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.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Finding Jesus
[The following sermon I preached at St. Joseph's Episcopal Church, the 5th Sunday of Lent 2010. The Gospel text is John 12:1-12.]
This is the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Next week we follow Jesus into Jerusalem, joyfully proclaiming as king this goofy beggar riding on a donkey, whom we will then proceed to mock, judge, torture and kill during holy week. We are not quite there, however. This week we sit with him in Bethany, continuing our strident and joyful penance, to which Bp. Marble called us anew a couple weeks back.
To what, this week, is our attention drawn? From what vanity are we to turn?
St Augustine says on our Gospel passage: “Anoint
the feet of Jesus: follow Jesus’ feet by living a good life. Wipe them with your hair. What you have beyond what you need, give to the poor, and you have wiped the feet of the Lord…You have something to spare from your abundance: it is excess for you, but necessity for the feet of the Lord. Perhaps on this earth the Lord’s feet are still in need. For of whom but his body parts did he say, “In as much as you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it to me?” You gave what was beyond necessity for you, but you have done a grateful thing to my feet.”
I wish to make just make a couple of simple points.
First, Augustine makes the point that what we lavish upon the poor we lavish upon Jesus. This is simple enough, but hard in practice. It is hard to see Jesus in the drunken, slightly pushy, smelly beggar on 9th St. But, though he is not a saint, he is still our Lord. “You will always have the poor with you.” Jesus says. He also says “I am with you even unto the end of the age” and St. Thomas Aquinas says that we had better read these two saying together: Jesus hangs out with us, dwells among us, in the person of that beggar. Jesus is not being selfless when he says: “Give to him who begs.”
Beggars themselves do this all the time. If you want to see folks unafraid to give, go hang out in our back parking lot. A while back I was taking a couple of these folks to down to Target to get some things they wanted. As we were pulling out of the parking after having done our shopping we stopped at the light where a beggar stood with a sign asking for money. I knew I only had a 20 in my wallet and so I didn’t reach for anything. The two guys dug in their pockets and came up with about four bucks for the beggar. “Whenever you get a chance to help somebody out, do it,” one of them said.
Jesus lives among us in the poor. But this points out that, downright inconveniently, Jesus has not chosen to hang out just everywhere. He does not tell us that we will find him everywhere we look. He does not say “if you want to find me, look at the sun set, look in a child’s eyes, look at the flowers, or the moonlit night.” We might find him in these places, but probably not until we have learned to find him in the places that he has told us specifically that he hangs out. Where else does Jesus say he is going to be found?
Besides the poor, Jesus says that he is present in the corporate prayers of the church. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” Here we learn our Savior’s voice in the daily reading of the scriptures and his prayers in the Psalms. We sing the songs of the church, his body. We read about his saints who embody him, and we beg for his mercy and forgiveness for the ways that we do not. We receive his peace from the hand of our sisters and brothers.
Climactically, of course, Jesus, has promised to be present in the Eucharist. In bread broken and wine poured out, as one saint used to say, we look at Jesus and he looks at us. Here, in this food, we taste and savor our Lord. Our senses are trained to know him, as it were, from the inside out. We know how to see the Lord only after he has told us where he is and what he looks like.
Before we can see Jesus everywhere we have to see him somewhere. So the first step toward seeing Jesus everywhere is to hang out in the places that he has promised us he will be. Learning to see Jesus in our spouses, our children, our labor or the created order must start by seeing him in the Eucharist, in common prayer, and in the poor. For how will we know how to find him in the places where he is hard to see if we haven’t learned from his certain presence in the places he assures us he will be.
But Judas always stands as a temptation to find Jesus wherever we want. “This resource could have been sold and given to the poor.” Such things are allegorical. Judas becomes for us a type of vice, whereby we determine the most effective means of serving Jesus. How many times have we all heard the argument about how inefficient and impractical it is to give directly to the beggar! Jesus says “Give to him who begs and you did it to me.” Judas says “He just wants a beer. I give my money to the shelter and I pay my taxes. That’s what the state and the charities are there for. They make sure the money goes to good use. If I keep giving to him I’m just perpetuating the problem.” The particularly vicious part of this outsourcing of the poor, says St. John’s Gospel, is that thereby we do not actually love the poor. For in not lavishing what we have on Jesus right in front of us, we profit. We might even say that we steal. We keep something for ourselves that belongs to Jesus. If it is not the money, it is security, it is comfort, it is our own schedule, our own healthy boundaries.
So: in this chaotic world with its anxiety and pressures, distractions and temptations, and demands for loyalty on all sides, it is hard to know where to find Jesus. But He gives us a roadmap of sorts. He tells us where we can reliably find Him, where He will always 'show up'. And if He is 'showing up' at the Eucharist, the prayers and among the poor, but we are not, then we must hear again that chilling question asked of Adam in the Fall: 'Where are you?' We are invited back into Eden, to walk in the cool of the evening with God, this is the building of and participation in the Kingdom, and it looks like this: Come to the Table. Gather for common prayer. Anoint and wipe the feet of the Lord while he is with you.
Amen.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Why I Love My Bike (and hate my car)
The following is an excerpt from Ivan Illich's book Toward a History of Needs
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors -- most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.
People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality, restricted mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers...
More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.
The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around vehicles rather than around people.
The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.
The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, subways, and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport.
The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.
DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel -- probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions -- finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.
Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.
Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.
The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.
Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Colin D. Miller, Ph.D.
Colin successfully defended his dissertation (which amounted to a theological reading of the book of Romans) yesterday. Congrats, Dr. C.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Maturing into Vulnerabiltiy
[I'm thinking as I type, so bear with me.]
On Sunday I spoke to a church group on the topic of being a servant. Within the discussion we spent a few minutes on the theme of "vulnerability". The Gospel, I contended, calls us to a form of service to one another that is vulnerable. There is, in contrast, a form of service that is always invulnerable, always keeping some form of structure between the neighbor and oneself. I think there is a parallel between this mundane distance and what they call in psychology/psychiatry "non-transference". In our case it may be either a physical or emotional distance; we might just say that we keep danger "at arm's length". This may be, for example, the relationship that a one-off server at a soup kitchen has with the local homeless: a well-defined relationship of server to served, on opposites sides of a plexi-glass sneeze guard, fulfilling roles for a specified length of time. One of the dangers of this sort of model is that the "good deed" is often just another luxury one may enjoy, the luxury of noblesse oblige, of doing something good for the less fortunate, etc. It's dangerous because it feeds the ego and the ego eats away at the soul.
So, I challenged this group to be vulnerable to their neighbors, rich or poor. Give to him/her who asks of you. Walk the extra mile. It sounds easy and straightforward. I'm just quoting Jesus after all. But what happens when your neighbor asks of you at an inconvenient time? What if befriending a homeless woman makes you late for work a month later because she has now asked you to sit with her at the doctor's office as she gets a test run? When your boss says, "Get your act together" what will you say or do? My impression is that few employers have much sympathy for the uncertain schedules that arise when one is selfless. The assumption of the workplace is, after all, widely recognized as being driven by the capitalist microeconomic mentality which boils down to self-interest. The self-interested employee will follow the instructions of a boss because he can choose between being fired and being promoted (and sometimes perhaps just staying put, but they want you to believe that if you're not on your way up you're on your way out).
We can become very vulnerable very quickly if we act selflessly in some very simple ways. Looking back, Adam raised this issue in a slightly different setting almost exactly a year ago in his post Scarcity and the Gift (Mar 27, 2009). If your family depends on you to bring home a paycheck while a homeless friend depends on you for companionship in the tough times generating a certain unsatisfactory evaluation of your work ethic in the office, what do you do with a finite amount of time? And, as one astute listener posed in our discussion at church, we obviously can't be vulnerable to every person we meet. Emotionally we'll be spent in no time, and it's just impracticable to be "close" to that many people. What do we do?
With regard to the scenario with the unhappy boss, I have heard repeatedly in my time the argument of managing multiple obligations, being a good steward (read "manager") of one's time, etc. All of these, it seems to me, are derivative of an economic view of time in which the central assumption is that time is scarce and thus the problem of "stewardship" is to figure who gets how much of my time and when in such a way as to... ??? well, what determines the optimum??? maybe: in such a way as to maximize the happiness in the world weighted by my emotional attachment to those I am obligated to, or something equivalently convoluted. That's to say, I don't buy the claim that we only have so much time and so we need to spend (time? effort?) becoming more proficient managers of our time all the while leaving the utility function that goes into this proficiency explicitly in the shadows (so that we don't have to admit that this is utilitarian?).
That said, we do have obligations to our bosses. They're paying us for 40 hours of work each week (even if sometimes they unofficially expect more). So, it seems only right that if we're late for work because we were helping a homeless friend we should make up that time somewhere else in the week. Right? But then one's wife begins to get frustrated that time with the homeless person is taken instead of time with the family (scarcity again!). So what to do? Well, why not just give back that time's worth of money to our boss? Seems just to me. The fact is that most of us want the money more than we want the time (that's why we "make up" time elsewhere if we are late to work). While the adage is "Time is money" maybe it should be "Money is better than time". Some will not be able to survive on less money, but that's also what the church is for. But for most of us, I think we can survive on a little less money, and probably a lot less. We just don't want to, and we kid ourselves into thinking we can get all the money that we want and still be selfless when our neighbor asks for our time. In the end, this isn't selflessness, it's just greed and the sin is transferred to one's boss or one's family.
I suppose I should just be up front: I don't think it's a sin for a family to be poor because the parents serve their neighbors. The Gospel assures us that these will be provided for.
Now what about being vulnerable to too many people? We can't be best friends with everyone. Certainly. Vulnerability does not necessarily mean emotional attachment, but it does mean that we feel an obligation to our neighbor, that we suffer when they suffer, we mourn with them, and we laugh with them. It also means that we are willing to bear their burdens, even if it means bearing them AS a burden (see Gal. 6). It seems to me that there are to modes in which we can bear another's burden. We can do so on the back of our ego or we can do so through grace. What's the difference (besides pious language)?
When we bear burdens with our ego we do so under our own power and by our own self will. The fruit of bearing burdens in this way is that we feel empowered, that we have performed a tremendous work for the good of our neighbor. It's the fruit, I think, that so easily identifies this mode. On the other hand, if we bear another's burden on grace, it means that we recognize that we have not born anything by our own power, but that we have been able precisely to move our egos out of the interaction sufficiently that God might carry the neighbor's burden through us. The fruit of this is that we recognize that we have done nothing but be a vehicle of God's grace, that by some effort and training we have held our sinfulness in check that another might experience God. And the work seems almost fleetingly simple because we have had to bear no real weight. The Way is difficult, but the burden is light.
It is here that I want to introduce a notion on which I have not heard anyone else speak but which seems clear to me: there is a very real and practical difference in spiritual maturity among Christians. Call it spiritual maturity or just holiness, it amounts to the same. And the practical difference that I allude to is that those who are holier have had much practice in putting the old man to death and thus are living ever more fully in Christ and Christ in them, and thus they will be able to bear more of the burden of this world than will novices in the faith precisely because it is not them but Christ in them that bears it. The perfect man can bear the whole sin of the world, but He is one and He is Christ. In the holy I think we see the fruit of Christ's work as the burden of sin on a poor soul is shared by another. The holy take up their cross on which hangs the sin of their neighbor.
We cannot be vulnerable to everyone, but the measure to which we can be vulnerable is the measure to which we have combated the evil in our own hearts so that we might be filled with Christ's love. This is why the way is narrow and difficult, because we must train ourselves against sin and combat the evil in our own hearts, not so that we can save ourselves or save our neighbors but so that Christ's love might find a vessel to be filled and so that that vessel might be poured out for the love of neighbor.
If the burden is heavy, then we are bearing too much of it ourselves. We need to pray earnestly and with urgency "Thy will be done". The way is difficult, for we must kneel and pray through temptation, but the burden is light because it is not ours to bear.
We have lost, I fear, a consciousness of maturing in the faith, a consciousness of the immense practicality of that process and the tremendous danger of leaving the novices in the faith without protection and guidance.
We are called not to adopt vulnerability but to mature into it.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
“...BUT BY PRAYER AND FASTING”
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.
Monday, February 8, 2010
In preparation for Lent
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.’
Thursday, January 14, 2010
On the Ground in Haiti
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
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
St. Therese on Giving to Him Who Begs (Part I)
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...)
Monday, December 28, 2009
Breakfast: Feast of St. John
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?”
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Criticism of Churches Feeding the Homeless
Here's an interesting piece of coverage from CNN.com. If we're not careful, we'll make the news...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Rome & Canterbury in Recent Economic News
Coincidentally, both His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Rowan Williams made speeches last Monday (November 16, 2009) regarding economics and public policy. The former addressed the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization during the World Summit on Food Security and the latter spoke to the Trades Union Congress at their economics conference in London. After reading the text of the Pope's speech here and the Archbishop of Canterbury's keynote address here, I wonder what we, the de pauperum collective, think of the two speeches, their similarities and divergences, and the theology/theologies of economics they reflect. Any and all insights, comments, and rightfully chastened critiques are welcome. At the very least, in these dark and troubling days of savage global capitalism the path(s) that these two leading lights of today's Church catholic are trying to illumine would seem to require our sober and prayerful attention. Happy reading!
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Dean Sam Wells: Open for questions
Sam Wells, Dean of Duke Chapel, will be interviewed live on Duke's website (at http://www.ustream.tv/DukeUniversity) on Friday, October 23 during the lunch hour (noon-1pm) concerning his role at Duke and in Durham. Viewers can email/tweet/facebook questions into the interview in real time. So, if you have questions for Sam, he'll be a captive audience.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
MacIntyrian Personalism; or Another Reason Macy Equals Concrete
In Dependent Rational Animals Alasdair MacIntyre gives an Aristotelian account of human development. It has often struck me that even those of us who seek to understand ourselves and others in the church’s terms nevertheless have no choice but to rely on the received accounts of the same in what are basically post-Freudian terms. The possibility therefore of a sort of Thomist psychoanalysis is intriguing. But more exciting still is the fact that MacIntyre’s account helps us understand what we are doing with the Guys by implying that a personalist ethics is the condition of the possibility of pursuit of the good. In other words, he links, in a way that modern psychology does not, the capacity of the human being for virtue with her upbringing and experiences.
MacIntyre notes that as the child first develops the first goods it pursues are entirely in terms of the satisfaction of its own immediate sensual desires for which it is entirely dependent upon its parents. A key aspect of the moral development of the child is to come to choose and eventually desire things that are not the simple satisfaction of their infantile passions. In other words, they have to come to reason that there is some good that is to be pursued and chosen because it is better than the good of the satisfaction of its elementary desires. So first the child learns that pleasing one’s parents and not simply crying is to be chosen in order to get food or praise. From this intermediate stage the parents will have to teach the child not to act so to please them but to act for what is truly better. Once the child has become sufficiently detached from both her own desires and the influence of others he becomes slowly for the first time a mature practical reasoner. The qualities that are cultivated in this transformation of desire, motivation and action are called virtues, and so a lack of virtue simply names the reason that one fails to attain what is good and best for them (see pp.83-9).
But what is needed in the first place for any such development to take place is unconditional acceptance in a situation of trust and security. This is usually provided by the parents, who teach the child that their commitment to him is not threatened by the child’s failures or by circumstance such as illness or retardation. In such an atmosphere the child is free to playfully test his experience and explore his world, knowledge of which is necessary for practical reasoning. The child is also free to take his first actions toward distancing herself from her desires and choosing a higher good for its own sake and so form the virtues. Absent such a situation of “trust based on experience” (85), however, the process will be significantly stunted. The child may become isolated from both parents and others, since the former does not provide support and the latter is a threat.
As a result, of course, the child is unable to develop the virtues necessary to judge and attain the good. He will remain focused on his own immediate desires and will develop the habit of fighting back against any who might threaten them. An inability to deal with conflict may result, since conflict is not conceived as disagreement over and reasoning about the good but as protection of the vulnerable self. Because this person has not developed practical reasoning and its attendant virtues which allow him to practice the good in a variety of situations he will often resort to either strident rule following or anti-nomianism. Both result from the inability to see or do the good in the contingent.
This account, while most influential in childhood, is also applicable across a lifetime. In other words, people need other people who love them and who refuse to leave them in order to become good.
While a catholic Christian account of such development would need to be filled out in several directions, MacIntyre's account sheds considerable light on what we have been drawn into at St. Joseph’s. Living on the street, or even as semi-homeless can be and more often than not is a dangerous, isolating experience. Faced with such insecurity, it is no wonder the satisfaction of elementary desires for comfort are pursued by binge drinking, sex and drugs. It is no wonder violence is common. But equally it is unsurprising that there continues to be a presence on the Hill, not just of individuals, but of a group of friends, at least one of whom refuses to leave the others alone. Many of these have lived their entire lives, from childhood, and continue to live, with inadequate resources of trust that would allow us to expect them to behave differently than they do.
So undeniably there is a sense in which our job is to be like parents. But this is far from meaning that we must be judgmental and strict and exacting. Being like parents does not mean being paternalistic. Like good parents, it means that we have to take what God has given us and love it and work with it at all costs and because that is our person. Like good parents, it means that we love these unconditionally, and at whatever cost to us. We simply are not free to behave otherwise, and it would be nonsensical to what limit we should set on the goods we give to our children. In this mode, being like parents simply means providing that context of unconditional love that is necessary for the development of the virtues and the attainment of the good life. Being parents, in other words, looks a lot like being friends. This is something that institutions, however compassionate, cannot provide.
MacIntyre’s account, that is, implies a sort of personalism by pointing to the fact that the development of virtuous people requires the same loving relationships that parents try to provide for their children. This is another reason why it does not make sense to ask if sending the homeless guys to Urban Ministries is not more effective for them and for as a use of our money. We should thank God for Urban Ministries and the necessary services that they provide. But, on this account, institutional solutions that treat homelessness or alcoholism or drug addiction by the imposition of external controls such as demanding sobriety before giving a bed or a meal are in a serious way putting the cart before the horse and in many instances expecting the impossible. It is no wonder that most of our Guys say they simply cannot go there.
The only “treatment program” that is going to “work” in other words, is not a treatment program at all. It is to enter into real friendships. And if this is the goal and if friendship becomes a reality, then the relationship by definition loses its nature as one person trying to “fix” another. Rather, we discover that precisely in treating each other as an end rather than a means, and by making each others' goods are own (the definition of friendship), we develop the virtues necessary to say that we are living well.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
When Not Caring For the Poor or Reading High-Brow Theology...
... you might find my compatriots attempting to get closer to God through various additional means as well. The pursuit of holiness never ends.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A Parent’s Reflection on Welcoming the Stranger - or - Macy Equals Concrete
Those who follow this blog with any regularity might have noticed that it has been awhile since I have posted anything of substance in contribution to the discussions we have here (of course, it is surely debatable that anything substantive has made the trip from my PC to cyberspace via de pauperum). Similarly, those whose lives are variously shaped by the rhythms and flow of the Daily Office community at St. Joseph’s may likewise have become cognizant of my recent absence there as well or, at least, the irregularity of my current, very limited participation. And while I might in part attribute my diminished involvement in both communities to the weeks spent in travel over the last few months, the real culprit for my lack of presence is probably best identified as my newborn daughter, Macy (with whom my wife and I were blessed mid-June of this year). For since my wife has newly returned to her job as a full-time elementary school teacher, and given that I am presently in a state of academic limbo this year with respect to my pursuit of a Ph.D., I have had the great privilege of having my time commandeered by both our children – but especially Macy – as I don the cap of the stay-at-home dad. And though I would have most likely been able to maintain more consistent involvement with de pauperum and St. Joseph’s if I were staying at home with my 4 year-old son alone, it is the mysterious gift that is our daughter which makes such fuller participation virtually impossible.
I must admit, however, that Macy’s (in concert with her brother’s) demands on my time are often hard for me to recognize as the gift that they are. Indeed, given the number of hours I was able to spend both in communal prayer and in being with “the guys” at St. Joseph’s last year, the adjustment to a much more muted involvement has been fairly difficult for me. I miss getting to see and pray with JR and Colin twice a day. I miss the adventures that always seemed to come with eating breakfast with “the guys” on the hill. I often feel like an outsider and am envious when I here my compatriots sharing stories or making references to events at St. Joe’s about which I now know little to nothing. In fact, I frequently feel guilty and perhaps even judged for my seeming abandonment of the communal life at St. Joseph’s in exchange for the demands of a more active domestic life.
What I am struggling to learn, however, is that the charge to pursue hospitality with respect to one’s children – who, let’s face it, are as demanding, trying and needy a bunch as any – is no less noble a charge, no less important a mission, no less necessary a calling for those so located as is the call to care for the poor and needy outside the shared walls of our family’s apartment. As our friend and teacher, Stanley Hauerwas, has often stated, the role of parent is very much one in which one is presented with the need to welcome in the stranger who comes in the form of children (cf. Stanley Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching. [Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009], 126.). But, of course, it doesn’t provide nearly as gratifying or proud a feeling for someone to acknowledge my role in the pursuance of holiness with respect to the ecclesia domestica as it is for my back to be patted (if even by myself) for time spent sharing meals with the homeless or in a quasi-monastic prayer life. It’s not just that trying to be a good dad isn’t nearly as sexy as spending time with the poor; it’s that the former often feels as if it were a lesser calling or an excuse to avoid the responsibilities of the latter. I am reminded of a bit from comedian, Chris Rock (edited, with faux apologies to Stanley, for the sake of our wider readership):“You know the worst thing about [some people]? [Some people] always want credit for some @#*% they supposed to do. [Some people] will brag about some @#*% a normal man just does. [They] will say some @#*% like, "I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb @#*$%! What kind of ignorant @#*% is that? "I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having @#*$%!” (Chris Rock, Bring the Pain, [HBO, 1996])
Surely, as the joke attempts to highlight, the meeting of one’s parental responsibilities is something that is simply expected of the parent, requiring no at-a-boys, recognition, or public expressions of honor for its ongoing pursuit. Caring for the needs of one’s children is just what one is “supposed to” do and, thus, tempts one into thinking it is less worthy an enterprise or allocation of one’s time than is feeding the poor in the quest for holiness. What I am learning from the experience, however, is that my responsibilities and role in the capacity of parent is ultimately no different a job than were/are my attempts to care for “the guys” on the hill. Indeed, I am discovering that sharing meals with the homeless and changing the diapers of one’s newborn daughter are, in fact, two species of the same genus, namely, the cruciform reception and serving of “the other” as “self” in charity. The recognition of this means both that I should feel no sense of shame for my forced time away from our homeless friends at St. Joseph’s and that those (especially at St. Joseph’s) not so familially blessed have as weighty – indeed, as equal! – a responsibility to care for “the guys” as I do as a parent in caring for my kids.
Further still, it means that no demarcating line can be claimed to exist between me and my need to care for my children, on the one hand, and the communicated at St. Joe’s and their/my need to care for the poor on the hill, on the other. Said differently, the privileged responsibility to care for either group cannot be divided up by any absolute boundaries. The biological structures of families and the social spaces in which we all variously move may suggest certain functional roles with respect to primacy regarding who cares for whom (e.g., it makes more sense for Megan and I, as Macy’s parents, to be the primary persons assigned to her care), but the call to welcome the stranger that both Macy and “the guys” comprise is universal to the Christian Church and her members. When it comes to the disciple’s call to follow Jesus in welcoming the stranger, Macy and Concrete are the same.
In short, embarrassingly obvious as it sounds to me now, I have no reason to feel my charge as a parent is less noble a devotion of my time than is, say, filling a prescription for a homeless friend; and I have every reason to believe that the failure to meet our responsibilities in welcoming the stranger, however said responsibilities are distributed sapientally within the Body, is a reprehensible and destructive denial of virtue and the good (e.g., the failure of any of us at St. Joe’s to meet the needs of the strangers daily presented to us in whatever form is as disgusting and roundly debilitating a sin as is parental abdication or the abuse that is fraternal negligence).
Perhaps my recent arrival at these insights is late in coming. And I wouldn’t argue with the charge that they are more than a little self-serving or are a demonstration of my moral obtuseness. I simply offer them in penitence as a reflection of my need for progression in the virtues, an exhibit of my selfishness and need for accountability. And I offer them in hopes that we might all do a better job in spurring each other on in good works, however the opportunities present themselves.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Review of Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of Saint Benedict
[I had to write this for class, but figured discussing monasticism is always good.]
A book like Esther de Waal’s Seeking God is difficult to summarize precisely because it is not so much an argument as an introduction to the Rule of Saint Benedict and Benedictine practice. If deWaal does have a thesis she is pressing it is to show through a tour of the Rule that it and the monastic life have many things to say to and many critiques to level against the insanity of life in a modern industrial state. So I will take a bit of liberty with my assignment and, instead of racing through an inadequate summary, offer in turn a tour of this little book with the aim of providing both a view of the gist of her project and a modest assessment thereof.
The book is often brilliant and even prophetic in its interpretation to us of the (sometimes) strange life of the monastery. At these times de Waal’s strength is an appreciation of the way that we have lost the ability to make monkish virtues intelligible in a culture that will tolerate just about anything but the austere and one-minded. In this sense she cracks open to view the deep way that St. Benedict’s Rule holds forth a remedy for which many Christians today are longing, but for which they have been taught only to reach for ever more and more when what they really needed was less and less. Thus she makes a necessary first step to beginning to “translate” the language of this strange old world of stability, conversion, obedience, austerity, denial, humility, silence, virtue and vice for a world that speaks only in terms of impulsiveness, authenticity, self-determination, satisfaction, comfort, self-esteem, entertainment, rules and requirements.
De Waal is perhaps at her best in her chapter on the Benedictine vow of stability. This may not be surprising since such a vow goes to the heart of a fundamental characteristic of the cloister, and that is its commitment to place. In a world where people shop around for the city in which they want to live, not to mention the church where they want to worship God, it is no wonder that Christians are uncommitted to their communities in the face of disagreement or difficulty (to say nothing of the parish-system). But such a commitment to place and people is the presumption of so much that to us seems un-realistic about the Gospel. Why is it so important to forgive my neighbor and to deal with it quickly when I don’t know her very well, only see her once a week and at any rate can always go to the church down the road? DeWaal’s answer is that Benedict says very simply that this not the way God wants us to live. The Rule shows that “monastic stability means accepting this particular community, this place and these people, this and no other, as the way to God” (57, my italics). In other words, part of where we have to get to in the church is being able to say “I’m not going anywhere. You can hurt me, I can hurt you. We can laugh and cry, forgive, yell, hope, live and die, even dislike each other, but we will do this together, loving each other, and we’ll both be here for it all.” We have to say that “there is no need to seek God elsewhere since, if I can’t find God here, I shan’t find him anywhere” (62).
Part of being in one place is a willingness to be one of the flock, and this is in fact essential for meeting God. Thus deWall tells us that at one point Henri Nouwen “knew that he wanted to be different, to attract attention, to do something special, to make some new contribution. Yet the monastic situation was calling him to be same, and more of the same. Only after we have given up the desire to be different and admit that we deserve no special attention is there space to encounter God” (61). What she so incisively has put her finger on is Benedict’s proscription of our contemporary obsession with cultivating personal identity. However valuable such cultivation may be in its place, says the Rule, the vow of stability means that it will always be defined, and decisively so, in relation to this place and these people.
And so, only in relation to stability, to this place and these people, and only as I am a member of them and not something over and against them, does it really makes Christian sense to talk of change. Thus deWaal places her chapter on the vow of conversatio morum directly after that on stability. She gives the vow a biting characterization as “a recognition of God’s unpredictability, which confronts our own love of coziness or safety. It means that we have to live provisionally, ready to respond to whatever and however that might appear. There is no security here, no clinging to past certainties. Rather we must expect to see our chosen idols successively broken” (70). This, I take it, is the vow of saying “be it unto me according to they word” when faced with the prospect of the total reconfiguration of our plans for our selves, our lives, our careers, and what is often harder: our days, our afternoons, our lunch breaks.
There are some things to quibble about in the book.
The first worry is about the status of monasticism in the divine economy. Is it a more faithful life or just a different one? At times deWaal seems to speak of what is “realistic” to expect, but from what vantage does she make this judgment? (I almost get the impression the middle-class English life is what is really “reasonable.”) And she even appears to imply here and there that it would be bad for all Christians to live like this. But this does not deal with the (at least implicit) claim of something like the Rule itself that it holds out a better and higher way to live than the ordinary parish Christian. This is, after all, why the first monks wandered off into the desert. Such a claim is especially unpopular today in the face what Charles Taylor has famously called “affirmation of ordinary life.” Part and parcel of such a phenomenon is in fact the rejection (at first mostly by the reformers) of the monkish higher vocation and the here is often implied a negative evaluation of “heroism” in general. The latter concern is certainly shared by deWaal, as she associates it variously with unsustainability of lifestyle and guilt (105) and even a sort of Pelagian tendency (in terms what God “demands”; ibid). Rather, the Rule “is mundane...day-to-day living that revolves around Christ” (30-1), and we find in it “the stark reality of the humdrum” (99).
In one sense of course this is just a good reading of the Rule, and it attests to a (I suspect) relatively new affiliation of monasticism and ordinary life: what we can call the heroism of the ordinary (prime example is someone like St. Teresa of Lisieux). But here we must be cautious because it is all too tempting to conflate our humdrum and Benedict’s and say that we can all be monks in or out of the monastery. DeWaal is by turns on guard against this move (“[The Rule] will not be impossibly tough but it will without doubt be tough...there is humanity here but there is nothing tepid…there can be no doubt about the rigorous demands on those who enter the monastic life” (34, 41 )), but it is her lack of a definitive evaluation of the sanctity of the religious compared to the lay that leaves open the domestication of the radicalism of Benedict’s call to us all.
This is closely related to a second point that involves de Waal’s hermeneutical appropriation of the Rule for the laity. She says that “the Rule of St. Benedict is neither rule book nor code; it points a way” (30). Again, one of the things I worry about in this sort of “metaphorical” reading of the Rule is that it can lose its convicting force for us. It is of course completely valid to look to the Rule for Benedict’s wisdom and for the Gospel therein; but the temptation is that once we have decided that we are not going to follow the rule literally, we forget that Benedict’s implicit claim is that it takes something like this rule to live faithfully. The function of a Christian Rule of life is to say concretely and literally how one is going act out the Gospel (so deWaal: “The Rule is simply an aid for us to live by the Scriptures” (32)), however literally or metaphorically we take the latter’s various claims. But to make then a Rule itself something further to be interpreted not as a code but by the way it points, is to risk sliding into an ever-deferred response to the Gospel. The Rule tells us to do things that have their value in the doing, not in the “principle’ behind them. I am skeptical of being able to abstract such principles from the Rule’s concrete prescriptions. Indeed the latter are merely instrumental to the end of virtue and salvation, but we must not be too quick to think that we can find other things to do the same trick. Fasting is indeed merely a means to temperance, but one who only fasts metaphorically risks having no temperance at all.
In this regard we can take her treatment of poverty in her chapter on “material things.” She says that for Benedictines “[n]either poverty nor affluence are desirable” (100). DeWaal in this chapter unfortunately gives the impression of wanting to show from the Rule why poverty is not necessary for Christian faithfulness. In this she is of course going to have issues with most other forms of religious life (including some Benedictines!). Her dismissal of St. Francis betrays her otherwise prophetic voice: “St. Benedict equips his monk with all that is needed for a decent standard of living….Poverty is not undertaken as one of the Benedictine vows, and there is nothing here of the ideal of absolute poverty as the friars present it. Instead we find an attitude toward possessions which speaks more realistically to many of us as we try to face of the question of destitution and poverty in the world today. For most of us the Franciscan way is not a practicable starting point.” But she is not playing altogether fairly here. She has said already that poverty is not desirable, not that it is not a practicable starting point. The latter is entirely understandable. But to deny that poverty (not destitution) in its various guises is part of what it means to follow Christ appears to me to be too blatant a denial of the Scriptures, the tradition, and broadly the monasticism which she elsewhere so elegantly affirms. As with fasting so with poverty: it is but a means to the goal is indeed spiritual poverty, but those who have only spiritual poverty risk having no poverty at all.
Finally, there is an individualism in this book that needs to be corrected. DeWaal at one point says that the rule of Benedict seeks to answer the question of how “we grow and fulfill our true selves” (29), which is hardly a question that Benedict could even have fathomed (not least because there is no word in his Latin that corresponds to the grammar of our word “self”). The Rule, moreover, is the “basis on which each individual is to grow and develop” (31). This means, apparently, that Benedict “does not confuse ends and means. The good order and stability of the community is the means: the end is that the individual must have space and time to enter into dialogue with God.” She says again that “the community exists for the sake of the individual, and not visa-versa” (116).
My claim would be that this is exactly the opposite of the truth the Gospel holds out for us, and the opposite of the ethical priorities the ancient world held out as a whole. Aristotle’s polis, Cicero’s Res Publica, St. Paul’s soma Christou, and Augustine’s Civitas Dei was the end about which all activity and all virtue was to be ordered. This was Benedict’s theology, and this was Benedict’s world. When personal development becomes an end in itself that is not ordered to a divine end beyond oneself then it becomes self-absorbed and paralyzing. It is only when the ultimate end of the beautific vision is intended through (and only through!) the proximate end of the edification of the church, and this by losing one “self” in service and giving that the nature of the person as created (Augustine’s natura) is gracefully completed.
This does not mean of course that we are allowed then to treat people as means in a sort of utilitarian calculus. But the path between such a thing and individualism is exactly the sort of “Christian personalism” that the Rule actually spells out: each person is Christ (especially the stranger) (120). DeWaal herself clearly realizes this, even if she does not integrate it into a holistic picture of the Rule: “St. Benedict would probably have appreciated Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s aphorism ‘He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community’. So he begins with the brethren, with people as people, and there is no distinction of persons” (139). Only when community itself, in the abstract, becomes the focus with principles like “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” do people start to be treated as means instead of ends. I think de Waal would agree that such a radical mysticism of the other as Christ is close to the heart of Benedict’s vision. Without it, there is little left of enduring value. But with it, a door opens to a strange but wonder-filled new world which, far from being rose-colored, slowly but surely, teaches us to see ourselves and others the way we really are.
