without the hot sauce (so glad I went to the store). I make coffee everyday and sometime no one drinks it, but I have this strange habit and serving people coffee makes me happy. So C's calm eyes and sips of his over-sugared, under creamed java calmed my soul for the moment. I felt a bond with him among the other chaos and demands that makes the rest of it doable. With his familiar "thank ya, dude" I headed back inside.

I sat down with the grocery list I am supposed to keep up for Gail to keep the kitchen stocked and finally got to a bowl of cereal. I was interrupted by J asking me to call Sammie away from him and then proceeding to rant about why I would bring a dog to church. "Calm down", I said, trying to hide my annoyance and be gentle. J muttered something about calming down and walked out of the parish hall, leaving his over-filled bowl of cereal and plate of eggs behind.

(Un)Deserving Poor

2009-05-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the NY Times that I stumbled on from 1995:

Defining Who Deserves What

And this one about a historically affluent church that embraces the poor:

Church for the Inner City

A Six Iron and a $20 Check

2009-05-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: The following is the narrative of an encounter which, if not typical, was also not exactly atypical of one of our regulars. The language is profane. This is not a post for sensitive readers.]

"Are you from Durham, J____?"

"From the worst projects around, Few Gardens."

"Really? The 'worst' projects, you say."

"Yeah," he said with some disdain as if anyone should know that. "You got Mac-Dougal and them other projects, but those mo' fuckas don't come up in Few. Run mo' fuckas from New York out of Few. Shit's rough."

"Huh."

"Hey, turn here." He motioned for me to turn at the next light. We were headed to get a check cashed. I wasn't entirely sure of the details. The vicar wrote him a check that he was having trouble cashing... the guy at the place said J____ needed some verification that he hadn't written the check himself... I just needed to tell the guy the check was legit.

"Man, I don't want no kids," he says, staring at a woman on the sidewalk. "Just want to hit that, but no kids. Too much responsibility and shit. These bitches. Man, sayin' I'm this and that, on crack. Shit. They's bitches sellin' they kids to men for sex around here. Shit's messed up. This world's screwed up, dangerous."

"Where are we going, J____?"

"Right here... turn here, right there." We turned into a place with "CHECKS CASHED" spelled out in six-foot neon letters above the windows. J____ got out of the car amidst a cloud of his own diffuse profanity and and partially articulated anathema. We walked into the business, the only patrons. A man seemed busy in the back, behind one-inch bulletproof glass. J____ paced up and down, with his little cloud of obscenity trailing slightly, leaving me with a "fucka" here and "pussy" there.

The man behind the counter was busy for three or four minutes. In the meantime J____ looked for a pen to endorse his check and cursed the world repeatedly when none of them seemed to work. I asked to see the mysterious check. Sure enough it was written by the vicar, but made out to "DEPT OF MOTOR VEHICLES". Hmmm..

"J____, this is made out to the DMV. They're not going to cash this."

"Man! The DMV don't cash no checks! She put the DMV on there cuz that's what it's for. I got to get my ID."

"That's fine, man. But she made it out to the DMV. Let me call her." So I dial the vicar's cell, but it's her day off and she probably left her phone somewhere out of earshot. No answer. Being able to guess what her intentions were with that check, I thought to myself that maybe not having a definitive word from her was best in this situation. No one was going to cash J____'s check anyway, so why involve the vicar.

Meanwhile, two attractive black women had come in and stood in line behind J____. Or maybe they just stood at a distance. J____ was pacing back and forth, cursing, momentarily letting his gaze fix on one of the women for a split second, followed by more obscenity. Never a fully audible sentence, just words, the intimation of sentences by his movement. They looked uncertain, but not entirely uncomfortable. Confident, but aware the J____ was acting crazy as hell.

"Can I help you?" The man behind the counter spoke to J____.

"Yeah, I need to get this check cashed. I get my.."

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you."

J____ lowers his entire head into the slot between the counter and the window through which he has just passed the check. I'm pretty sure the clerk on the other side could only see J____'s lips and teeth flapping obscenities about this check and his difficulties cashing it.

"I'm sorry. It's made out to the DMV. We can't cash it here."

"Man, the guy at the other place said all I had to do was get somebody from the church to say the shit's legit..."

"But, sir, the check is not made out to you. We cannot cash."

"Fuck that. Com'on. We'll go down... Fuck that. Shit. Mo' fuckas want the DMV. The DMV don't take no checks. You fuckin' white people can do that shit. Fuckin Klan.

We got back into the car and J____ motioned to go up to the place he had been the previous day. "Alright," I said, "but I don't think they're going to cash it either. Why don't we just wait and talk to the vicar..."

"The hell! I saw you in there. Yo' eyes told the whole story. In there. You don't just have to talk with yo' mouth. You talk with yo' eyes and I can read that fuckin' eye-speak. You in there, you racist fucka, probably in the Klan. You think I'm just tryin' to get money for drugs or something. Fuckin' prejudice. I can smell that shit. The way you got your face all wrinkled up. Fuck that motha fuckin shit."

"We're here."

We walked into the second place. Two hispanic men were ahead of us in line. When the first finished his business and left, J____ could barely contain himself while the second spoke slowly and deliberately in Spanish to the clerk. J____ kept marching up behind the man, standing on his tip-toes and leaning over the man making severe eye contact with the clerk. The man finished, and while folding his papers, had to untangle himself from J____ to get away from the teller's window.

J____ told the same story, with his entire head in the slot at the bottom of the window. The same negative result. J____ stormed out. Having anticipated some degree of eruption I had locked the car door before we went in. I wanted some degree of choice whether to let J____ back into the car. He was pissed, but still seemed marginally stable. When we got to the car I unlocked my door. He grabbed for the door handle and, when his jerk just left his hand empty and the handle slapping back down hard, he was taken aback and looked at me saying, "What, you fuckin' not going to let me in the car." I didn't answer, opened my door and unlocked his as I sat in the driver seat. He didn't hear the locks click and continued his profane tirade. The sunroof was open. I said, "J____, shut up and open the door."

"Oh. Fuck." And he opened the door and got in.

"Let's go down here. We'll go to the DMV. You think you so right. Let's go to the DMV."

"J____, it's 9:30. I have to go to work. Now you tell me where you'd like me to drop you off between here and the church."

"Huh. Why don't you just give me the twenty dollars."

Wouldn't that have been so much simpler to begin with? "Because I don't have twenty dollars on me."

"Then ten."

"J____ I don't have any money on me. Why don't we go back to the church and we'll find out from the vicar exactly what her intentions were for that money and we'll go from there."

"Man, fuck you. Here's your fuckin check." He threw it up and let it flutter down to the floorboard. "All you fuckin white folks think I'm just tryin to get drugs. And that fuckin white boy up on the hill. He doin crack and drinkin and smokin shit. But all you mo' fuckas are in the Klan. You racist fucks. Think I don't see it? I see that shit. Man, I bust all yo fuckin heads."

I sat listening as I drove us back to the church.

"You gone go tell the po-lice.. threatenin... Shit. Send the police. I bust they heads too... with a fuckin six iron. Crack they skulls. Man, I wish I had a gun. Shoot the fucka's in the face. All you fuckin' white folks is in the goddamn Klan. Klu Klux Klan racist. Fuckin' po-lice crooked as hell. Send me to jail. I ain't goin to jail. An' I'm goin to get my shit, don't matter what you fuckin do. Think I'm... Fuck that, I'll smoke my fuckin crack. I'm gonna do what I wanna do. Ain't nobody gone stop me. You fuckin' Klu Klux mo' fucka. I've fucked up niggas twice my fuckin size, I'll fuck that shit up too.

"You ain't gotta say nothin'. Yo' eyes say plenty and I can read that shit. Check. Shit. I'll get mine. You don't fuckin' matter. I'll do what I want to do..." And on it went.

We pulled up to the church. "See you later, J____."

"Fuck." And he got out.

Schools, Agencies Seeing Big Increase in Homeless Families

2009-05-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

See the CNN story here.

Why Jesus Should Have Been Institutionalized

2009-04-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

By the modern day standards by which individuals of questionable sanity are deemed to be proper candidates for institutionalization or, at least, to be highly psychotropically medicated, Jesus clearly fits the bill to receive the benefits of either intervention. In fact, given the definition of what constitutes a mental disorder in the DSM-IV-TR, the bible of psychological diagnoses, there is likely no known person in the history of mankind who would have qualified for systemic, institutionalized psychiatric treatment more than Christ.(1) And when the DSM-IV-TR’s definition of “mental disorder” is taken in conjunction with the criteria for involuntary committal as delineated in North Carolina state law, the latter stating that a “client” may be “involuntarily committed” if “[there] is, without the benefit of the specific treatment measure, a significant possibility that the client will harm self or others before improvement of the client's condition is realized”, there is no doubt that, whether against his will or not, Jesus, of all people, should have been promptly and indefinitely committed. (2)

For at least as far as the New Testament witness in concerned, Jesus’ speech and behavior most certainly show that he posed a consummate threat to himself.(3) For example, he intentionally gave up what could have been a stable income in carpentry, leading perhaps to marriage, children, and a comfortable domestic situation, in order to wander around as a homeless, single, poverty-stricken nomad. Further still, the people with whom he ended up spending most of his time were typically those of deeply suspect personal histories, many of whom had long public records of socially deviant behavior, and the likes of which included hookers, scam artists, and zealous infidels of high volatility. Similarly, he showed no regard for his own personal safety when it came to the risks involving his physical health, exposing himself to the leprous and variously and violently demonized with a reckless and unrepentant regularity. The way that Jesus spoke and the paranoid language he so often used certainly warranted his immediate hospitalization, as well, endlessly speaking, as he did, of dark and apocalyptic nightmares that he so delusively believed would come true. His ability to rightly and safely judge the character of others was also clearly shown to be impaired, given his willingness to befriend and maintain close associations with Judas Iscariot, a man whom he knew would eventually hand him over to be tortured and sadistically killed. In fact, Jesus evinced the ultimate symptom warranting his hospitalization by his intentionally choosing to travel to Jerusalem at Passover, knowing full well that such would culminate in the prolonged brutality that was his crucifixion.

But as if the harm Jesus posed to himself were not enough, it is equally clear that Jesus represented a serious threat to the well-being of others, as well. For not only did he convince the twelve disciples to give up their jobs and financial security as he had done, but he also explicitly called upon and convinced them to de-prioritize their respective families and loved ones in order to follow him. He likewise thoughtlessly endangered them by negligently bringing the twelve into his own psychotic web of social irresponsibility, exposing them to the same group of miscreants, diseases, and lifestyle of poverty that he had chosen for himself. And, to top it off, he knowingly brainwashed them to adopt a manner of life and practice whereby each would be killed as was he, intentionally grooming each disciple for the grisly and senseless demise that is martyrdom. He even went so far as to set up an organization formed in his name (i.e., the Church) which he consciously intended to be an ongoing recruitment program for the promotion of the same maladjusted and disordered lifestyle he had chosen for himself and his twelve disciples! Certainly, apart from merely being a harm to himself, Jesus presented (and still yet presents!) an unprecedented danger to countless scores of others.

Thus, in light of the above, there can be no doubt whatsoever that Jesus was stark, raving mad, posing a significant risk of injury both to himself and those surrounding him, clearly requiring the corrective aid that comes from institutionalization and high doses of psychotropic medicine (and all this is to say nothing of the need to have involuntarily committed other biblical figures like the camel-suit-wearing, locust-eating, desert-dwelling, ranting, apocalyptic preacher, John the Baptist, or the split-personality, megalomaniac, and glutton for punishment that was St. Paul).

Sadly, none of the enlightened individuals who encountered him sufficiently loved Christ or were responsible enough to have him indefinitely committed for redemptive psychiatric treatment. And, as a result, it seems we have little room not to seriously question their basic morality or any claim they might have made about being altruistically concerned about the needs of the mentally ill. For, clearly, if they did not perceive or did not act upon the fact that Jesus, the recruiter of martyrs and willingly crucified, was certifiably crazy and in need of the state’s intervention to protect himself and others from the danger that he plainly was, then obviously the bible from which they mistakenly discerned what constitutes “disorder” and/or the means by which such should be treated was something embarrassingly frail or irrelevant in comparison with the infallible canon of the American Psychiatric Association that is the DSM-IV-TR or North Carolina state law. Indeed, it seems we have significant reason to ponder why they were so cruelly and irresponsibly unwilling to help Jesus when he so obviously needed it, or why it was they allowed for the prolonging of his undeniable suffering. For, given what I’ve outlined above, if Jesus isn’t the quintessential poster child of the mentally deranged or psychologically sick, desperately in need of institutionalized medical assistance, then I cannot imagine who is. If only the truly wise around him had loved Jesus or been responsible enough to properly intervene on his behalf, perhaps he could have been rescued from himself and the inevitable fate that would result from his psychosis! What a wonderful thing that would have been! What a tragedy that it did not occur.
________________________

(1) “In DSM-IV, each of the mental disorders is conceptualized as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.” American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, Text Revision. (Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), xxxi.

(2) Quoted from North Carolina state law122C-57.e.2. Cf. http://www.psychlaws.org/legalresources/StateLaws/NorthCarolinastatute.htm

(3) Each of the specific claims regarding Jesus and his ministry can be supported by textual evidence from the four canonical Gospels. The reader is encouraged to read through those texts for herself, should verification be desired.

Reporting as Advertising

2009-04-17T06:50:00.000-07:00

Today CNN.com has an article about a woman who kicked a crack cocaine habit. What strikes me about the article is that it is mostly an advertisement for Mothers Making a Change, a 12-step program developed by AA. It is certainly wonderful that the folks at AA have the insight to design programs that can address the problem and, at least often, succeed. But from a journalistic standpoint, it's sort of an odd piece. The article bears more generic resemblance to an info-mercial than anything else.

What else should it be, you ask? I suppose there is nothing wrong with info-mercials on news sites. On the other hand, it might be nice to see some reporting on how successful the program is or what other programs there are like it and how successful they are. It's also interesting to me that there is never any mention of a significant relationship during her drug use (after her husband's suicide) besides that of mother and child. There appears to be no one there giving her hope or urging her to walk away from the drugs.

So, I might have asked the journalist to provide a little more detail into her world besides just "Wow, she was screwed up! But look she clawed her way out with the help of this 12-step program". The article is for the most part creating a spectacle. I see people rather too often who probably aren't too far from her condition. Most of them are now homeless, and almost never for the same reason (unless you want to reduce it ultimately to drugs, but I think that is a useless reduction). These people don't self-destruct in a vacuum. There is a whole society bustling around them. So, why do we write about these things as if it bears no connection with our daily lives?

As a friend of ours put it, one of the main problems is that these folks "ain't got no people."

They're alone.

Eastertide Commitment

2009-04-16T04:27:00.000-07:00

After spending seven days in the ER, C was transferred to the regional psychiatric hospital yesterday morning.

Sent to the loonie bin - that's the bad news. The good news is that now we can visit him. So Lisa and I went up last night after supper.

The facility is brand new, replacing the older one in that same town. This probably helped to relieve a bit of the awkward nervousness I felt approaching my first mental health ward. They lead us through a series of four electrically locking doors. The hallways were white and sterile but bigger than your average hospital types. This would have been comforting, but medical hospitals are usually bustling with doctors, nurses and patients, carts and machinery here and there. Here there was nothing. No other people, bare, slightly curving, medium-light corridors smelling of antiseptic soap.

They led us into an austere little room with two chairs, a table and a bench. "Shut the door behind you," the nurse said. She then opened the other door into the common area of C's wing. "Mr. G____?!" she yelled.

C walked in, staring at the floor. He was dressed in his normal street clothes, which had clearly had a recent run through the wash. He looked good.

We all sat down and C started talking. He said that he had just been transferred there today and that they hadn't given him any drugs yet. He said he didn't know what had set "that lady they call my sister" to commit him at that time. He ran through various things that had happened in the few days before the police nabbed him, and wasn't sure what it had been. "They just kept telling me that it was because I'm not showering...but that doesn't seem right." To that charge was later added, he said, that he was a danger to himself and others. The former might, by an almost infinite stretch of the imagination, in the state's definition, be entailed in long periods without a shower (which, by the way, is itself highly questionable). The latter is simply laughable.

C talked a lot about how his present predicament is caused by the state's inability to put up with or even comprehend his chosen way of life. "They got all their people out on this one...police, FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, Marines, ROTC. They are killing each other all day trying to kill me because I love God. But they really are destroying themselves...they say they are helping me but I know that they gotta do this to function a profit [benefit] for the rest of the world. So they' really just blessin' themselves."

As always, though, he takes this with patience and understanding and never blames anyone personally. Quite in the New Testament sense, he blames "the world." "I talk to folks all day who are trying to help me, and I'm trying to help them, cause I know they're not even intending to do what they are doin'. But whatever I say they just make me look stupid."

He refuses even to speak badly of his sister, who had him committed and whom he has not seen or heard from through this whole process. Responding to something I said hinting of a negative vibe toward his sister he said, "People are gonna think I should make war against her, but I'm not gonna do that."

Lisa and I told him that the Guys were worried about him and that JR and Adam would be up to visit soon. I said that we've been able to talk to his social worker and doctors and that hopefully our testimonies of our normal life with him, along with Adam's ability to speak intelligently about things psychiatric would convince them that the facilities' over-crowed beds need not be taken up by Crete. He looked intently and hopefully when I told him we'd do everything we can.

Probably the biggest obstacle to his release right now is the way he talks. His speach sounds strange, incomprehensible and, well, crazy - to someone who doesn't know him. But it is eminently intelligible and rational - it is simply a different idiom, laden with metaphors and rather apocalyptic in tone, spoken from the underbelly of the world. The problem is that psychiatrists don't know him or live with him, so when he says that he's "gettin' hit" or that "the world is trying to kill him" or that he's "not getting any women" he can only be classed as delusional, paranoid, or perverted.

The ER psychiatrist told us the other day that three weeks is along stay at the Regional Psychiatric Hospital. Lets pray its shorter than that.

Faithfulness and the New Man

2009-04-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

Delivered at Church of the Holy Family
Wednesday of Easter Week, 2009
Propers: Luke 24:13-35, Acts 3:1-10

In the short passage from Acts 3:1-10 we are immersed in the ordinary and the routine. Peter and John are going up to the temple at the hour of prayer. Indeed, at the end of chapter 2 we are told that the believers “day by day, spent much time at the temple”. Peter and John are just going about the daily routine; it is probably not even the first time they have been to the temple that day.

At the gate of the temple lay a beggar, lame from birth, now in his fortieth year. He is laid there daily. His routine is well known. Luke even notes that the people of Jerusalem recognize him as the beggar at the Beautiful Gate. For this man the routine may have become a source of despair – a lifetime of begging, no longer even looking up at the almsgivers as they pass by.

So, we must imagine that Peter and John have seen this man before, probably many times. Yet this time when the beggar asks Peter and John for alms, Luke tells us that Peter looked at him intently, as did John.

The story continues, almost without missing a beat. It would be easy to pass over this detail. Still, Luke tells us that Peter did not just glance down at the beggar, but that he looked at him intently.

Just what went through Peter’s mind at that moment – Peter, who had been at Jesus’ side through his ministry?

Did Peter perhaps see Lazarus lying at the gate of the rich man’s house? As the beggar asked for alms, did Peter hear Lazarus hungry and pleading for the falling crumbs?

So much has happened since Jesus told that parable: the Passion, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. It is a new time.

Then perhaps Peter looked up for a moment through the gate toward the temple and saw now the temple as the house of the rich man, and Peter the servant of that rich man, nourished at the sumptuous table of the Lord of that house in the breaking of bread - Peter who has nothing of his own because the church holds all things in common, says with honesty, “I have no silver or gold,” and then with gentleness, “but what I have I give you” – and what crumbs from the table of the Lord can he possibly offer to this beggar at the gate? Nothing less than,

“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”

Then Peter took the beggar by the right hand and, Luke says, “raised him up” – for this is a story about healing, certainly, but only to point to the Resurrection; Peter “raised him up”. As Paul writes, Christ “will transform the body of our humiliation (the body of a lame beggar lying outside God’s house) that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (the healed man running and jumping into the temple, a figure of the new man in Christ) by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself (instantly this man believed and praised God).” Phil 3:21

Peter lives in a community of faithful obedience to ordinary practices, devoted to the prayers, and to the breaking of bread. It is in devotion to these ordinary things that Peter’s eyes are opened to the beggar at the gate – much as Cleopas’ eyes are opened to Jesus in the breaking of bread - and it is through faithfulness to holding all things in common that we find Peter with no silver and gold.

Let us not miss the irony: Through faithfulness Peter’s eyes are opened to notice the beggar, but through faithfulness he also has no silver or gold to give. From the beggar’s vantage it’s a bit of a Catch 22!

But it is a new time - a time not of defeat, nor of despair, but of victory. For, Christ is risen!

Thus in Peter’s faithfulness to the risen Christ, we find that having nothing he yet possesses everything, being poor he yet makes this man rich, and this beggar, whom everyone recognized but no one knew, is yet well-known as he is raised up with Christ.

Peter’s faithfulness turns an ordinary, and potentially awkward, encounter into a mirror of the Resurrection.

We must be faithful in small things, if we are to participate in the glory of God that is the resurrection of his Son. Let us go therefore and devote ourselves to Christ in every small act. Let our daily routines be set by the worship of God. Let our eyes be opened in the breaking of bread.

And may every mundane encounter be transformed by the resurrection of our Lord.

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his

disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith,

that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives

and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God,

now and for ever. Amen.

36 Hours In

2009-04-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

Relatively little has changed.

JR has talked to the hospital several times and they have confirmed that he is still at the ER. Yesterday there were no rooms available at Regional Psychiatric Hospital, so they may be waiting for one to open up.

The last we heard he was being uncooperative. C did a stint at the regional facility a few years ago, and he still bears the scars. I'm sure he is terrified of going back, but he also won't put on a show for anybody, no matter what the cost.

On this day we remember the Institution of the Eucharist, our Lord's sharing of his very body with us. Let us remember also Concrete today, who has taught us Christ not just in his poverty, but by sharing everything he ever had.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

C Has Been Committed

2009-04-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, during Evening Prayer, R poked his head in and waved me to come to the door. I didn't, thinking that the ciggs or supper that he wanted could wait until after we were done.

After prayer I walked out to the parking lot to find out that, while we were saying the Office, the police had come by, put C into the back of the squad car and taken him away. He was involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment to a local ER and remains there for evaluation and prognosis.

We have called and visited the ER several times, but he is allowed no visitors. We have been successful in communicating to his nurse that we think he is not a danger to himself or others (though, under state law, homelessness qualifies as such). He will likely stay at the ER for a couple more days and then either be released or transfered to a regional mental hospital.

We are hoping and praying for his quick release, and doing whatever we can to that end.

There is more to come on this front, but I thought I should post the basics.

Please join us in praying for him.

Public service

2009-03-30T06:46:00.001-07:00

On Saturday evening while H and I were preparing dinner, Colin's wife L called because she needed some help and Colin's phone was off. She had been walking to the grocery store, listening to her iPod, when she made eye contact with a man sitting on the curb at a busy intersection. He seemed to be speaking to her, so she removed her ear phones and realized that he was asking for help. He said that he was not feeling well, that he could not stand up, and that he needed to go to the hospital. He also related with shame that he had also suffered a bout of incontinence while there on the curb. To L he kept saying, "This has never happened before."

L did not know exactly what to do. Colin's phone was off, and L did not have a car to take him to the hospital. She called me to see if I was around to help. When she described the man I recognized that it was probably JJ. She asked the man his name and confirmed my guess. The first thing that went through my mind was, "Oh boy. This is not going to go smoothly." JJ is a local, but does not come to breakfast at the church. He often sits on the steps to the street at the back of the property and drinks. When he drinks he is prone to be verbally aggressive and belligerent.

I told L that I would drive up to see if I could help as soon as we finished dinner. I've learned that one of compromises that I must make when responding to the poor is that sitting down to dinner with my wife takes priority - if I am not to become homeless myself. I told L that I would be there in about twenty minutes and that there was no need for her to stay with JJ. Somehow this was miscommunicated and L waited with JJ until I got there (with Colin). In the meantime, since JJ was hungry L went into the grocery store and bought some hand sanitizer and some chicken. JJ proceeded to eat the chicken with his soiled hands. After eating he proceeded to apply hand sanitizer liberally to his arm and pants leg.

I went by Colin's place and picked him up. Neither of us had the good sense to bring towels which would have been handy both because it was raining and because of JJ's unfortunate accident. So when we pulled up to the intersection Colin got out to relieve L and I went over to the church to pick up something for JJ to dry off with and sit on. Colin, having once been an EMT thought to get some plastic gloves.

We walked over to JJ who was still sitting on the curb of the sidewalk, partially obscured by the fir tree growing out of the landscaped garden behind him. It was 6:30pm on Saturday. The intersection was very busy. People were walking and jogging by on the sidewalk.

The drizzling rain had soaked JJ's pants. Down his leg ran a ribbon of brown, soaking into his sock, and dripping onto the sidewalk, which had now taken a brownish hue in JJ's vicinity. His left hand was obviously covered with feces, but his right seemed relatively unsoiled. I shook his hand and reminded him of my name. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes, but it was clear that he did not remember much.

He repeated several times that he was feeling bad and needed help. We said that we'd help him out. Colin told him we'd give him a ride to the hospital and asked if he could walk to the car. JJ said that he might be able to with some help. Colin started to put on the gloves. I looked over and tried to control myself when I realized that they were not latex medical gloves, but rather the plastic gloves that you see food service workers wearing. I wanted to ask "Are we taking him to the hospital or setting up a cafeteria line?" The gloves were also, it turns out, the wrong size. After watching Colin struggle with them for a few seconds, I noted that I was on JJ's right side and simply reached out to pull him (and maybe asked Mother Teresa to intercede for my health). I think Colin also gave up on the gloves, or maybe he finally got them to work. Regardless we escorted JJ to the car.

I spread some cloth on the seat for him and suggested that he could dry himself off with a pair of sweatpants that were on the backseat. Colin and I got in the car, rolled down the windows, and proceeded to weigh the options of which hospital was likely to be more friendly to JJ's case. We settled on the rich university hospital down the street. It proved to be a good choice.

We drove into the emergency room lot and I let Colin get out with JJ to escort him inside. I then went to park the car. While I was away with the car, Colin and JJ proceeded through security. At the ER entrance there is a metal detector and an x-ray scanner. Colin threw his wallet and keys in a plastic tray and walked through the metal detector. JJ was careful to remove everything from his pockets, doing so slowly. The security station is a small anteroom before entering the ER lobby. The small area was cramped with three people, and JJ's odor was becoming a fourth discernible presence. The guard was getting impatient. JJ was insistent that he had a penny in his pocket that he should remove before going through the detector; he just couldn't find it. The guard began to hold his breath. Finally JJ found the penny and tossed it in the tray.

The guard waved JJ through the detector and then promptly left the security station.

Colin and JJ had no trouble getting attention from the nurses. When I returned from parking the car JJ had already been admitted, and Colin was speaking with the nurse at the desk. When everything was done Colin asked if the nurse wanted a phone number in case the hospital wanted someone to pick JJ up later. The nurse looked up somewhat incredulously and said, "Sure." Colin hesitated, no doubt realizing that his phone battery was dead and so his phone number would be worthless. He turned to me, "Give her your phone number." Of course.

The next day the hospital called us because JJ was being released and he wanted a ride to the neighboring town. H and I had somewhere to be so, feeling much guilt, I dumped the task on Colin. The hospital had cleaned JJ but had put him back in his old clothes. So Colin went to get JJ some new clothes and let him change at the hospital before setting out in the car. The hospital had renewed a prescription for JJ to treat a seizure disorder. Apparently JJ had been carrying a prescription with him that he could never afford to fill. The hospital kindly paid for the first two weeks of the new prescription, and Colin took JJ to pick up the medicine.

In the car JJ told Colin that he'd been hit by a car while crossing a street in town and was in a coma in another hospital for a few weeks. He had just gotten out recently.

When they arrived at the spot for JJ to get out, he professed his undying gratitude to Colin and promised to call Colin every night. Colin said, "You won't, but that's okay. We'll see you soon."

"Let the People Eat You Up"

2009-03-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

"You must allow Jesus to make you bread to be eaten by all those you come in touch with. Let the people eat you up...We could maybe have adoration [of the Blessed Sacrament] everyday and so bring and weave our lives with the Bread of Life. No greater love not even God could give than in giving Himself as Bread of life - to be broken, to be eaten so that you & I may eat & live - may eat and so satisfy our hunger for love. - So He made Himself the Hungry One, the Thirsty One, the Naked One, the Homeless and kept on calling - I was hungry, naked, homeless. You did it to me. - The Bread of life and the Hungry One - but one love - only Jesus.

His humility is so wonderful. I can understand His majesty, His greatness because He is God - but His humility is beyond my understanding, because He makes Himself Bread of Life so that even a child as small as I can eat HIm and live.

Some days back - when I was giving Holy Communion to our Sisters in the Mother house, I suddenly realized I was holding God between my 2 fingers.

The greatness of the humility of God."

- Mother Teresa, excerpts from a letter to Fr. Michael van der Peet. Quoted in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 282-3.

Scarcity and the Gift

2009-03-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

Today’s post-prayer breakfast was a rather tense one, I’m afraid to say. Shortly after E and C sat down to eat, G walked in, handed C a broken watch, and began insisting that C make good on his promised provision of a tire. Whatever details initially surrounded this ostensibly pre-arranged deal are unknown to me, but C’s response to G’s “request” seemed to suggest that one or both parties had either misunderstood or shifted away from the original terms of the bargain. The mildly heated verbal exchange that ensued only escalated when G’s accusations of misconduct modified to include C’s apparently having recently burned the collection of plastic buckets our neighbors on “the hill” use for seats. C replied that his committing the buckets to the communal fire barrel was an emergency; there was no wood left and he and R were desperately cold that evening. G was decidedly unmoved, however, and went on to complain how C’s “emergency” resulted in the barrel’s vent holes having become clogged by the melted plastic, rendering the make-shift furnace unusable. (Of course, the altercation was significantly more colorful and verbally freighted than the above description, resulting in Colin’s and my closely observant but deeply uneasy silence.) The argument only came to a close (at least for the moment) when, after G threatened to “put a knife on [C’s] neck”, Colin jumped in boldly to pronounce, “We don’t talk like that here.” (Well done, by the way, Colin.) G later apologized to Colin but, needless to say, this was not the breakfast we were anticipating when we had earlier concluded Morning Prayer!

Moments before Colin’s timely interruption, however, and seconds after C had angrily stormed from the Parish Hall, G interestingly turned to Colin and I for support in pleading his case against C. Theretofore having sat in a quiet disquietude, now Colin and I were being enlisted to back up G and the “justice” of his cause. And herein lies the reason for my post. It struck me that, for the first time, I was being asked to give something of a strictly limited quantity that two different people both equally and obviously wanted. For even though C never attempted to recruit our assessment of the matter in his defense, it seems simply the nature of such disputes that one always naturally desires the security that comes from having amassed for oneself the majority opinion. Thus, while G explicitly made such an appeal and C did not, both men clearly desired (or would have so) our outside judicial endorsement. And, as I said above, this presented me with a startling and puzzling new dilemma. For most of the time when “the guys” make a request, whether for food or socks or what have you, we are generally in a position of having, or being able to quickly obtain, sufficient supply for the meeting of the present demand. In this case, however, we had only one “yay” or “nay” to give respectively, one vote on a ballot of two competing candidates, and both men sought to have it. Though we ended up choosing to refrain from offering a judgment, it forced me to realize how ill-prepared I was for dealing with such a moment. For if I only have one X and yet said X is begged simultaneously by friends A and B, how do I proceed (justly, charitably, and prudentially) in such a situation? What kind of politics is involved with such a scenario and what kind of power relations are in play? I suppose, on one level, this is a manifestation of the generally perceived (which is not to say false) problem of scarcity. But, on another level, there is an economics involved in which my having anything at all becomes morally problematic in the face of those mutually agonistic ones who have none. What are we to do in such situations? How do we adjudicate these predicaments? To simply refrain from giving appears a dubious way to proceed (though in the above situation I still think it was the wisest move immediately and consciously available) but how then do we negotiate the ostensive lack? And what does this say about our giving as isolated individuals to those who ask versus our giving through the channels of the Church and her infinitely endless resources? Or how does what we offer at St. Joe’s as Colin, JR, and Adam either differ from or embody the provisions made available in/through/by/with the Church local and universal, and how might our answer complicate or amend the politics and supposed existence of such scarcity? As is increasingly common with my posts here, I have no idea what proper answers to the above might look like. I simply pose the questions in hopes that whatever thoughts or discussion may result might leave us better prepared for the inevitable moment when we are confronted with this bothersome quandary again.

Breakfast

2009-03-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

An entertaining and jovial hour at breakfast this morning. Things were a bit unusual since JR and Adam happened both to be absent the same day, and so Trevor and I started things off on our own.

But quickly the room was filled with six of the regulars, all with hearty appetites. I heated up what was left of the egg casserole from last week and quickly moved on to the rest of the lasagna which we had for this week. (I often feel bad when we have nothing but dinner food to give out for breakfast, but they liked it better than the eggs!)

The ensuing discussion centered on G's story that his uncle once tried to kill a rattle snake with a power saw and only barley missed getting struck. The table was packed full and when W came in too I heated up a second plate of food (one is usually enough). Finally G told us that ever since seeing that snake with his uncle he couldn't pick up a stick without thinking it was a snake. E, especially, thought this was hilarious and laughed over and over again for several minutes, petting Sammie intermittently. Soon E's laughter was funnier than G's story.

Then they started talking of preparing for the rain that's supposed to come for the next three days. Looks to be a cold rain too, if the north breeze this morning is any indication. I gave out a few large garbage bags that help keep the few possessions they have dry. I was sorry to be out of bus passes when a couple of them wanted to go to a place they knew of to get rain coats. Hopefully some day passes will come in today.

It was a sublime view indeed as, towards the end of the hour, I sat back from the group, all still gathered around, and noticed that our latest copy of the Catholic Worker was sitting on table in the midst of them. As things were winding down W picked it up and started reading one of the articles.

Pastoral Letter from the House of Bishops

2009-03-20T06:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to the letter drafted by the bishops meeting in Hendersonville, NC this past weekend. It's pretty poor theology.

View the pastoral letter here.

Hauerwas on the Handicapped...and the Homeless

2009-03-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

Stanley was recently on NPR talking about the "handicapped". Virtually everything he says can also be applied to the homeless.

http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/sot0127bc09.mp3/view

I'd be interested to hear what anyone thinks the similarities and differences are between the homeless and the handicapped.

On Living Within the Questions

2009-03-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

The last 24 hours at St. Joe’s have been particularly interesting ones for JR, Colin, and I; more on that below. In the meantime, however, I must say that having had the great privilege of being able to bring an out-of-town family member to Evening Prayer the last couple nights has unwittingly forced the return of my frequently forgotten sense of the incredibly oddity that is …well, whatever it is that we do at St. Joe’s. For given the general consistency of those participating in the Daily Office there, it is easy for me to go through each day with a relative sense of normalcy in terms of all that goes along with that practice and the location of its particular enactment. More specifically, I guess rarely having to explain ourselves and our relationship with our neighbors on “the hill”, allows for a certain unconscious experience of the day’s events paralleling something akin to a routine banality. I’ve simply been habituated into what doing the Daily Office at St. Joe’s means, and rarely think much about it, at least by way of explanation. The questions that would and did inevitably come from the above-mentioned family member’s recent exposure to that routine, however, left (and still leaves) me stricken with a sense of the utter strangeness that is our life there. Just what is it, after all, that we are doing, exactly?

To illustrate by way of example, last night’s conclusion of Evening Prayer involved our being graced with the opportunity of meeting R. What quickly became apparent from our interactions with R, however, was that he presented a textbook case of Schizophrenia of the Disorganized Type (sometimes referred to as “hebephrenia”). After a rather confusing and lengthy bit of conversation, JR and I convinced him to stay the night at St. Joe’s with the promise of breakfast and whatever continued assistance we might be able to provide in the morning. Now, having worked in the mental health field, I have a sense of what would traditionally be done to help folks with psychological conditions similar to R's, but given our promise of aid in the morning (and perhaps sinfully feeling a perceived lack in requisite resources), I had to ask myself about what it is that we, as church, are to do exactly for such a one?

Jumping forward a little, somehow or other it seems I have been so privileged as to be typecast among our neighbors on “the hill” as the go to guy when it comes to meeting their ongoing need for cigarettes. And under the tutelage of my more pious and faithful brothers, I’ve begun (though only begun) to better learn just what it might mean to follow Jesus’ instructions to “give to him who asks.” (Matt 5:42) At any rate, this evening replayed Concrete’s increasingly common (and certainly not undeserved) request for Marlboros for he and the guys. When observed by O and the above-mentioned family member in handing over the boxes of smokes, however, and later confronted by O on my “rationale” for so doing, again, I was taken aback at the ambiguity and utter strangeness that life at St. Joe’s entails. For how does one negotiate the fulfilling of a request that one knows will bring eventual physical disruption as well as the immediacy of the desired comfort? Just what exactly are we doing in buying cigarettes for these friends, after all?

Perhaps here, in our final paragraph, you might expect the attempt at profundity by way of some sort of concluding and salutary answer to the questions posed above. But I must confess that both in the case of R’s disorder (that term being meant Thomistically) and in that of Concrete’s communal cigarette requests, I have nothing of substantive value to offer. Indeed, I have virtually no idea how to respond to such queries (leaving little to assuage my family member of her puzzled concerns). I suppose various answers could be proposed but I strongly suspect that these might mutually contradict each other and, at any rate, fail to capture, let alone explicate, the oddity of it all in its fullness. I’ll leave the telling of the rest of our story with R to JR or Colin, but I guess all of the above is simply an expression of my newly discovered gratitude, both to the inciting family member (and O) for her questions and to our Savior, our neighbors on “the hill”, and my partners-in-crime for the opportunity of their being asked. These, it seems, are questions in which we are meant to dwell. And I’m thankful for the chance to have entered that space, strange and difficult though it is.

Chrysostom on Personal Safety

2009-03-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

This is a re-posting of a nugget that is already in the long post below. Lest it be missed, because it is of such power, I am posting it here again. Savor it...

"Do not tell me then, that so and so hath done me grievous mischief, but just consider what Christ did near the Cross itself,wishing to amend by His kiss the traitor by whom He was on the point of being betrayed. And see with how much power to shame him. For He says, "Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" (ib. 48.) Who is there He would not have softened? who is there that this address would not have made yielding? What beast? what adamant? yet not that wretched man. Do not then say, that such an one murdered such an one, and that is why I turn aside from him. For even if he were upon the point of thrusting a sword down into thee, and to plunge his hand into thy neck itself, kiss this very right hand! since even Christ kissed that mouth which wrought His death! And therefore do not thou either hate, but bewail and pity him that plotteth against thee. For such an one deserveth pity at our hands, and tears. For we are the servants of Him Who kissed even the traitor (I will not leave off dwelling over that continually), and spoke words unto him more gentle than the kiss."

Chrysostom on the "Undeserving" Poor

2009-03-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it gets hard to be with and especially to give to those whom we deem ungrateful and undeserving. Here's what Archbishop John thinks about the matter.

"Pursue hospitality." (Rom 12:14)

He does not say "do it", but "pursue it", so to instruct us not to
wait for those that shall ask it, and see when they
will come to us, but to run to them, and be given to finding [1545]
them.

Thus did Lot, thus Abraham. For he spent the whole day upon it, waiting
for this goodly prey, and when he saw it, leaped upon it, and ran to
meet them, and worshipped upon the ground, and said, "My Lord, if now I
have found favor in Thy sight, pass not away from Thy servant." (Gen.
xviii. 3.) Not as we do, if we happen to see a stranger or a poor man,
knitting our brows, and not deigning even to speak to them.
And if after thousands of entreaties we are softened, and bid the servant give
them a trifle, we think we have quite done our duty. But he did not so,
but assumed the fashion of a suppliant and a servant, though he did not
know who he was going to take under his roof. But we, who have clear
information that it is Christ Whom we take in, do not grow gentle even
for this. But he both beseeches, and entreats, and falls on his knees
to them, yet we insult those that come to us. And he indeed did all by
himself and his wife, whereas we do it not even by our attendants. But
if you have a mind to see the table that he set before them, there too
you will see great bounteousness, but the bounteousness came not from
excess of wealth, but of the riches of a ready will. Yet how many rich
persons were there not then? Still none did anything of the kind. How
many widows were there in Israel? Yet none showed hospitality to
Elijah. How many wealthy persons again were there not in Elisha's day?
But the Shunamite alone gathered in the fruits of hospitality; as did
Abraham also, [1546] whom beside his largeness and ready mind it is
just especially to admire, on this ground, that when he had no
knowledge who they were that had come, yet he so acted.
Do not thou
then be curious either: since for Christ thou dost receive him. And if
thou art always so scrupulous, many a time wilt thou pass by a man of
esteem, and lose thy reward from him. And yet he that receiveth one
that is not of esteem, hath no fault found with him, but is even
rewarded. For "he that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet,
shall receive a prophet's reward." (Matt. x. 41.) But he who out of
this ill-timed scrupulousness passeth one that should be admired, shall
even suffer punishment. Do not then busy thyself with men's lives and
doings. For this is the very extreme of niggardliness, for one loaf to
be exact about a man's entire life. For if this person be a murderer,
if a robber, or what not, does he therefore seem to thee not to deserve
a loaf and a few pence? And yet thy Master causeth even the sun to rise
upon him! And dost thou judge him unworthy of food even for a day? I
will put another case to you besides. Now even if you were positively
certain that he were laden with countless iniquities, not even then
wouldest thou have an excuse for depriving him of this day's
sustenance. For thou art the servant of Him Who said, "Ye know not what
spirit ye are of." (Luke ix. 55.) Thou art servant to Him Who healed
those that stoned Him, or rather Who was crucified for them. And do not
tell me that he killed another, for even if he were going to kill thee
thyself, even then thou shouldest not neglect him when starving. For
thou art a disciple of Him Who desired the salvation even of them that
crucified Him Who said upon the Cross itself, "Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do." (Luke xxiii. 34.) Thou art the servant
of Him Who healed him that smote Him, Who upon the Cross itself crowned
the man who had scorned Him. And what can equal this? For both the
robbers at first scorned Him. Still to one of these He opened Paradise.
[1547] And He bewails those who were upon the point of killing Him, and
is troubled and confounded at seeing the traitor, not because He was
going to be crucified, but because he was lost. He was troubled then as
having foreknowledge of the hanging, and the punishment after the
hanging. And though He knelt his wickedness, He bore with him [1548] to
the last hour, and thrust not away the traitor, but even kissed him.
Thy Master kisseth, and with His lips receiveth him who was on the very
point of shedding His precious Blood. And dost thou count the poor not
worthy even of a loaf, and reverencest not the Law which Christ laid
down? Now by this He shows that we ought not to turn aside, not only
from the poor, but not even from those that would lead us away to
death. Do not tell me then, that so and so hath done me grievous
mischief, but just consider what Christ did near the Cross itself,
wishing to amend by His kiss the traitor by whom He was on the point of
being betrayed. And see with how much power to shame him. For He says,
"Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" (ib. 48.) Who is
there He would not have softened? who is there that this address would
not have made yielding? What beast? what adamant? yet not that wretched
man. Do not then say, that such an one murdered such an one, and that
is why I turn aside from him. For even if he were upon the point of
thrusting a sword down into thee, and to plunge his hand into thy neck
itself, kiss this very right hand! since even Christ kissed that mouth
which wrought His death! And therefore do not thou either hate, but
bewail and pity him that plotteth against thee. For such an one
deserveth pity at our hands, and tears. For we are the servants of Him
Who kissed even the traitor (I will not leave off dwelling over that
continually), and spoke words unto him more gentle than the kiss. For
He did not even say, O thou foul and villanous traitor, is this the
sort of recompense thou returnest us for so great a benefit? But in
what words? "Judas;" using his own name, which is more like a person
bemoaning, and recalling him, than one wroth at him. And he does not
say, thy Teacher, thy Master, and Benefactor, but, "the Son of Man."
For though He were neither Teacher nor Master, yet is it with One Who
is so gently, so unfeignedly affected towards thee, as even to kiss
thee at the time of betrayal, and that when a kiss too was the signal
for the betrayal; is it with Him that thou playest the traitor's part?
Blessed art Thou, O Lord! What lowliness of mind, what forbearance hast
Thou given us ensamples of! And to him He so behaved. But to those who
came with staves and swords to Him, was it not so too? What can be more
gentle than the words spoken to them? For when He had power to demolish
them all in an instant, He did nothing of the kind, but as
expostulating (entreptikhos), addressed them in the words, "Why, are ye
come out as against a thief with swords and staves?" (Matt. xxvi. 55.)
And having cast them down backwards (John xviii. 6), as they continued
insensible, He of His own accord gave Himself up next, and forbore
while He saw them putting manacles upon His holy hands, while He had
the power at once to confound all things, and overthrow them. But dost
thou even after this deal fiercely with the poor? And even were he
guilty of ten thousand sins, want and famine were enough to soften down
a soul ever so blunted. But thou standest brutalized, and imitating the
rage of lions. Yet they never taste of dead bodies. But thou, while
thou seest him a very corpse (tetaricheumenon lit. salter, or, a mummy)
for distresses, yet leapest upon him now that he is down, and tearest
his body by thine insults, and gatherest storm after storm, and makest
him as he is fleeing to the haven for refuge to split upon a rock, and
bringest a shipwreck about more distressing than those in the sea. And
how wilt thou say to God, Have mercy upon me, and ask of Him remission
of sins, when thou art insolent to one who hath done no sin, and
callest him to account for this hunger and great necessity, and
throwest all the brute beasts into the shade by thy cruelty. For they
indeed by the compulsion of their belly lay hold of the food needful
for them. But thou, when nothing either thrusts thee on or compels
thee, devourest thy brother, bitest, and tearest him, if not with thy
teeth, yet with words that bite more cuttingly. How then wilt thou
receive the sacred Host (prosphoran), when thou hast empurpled thy
tongue in human gore? how give the kiss of peace, with mouth gorged
with war? Nay, how enjoy every common nourishment, when thou art
gathering so much venom? Thou dost not relieve the poverty, why make it
even more grinding? thou dost not lift up him that is fallen, why throw
him down also? thou dost not remove despondency, why even increase it?
thou givest no money, why use insulting words besides? Hast thou not
heard what punishment they suffer that feed not the poor? to what
vengeance they are condemned? For He says, "Depart to the fire prepared
for the devil and his angels." (Matt. xxv. 41.) If then they that feed
not are so condemned, what punishment are they to suffer, who besides
not feeding, even insult? What punishment shall they undergo? what
hell? That we kindle not so great evils against ourselves, whiles we
have it in our power, let us correct this evil complaint also, and put
a bridle on the tongue. And let us be so far from insulting, as even to
invite them, both by words and actions, that by laying up much mercy
for ourselves, we may obtain the blessings promised us. Which God grant
that we may all attain unto by the grace and love towards man.

Pray for us, Brother John.

More Concrete Theology

2009-03-09T09:04:00.000-07:00

When I ask Crete how he's doing, he often replies, "Gettin' killed. Ain't my stuff, but they killin' me for other folks stuff. Been gettin' killed all day for stuff that ain't even mine."

Yesterday evening's psalms (on the 30day cycle) included Psalm 44 which has the verse:

"Indeed for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter"

We can hear those lines variously as the ramblings of a homeless man, as the prayer of the church, or (in another popular view of the psalms) as the lament of Christ...

But if we just read it through Matthew 25, we get all three.

St. Chrysostom on Giving Alms

2009-03-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

"He that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness." (Rom 12:8)

For it is not enough to show mercy, but it behooves us to
do it with a largeness and an ungrudging spirit, or
rather not with an ungrudging, but even with a cheerful and rejoicing
one, for not grudging does not amount to rejoicing. And this same
point, when he is writing to the Corinthians also, he insisted very
strongly upon. For to rouse them to such largeness he said, "He that
soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly, and he which soweth
bountifully shall reap also bountifully. (2 Cor. ix. 6.) But to correct
their temper he added, "Not grudgingly or of necessity." (ib. 7.) For
both the shower of mercy ought to have, both ungrudgingness and
pleasure. And why dost thou bemoan thyself of giving alms? (Aristot.
Eth. N. ii. 3 and iv. 1.) Why dost thou grieve at showing mercy, and
lose the advantage of the good deed? For if thou grievest thou dost not
do mercy, but art cruel and inhuman. For if thou grievest, how shalt
thou be able to raise up him that is in sorrow? For it is much if he
suspects no ill, even, when thou art giving with joyfulness. For since
nothing seems to men such a disgrace as to be receiving from others,
unless by an exceedingly cheerful look thou removest the suspicion, and
showest that thou art receiving rather than giving, thou wilt even cast
down the receiver rather than raise him up. This is why he says, "He
that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness." For who that is receiving a
kingdom, is of sad countenance? Who that is receiving pardon for his
sins continueth of dejected look? Mind not then the expenditure of the
money; but the increase that comes of that expenditure. For if he that
soweth rejoiceth though sowing with uncertainty of return, much more
should he do so that farms the Heaven. For in this way, even though
thou give but little, thou wilt be giving much; even as how much soever
thou givest with a sad countenance, thou wilt have made thy much a
little. Thus the widow outweighed many talents by the two mites, for
her spirit was large. And how is it possible, it may be said, for one
that dwells with poverty in the extreme, and empties forth his all, to
do this with a ready mind? Ask the widow, and thou wilt hear the way,
and wilt know that it is not poverty [1536] that makes narrow
circumstances, but the temper of a man that effects both this and its
opposite. For it is possible even in poverty to be munificent
(megalopsuchon), and in riches to be niggardly. Hence in giving he
looks for simplicity, and in showing mercy for cheerfulness, and in
patronizing for diligence. For it is not with money only that he wishes
us to render every assistance to those in want, but both with words,
and deeds, and in person, and in every other way. And after mentioning
the chief kind of aiding (prostasian), that which lies in teaching,
namely, and that of exhorting (for this is a more necessary kind, in
that it nurtures the soul), he proceeds to that by way of money, and
all other means; then to show how these may be practised aright, he
bringeth in the mother of them, love.
(Homily 21 on Romans)

Breakfast

2009-03-05T06:44:00.000-08:00

MP and breakfast as usual. JR was absent looking into a post-doc opportunity he has at UNC. So at prayer were Adam, Trevor and I, among the usuals, and Emily, who is in the catechesis class, and Jimmy.

After prayer we all walked over to the parish hall and took the normal refrigerator items into the microwave: grits and sausage, coffee cake and Megan's pigs in blankets. I started a pot of coffee perking. (Only occasionally do people really drink the coffee but for some reason it makes me feel good to have that sound and smell around.)

Eddie came in after a while and grabbed some sox and bit to eat. Crete walked by the window as he is wont to do and I brought him out a plate of grits and his hot sauce. Jimmie told me he was looking "to get up out of North Carolina", but he wasn't exactly sure where he was going. He asked if I could help him get a Grey Hound ticket. I have to confess that I find Jimmy one of the most circumspect of our beggars, but I suppose that this makes it even more imperative that I give to him without any scruples.

A Eucharistic Homily (Tangentially Related)

2009-03-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

I don’t know about y’all, but yesterday it wasn’t long into the morning before I found myself painfully aware of how most of my days are unconsciously structured around a regular desire for food. Indeed, with the Ash Wednesday fast, I became increasingly aware of not only how important the intake of food is to the simple preservation and proper functioning of life, but how much our creaturely drive to live is tied up with a concurrent desire simply to eat. I suppose that at some basic animal level, the intensity and immediacy of our desire for the regular intake of food is bound up with this innate simultaneous desire to live and live richly (for as my wife’s spice rack so nicely illustrates, rarely are we satisfied merely to eat). In fact, hungry and newly conscious of this desire as I was, though it may just have been brain-starved delirium, I found myself momentarily transported to some distant Saturday afternoon in my youth where I first watched that 1968 musical remake of Charles Dickens’ classic novel Oliver Twist, Oliver! Resounding in my head and musically syncopated with the rumblings of my stomach were those melodious words Oliver and the young orphan boy’s sang at top volume:
“Food, glorious food!
What wouldn't we give for
That extra bit more -
That's all that we live for
Why should we be fated to
Do nothing but brood
On food,
Magical food,
Wonderful food,
Marvelous food,
Fabulous food”

Of course it is our human desire for food which stands in the background of our Gospel lesson for today. As Jesus prepares to teach in the synagogue in Capernaum, the people whom he had miraculously fed the previous day return, apparently seeking seconds, and having gone so far as to cross the Sea of Galilee in pursuit of this promising, albeit curious, meal ticket. They had been quite impressed with yesterday’s performance and presumably thought this prophet from Nazareth, this supplier of bread in abundance, might just be the answer to their socio-economic woes. Yet Jesus, both sensing their motives and aware of their deeper hunger responds, "Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal."

Not sure this was the answer they had in mind, the people persist, asking Jesus to perform a sign mirroring Moses’ calling down manna from heaven in the wilderness. “Yeah, yeah, Jesus, food that endures to eternal life. But how about we talk this over after another one of your tasty Mosaic lunches?” …It’s startling to see just how much our natural cravings can blunt our sense of the truly important.

Jesus, however, not to be distracted, moves to remind the people that even the bread which Moses called down from heaven was given to those who, if they recalled, all eventually died nevertheless. For, hadn’t Moses said, “[God] humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD?” Stomachs growling, the people, it seems, are nonplussed.

Then, with unfathomable patience and love, Jesus counters their request for a meager and transitory meal with an even better offer; indeed, the greatest offer of all: a bread given from the Father in heaven that gives real life to the world. “I am the bread of life,” he says. “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; …the bread …which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." Despite the shock on their faces he continues, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever."

The story our Gospel writer tells is one which reminds us in Trinitarian fashion of our truest and deepest need, the real object of our creaturely hunger and desire. Beyond our various appetites for mere food or status or stuff, natural though they may be, Jesus makes clear that it is only our consumption of him, made present for us in the Eucharistic meal, wherein the satisfaction of our real hunger may be met; that feeding on Jesus’ flesh and blood made possible in our celebration of Eucharist, which fulfills our most basic of creaturely desires, the desire to live and live richly. Our Gospel lesson teaches us that it is Jesus for whom we truly crave, and that, by feeding on him in the bread and wine, our desire to live, our most basic creaturely hungers are satisfied. It is by feeding on Jesus in this meal, for example, that our hunger for relationship and community is most fully met, as Paul tells the Corinthians of how we are united to Jesus and each other thereby. It is in this meal that our longing for intimacy is fully realized, depicted in Revelation as the wedding feast celebrating our new union with the Lamb who was slain. It is in this meal, that our desire to live and live richly, indeed, eternally!, a desire made significantly manifest in our simple desire for daily food, wherein our longing for nourishment and life may be realized. Oh that we would hunger and seek after him, Christ made present in the Eucharistic meal, with the vigor in which we pursue for our daily meals! Oh that it was in reference to Eucharist that we found ourselves overwhelmed with song:
“Food, glorious food!
What wouldn't we give for
That extra bit more -
That's all that we live for
Wonderful food,
Marvelous food,
Fabulous food”

Amen.

Deuteronomy 8:2-3
Revelation 19:1-2a, 4-9
1 Corinthians 10:1-4, 16-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-29
John 6:47-58

Catechesis with the Catechist

2009-03-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

Disciples in training.

Inequality and Society

2009-03-04T07:07:00.001-08:00

The Economist magazine has a review of a book, released in January in Britain, that analyzes links between social health (e.g., crime) and inequality. Specifically they critique the notion that the desire for economic growth should trump the desire for wealth distribution. The book has only been released in Britain thusfar, but when it comes to the US, we'll offer a review.

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Hardcover)
by Richard Wilkinson (Author), Kate Pickett (Author)

Supper

2009-02-25T07:53:00.000-08:00

Concrete came by my place a couple times last week for supper. He does this a few times a week, just stopping in when he is cold or hungry or needs to get away from the other guys. I made him some pork chops I had gotten out for such an occasion and he exclaimed about how good they are. The second time he came I wasn't around but Lisa made him the remaining chop, for which he was grateful. But what he really wanted, he said, was spaghetti. "I'm trying to get you to make up a big bunch of spaghetti", he said the next day. "Lots of meat and green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, orange peppers, in a big pot."

So the next night I dragged my wife and a couple of my catechumens with me and we all made a bunch of spaghetti in the church kitchen, complete with as many different colored peppers as we could find. I had been conflicted about whether to make it at the church so all the Guys could partake or to make it at home where Crete could warm up while he ate (he doesn't go inside churches). When I asked Crete what he'd prefer I was told (as I should have known) "I don't run nothin'."

We pulled the picnic tables under the covered walkway and, along with a bunch of other Guys, all ate outside in the cold with Crete (I usually don't insist on this, but I did this time). Joel and Kenetta did a great job with the food and everybody ate a lot. Most of the Guys packed up a plate or two and took it back to the Hill where the fire was keeping them warm. But a few cold souls ate at the table. Sarah gave Sammie as much petting as she wanted and Joel chatted up Howard, Crete and Eddie over at the other table. Trevor kept Gail company inside and was helpful as usual cleaning things up.

I hope Concrete knows by these tiny gestures we sometimes make how much he means to us and that he can see that our lives have been changed by his presence. Of course, such a wish falsely presumes that he is as self-centered as I am.

Poverty Porn

2009-02-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

An above average treatment of the issue of poverty, especially as it relates to making others rich, can be found here.

Incorporating Individuals

2009-02-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

Willette said to me on Thursday evening after prayer, "Thank you for this service. Now maybe I'll make it through the week." I must admit that I was a little surprised by the comment. Willette comes to EP rather often, so it is not as if she just happened by in a moment of spiritual necessity and found the requisite manna from heaven. She was thanking us for being present, for opening the church, and for leading the office. Her statement made me think, and still has me pondering. I wonder if it has not revealed some of my own myopia and even selfishness.

I wrote about presence in a post for the blog a long while ago. The essence of that piece was the importance of constancy and physical presence, day in, day out. But that piece also focused on how our presence for the office brought us in communion with the homeless, and how the constancy of that presence was the foundation for us all to be transformed through friendship with one another. In that vein I think we have come to stress the office in two main ways: (1) as a fundamental part of the day, as routine and necessary as brushing one's teeth, and (2) as a practice that, through its mere observance, will transform us in spite of ourselves as, for example, in bringing us in contact with the poor. These two emphases have, for me, become slightly pathological in that the emphasis seems to be on me. The office is something that I need to do, day in and day out (literally through MP and EP), and it is something that will transform me. What is lost in this pathology is the notion of liturgy as "work of the people" and the realization of the office as an extension of the Eucharist. It seems that I have found an encroachment of individualism even in the commitment to corporate worship.

Willette reminded me of this because I often lead the office with a rather perfunctory attitude (much as I might brush my teeth), sometimes even as a chore that needs be done. It's not a glorifying admission, but true. Willette comes, as I expect Shirley does too, in part to step into the Kingdom for a few minutes during the week and find refreshment. Willette has challenged me, albeit unintentionally, to see the office now also as part of the preparation of the altar for Sunday -- we are an altar guild of sorts. We gather morning and evening to bring the cares and anxieties of the world into the congregation, piling them upon the altar. On Sunday Christ's body will be broken, and with it the altar will be cleansed and renewed. We are, in a way, sanctifying this world by faithfully gathering its sins and bringing them to the altar.

This is to say that while we are being transformed by stamping the time-card, by just being present, we are also making Christ's presence real during the week for all who need him -- not in the way that the priest makes Him present at Sunday mass, but as the priest has already made Him present and presented Him to us, forming us into the Body. The office is part of the preparation for Sunday, but equally it is part of Christ's presence to His people. It bears all the marks of the already and the not yet.

It is worth bearing this in mind (even if this is mostly a self-referential meditation). When we gather during the week we are doing more than we know, making God present in the world. The presence we offer is not just to the guys but to Onye and Willette and Shirley and everyone else who is weary and heavy laden (myself included). We come to the office to be in the presence of God, to sit at the Trinitarian banquet, and so our participation in the office should bear all the care and attention with which we come to the Eucharist. For even as we seek sustenance, by doing so-- by seeking faithfully-- we also create a space in this world where the finding is possible for those around us. We say the office not just that we may find transformation but that we may offer it through our service, "always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies."

So, it should be no surprise to me that those who attend only episodically or even only once may be blessed by the office. The office is a liturgical reminder and enactment of Psalm 121, fulfilling the daily cycle: "The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, from this time forth for evermore." The office is in part a sacramental sign of Christ's enduring faithfulness -- that He will be present and available bodily -- that "He who watches over you will not fall asleep."

Willette's statement should be no surprise, but I had lost sight of what we were doing.

Giving to Him Who Begs

2009-02-19T08:48:00.000-08:00

Today when I arrived for morning prayer I noticed a well-dressed young man, probably in his early 30's, that I had not seen before. He worked his way through prayer with us (as he was not familiar with the BCP), and exchanged the peace afterwards. As everyone finished exchanging the peace he introduced himself as a pastor and approached C saying that he was in a bit of a tough spot. He had a flat tire on his vehicle. A local man was replacing the tire, but the pastor had only half the necessary money to pay for the replacement, which would cost approximately $120. Could we help him?

C offered him whatever was in the poor plate at the back of the church. On this particular morning that amounted to about $10. I volunteered to go across the street to the bank and withdraw some money to make up the difference. I doubted that I had enough in the bank to cover the full difference, but I was willing to contribute whatever was there.

As it turned out I had enough money in the account to give him $60 to cover the other half of the cost of the new tire. When I handed over the money to Pastor D he asked if we were at the church every morning. We replied that we were, and he followed by saying that he would be back tomorrow to reimburse me.

At breakfast C admitted that he was a little scandalized by my giving the man $60. I admitted that I was too but that it hadn't fully hit me yet. I just gave away $60 to a stranger. Why? Or, as my wife would put it: Why!?! C, A, and I were all reasonably confident that I would never be reimbursed as the man had promised. This is a self-conscious skepticism on our part, born of being conned and lied to repeatedly. So, why did I give this man the money if I was skeptical of his honesty, and especially when the request was for so much?

An oft overlooked passage spoken by Jesus is "Give to everyone who begs of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." (Matt. 5:42) What do you do with an exhortation like that? Does Jesus really mean "everyone"? Does he not mean something a little more restricted, perhaps "give to all Christians" or all "decent folk", or to all those whom you have no reason to believe are lying?

Matthew 5:21-48 consists of a series of expositions in the format "You have heard it said... But I say..." So, before we put caveats on the exhortation to give to everyone who begs, consider that the exhortation comes on the heals of "You have heard it said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer."(v38-39) Jesus tells us not to resist the evildoer and then in the same rhetorical unit exhorts us to give to everyone who begs. The implication seems plain: Do not offer evil in return for evil; to him who asks of you out of greed, respond to him from your charity.

The scandal of this passage is that Jesus implies that "being reasonable" about giving, to deny the gift when it is a poor investment or the recipient is not virtuous, is to return evil for evil. It is to return the beggar's sinfulness in asking with my lack of charity.

If I thought that I could get out of this scandal by suggesting that Jesus' exhortation was not a part of the "eye for an eye" reversal but perhaps the one following, I find no help. For the one following is "love your enemies". The exhortation to give is sandwiched between expectations of the agency of evildoers. We might abbreviate the passage:

Do not resist the evildoer. Give to everyone who begs of you. Love your enemies.

Jesus cannot be called naive in his exhortation to give freely. He explicitly locates his exhortation in the context of sinful world full of evil requests. And yet he says to us that giving freely of ourselves is the way to take up his yoke. We are not called to control this world, but to offer ourselves as living members of Christ, who is love, and who poured himself out for us.

There is a part of me that is still shocked that I gave away $60 dollars this morning with little or no consideration of the "reasonableness" of doing so. But I don't see that I had many options if my actions are to be accountable to Christ.

And tomorrow, if Pastor D returns with $60 to reimburse me, then I will have to confess my lack of trust that he would do so. My giving is still incomplete, because through skepticism I did not realize Godly love in the transaction.

Breakfast

2009-02-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

Breakfast as usual this last week. Friday Joel and Sarah came to Morning Prayer and then over with us to eat. I suspect that they come because i make them - they are part of the Catechesis class at St Joes and have voluntarily committed to coming to the Office and serving the poor once a week - but they never seem too put out about it.

After a few minutes C and E came in for a bite. We talked about dogs for a while. Sammie my dog is always at prayer and so if conversation runs dry we can always talk about her. She loves most of the guys but especially E, since he is wont to give her a little of what is on his plate. C told us about the program he is in in Chapel Hill to try to get hooked up with transitional housing. So he is bussing up and down the eight miles three or five days a week to go to meetings with various folk. He complains that the staff is all volunteer and so they often don't show up. He also relates story after story about why "he hates cops". "I don't want to hate anybody", he says, "but I just can't help it." He told us one story about standing at the bus stop waiting for a bus and being told that he couldn't loiter. "I'm waiting for the bus", he protested, "along with all these other folk." But the cop knew him as a homeless man and made him move off the sidewalk to a bit of dirt beside one of the buildings. They police the homeless so tirelessly in Chapel Hill, C says, that most of the guys he knows come up to Durham. But even in Durham, he says, if the police don't like you, or don't like the homeless in general, they can make life hell. One guy consistently calls them "cockroaches", apparently.

T was quiet and well mannered as usual. Earlier this week he went over to Whole Foods and got us some cereal when we were running low. This man's generosity and faithfulness amazes me. He mentioned that he just managed to rent a room somewhere across town and he was worried that the couple he rented it from were - for some reason - going to be arrested. Barely enough money to get himself a sub-par room he still shows up for prayer, Eucharist and Bible Study, and insists upon contributing to the needs of the saints week after week, day by day.

Because the Real Reason to Help the Poor...

2009-02-12T20:27:00.000-08:00

...is that it is a boost to the economy. See the story here.
Please forgive the sarcastic cynicism, but perhaps the poor would be better served if the relationship of poverty to our capitalist economy could properly be named as being of an entirely different sort. At any rate, it's nice to see that altruism (on behalf of the economy, of course) is on the rise.

What's In a Name?

2009-02-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been wondering what it means for us to use the word "homeless" in reference to a particular person or group of persons. It's a linguistic practice I engage in all the time but one to which I have paid little sustained attention. For example, in conversations with my wife I will frequently refer to the "homeless" or "our homeless friends" at St. Joe's. And I suspect that, like me, most of us think nothing of using "homeless" as an indexical marker, a sortal by which to name a person or persons. However, it occurred to me today that, as a primary means of distinction, this readily available and handy denominator, while presumably applicable in the majority of cases it is used, is nevertheless perhaps not the most charitable descriptor available for our use.

For starters, the use of the adjective "homeless" as a primary designator opens subtle but no less insidious possibilities for the individual and collective exploitation of the already oppressively subjugated. After all, there's no glory (and thus, little point) in relaying to a colleague that I happen to have breakfast with some guys from my church every morning. But to mention that I daily share a breakfast table with the homeless, well, that's a much more personally advantageous way to tell the story! In such a case, my breakfast companions' plight can quite easily become my profit simply by use of that two-syllable word, "homeless." Indeed, by employing that otherwise seemingly harmless term, a great deal of social capital can be had at the expense of those with little to no capital whatsoever.

Secondly, and more reflexively, I think it is worth asking the question as to whether or not I would like to be identified primarily through descriptors the possibility for the rightful application of which I would be less than enthused to have so highlighted. What would it be like for the generally perceived "negative" features of my daily existence to be raised to the level of a primary marker? "Oh, there's Adam, my lazy friend." "Hi, I'd like you to meet my unjustifiably self-satisfied buddy, Adam." "Let me tell you what my unreasonably rotund friend from church did the other day." How many of us would like to be so denominated? Though ostensibly innocuous, I would imagine a less potentially damaging means of identification could be conjured than "homeless." I certainly have difficulty conceiving a scenario wherein I would be comfortable referring to my friend W primarily by the term "homeless" while in W's presence. What, then, does that say about how I use the term?

Thirdly, and on the topic of identification, how might the use of the word "homeless" as a frequently recurrent signfier promote the creation of a static and behaviorally short-circuiting identity among those so named? Here I have in mind friends whose various inclinations (imagined or otherwise) have, through externally generated reinforcement, become their primary (and often sole) means of self-description such that they cannot conceive of themselves apart from those descriptive terms. If one grows up in a home, for example, where one is called "stupid" with any significant frequency, it often becomes painfully difficult to imagine oneself in any other terms, effectively trapping such a one in an unnecessarily generated prison of identity. "Homeless" could thus function, not as a description of one's current domestic circumstance, but as an integral (metaphysical) feature of who one is. Yet, how would/could such a one ever begin to think of themselves any differently after having been (repeatedly and reinforcingly) so damned?

Lastly, I wonder how much the primary use of "homeless" as an indexical term is a function of our desire to create distance between our bourgeois selves and these, the phenomenologically "other". To what degree does "homeless", as a fundamental category, quarantine the terrifying possibility that we might otherwise be confronted with an actual person whose naked and common humanity, freed from all externally imposed, carefully constructed, and calculatedly constraining labels, might be seen to have legitimate claim on our lives and possessions? What kind of buffer or boundary does "homeless", as a primary designator, create for we who are apt to use it? At the very least, I wonder what it would be like if I discovered that "the homeless" folks with whom I share breakfast primarily referred to my friends and I as "the homed." What would the use of such a label, the differential grammar of which is rooted in economic class/status, do to my understanding of the nature of our relationship or their perception of me as a (classed) person?

I must confess that I don't have much to offer by way of an answer or linguistic replacement (recall that the above is merely a reflection on my own deeply ingrained - and potentially bad - linguistic habits). Really, all I intend to accomplish at this juncture is the raising of a question. And, indeed, perhaps a case can be made for the continued use of "homeless" in the signifying capacity I have described above. But, for the time being, I think that the question is worth asking and our linguistic practices with respect to "the homeless" we encounter worth evaluating. Minimally, can we not envision a more intentional and charitable means of reference to these, the embodiment of Christ's person made present?

Widow's Mite

2009-02-03T06:25:00.000-08:00

There is a man, T, who lives in his truck in the church parking lot. He has been around St. Joe's now for a good while - perhaps a year. At first I didn't think he was homeless. He would come to HE on Sunday and stick around for coffee hour to chat. He never asked for anything.

Since taking up residence at the church he has rarely missed a service of Communion or Daily Prayer. He comes to breakfast, sometimes eating and sometimes not (I think it depends on what the casserole looks like), but always politely conversing. I've never seen him drink, though he seems to be on good terms with the others at church that do. T is one of the folks that makes the work we do easy and joyful.

This morning T and I said prayer together, just the two of us, for the first 15 minutes of the service. As we were leaving prayer, a woman who had arrived in time for the last few prayer asked for a bus pass to go job hunting. I said I would have to try to get one for her today because I was out. Then I turned around to the poor plate to see if I could fish the two dollars for the pass out of it. Before I could do so, T had opened his wallet, pulled out two dollars and given them to her.

I smiled in awe of the beauty.

I hung my head half-comically at my hardness of heart. I had been inclined to wait and see if I could get someone to pick up some passes later that day. That would cost me nothing. Then I had turned to the $60 in the poor plate to see if there were a couple of singles. Administering the poor plate costs me nothing, and by it I gain recognition for "serving" the poor. And it is mostly filled by those giving out of their abundance. The poor plate usually costs its donors nothing.

But T had given out of his lack. Such a gift was costly and it must have hurt. With all the cash in the poor plate I could not have given more. It was a sacrifice I did not dare council against.

Expect more...

2009-02-02T14:23:00.000-08:00

... not less patronizing and ridiculous coverage of poverty from the major news outlets. Our latest example of "simulating poverty": http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/02/02/food.stamps.economy/index.html

Breakfast

2009-02-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

Every weekday we have breakfast at the church parish hall after Morning Prayer. A couple of nice ladies from the Presbyterian church next door provide us with breakfast casseroles each week (these range from regular eggs and sausage to grits and chili and cheese and they are always a surprise). The purpose of this was originally to create a time each day when we would hang out with our homeless and poor friends, and not just co-exist in the same space with them.

There are usually at least two of us from the MP congregation that stay and eat. At least half the time one of the men brings his three year old son. The lad was originally shy of the homeless but once last month he expressed his displeasure when no one had yet come in to the table. Sometimes we are joined by a catechumen from the church who is required to serve the poor once a week.

The number of people that actually come in off the street varies from morning to morning, depending on a number of variables like temperature and how much they had to drink last night. This morning we had four poor friends (two of which are also catechumens and have recently moved into a room together but they make a point to come the two miles across town to eat), one catechumen, and four members of the congregation.

Y was particularly happy this morning to have passed her state exam to be a Certified Nursing Assistant. She printed out her resume on the computer so she could go over to Duke Hospital and apply for a job. W came in to eat, having been happier to sleep on his cardboard in the walkway than to stay at the hotel his friends had offered him. He didn't have his hat on and his graying hair reminded me that being on the street is harder for him than his casual, placid, if slurred, speech would let on.

As usual, breakfast lasted about 45 minutes and all were full and caffeinated and ready to move onto whatever the day held for them.

Poverty as Conscientious Objection

2009-02-01T05:28:00.000-08:00

Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war and that is one of the great modern arguments for poverty. If the comfort one had gained has resulted in the death of thousands in Korea and other parts of the world, then that comfort will have to be atoned for. The argument now is that there is no civilian population, that all are involved in the war (misnamed defense) effort. If you work in a textile mill making cloth, or in a factory making dungarees or blankets, it is still tied up with war. If one raises food or irrigates to raise food one may be feeding troops or liberating others to serve as troops. If you ride a bus you are paying taxes. Whatever you buy is taxed so you are supporting the state in the war, which is "the health of the state," exactly to the extent of your attachment to worldly things of whatever kind.

[Day, CW, April 1953]

John Wesley to Miss J.C. March

2009-01-29T08:47:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of excerpts from letters from John Wesley to a Miss March, a woman of "wealth and education". When Miss March admitted her struggles with the fact that associating with Methodists also meant she came into contact with the poor, Wesley wrote to her:

"Go and see the poor and sick in their own poor little hovels. Take up your cross, woman! Remember the faith! Jesus went before you, and will go with you. Put off the gentlewoman; you bear an higher character. You are an heir of God and joint-heir with Christ! Are you not going to meet Him in the air with ten thousand of His saints? O be ready!"

She complains of associating with people of poor taste and low character..., and Wesley replies:

"I want you to converse more, abundantly more, with the poorest of the people, who, if they have not taste, have souls, which you may forward in their way to heaven. And they have (many of them) faith and the love of God in a larger measure than any persons I know."

To her continued protest he writes:

"What I advise you to is, not to contract a friendship or even acquaintance with poor, inelegant, uneducated persons, but frequently, nay constantly, to visit the poor, the widow, the sick, the fatherless in their affliction; and this, although they should have nothing to recommend them but that they are bought with the blood of Christ. It is true this is not pleasing to flesh and blood. There are a thousand circumstances usually attending it which shock the delicacy of our nature, or rather of our education. But yet the blessing which follows this labour of love will more than balance the cross."

Miss March replies saying to this exhortation to "constantly" visit the poor that she is already a busy woman and that some time must necessarily be put aside for seclusion and prayer in the maintenance of her spiritual life. To this, Wesley:

"Yet I find time to visit the sick and the poor; and I must do it, if I believe the Bible, if I believe these are the marks whereby the Shepherd of Israel will know and judge His sheep at the great day...
... and I am concerned for you; I am sorry you should be content with lower degrees of usefulness and holiness than you are called to."

-selections taken from the essay "Visit the Poor: John Wesley, the Poor, and the Sanctification of Believers" in The Poor and the People Called Methodists, ed. Richard Heitzenrater.

On Grace

2009-01-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

Unless I am convinced otherwise by my Augustinian friends, this reading from St. Chrysostom, appointed in Celebrating the Saints on the Feast of Ss. Timothy and Titus, goes for me.

Paul's words remind us that much zeal is required to stir up the grace of God in us. Just as a fire requires fuel, so grace requires our glad and willing consent if it is to be fervent. For it lies within our power to kindle or extinguish the grace of God in each of us. That is why Paul admonishes us: "Do not quench the Spirit!" The Spirit is quenched by sloth and carelessness, but kept alive by being watchful and diligent. As Paul goes on to say: "God did not give us a Spirit of fear, but rather a Spirit of love and of self-discipline." In other words, we have not received the Spirit that we should not need to make any effort in life, but rather that we may speak with boldness. But to us God has given a Spirit of power and of love for himself. This is the work of grace, and yet not only of grace: we too have a part to play. For the same Spirit that makes us cry out "Abba, Father!" inspires us with love both for God and for our neighbor, that we may love one another.

[In Praise of St. Paul, PG 52.427-30]

Chrysostom on the Practicality of Prayer

2009-01-25T08:50:00.000-08:00

"Do you not know that if you come and worship God and take part in the work which goes on here, the business you have on hand is made much easier for you? Have you worldly anxieties? Come here on that account that by the time you spend here you may win for yourself the favour of God, and so depart with a sense of security; that you may have Him for your ally, that you may become invincible to the dæmons because you are assisted by the heavenly hand. If you have the benefit of prayers uttered by the fathers, if you take part in common prayer, if you listen to the divine oracles, if you win for yourself the aid of God, if, armed with these weapons, you then go forth, not even the devil himself will be able henceforth to look you in the face, much less wicked men who are eager to insult and malign you. But if you go from your house to the market place, and are found destitute of these weapons, you will be easily mastered by all who insult you. This is the reason why both in public and private affairs, many things occur contrary to our expectation, because we have not been diligent about spiritual things in the first place, and secondarily about the secular, but have inverted the order. For this reason also the proper sequence and right arrangement of things has been upset, and all our affairs are full of much confusion." - St. John Chrysostom, from the homily on "If thy enemy hunger, feed him."

Love and the Poor: A Personal Reflection

2009-01-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

I have said elsewhere that the only positive thing that we do at St. Joseph's is decline the temptation to exclude the homeless from fellowship. In that sense we have only made the most basic step toward community, which is not to preclude its possibility. Now we have, in a way, moved on. We have long since invited the poor among us, or perhaps we have responded to their invitations - after all, they have been there longer than most of us. But having avoided the first temptation to undermine community, moving ever toward the eucharistic ideal, we are faced with new challenges.

The challenges, I have thought at times, are those of discerning the deserving from the undeserving, or perhaps of convincing my new friends that I am not to be conned, or to establish a level of understanding with them concerning what I can and cannot give, or will and will not. These challenges, it turns out, are all the challenges of maintaining control. The first is to control the reception of my charity, that it not be taken for granted or squandered when others could use it more. The second is control of my dignity. The third is control over the claims that the poor might make of me, as if to say, "I'll give you anything as long as you don't ask for this, or that."

The fear of losing control is at once a fear of "enabling" or perpetuating sin (by giving money to an alcoholic in search of a drink), of being made a fool in a con, or of the slippery slope that one seems to occupy when one starts giving freely to those who ask (because so few exercise proper restraint in asking!). It is clear that these are fears that I face. And yet the fear of enabling rests on a conviction that I am a more responsible steward than the alcoholic, perhaps that spending that money on my own dining-out habits, on coffee for a meeting with a colleague, is somehow more faithful than this man's indulgence in a destructive habit born of who knows what hardship. The fear of being made a fool is a fear of losing the esteem of others, and ultimately a fear of being made lowly, even if it be for the sake of Christ. The fear of the slippery slope is ultimately a fear of becoming poor. And the fear of becoming poor is the fear that God will not provide what I need. The belief that through charity one might be left with too little is fundamentally a failure of faith.

Once I realize that what I thought were the challenges are really no more than my own habits to distance myself from the poor, or even from others generally, I begin to have some idea of greater challenges. The greater challenge as I see it is to see Christ in the undeserving, the needy, the down-trodden. To see a man or woman who is so battered to the point of self-loathing is to see an immensely unattractive person. But Isaiah gave a foretaste of this:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not…

He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Christ lives among us, as the least of these, the despised, those of little esteem, perhaps as those who have not even their own esteem. Not only is it hard to see Christ in this suffering person - for it is hard, really, to fathom that He went not up to joy but first He suffered pain - but we turn our heads from this pitiful creature perhaps because it makes a fool of us just to see it: the image of God found self-loathing and alone. It is repulsive to see the pearls cast before swine, the beloved of Christ trodden by sin, and we turn our heads in shame and disgust, and distance ourselves from the sacrilege.

But is this not the view of God from the beginning of time, to see sin mingled with his image, the goodness of creation soiled by sin? His response was not to lift himself higher, distancing himself from that which conceived in love and goodness had become tainted, but instead he lowered himself to come among us, to sit in fellowship with sinners, to have himself lifted high on a cross. The perfect image of God became incarnate, first as salvation from the power of death, but also as an example to man of the perfection of the very image in which he was created.

So then in these encounters we recognize that Christ is on both sides. We find him in the least of these, and we find him as our victory over the threats of sin and death. We no longer have anything to fear by encountering Christ in this person, and love of God demands that we raise this Christ-like figure to his proper glory, out of the muck and offal of anonymity and scorn, and into the love of Christ.

The challenges, I have decided, are not challenges intrinsic to the poor. The challenge is no more particular than learning to love another person as Christ loved us. Perhaps he gave us the poor to love in part to convince us how much deeper could be our love even for those to whom we acknowledge our closeness, our spouses and family. This is the sacramental presence of the poor, a vehicle of grace and instrument of Divine Love.

It is a challenge to love the poor not because of their poverty or their faults - not because of smells or impropriety or disease - but because we know so little of how to love in the first place, poor or otherwise.

Use of Force

2009-01-23T04:38:00.000-08:00

Christ our Lord came and took upon Himself our humanity. He became the Son of Man. He suffered hunger and thirst and hard toil and temptation. All power was His but He wished the free love and service of men. He did not force anyone to believe. St. Paul talks of the liberty of Christ. He did not coerce anyone. He emptied Himself and became a servant. He showed the way to true leadership by coming to minister, not to be ministered unto. He set the example and we are supposed to imitate Him. We are taught that His kingdom was not of this earth. He did not need pomp and circumstance to prove Himself the Son of God.

His were hard sayings, so that even His own followers did not know what he was saying, did not understand Him. It was not until after He died on the cross, it was not until He had suffered utter defeat, it would seem, and they thought their cause was lost entirely; it was not until they had persevered and prayed with all the fervor and desperation of their poor loving hearts, that they were enlightened by the Holy Spirit and knew the truth with a strength that enabled them to suffer defeat and martyrdom in their turn. They knew then that not by force of arms, by the bullet or the ballot, they would conquer. They knew and were ready to suffer defeat--to show that great love which enabled them to lay down their lives for their friends.

And now the whole world is turning to "force" to conquer. Fascist and Communist alike believe that only by the shedding of blood can they achieve victory. Catholics, too, believe that suffering and the shedding of blood "must needs be" as Our Lord said to the disciples at Emmaeus. But their teaching, their hard saying is, that they must be willing to shed every drop of their own blood, and not take the blood of their brothers. They are willing to die for their faith, believing that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Our Lord said, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." And do not His words apply not only to Him as Head of his Church but to His members? How can the Head be separated from the members? The Catholic Church cannot be destroyed in Spain or in Mexico. But we do not believe that force of arms can save it. We believe that if Our Lord were alive today he would say as He said to St. Peter, "Put up thy sword."

Christians when they are seeking to defend their faith by arms, by force and violence, are like those who said to our Lord, "Come down from the Cross. If you are the Son of God, save Yourself."

But Christ did not come down from the Cross. He drank to the last drop the agony of His suffering and was not part of the agony the hopelessness, the unbelief of His own disciples?

Christ is being crucified today, every day. Shall we ask Him with the unbelieving world to come down from the cross? Or shall we joyfully, as His brothers, "Complete the sufferings of Christ"?

And are the people to stand by and see their priests killed? That is the question that will be asked. Let them defend them with their lives, but not by taking up the sword.

At a meeting of the opposition last week, when a Spanish delegate of the Loyalists told of unarmed men flinging themselves, not from principle but because they had no arms, into the teeth of the enemy to hold them back, the twenty thousand present cheered as one.

In their small way, the unarmed masses, those "littlest ones" of Christ, have known what it was to lay down their lives for principle, for their fellows. In the history of the world there have been untold numbers who have laid down their lives for our Lord and His Brothers. And now the Communist is teaching that only by the use of force, only by killing our enemies, not by loving them and giving ourselves up to death, giving ourselves up to the Cross, will we conquer.

If two thousand have suffered martyrdom in Spain, is that suffering atoned for by the death of the 90,000 in the Civil War? Would not those martyrs themselves have cried out against more shedding of blood?

Prince of Peace, Christ our King, Christ our Brother, Christ the Son of Man, have mercy on us and give us the courage to suffer. Help us to make ourselves "a spectacle to the world and to angels and to men." Help your priests and people in Spain to share in your suffering, and in seeming defeat, giving up their lives, without doubt there will be those like the centurion, standing at the foot of the cross who will say, "Indeed these men are the sons of God."

[By Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, November 1936; From catholicworker.org]

Entertaining Angels

2009-01-23T04:34:00.000-08:00

Mick told me a story yesterday. Last Saturday, Gail was up at the church and a cab pulled up. Out stepped a man with some papers in his hand, and he was a wreck. Sobbing, he told her that he had just been released from the mental health facility in Butner. His papers verified this, and it was apparent, and he agreed, that he was in no shape to be released. At any rate, somehow either he or the cab driver had heard about our little church, and he had been dropped off “for us.” Gail made him a sandwich and said he was welcome to hang around.

I’ve not seen this man, but this is not the first time people released from Butner have made St. Joe’s their first stop. I have no idea how they find out about us or what they expect to find when they get here. Most of the time we are singularly unprepared for them and unable to do anything other than feed them and offer them the church grounds for a place to lay their head. But it appears there is some word on the street that you can always go to St. Joseph’s.

This is anything but a pat on our back. If anything, it should make us aware that God is often sending his outcast our way. And I think he intends for us to care for them all.

Lord, have mercy.

Love Is the Measure

2009-01-23T04:31:00.000-08:00

We confess to being fools and wish that we were more so. In the face of the approaching atom bomb test (and discussion of widespread radioactivity is giving people more and more of an excuse to get away from the philosophy of personalism and the doctrine of free will); in the face of an approaching maritime strike; in the face of bread shortages and housing shortages; in the face of the passing of the draft extension, teen-agers included, we face the situation that there is nothing we can do for people except to love them. If the maritime strike goes on there will be no shipping of food or medicine or clothes to Europe or the far east, so there is nothing to do again but to love. We continue in our fourteenth year of feeding our brother and clothing him and sheltering him and the more we do it the more we realize that the most important thing is to love. There are several families with us, destitute families, destitute to an unbelievable extent and there, too, is nothing to do but to love. What I mean is that there is no chance of rehabilitation, no chance, so far as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance of adjusting them to this abominable world about them, and who wants them adjusted anyway?

What we would like to do is change the worldmake it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitutethe rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion.

We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and dear Godplease enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

This is the month of the Sacred Heart, the symbol of Christs love for man. We are supposed to love as Christ loved, to the extent of laying down our lives for our brothers. That was the New commandment. To love to the extent of laying down our lives, dying to ourselves. To accept the least place, to sit back, to ask nothing for ourselves, to serve each other, to lay down our lives for our brothers, this is the strange upside-down teaching of the Gospel.

We knew a priest once, a most lovable soul, and a perfect fool for Christ. Many of his fellow priests laughed at him and said, "Why, he lines up even the insane and baptizes them. He has no judgment!" He used to visit the Negro hospital in St. Louis, and night and day found him wandering through the wards. One old Negro said to me, "Whenever I opens my eyes, there is Father!" He was forever hovering over his children to dispense the sacraments. It was all he had to give. He couldnt change the rickety old hospital, he couldnt provide them with decent housing, he could not see that they got better jobs. He couldnt even seem to do much about making them give up liquor and women and gamblingbut he could love them, and love them all, he did. And he gave them Everything he had. He gave them Christ. Some of his friends used to add, "whether they wanted Him or not!" But assuredly they wanted his love and they saw Christ in him when they saw his love for them. Many times I have been reminded of this old priest of St. Louis, this old Jesuit, when I have visited prisons and hospitals for the insane. Its hard to visit the chaplains and ask their help very often. They have thousands to take care of, and too often they take the view that "its no use." "Whats the use of going to that wardor to that jail? They wont listen to you."

If one loves enough one is importunate, one repeats his love as he repeats his Hail Marys on his rosary.

Yes, we go on talking about love. St. Paul writes about it in 1 Corinthians 13. In The Following of Christ there is a chapter in Book III, Chapter Five. And there are Father Zossimas unforgettable words in The Brothers Karamazov"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." What does the modern world know of love, with its divorces, with its light touching of the surface of love. It has never reached down into the depths, to the misery and pain and glory of love which endures to death and beyond it. We have not yet begun to learn about love. Now is the time to begin, to start afresh, to use this divine weapon.

[Dorothy Day, June 1946, Catholic Worker: taken from catholicworker.org]

That Which is Lacking in Christ's Suffering

2008-12-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

One man very dear to us often says things like, "The world is killing me," or "I'm gettin' smoked for other people's sins," or, "they're trying to set me up for things that I don't know nothin' about." Sometimes I think he is talking about something specific that has happened to him where he is literally getting blamed for something someone else has done. Sometimes perhaps that's the case. But more often he is talking about the "world" much more abstractly, and the experience of "gettin' smoked" is actually a physical pain that he feels in his torso, or an indescribable emotional state that seems to make it hard to think straight. I'm often astounded at just how close he comes his words come to the Servant Songs in Isa. 53.

He was despised and forsaken by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised and we did not esteem him. Surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried....He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.

Then I ran across one of Dorothy Day's description of her own suffering during one of the times she was in prison...

Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit - these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself.
I was mankind.

I was as no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed; I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who, for rebellion, was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover. The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. (From Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, p.5)

We are all parts, one of another.

Mounier

2008-12-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

While I was in Boston a couple weeks ago, I read Mounier's Personalist Manifiesto, one of Peter Maurin's favorite works. I couldn't help but see the SBL meeting - with its massive book displays, self-important bearded suits, rampant insecurity, social climbing, and comfortable cultural critics - written into page 151.

Except in heroic instances, the world of money has perverted both the intellectual and the artist. They have no place in bourgeois society unless they serve it, unless they renounce honesty of work for a strict propriety of thought, unless they cater to a minority art of class and snobism that is destined for the salons and the chapels of the financiers. Bourgeois society is indulgent to them, even at its own expense, as long is they amuse it and do not become too dangerous in their audacity. As to the others, the bourgeois ejects them from his life as so much wasted effort and ignores them.

Romero on the Poor and the Body of Christ

2008-11-29T04:19:00.000-08:00

"Real persecution has been directed against the poor, the body of Christ in history today. They, like Jesus, are the crucified, the persecuted servant of Yahweh. They are the ones who make up in their own bodies that which is lacking in the passion of Christ. And for that reason when the church has organized itself around the hopes and the anxieties of the poor, it has incurred the same fate as that of Jesus and of the poor: persecution."- from The Political Dimension of the Faith from the Perspective of the Poor

This theology is an interesting blend of the Pauline doctrine of the body of Christ with the Matthean identification of the Poor with Christ (Matt 25.31-46), so that the poor actually become the suffering body of Christ in the world. This raises nicely the question, which I think we have yet to think about seriously, of the theological and practical relationship between the church and the poor.

Thoughts?

Excerpts From Herbert McCabe’s Catechism*

2008-11-25T18:54:00.000-08:00

Here are a few excerpts from Herbert McCabe's Catechism, chosen either for their relevance or their inherent interest.

134 :: Why is the Church called the Church of the Poor?

The Church is called the Church of the Poor because Christ said that to the poor belongs the Kingdom, because she is dedicated to upholding the cause of the needy and the oppressed and because Christ promised that she would be hated by the wealthy and powerful of the world (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 1).

208 :: How do we usually exercise [the virtue of] charity towards others?

We usually exercise charity towards others by seeking their good and supplying their needs; by readily forgiving their offences; by mercy; by thinking and speaking of their good points; by helping them in temptation, sickness, ignorance or poverty; by seeking to enjoy their company.

221 :: What is an unjust society?

An unjust society is one in which some section of the community is systematically exploited in the interests of another wealthy and powerful section. Although we must use every means in our power to liberate such a society, we know that, because of original sin, any society will be in some respects unjust until the coming of the Kingdom.

231 :: How can we fail in the exercise of justice?

We fail in the exercise of justice by depriving others of their due or failing to defend them against an injustice: by murder, abortion, injury, including self-injury, torture, rape and adultery; by collusion with an oppressive and exploitative regime or with an unjust war; by indulging racism, sexism or religious bigotry; by avarice, by accumulating wealth and keeping it from the poor; by stealing or misusing the legitimate property of the community or individuals; by tax-evasion and inequitable forms of legal tax avoidance; by spreading deceptive propaganda or misleading advertising; by perjury and all forms of dishonest or sharp practice and by any form of co-operation with the injustice of others.

235 :: How do we exercise the virtue of courage?

We exercise the virtue of courage principally in energetic struggle on behalf of the poor and the weak and on every occasion when we have to face hostility and danger for the sake of the gospel.

241 :: How do we fail in the exercise of [the virtue of] temperateness in [the area of eating and drinking]?

We may fail by indifference to the enjoyments of the table; by eating and drinking that is totally divorced from either friendship or the requirements of health; by eating what is merely superficially attractive at the expense of a reasonable diet, by drug abuse and by all forms of gluttony and drunkenness.

253 :: How can we fail in the exercise of good sense [a.k.a. the virtue of prudence]?

We fail in good sense by the exercise of cunning to encompass bad ends as well as by foolishness while trying to do good; by all forms of unreasonableness, self-deception, bigotry, and prejudice; by pedantic legalism; by being doctrinaire; by voting ignorant, irresponsibly or merely selfishly; by careless incompetence in the management of domestic affairs and by leading a life without any conscious purpose or meaning.

260 :: How do we become detached from the things of this world so that we may be prepared for death?

We become detached from the things of this world by penance and mortification, especially by almsgiving and all forms of difficult works for others in need.

* Herbert McCabe, OP, The Teaching of the Catholic Church: A New Catechism of Christian Doctrine (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2000).

Closer to home

2008-11-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

The rare acknowledgment of homelessness back home in MS, see here.