Guerilla Orthodoxy

Letter to a Right Wing Nation

2007-01-05T22:08:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, I took a hiatus from blogging for about a year. Like Rip Van Winkle emerging from sleep, when I went back to the blog I discovered a lot had changed. Most of the blogs that used to link to mine had given up on me (can't say I blame them), as had many of my regular readers. But I found there was a new blog linking to mine, a blog called "Right Wing Nation."

Perhaps, now that I am starting up blogging again, this is a good opportunity to reiterate a few things I have mentioned in the past. I am an Orthodox Christian who lives and writes from a socially and politically liberal perspective. I'm a pacifist, a vegetarian, and a socialist/distributionalist. I am anti-death penalty, and favor eliminating the stigma attached to homosexual people in society and in the church. And my family and I, in the various situations in which we have lived over the past number of years, have attempted to live in community with the poor, to make disadvantaged people a part of our lives. This is really the basis for the Guerilla Orthodoxy blog: it is one family's attempt at living out a personal preferential option for the poor.

So it was a real surprise to discover that someone whose tag line is "peace through superior firepower" is linking to my blog.

Now, I want to emphasize that I'm not complaining about this (and not only because I don't want to lose one of my few remaining referrers!). Despite my own ideas and leanings, I happen to think there are many things that are more important about a person than his or her political affiliation. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat or a Constitutionalist or a Green, it doesn't answer some of my most basic questions about you: Are you kind? Are you fair? Are you generous?

Moreover, I genuinely believe (appearances in this country often to the contrary) that it is possible for people of good faith on the right and on the left to work together on some very difficult issues if we are willing to surrender some of our preconceptions, rather than using these issues as fulcrums to leverage ourselves into power. Take abortion, for example, one of the most divisive issues of our time. If you study the statistics about abortion, you will soon learn that one of the strongest predictive factors as to whether or not a pregnant young woman will get an abortion is poverty. The country that has the lowest abortion rate in the world is not the country with the most restrictive abortion laws, but rather the one with the most liberal abortion laws, the Netherlands. Why is this? Probably because there is very little poverty in the Netherlands, a narrow gap between rich and poor, a generous medical leave program, and health care for everyone.

A world without abortion is not a world with better laws. It is a world without desperation. So being pro-life doesn't just mean passing stronger abortion laws. It also means working to eliminate poverty, narrowing the gap between rich and poor, making health care accessible to everyone, and creating a society where family is more important than productivity or profit. I'd like to think there is a "win-win" on abortion, a way for people on both the right and the left to agree that every abortion is a tragic event, and to work towards eliminating the root causes of abortion, rather than endlessly reiterating the "right to life/right to choose" dichotomy like a bad and endless beer commercial ("Tastes great!" "Less filling!").

So this is my letter to a right wing nation. I'm glad you're here, I really am. I just wanted you to know where "here" is.

Peace,

Sampson

Working on Broadway

2007-01-05T21:21:00.000-08:00

So this morning when we got up, Jeff was still asleep in the doorway of the church next door. After breakfast, I brought him some coffee and blueberry flapjacks, and we talked a little.

Jeff's story was familiar in many ways. He's lived all over, including Hawaii and Alaska. Like a lot of people I've met, Jeff went on the street when his family network of support disintegrated: his mom died young, his dad remarried soon after, and then more or less disowned Jeff and his sister in order to focus on his new family. He's 42 years old, and been on the street for over ten years. He has the worn look of someone who's been out for awhile; the average age of death for people on the street is 43 (as compared to about 70 for the rest of us).

One of Jeff's biggest problems is that he has no ID, nor does he have the ID necessary to get ID. This has become a very big problem for homeless people since 9/11, when the standards for getting identification were significantly raised. When you're moving all the time and have no safe dry place to store stuff, it's easy to lose your ID, have it stolen, or ruin it. Then you need a certified copy of your birth certificate to get a new license or state ID. But Jeff doesn't have a birth certificate, nor does he have the means to get one, and without a birth certificate, no ID. And without ID, its difficult for him to get assistance or services, and easy for him to get arrested. As he put it, "It's like they say, 'in order to work on Broadway, you have to have worked on Broadway.'"

Jeff told me he thinks his sister may have a copy of his birth certificate, but she's moved to Arizona, or maybe Florida, and he doesn't have contact information for her. He doesn't remember the spelling of her married name, but thinks he can get it. I told him I'd give him a hand trying to look her up on the Internet sometime.

This evening, I saw that he was still there under a pile of blankets, though in the morning he had said he was going to try to move on to another place where some friends were staying. It's a blustery and rainy night, no time to be traveling, so I figured he was going to hunker down for one more night. After dinner, I got some shells and cheese and Eritrean style vegetables together on a plate, along with some hot coffee, and brought them out for him.

When I got out to the church doorway, I could hear music and singing; a service was going on inside. And Jeff was gone.

Sleeping in the alcove of God's house (again)

2007-01-04T22:43:00.000-08:00

Our new house is next door to a church. Not a nice, beautiful, suburban chapel, but a big, boxy, urban church that looks like it wanted to be a warehouse like all the other cool buildings, but instead ended up as a church.

Tonight when I got home, there was a guy sleeping in the back entrance to the church (which faces our house). The she-guerilla told me he'd been there all afternoon. She had left some homemade caldo verde soup and biscuits for him on the steps, but he hadn't stirred.

So I went out and walked halfway up the steps. "Friend," I called out. No answer. A little louder, "Hey friend, would you like some coffee or something?"

Pause.

"That sounds good."

So we brought him some coffee and reheated the soup and biscuits (and added a piece of baklava left over from a Christmas plate), and we gave him a blanket out of the garage. He said his name was Jeff, and thanks. He didn't seem too interested in talking, so I said I was sorry he had to be out tonight, and went back in.

A few hours later, we turned up the heat. It's cold out tonight.

I thought about Milton, who used to sleep "in the alcove of God's house." I wondered how he is doing, or if he is even still alive.

It's tough out on the damn street.

The Legend of Old Befana

2007-01-02T12:53:00.000-08:00

So since the purchase of our home, I have been reflecting on what it means to create a hospitable and inviting space. On Christmas day, we decided to have some guests over, a few people who otherwise didn't have any place to go. We invited Stan and Mona over, with their daughter Stephanie and Mona's son Romero. I first met them in the Salvation Army shelter last February; now they are in an apartment, but still in a pretty precarious situation. Romero is not quite 13 years old, basically a good kid in a horrible situation. I see so much gentleness in him, watching the way he takes care of his two-year-old baby sister. He's still a child, but just old enough to have started to become intimidating, at that age when we stop adoring children and start fearing them, especially if they have dark skin. He wears his baseball cap cocked to the side and punctuates his speech with wide, gangly, hip-hop gestures, talking about Tupac Shakur and "the street" and "keeping it real." But he's still enough of a kid to look up from time to time to see if you notice him, to make sure you're still listening.

Romero was suspended a couple of weeks ago for bringing a knife to school. When I heard this, I couldn't help but think of the knife his stepfather Stan brandished when he had a nervous breakdown a couple of months ago, the day Romero had to help tackle him to protect his mom and sister, and then watched the paramedics take him away in an ambulance to the mental ward. When I came over a few hours later, there was still blood on the wall, Stan's own blood from where he slashed himself when he was struggling with Mona and Romero.

Now Stan is back with the family; he's taking his medication regularly and appears to be doing much better. But Romero has started carrying a knife, perhaps because it makes him feel strong and tough and "real," perhaps just in case he needs to protect his mom and sister again. And the guidence counselor at the school is saying he may not be readmitted to school in January because of the school's "zero tolerance" weapons policy.

In the Italian Catholic tradition, the season between Christmas and Epiphany is a time for telling the story of Old Befana. According to the legend, Befana was a grouchy old woman who kept a neat house and did not like children. One day, she sees a wonderful sight: a magnificent train of camels, wise men bedecked regally, and a little child who tells her that they are following the star, seeking the Child who has been born a king. When Old Befena hears this, she says "humph" and goes back to her sweeping. But the story has captured her imagination, and so before long she lights a fire in the oven and prepares her very best sweets for the new king, then hurries after the wise men, now long gone.

She is still searching to this day.

It is said that on Epiphany eve, Old Befana creeps into the room of all children and peers into their sleeping faces, seeking the Child born king. And she leaves sweets for every child, saying to herself, "Who knows? Perhaps this is the one."

For some reason, I imagine Old Befana coming to Romero's room. I see her looking deeply into his still boyish, not-quite adolescent face, relaxed in sleep. And then silently leaving sweets.

Perhaps Epiphany is calling all of us to this: to learn to see through the eyes of Old Befana. To see in each face, even those we are tempted to fear, the face of the Child. To keep saying to ourselves, "Perhaps this is the one."

What makes a boy like you go bad?
What makes a man so lonely and sad
That he'd poison all he knows
And in one year, just let it go?

And all that time you were telling me
You were fine
Aw, silly man, silly boy.

"Dirt and Dead Ends," from Despite our Differences
Amy Ray, The Indigo Girls

WWJC?

2006-12-31T15:50:00.000-08:00

Someone who is close to me wrote on her blog:

At a recent holiday dinner, I heard a man with a red moustache say,

"My house belongs to the Lord. And so does my car. So if Jesus wants to take them, that's okay with me."

I don't believe him.

I wonder what that means, "If Jesus wants to take them"? It made me think that maybe if this guy were carjacked by Jesus, he'd be OK with that, but if anybody else tries it, he's definitely pressing charges.

WWJC?

Just Another Killing

2006-12-30T12:19:00.000-08:00

The last thing my wife said to me last night when she came into the bedroom after turning off the computer was, "They killed Saddam." This morning I awoke to the story all over the newspaper, and to all the questions that are being asked. Will Saddam's execution bring peace? Will it bring about greater stability? Will it be the end of one chapter in Iraq's history, and the beginning of another, better one?

Everyone seems to agree the answer is "probably not."

I saw profound irony in the statement of President Bush, that Saddam received "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime." In fact, this kind of "justice" was all too prevalent under Saddam's reign. His execution is just another killing, and all the trappings of officialdom cannot make it otherwise. His death, like all the other deaths that came before and all the deaths that will come after, will not bring peace.

Lately, as a part of my morning reflections, I have been reading the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After finishing with the newspaper, I read his sermon "Loving your Enemies." The sense of tension and counterpoint in this sermon could not have been greater. Following are a few excerpts from; you can find the text in its entirety here.

Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system...

It’s not only necessary to know how to go about loving your enemies, but also to go down into the question of why we should love our enemies. I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. [tapping on pulpit] It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. And that is the tragedy of hate, that it doesn’t cut it off. It only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love...

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, "Love your enemies." Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

What might have happened if we had loved Saddam? What if, instead of breaking his neck with a rope, we had kept him alive in a place where he could do no further harm to others or himself, treated him humanely, allowed him to read, and offered him access to moderate Muslim clergy? Might he eventually have recognized the horror of his actions? Might he one day have repented? Yes, I know this is a one in a million chance, but such things do happen. A change in Saddam would have a chance of bringing about change in Iraq; then he might indeed have become a symbol of a new chapter in the country's history. Now, he is merely a symbol of the fact that the Shiites are executing Sunnis, instead of Sunnis executing Shiites.

Every person who commits acts of great evil contains within himself or herself the key to understanding that evil, and so to redeeming, transforming, and healing it. When we kill that person, the key is lost forever.

My morning meditation was from Mark 13:12-13, "You will be hated by all because of my name. The one who endures to the end will be saved." What does it mean to endure to the end? Perhaps it means, in the midst of hatred, to abide in love, not to succumb to hate or to the tactics of those who practice hatred. It means remaining steadfast in the confidence that love is, as St. John Chrysostom says, τό ισχυρόν, the greatest power, the strongest force on earth.

It doesn't come by the bullwhip
It's not persuaded with your hands on your hips
Not the company of gunslingers
The epicenter love is the pendulum swinger

If we're a drop in the bucket
With just enough science to keep from saying fuck it
Until the last drop of sun burns its sweet light
Plenty revolutions left until we get this thing right.

The Indigo Girls, "Pendulum Swinger," from Despite our Differences

On moving into an "up and coming" area

2006-12-29T21:20:00.000-08:00

We bought a house.

This is a first in the life of the she-guerilla and me. A friend of mine remarked that we'd be switching over to the Republicans any day now.

Lots of people have asked us, "So where did you move? What part of the city?" When we tell them, they often look a little surprised at first, but then quickly recover and say, "Oh, that's an up and coming area." At first, I felt a little twinge of pride when people said this (how smart we were to buy a house in an "up and coming" area! That kind of bear!). But after the third or fourth time, I started to get suspicious and began wondering what this phrase really meant.

We bought a house in a minority neighborhood. Our new home is in a part of town traditionally associated with African-Americans. We are right next door to a predominantly African-American church, shared by a Latino congregation that meets on Saturday nights. One of our neighbors is from Ghana, a woman who lives with her daughter and at least one other tenant, also from Ghana. Another neighbor from across the street, Brian, is African American; he has a big, beautiful son named Rasheed, with deep ebony skin. We chose this neighborhood because we weren't comfortable in the lily-white upper-middle class part of town where we were renting, and wanted a place where there was diversity and a sense of community.

It's an up and coming neighborhood.

I suppose "up and coming" is probably the nicest possible way of saying "down and out with possibilities." You can't exactly call it a nice (read "white") neighborhood, but maybe in time it will get nicer (i.e., more nice white people will move there and drive the housing prices up so the minority and low-income people will have to leave and find someplace else to live). In saying this, I'm acutely aware that I am a part of this process of gentrification. I think I'd feel differently about being here if we had bought the house from an African-American family, but we did not. Our coming didn't change the demographic.

Today I was reflecting on Jesus' teaching in the Gospel of Mark with regard to the Son of David. Jesus asks the question, "If the Messiah is the son of David, how can David call him Lord?" The traditional exegesis is that Jesus is speaking about his own divine status as the Son of God. But perhaps there is something more to this passage.

David was the perfect example of an "up and coming" ruler, a man of deep-seated ambition. David was a winner. He never lost a battle. He successfully engineered the downfall of Saul, after marrying Saul's daughter so as to have a clear claim to the throne. He successfully united the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel under his rule, and began a dynastic succession of kings that spanned some twenty generations.

Jesus' point was that the Messiah would be something more, something greater than David, David's own Lord. But he would do so not by winning, but rather by losing, by an act of voluntary sacrifice. There is a kind of deep irony in the statement "Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies beneath your feet;" Jesus' enemies are placed beneath his feet only when he is lifted up on the cross.

Jesus was a down and out Messiah.

The scribes expected a Messiah like David. And who could blame them? Everybody loves a winner. Isn't that what we expect at the Second Coming: the Heavenly Winner? I wonder why are we so hard on the Scribes and Pharisees for seeking that which we ourselves so eagerly desire?

We made a conscious decision to move to this neighborhood. So please don't pity us, and spare us the whole "up and coming" thing. We didn't choose this place in spite of the diversity, but because of it. We came seeking a sense of connection to a wondrously diverse human community.

We're glad to be here.

If life were more like the X-Files...

2006-09-05T22:38:00.000-07:00

A post I've been saving for awhile. This grew out of an X-Files DVD binge last year.

Every time you heard a bump from the ceiling, it would be followed, a few seconds later, by something starting to drip.
Every time you passed a hole or some kind of dark opening, you would feel an irresistible urge to pull out a flashlight (which you always carry with you on your person) and crawl down into it.
All uniformity--people who drive the same nondescript dark sedans, wear the same dark suits, or sport the same dark sunglasses--would be regarded as sinister and conspiratorial.
Creepy music would play frequently in the background, making otherwise mundane tasks like opening the mailbox or reaching into the garbage disposal preludes to disaster.
Conduits that lead to places you cannot see--drains, vents, manholes, etc--would be a source of endless fascination for you, and would always have occupants.

Dinner at the Catholic Worker House

2006-09-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

Although perhaps first I should answer the question "where the hell have you been?!?" that a few of you have been kind enough to ask...

Answer: Out. Busy.

Ah, that's my inner teenager talking. It's never too late to have a rebellious adolescence.

The short of it is that we are in a new location, and I have been doing some new things. At some point I may write about this, but not now. Tonight, this is what I want to talk about:

For the past several years, we have tried to invite the poor to be a part of our lives, and we have found various ways of doing so in a couple of different locations, both rural and urban. As I said to my son today, I think religion goes bad when it grows far from the poor. But in our new location, we have not yet found a way to do this. We currently are living in an overly residential location with little or no sense of connectedness or community. We have found some opportunities to volunteer our time, but not a niche. Not a commitment.

So tonight it was food for the soul for us to go to the local Catholic Worker House and share a potluck vegetarian meal with people who define their ministry as one of "hospitality and resistance." We ate together, and talked about what we are doing and what we would like to be doing. We agreed to come back for the potluck next month. And we are looking at the possibility of being "house-parents" from time to time, coming over to the house to cook dinner, talk with the guests, and give members of the core staff a night off.

As the she-guerilla put it, "we found our tribe."

I think many of us are looking for precisely this. We are not looking for another volunteer opportunity. We are looking for a tribe, a community, a group of people with whom we hold values and a vision of the world in common, with whom we can share, not just work, but cooking and laughter, washing dishes, working in the garden together. We are seeking a sense of belonging, a connectedness that overcomes the isolation that has been imposed upon us by race, by class, by gender, and by a thousand others meaningless distinctions, the ways by which we size up others and say, "like me" or "not like me."

I think there are many, many people out there who are still looking for their tribe. Some of you have been looking for years.

I hope we have found a niche, a place to hang a longer-term commitment.

But in any case, tonight I am happy. And glad to be back.

For more information about Catholic Worker Houses, including a listing of locations, see http://www.catholicworker.org/.

From 20,000 feet

2005-10-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

From 20,000 feet
The world looks somehow different
The things that separate us fade
Into apparent harmony

From 20,000 feet
The fences are invisible
You cannot see the railroad tracks
Or tell which is the wrong side

From 20,000 feet
You cannot tell black from white
Rich from poor
Saint from sinner

At 20,000 feet
You cannot see the chaos
Or hear the cries for help
Or smell the fear in the air

The world is peaceful here
Calm and beautiful
Not such a bad place at all
From 20,000 feet.

Beauty

2005-09-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

Psalm 27
Journal entry dated March 22, 2005

"to feast my eyes on the beauty of the Lord"

Like Psalm 23, Psalm 27 identifies dwelling in the house of the Lord with freedom from fear. But there is an additional element: beauty. We are the creators of so much ugliness: war, environmental devastation, senseless violence, poverty that breeds despair and endemic hopelessness. And beauty, on the other hand, has become largely a prerogative of the bourgeoisie, a luxury for those who can afford it. We spend so much on imperial Byzantine churches and iconography projects that we have nothing to give to those in need.

What is the beauty of the Lord?

Spontaneous and simple. Unanticipated. It is an act of kindness when you least expect it, restoring hope. Beauty is a healing event. Beauty is fearlessly fragile and vulnerable. Like kindness, beauty is a concept not easily commodified as an instrument of control. Beauty is free.

A single act of beauty is like a seed that has the power to save the world.

The Selah Project

The Feast of the Holy Ghost

2005-09-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

The following is a guest post by Johanna, a regular reader. She sent it to me and I loved it, and asked if I could put it up on the blog. Another guest post by Johanna, "The Lover of Truth," can be found here.

I grew up in a tiny coastal fishing village in southeastern Connecticut. When my parents moved there in 1962 it was inhabited by an interesting cross-section of humanity: primarily poor working-class Portuguese fishermen and their families, a few lower-middle class Navy families (like mine), a healthy dose of eccentric artists and writers from many different places, a few wealthy year-round families involved in local businesses, and a trickle of summer folks who came up from New York City and Washington DC. You could walk to anything you needed. There were five little local markets, a few package stores, a lumberyard, two hardware stores, a gas station, a few bars, three churches, a post office, a drugstore, a few gift shops, a small department store, a few restaurants, a dry cleaner, and of course, you could buy fresh fish and lobster right off the boats. The school was within walking distance. You didn't really need a car for much. There were lots of things to do all the time; it was a great place to grow up. I went to school with mostly second-generation Portuguese kids; they were the "blacks" of our community. I remember in the summers we would go for walks around the village after dinner and a lot of (the Portuguese) people down by the Point would sit out on their front stoops, enjoying a sunset, visiting with people walking by, and the atmosphere was lively, congenial, interesting and vital. It sure wasn't boring.

Every year on Labor Day Weekend, the local Portuguese community celebrates The Feast of The Holy Ghost. The Portuguese Holy Ghost Society owns a big Greek Revival three-story building whose side yard backs right up onto the back of our house. The feast commemorates a miracle of faith and unconditional giving: in the midst of a great famine and flood, Queen Isabella of Portugal sold her crown jewels to buy food for her starving people, and the flood waters receded. There are parades, band music, feasting, and a lively Portuguese sweetbread auction all weekend. Because we're perhaps the most intimate of their neighbors to this whole scene, we have been a part of it from the very first year we lived there. We've always loved it and looked forward to it.

One of the highlights of the weekend is "the feeding of the masses." The Daughters of Isabella prepare a huge meal of traditional Portuguese "sopas," a heavenly broth, with bread in it, and beef, potatoes, chorizo, cabbage, roasted onions and fresh mint. They feed everyone and anyone who walks through the door, all without charge. For a long time when I was a kid, we were too afraid to go wait in line and go into that big hall on the second floor and find out what all of this was about. So we just enjoyed the wacky, ethnic festival atmosphere that prevailed in the neighborhood all weekend. But when I was 15, one of our neighbors, who was Greek and felt like he fit in anywhere said, "Hey, let's just go." So we braved the long line stretching out the front door, down the steps and way down the block to Wall Street, went inside, and had our first meal of sopas. Believe me, it was totally incredible, not just the food, but the whole experience: of going even though we are not Portuguese, of being welcomed and embraced into this cacophonous joyous community as one of their own, of tasting the outpouring of service and unstinting, unconditional giving that this meal is... we ARE a part of this, because we dared to cross the boundary of our fear and to mingle as equals.

I make it a point to be there every year for this weekend. I am happy that even though it is 2005 and the once very strong traditions are fading somewhat from the years of my childhood, that this at least still exists in some form, and I am happy that this diversity still exists. It makes life so much more real and interesting.

But Stonington has changed a great deal in 40 years. In the renovation boom of the 70's, most of the poorer fishing families down at the Point sold their homes to wealthier out-of-towners who were looking for idyllic second homes by the sea. The village is now too expensive a place for my husband and I to own a home in, let alone even rent a modest apartment. At least my mother owns her house and can still afford to pay the taxes. It is now a wealthy bedroom community, with little diversity with which to recommend itself.

And, there are a lot of new residents to the village who try to make life difficult for the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society because they consider their festivals and feasts to be neighborhood annoyances that disturb their expectations of a perfectly noiseless, tranquil life in their expensive real estate, and which threaten "the value" of said property.

If they could just have the humility to be ordinary for a few hours, and go stand in that jostling line with all the other human bodies, and go inside and sit at large tables with neighbors they haven't met yet and eat this wonderful meal, to accept the gift, then they too could realize that they are totally a part of the community and would appreciate a depth and breadth to this place that perhaps they have not yet been able to connect with.

I think essentially this is the same issue at work in all of these things. We make barriers out of our fears. We keep ourselves separated from others. We often want our own way in things rather than having the willingness to consider life from the perspective of someone very different from ourselves.

A dollar for a cup of coffee

2005-09-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight, when I went down to the corner to get some plain yogurt from the organic market, Milton was there talking to his friend Bernice and a guy named Mike whom I've only met once before. Mike looks like Johnny Cash, with salt and pepper hair pulled back into a long ponytail. He sounds a bit like Johnny Cash, too, with a deep smoker's rasp. The last time I saw Mike, he was sitting on the corner running a sign, "Homeless, please help," and he had an old comic book, a real collector's item, sitting on top of his pack. I mentioned that I had a friend who collects comic books, and offered him some dinner. He accepted, but it took longer than I thought to get the food ready, and by the time I got back to the corner, he was gone. But he'd left the comic book with somebody else to give to me.

I went to shake Mike's hand, and he reached out gingerly, saying he'd hurt his hand a few days ago. I sat down on the little brick wall in front of the library, with the sun setting and a cool breeze blowing, and we talked. Mike told me about how he likes to feed the birds in the morning. He gets day-old bread from the local café and scatters it for the pigeons. Years ago, he found a baby pigeon that had fallen out of the nest prematurely, and raised it till it was old enough to fly, then released it. He named it Sammy. Mike said that he could recognize Sammy out of all the other birds, but that last year Sammy stopped coming around, and he figures a hawk probably got him. He said that a song he once heard by Celine Dion made him think that maybe he would see Sammy again "up there." I told him that I thought that an act of kindness is never lost, that one day every generous act would come back to us. So maybe he's right.

Mike told me he has a learning disability; it doesn't really show, except that he talks slowly and deliberately. He strikes me as kind and peaceful. He is a musician; he has a one-man-band act that he puts on for the tourists in town, with a guitar and a harmonica and bells on his legs. He's even recorded a CD with a man he met who has recording equipment. One of his songs, a gospel/blues number, is called "Hear the Beggerman Cry."

A few weeks ago, Mike was walking his bike across a crosswalk, and a woman hit him with her car. She hit him pretty hard, hard enough to knock him down and break his bike. He was lying on the street, and she pulled up next to him, rolled down her window, and asked if he was hurt. He said, in his slow way, "I don't know. I don't think so." He stood up, and she told him she was in a hurry; she had her nephew in the car and had to get him to school. "Can I give you a dollar for a cup of coffee?" Mike said no, he didn't think so, and bent over to pick up his ruined bike.

When he looked up, she was driving away.

Mike was hurt in the accident, though he didn't feel it right away; his hand was injured, and he was unable to urinate for over two days. He got down on his knees and tried and tried. His abdomen distended. Finally he went to the hospital. They told him he had internal injuries, possibly a hernia. His ureter was blocked. They catheterized him and drained 1,000 cc's of urine, gave him a leg bag, and released him back to the street. He told me that now there's a discharge of pus from around the catheter.

I brought him down some dinner: spicy cucumber salad with yogurt, tofu with peanut topping, brown rice, and orange juice, with lemon meltaway cookies for dessert. I told him I thought he should go to the hospital. He said he was thinking about it, but he wasn't sure he would. He didn't want to get an infection. He looked over at Milton, who got a staph infection while he was in the hospital for a broken leg, and ended up losing the use of his leg and being confined permanently to a wheelchair.

People on the street know all too well that they don't get the same care as everybody else.

My wife checked out a book from the library over the weekend called Disposable People, about slavery in the modern world. I couldn't help thinking about Mike when I looked at the title. Here is a musician, a songwriter, a guy who feeds the birds like St. Francis, peaceful, generous with day-old-bread and antique comic books. A kind person. In my mind's eye, I see him walking across the street, see the car coming up and striking him, see the window rolling down, see the face of the person inside, saying "can I give you a dollar for a cup of coffee?"

It's my face.

I'm just as guilty. I see someone hurt, someone in whose injury I am complicit on some level, and I offer just a little bit of help, a quick and easy fix, something small and manageable and noncommittal, and then drive away. I'm in a hurry, after all. Places to go, things to do. I'm an important person. One of the non-disposable people.

"A dollar for a cup of coffee" is what passes for compassion in our world.

Fortunately, shame gets smaller and smaller as it recedes in the rear-view mirror.

Two new CDs

2005-09-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

I am currently listening to two terrific CDs that I recommend highly. The first is Rarities by the Indigo Girls, my absolute favorite musicians in the world. Rarities is a B-side release, a bunch of songs that never made it out of the studio, together with some remixes and tribute album pieces. I never thought I would hear a collaborative effort between IGs and Rage Against the Machine, but there it was on the album. The second-to-last song, "It Won't Take Long," made me weep, because I want so much to believe that a day could come when, "as we let outselves be bought, we're gonna let ourselves be free."

The second CD is 40 Days by the Wailin' Jennys. We heard them on A Prairie Home Companion, and checked out a CD. Gorgeous folk music. Painfully beautiful, if you know what I mean.

Check 'em out.

Train my hands

2005-09-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

Psalm 144
Journal entry dated September 15, 2005

"A blessing for the Lord, who trains my arms for war, my hands for battle"

This psalm begins as the song of the well-trained warrior. Yet it ends with a vision of a world beyond war and the threat of war, a world where children grow up to take their places in society, where there is plenty of food and animals are well-cared for, where there is no breach in the wall, no terror in the streets, no captives being led away to exile.

The great lure of war has always been the false promise of building a better world through violence. But if it is true that we cannot build a new world through war, which seems more apparent every day, it is equally true that we will not build it through inactivity, by sitting in our homes and watching television or by talking about it. We have to build it with our hands.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes that if you look into your hands, you will see all the past and all the future of the world. It's a shock for someone like me, a wordsmith by trade, to realize that the New City will be built, not with words, but with our two good hands. I say to the she-guerilla from time to time that I am jealous of her. She works with her hands, produces something real, tangible. She makes handmade soap, artisan breads, delicious meals from organic ingredients. At the end of the day, I am left with nothing but words on paper.

"A blessing for the Lord, who trains my hands for..." what? It's not enough to say "peace;" this is far too abstract.

Train my hands for art, for music, for cooking, for kneading bread. Train my hands for building homes for those who have none; shape my fingers to the hammer and the nail. Train my hands for gardening, to feel the richness of the soil. Train my hands to plant, to build, to create, to heal.

If ever we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, it will not be with our words, but with our own hands.

The future of the world is literally in our hands.

At noon on one day coming,
Human strength will fill the streets
Of every city on our planet,
Hear the sound of angry feet
With business freezed up in the harbor,
The kings will pull upon their hair
And the banks will shudder to a halt,
And the artists will be there

'Cause it won't take long,
It won't take too long at all,
It won't take long, and you may say,
"I don't think I can be a part of that,"
And it makes me want to say,
"Don't you want to see yourself that strong?"

"It Won't Take Long," by Ferron
as performed by the Indigo Girls

A world without violence

2005-09-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

Psalm 140
Journal entry dated September 11, 2005

"Rescue me, Lord, from evil men; from the violent keep me safe"

In this psalm, the psalmist appeals to God for mercy, meaning protection from the plots and evil intent of violent people. The violent will suffer what they planned for others, and will be ultimately cleansed from the earth: "let evil hound the violent man to his death."

On this day, our nation remembers 9/11, but for the most part, it is an evil memory, not a transformative one. We have dashed their infants against the rock, rocked the nations of our foes with shock and awe, killed our enemies, their children, and their children's children.

Is there less violence in the world as a result?

Hurricane Katrina came as a massive embarrassment to us, because it showed us that, despite our efforts to rid the world of evil, evil remains in our midst in the form of poverty, racism, and utter selfishness. We quickly lowered the curtain, cut the microphones of those who said it openly, but the damage was done. The world saw the ugliness, the evil of our doings.

The times are calling us to broaden our appeal for mercy. Like the psalmist, we pray that we may not suffer violence. But we must also learn to pray this on behalf of our enemies, or better, "on behalf of all, and for all." If we seek a world without violence, as the psalmist does at some level, then we must have the courage to create a world without violence. A world without violence only for a few is a world perpetually at war. A green zone of safety within a world of violence is a bubble waiting to burst.

The bubble burst on 9/11, and we responded, at best, with immaturity. Perhaps the close coincidence of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina may lead us as a nation this year to a deeper reflection as to how we might create a world without violence.

Gone fishin'

2005-09-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Well, not really, since we're vegetarians, but we have gone camping for the next week, where there in no internet access. So see y'all next week!

God's a-gonna trouble the water

2005-09-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s a-gonna trouble the water

This is the first song we sang in church this morning. On almost any Sunday, I am to be found in the Orthodox Church. But this Sunday, my family and I went to the local African Methodist Episcopal church. On this Sunday, we wanted to stand in solidarity with our African-American brothers and sisters, some of whom grew up in New Orleans, many of whom have friends and relatives who have been affected by this tragedy.

As we sang, a projector flashed slides on the back wall: pictures of people walking in the water. People being rescued, pulled into boats and helicopters. Houses half-submerged in the flood. Black faces. White faces. Faces so covered with grime it was hard to tell what color they were.

I wept as I sang, tears sliding down my face while the ushers handed out fans and tissues.

Wade in the water

The service was not somber or subdued, but joyous. It was a celebration, an affirmation of life. I sensed within these people the indomitable spirit of those who have suffered. I noticed that those who were weeping, like me, were mostly the white folks. The black faces were set with a kind of fierce joy; they had seen this bad and worse before, and they had survived. They summoned a courage and dignity from deep within to which I did not have access, a strength that belongs to those who know what it means to patiently endure.

The last scene that flashed on the screen was a picture of New Orleans with a rainbow over it. Devastation and promise. “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”

Wade in the water, children

There is an Orthodox blogger who calls me his “leftist counterpart.” He wrote a piece critical of my post about looting. He claimed that the minority poor of New Orleans are suffering, not because they had no transportation to get out of the city, but because they are evil people, lazy and incorrigible, “a community which has so embraced a culture of crime, laziness, contempt for the general social order, abuse, drugs, sexual promiscuity, and lawlessness that it is past the point of no return and cannot be helped for the foreseeable future.” Unlike, apparently, all those good and virtuous white people who cruised out of the city in their air-conditioned SUV’s.

Wade in the water

I wrote a post full of white-hot rage when I read what he had written, in which I inveighed bitterly against a “racist worldview of post-Confederate fantasies.” I’m still angry. But after today’s service, I feel something else.

I feel pity.

Barricade yourself in your house. Lock your doors. Load your guns. Defend yourself and your stuff against those you fear. Choose to believe that some people are not worth the effort to save.

It sounds to me like a foretaste of hell.

God’s a-gonna trouble the water

I learned this from my black brothers and sisters: that the proper response to tragedy is to celebrate life, to affirm it as God’s gift, not to surrender to bitterness or anger. In their midst, I did not see “a spirit of blame and hostility.” I saw a river of joy to wash away a river of pain, and an ocean of love to wash away an ocean of tears. I saw strength, and dignity, and above all, a deep faith that we shall overcome.

A beautiful rendition by Eva Cassidy of "Wade in the Water," a slave spiritual, is available for free and legal download at WashingtonPost.com: http://mp3.washingtonpost.com/bands/eva_cassidy.shtml.

The storm after the storm

2005-09-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times to follow our discussion on looting and human behavior.

"Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities..."

The psychology of looting

2005-08-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are standing on a sidewalk looking into a store. A natural disaster has befallen your town. At your home, you are dangerously low on supplies: you are out of clean water, and nearly out of food. On the other side of that quarter-inch thick glass pane is clean water, food, medicine, and other supplies.

Do you break the glass?

My hunch is that the vast majority of people would say yes. Some would qualify their answer by saying that they would leave money or go back later to pay for what they took plus damages. But I think that just about everyone would agree that in a time of crisis, there are more important things than private property.

Now, let me ask another question. Let's say you have lived your entire life on one side of a line. People who live on your side of the line do not have new clothes, or good food, or decent housing, or jobs. People on the other side have plenty of all those things, and more. All your life, you have tried to cross this line, tried to better yourself through education in substandard schools or by searching for jobs where there are none. And then suddenly, one day, that line, a thin blue line marked out with police and laws and guns, is taken out of the way. Suddenly, everything you and your children have been denied is available to you. It's right there, just on the other side of that glass, and if you leave it, chances are it's going to be destroyed anyway by the swiftly rising waters.

Do you cross the line?

The primary reason for the existence of laws and police is the preservation of a certain disparity within society. Think about that statement for a second. Society contains some people who possess a great deal, and others who possess very little. The laws of our country, the majority of which deal with questions of money and property, serve to maintain this imbalance by creating categories of "rightful" ownership. Laws are like dams and levies that allow a state of non-equilibrium to exist, a situation in which there can be vast amounts of resources on one side, and very little on the other.

Looting is a breach in the cultural levy, a sudden and spontaneous rush towards equilibrium.

There are many people who will look at the pictures of looters in the morning papers and shake their heads and cluck their tongues. Most of these people, the vast majority, have never had to ask themselves whether they would cross that line if given the opportunity, because they were born on the other side of the line, the one defined by access to resources. Some who were born on the side of the line defined by poverty and deprivation will make the decision not to cross the line, and for them, I have nothing but the utmost respect.

For most of these people, Hurricane Katrina is not the real catastrophe. They have very little to lose. The real crisis is Hurricane Poverty, a storm they have been weathering their entire lives.

"In a time of crisis, there are things more important than private property." Perhaps that statement does not sit with us quite so comfortably as it did at the beginning of this conversation.

Looting is an uncomfortable reminder that there is a sizable percentage of our population that does not accept the cultural myth that those who have, have because they are better or smarter or work harder. And that should make those of us who live on this side of the thin blue levy very uncomfortable indeed.

St. Basil the Great on disparities of wealth:

Once wealth has been forcibly contained until it becomes a flood, it washes away all its embankments; it destroys the storehouses of the rich man and tears down his treasuries, charging like some kind of enemy warrior.

--from Homily Seven "I Will Tear Down My Barns"

Orthodoxy and Cremation

2005-08-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

Since I made reference to Mark being cremated below, I'd like to post a quick comment about my feelings on cremation. The Orthodox Church forbids cremation under most circumstances (though it is permitted in certain special cases such as epidemics). The reasons usually given are that cremation is disrespectful to the body, which is holy, and represents a denial of the Resurrection at some level.

Fine.

Do you know what is involved in the process of embalming? I personally cannot think of a more disrespectful, invasive, and unnatural process. I won't disturb you with undue details (draining, mincing of internal organs, etc.), but you can read about them if you want at this site. Embalming dishonors the body by fillling it with toxic chemicals, and it dishonors the earth by poisoning the land and the groundwater. Moreover, I fear that the Orthodox Church has unwittingly allowed itself to become complicit in the death-denying zeitgeist of our culture by permitting embalming, the primary purpose of which is to make a person look like something other than what they are: dead.

In addition to the above, burial of the dead has become exorbitantly expensive, since the entire process of preparation and burial has come to be controlled by a vast industry. Poor people can't afford burial in many cases, and therefore many of the poor end up being cremated, thus losing their opportunity for an Orthodox funeral and subsequent commemoration in the Church.

In the ancient Church, one of the primary works of mercy was burial of the dead, including the poor non-Christian dead. This ministry was known as the xenotaphion (lit. "burial of the stranger"). But the Orthodox Church has for the most part forgotten this tradition, and does not involve itself in the burial of non-Orthodox, nor does it have many ministries for giving dignified burial to poor Orthodox Christians.

So...

We in the Orthodox Church should either stop permitting embalming, or start allowing cremation, or possibly both. Requiring burial of the dead, which has become prohibitively expensive in our culture, while doing nothing to assist the poor with the costs involved and prohibiting less expensive options such as cremation, is discrimination against the poor. To use the words of Jesus, it is hypocrisy.

"They (the Pharisees) tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them."

Matt. 23:4

Mark Castle: 1954-2005 (Part Three of Three)

2005-08-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

Being poor is a series of indignities, and death is the final indignity.

When I spoke to the coroner about the disposition of Mark’s body, he prefaced what he was about to say by telling me that he doesn’t make the policy, and he doesn’t have to like it. If Mark is found to be indigent and his family cannot pay for a funeral, the city will cremate his remains and scatter the ashes at sea. The family will not be able to have his ashes, they will not be allowed to be present when his ashes are scattered, and they will not receive a death certificate. They would have no opportunity to say goodbye.

I went over to Mark’s daughter’s place that night to bring the awful news. I brought a picture album with me, something Mark had given me to hold for him the last time he came over, a few days before he died. When I told her his body was at the morgue and explained their policy, she looked at me with tear filled eyes and said, “So, that’s it? He can’t even have a funeral?” And in that moment I blurted out a promise: Mark would have a funeral. Somehow, we would find a way to bring some dignity to what had been a terribly undignified end.

Making good on that promise has brought me closer to Mark than I ever thought I would feel. As I have spoken to funeral home and cemetary directors, I have found myself in the same position he was in countless times: trying to get what I need with nothing but my words, spinning out the story that will overcome all resistance and reach the goal. Mark was the master, and I have apparently learned a thing or two from him in my yearlong apprenticeship.

A wake for Mark will be held tomorrow night. Afterwards, he’ll be cremated, and his ashes interred in a small plot at a local cemetary, where his younger daughter can bring his grandchildren when they get older.

I went over to Sheri’s place to break the news to her. She is living in a cooperative housing program in a beautiful apartment. We sat in her kitchen and she made us hot chocolate, and I told her what had happened. I sat in her kitchen and thought about all the times we sat together on the curb while she sucked poison into her body out of a vodka bottle. All the times we had offered her hospitality in our home. Now she was offering hospitality to me.

It was a good feeling.

A few nights before Mark died, he came over to out place and we had dinner together. He actually crossed himself before dinner, something I had never seen him do before. He read me something he wrote for me in prison about growing up in a dysfunctional family where violence and addiction were the norm (I will try to post this at some point). He told me he wanted to pursue his writing, that he was going to try to enroll in a college writing class if he could get some loans. He also wanted to learn how to use a computer. We set up an email account for him that night, so he could start using email.

We talked about the letters he sent while he was in prison. He apologized for sending them, and I apologized for not writing, for not being able to listen through the anger to hear his cries for help, his need for understanding. I later described the time just before his death as a “space of reconciliation.”

Before he left, we embraced, and he walked out into the darkness, like he did that very first night he and Sheri came over:

When it was all over, we said goodnight and showed them to the door, knowing that they were not going to get into the car and drive home like ordinary guests, but catch the tram back to their little park where they will try to live out another night without getting mugged or killed, lying huddled together in the darkness.
(Mark and Sheri, September 10, 2004)

We spent a year with Mark, and in the end, he died just about the time it looked like he might get traction, just about the time it looked like his life might turn around and start to move forward.

What did it all mean?

I've been struggling with this question, and the best answer I’ve come up with so far was written in Mark’s own handwriting, a letter he wrote in response to something Johanna posted on the blog, about a man she knew who drank himself to death:

“Reading your story let me see that we can only do so much to save the people we love and care about. Only God has the answers as to why people choose to drink themselves to death or drug themselves. So please don’t be feeling remorse that you didn’t do more. You did what you could by caring and loving him.”

And I’ve thought a lot about this post since his death.

I'm still on your side, brother. Still holding out for that winning season. Praying that it finally comes.

I still believe in you.

Goodbye brother, and Godspeed.

May you find the home you’ve been looking for.

Mark Castle: 1954-2005 (Part Two of Three)

2005-08-23T22:18:00.000-07:00

It was about 10:00 PM when we found the card from the coroner’s office in our door.

We called the number on the back of the card and paged the investigator, knowing that this was unlikely to be good news. But it was worse than we could have imagined. Mark’s body had been dumped out of a car late at night almost a week earlier, with no ID. He had fresh needle marks in his arm, but no signs of foul play. The coroner ruled it an overdose. It took them a few days to identify him from his fingerprints, and then they didn’t know who to call. I still don’t know how they found us.

He was discarded like trash in the streets, left behind like an old couch somebody didn’t want to bother having hauled away, so they just abandoned it on the sidewalk.

The thing we loved about Mark right away when we first met him was his writing, his ability to tell a story, his skill in the perilous business of transforming experience into meaning. That first night he and Sheri came to our place, he read a long firsthand account of the 1960's and the “Summer of Love” he had written, entitled “Peace, Pot, and Microdot.” It was a story about freedom and the aftermath of freedom, about how plenty of drugs and free love and optimism had not, in the end, been enough to change the world. It could have been the basis for a documentary. Mark had talent, although his writing was rough and needed some grammatical work. But for someone who had only finished eighth grade, he was amazing.

Here’s a sample from a piece he guest published on the blog, “Vietnam Revisited:”

Our government would lead us to believe that the US wins all the way around (in the Iraq war). But what of all the American lives we are losing? Who is really going to benefit in the long run? Why do we let our government, at the cost of American lives and in the name of freedom, use us as pawns in their own personal board game, one that seems to be a combination of Risk and Monopoly?

On the whole, we Americans have become far too complacent in managing our country’s affairs. But the government is only part of the problem; we are the other side of the equation. We are so wrapped up in our lifestyles—our cars, clothes, toys—that we are reluctant to rock the boat, for fear of losing what we have.

It was only later, when his endless talk began to wear on us, that we started to see another side to Mark’s storytelling. Mark talked in order to stay in control of the situation. I honestly believe that he felt, deep down, that if he ever stopped talking, if words ever failed him, his life would spin completely out of control into that void of silence. He was always one word ahead of disaster. He was talking himself down off the edge, day after day.

I think that people whose lives are spinning out of control feel a deep need to tell their story. Putting the events of their lives in the form of a narrative is a way of trying to regain some measure of control over their destiny. Telling their life in the form of a story gives the sense that there is meaning and purpose and direction, and not just random tragedy after random tragedy.
(The Poor Talk too Much, September 24, 2004)

Sheri’s relationship with Mark started falling apart about the time things started to turn around for her, about the time she hit bottom and started to rise. Mark was angry when she left him to go into the rehab program. I wrote this about the two of them during this time:

Mark had a violent father. He hated his dad, and yet at a certain level I think he still believes the lies he learned as a child: that violence is the only way to get through to people sometimes. And Sheri had an abusive step-father, who conditioned her to the patterns of living with an abuser. The most difficult thing about trying to live in community with people like this is the recognition of how difficult it is for them to get back on their feet. You try to address one need, and it's like picking at a loose thread in a sweater: it just goes on and on forever. They need so much more than food and shelter, the basics; they need to learn a whole new way of living. They need models of the kinds of healthy relationships that they never experienced. You could spend your whole life working with just one person. And in the end, it might not be enough.
(Blessed is the One who Comes, February 12, 2005)

From the time we first met Mark, he was a parole violator, though we didn’t know this until much later. He had served prison time for possession of a fairly significant quantity of heroin. He had violated his parole early on by failing to report, because he was "dirty:" he had lapsed and started using heroin again. But in November, he enrolled himself and Sheri in an outpatient methadone treatment program, and things started to turn around for them both (methadone is a heroin substitute that comes in liquid form). Some of the desperation that had characterized their life on the street faded, as they shed the burden of a fifteen-dollar-a-day habit. Before methadone, if they had a good night panhandling, they would buy both heroin and food. If they had a bad night, they only bought heroin. Heroin was the one constant in their lives, the speed of light in their personal universe. Sheri’s success in the detox program the second time around was probably partly due to the fact that she had already dealt with her heroin habit, and was now fighting just one addiction, alcohol, instead of two.

After Sheri went into the detox program, Mark did some stupid things that made him conspicuous in the neighborhood, a bad idea if you’re a parole violator. Eventually, he got picked up by the police, and was sent back to prison for a few months for his parole violation. While he was there, he wrote some very hurtful letters to us that were hard to read. He blamed us for breaking him and Sheri up, and even made some veiled threats. I didn’t write to him while he was in prison until the very end, because I didn’t know what to say, because I was hurt and angry and a little bit afraid of what would happen when he got out.

Mark was released from prison on July 31, and immediately tried to go into a supportive housing program where he could get drug rehab therapy and anger management classes, but there were no beds available. Instead, they put him in a roach-infested, crime ridden hotel where drug use was rampant. He stayed there for over two weeks, trying to stay clean, waiting for a space in the rehab center to open.

And then, apparently, he wavered.

(To be continued...)

Mark Castle: 1954-2005 (Part One of Three)

2005-08-22T22:33:00.000-07:00

I never imagined it would end like this.

My relationship with Mark started out almost a year ago, with this post on September 10, 2004, just a few days after we arrived in the city:

The other night, we had our new friends Mark and Sheri over for a few hours to our new apartment. We met Sheri on the street corner last week, holding a little sign, "homeless, please help." We talked for awhile. The next evening, my wife sent the kids down to her with a plate of her very special chile relleno. Later, she introduced me to her husband Mark (he works the opposite corner); Sheri wanted me to meet him so I could beat a little God talk into him, but I told them I'm not really all that pushy about the whole God thing. I invited them to come over to our place and get washed up sometime. So they came over, took a shower, washed their clothes (it had been two months), had some tea, and we talked.

It ended with a card shoved into the doorjamb, waiting for us when we got back from a conference last Sunday night, a card left by an investigator of the Medical Examiner’s (i.e., coroner’s) Office: “Please Call RE. Mark Castle.”

Over the past year, we have met a lot of people on our corner. We have adopted this corner, made it an aspect of our commitment to living in community with the poor. If you stand out on our corner looking like you have noplace to go or run a sign there, we will share our food with you and listen to your stories, and sometimes we will share our money or open our home. It is our personal preferential option for the poor. In this way, we have brought drug addicts and alcoholics and people with psychological problems into our lives, and we have found our lives enriched by their presence. Over the past year, we met Michelle and Milton and Larry and Mike and Donald and those two kids whose names I don’t remember, who were too young to be on the damn street, and a few others.

But first of all came Mark and Sheri.

So much has happened between then and now. The changes really began when Sheri made the decision to go into a detoxification program to get clean and sober. She and Mark stayed over at our place that night for the first time, and the next morning, I went down with her to help her through the process. The day ended something like this:

As we sat together waiting for the van to come and take her to the treatment facility, a beautiful African-American woman, one of the social workers, came into the room, radiant and smiling at Sheri. She said, "You're going to be OK honey. Everything's gonna be all right. You're doing a really good thing." In a day that was measured in the incremental advances of bureaucratic negotiation, this was grace wholesale and unexpected. In that moment, her voice sounded more like the voice of Christ than anything I had ever heard.

I noticed that Sheri was still nursing the cup of coffee I had bought her that morning at the hospital, and mentioned it to her. She nodded, and said, "Yeah, I poured my vodka into it." She nodded to herself a couple more times, then peered meditatively into the cup and said, "It's my last one."

I walked across the parking lot after they picked her up, and unexpected tears flowed. It was a release of tension, of all the things that could have gone wrong, all the things that had gone wrong for Sheri in this terrible fucked up world. But today, one little thing went right.

She was three sheets to the wind when the van picked her up. But "the wind bloweth where it listeth," and the Spirit also moves in mysterious ways. Maybe today I bought Sheri her last drink.

You're going to be OK, honey. Everything's going to be all right.
(Three Sheets to the Wind, October 6, 2004)

Unfortunately, at the time I was naïve and overly optimistic. Sheri only lasted about seventy-two hours in the detox program, then walked out and went missing for almost two days. When we found her, she was gray and as near to death as any living person I have ever seen. She sat in our apartment eating cereal and nodding off between every bite. I was afraid she might die in our home.

But the second time around, a few months later, she went back into detox and stayed in.

(To be continued…)

Of Mexico and M-16's

2005-08-18T21:47:00.000-07:00

"Wow, Mike, this is pretty heavy duty stuff."

We were bouncing down a rural dirt road in Mexico that was getting worse by the mile. I was sitting in the back of a VW van belonging to Mike, a friend of mine from college. Bored, I had picked up a pamphlet lying in the back and started flipping through it. It was about how to survive gas warfare, with lots of handy diagrams as to how to get your chemical protection suit on right and your mask sealed so as to avoid a very messy death. Mike was a Marine reservist, and the pamphlet was apparently part of his training.

"If you think that's heavy duty, then don't look in the cabinet." Mike said.

beat

"Why, what's in the cabinet?"

"I checked out an M-16 for target practice at the base range yesterday, and forgot to check it back in."

I froze, or at least sat as still as you can while bouncing down a dirt road that didn't seem to have been graded since dirt was invented.

"Mike! You have an M-16 in the cabinet?"

"Uh-huh."

"Mike, you know that if the Federales catch us with an M-16, we'll be in Mexican prison for the rest of our foreseeable lives?"

"Yeah," said Mike unconcernedly, not taking his eyes off the road.

We were in Mexico to do relief work. Every couple of weekends, a group of us would get together, put well-drilling equipment on top of the van, flip a boat over the equipment, and then smuggle it down to a remote barrio. In this little village, people had to walk half a mile to get water from a shallow well that was polluted. We had a little hand well-drilling rig that used eight-foot lengths of pipe to drill, so every eight feet you had to stop the rig and install a new piece. We had been working for a couple of months, and had succeeded in getting down almost a hundred feet, but hadn't found water yet. The local authorities knew about our little public works project, but they hadn’t tried to interfere, because they were taking credit for it in the local newspaper.

Mike and I were both students at a Christian college a little north of the border. Despite my annoyance with him at that moment, I had a lot of admiration for Mike. At the college, we did a lot of talking about Christianity, a lot of reading, a lot of writing. But his was a strong, muscular version of Christianity that involved long dirt roads and hard, dusty work. His was a Christ of the barrios. I badly wanted that kind of faith for myself.

Mike lived a couple doors down from me in the dormitory. He had done missionary work in Africa. This was the guy who used to yell "Clear!" just before using an African blowgun to shoot poison-tipped darts down the length of the hallway into plastic milk jugs he set up at the far end. He was cheerfully insane. So the whole M-16 incident wasn't really much of a surprise.

I have so many memories of that time. I remember drinking cold Mexican Cokes in bottles to wash down the dust. I also remember drinking the water once or twice, despite all the “don’t drink the water” stories. And yes, I did catch something from it that stayed with me for months. I remember children, lots of children, who didn’t have any toys but could entertain themselves for hours with a piece of rope. Of course, when we were there, the primary entertainment was us, the gueros. El Oso was what they called Mike: “the bear.” Their favorite game was to sneak up behind him and tackle him and try to throw him into the ten-foot deep pit that was next to the well-drilling rig, where the people of the town had started digging for water by hand. Eventually he would topple over the edge, laughing, with seven or eight kids clinging to him.

I remember eating menudo, intestine soup, for the first and last time, which may have had something to do with my eventually becoming a vegetarian. I also remember handmade tortillas and the best fried chicken I ever had, eaten in the home of one of the local families. Sitting in the dim, smoky lantern light around a guitar, singing an impromptu Spanish translation of “Wild Thing” (Loca Cosa) that had us all in tears of laughter. Sleeping in an abandoned house with unexplained bullet holes in it, kept company by a little dog we named “Taco.”

I remember shaking the hand of a leper, looking down at the gnarled, twisted fingers, thinking I’d expected leprosy to look different, more dramatic somehow. Seeing shacks made of cardboard and scrap and old tires, leaning crazily to one side, with four, five children peeking out through the gaps. People living in whatever they could find to make some semblance of shelter. Children picking through the dump, looking for food.

If you’ve seen it, you don’t need me to tell you. If you haven’t, no words can ever be enough.

I remember standing for an hour in a hot shower in the dormitory afterwards, never understanding how something could feel so good and burn like shame at the same time.

We never did find water.

Somehow, all of this strikes me as a kind of parable, or maybe as a question. The question is, “Is it worth trying to accomplish something, trying to help someone else, even if you never succeed, even if the effort is doomed from the start?” Was it worth all the work that we and the people of the barrio put into the project, only to reach that last length of pipe, and still no water?

I don’t know what the people would say; they were the ones who continued to walk half a mile to get water that developed a rainbow-colored film on the top if you let it sit for awhile. Their lives were no different afterwards. But my life was. Something was growing in me during those trips, something I couldn’t name yet: a vast, swelling outrage. This should not be. No one should live like this. I should not be standing for an hour in a hot shower while they can’t even get clean water. There should not be a line that divides me from them, the rich from the poor, a line I can just saunter past, while they cannot.

I would never look at the world the same again.

Mike taught me that the greatest revolution of all can happen while the M-16 stays put in the cabinet.

Mike made me a guerilla.

To learn more about how to get involved in projects to assist the Mexican people, visit the website of Project Mexico.

Carmen's Story

2005-08-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

Last week I got embroiled in a discussion on Fr. Johannes' Orthodoxy Today blog. Fr. Johannes had gone to a migrant worker center in Florida to help paint a school, and reported some things on his blog that the director of the center had told him. The discussion was about illegal immigration: why illegal immigrants come to America, how much money they send back to their countries of origin, and whether (or not) most of them return to retire in luxury. I participated for awhile, then got tired of it and dropped out. Fr. Hans remarked that I seemed to tire easily; I thought to myself that I am apparently not taking the "argumentational Viagra" of which some others seem to be partaking. My last word on the discussion was to ask Fr. Hans if he had taken time to listen to the people whom he had gone to serve, to hear their stories about how and why they came to the United States.

There is a Latina woman who comes to clean once a week at the office where I work; her name is Carmen. Carmen works quietly and doesn't say much; half the time I don't even know she's there until I go upstairs to get something and find her scrubbing the floors. So today, remembering my conversation with Fr. Hans, I decided to ask her about her story. I just happened to have a big lunch, a delicious homemade pizza made by the she-guerilla, with whole-wheat crust and heirloom tomatoes. So I invited her to share my lunch, and we talked.

I asked Carmen about where she was from: El Salvador, the Land of the Savior. Recently, I watched the movie "Romero," about Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, the great pastor de salvadoreños, who took a strong and radical stand against the government and the military on behalf of the poor of his nation, and was subsequently assassinated while serving the Mass on March 24, 1980. So I asked her if she knew about him. She did. She was eighteen years old when Archbishop Romero was assassinated. She remembered him as a "good man." She also told me "a lot of people in the Church got killed" during the civil war that pitted the Salvadorean aristocracy, backed by the military, against the poor people. She remembered waking up one morning and looking outside: "there were people with hoses, and they were washing the, sangre, how do you call it?" she asked.

"Blood," I told her.

"Si, the blood out of the church. Many people got killed there the night before."

Esta es mi sangre del nuevo testamento, que por muchos es derramada...

She also told me about the day her brother was shot. She told me that during the guerra, you never stayed out after 6 PM. But one night, her brother had to go out, and he was shot in the left shoulder, just above the heart. He came staggering through the door, blood pouring out between his fingers, and collapsed on the floor of their home. He almost died.

That was the day she and her sisters decided they had to leave El Salvador.

Her oldest sister left first for El Norte. She worked here for two years in order to send home enough money so that her two other sisters and brother could come to the US. I asked her if they came illegally. "Si, like everyone else." They were ineligible to apply for asylum as political refugees, because the US backed the Salvadorean government, funded its war against its own people, and denied that any atrocities were being committed. It didn't matter that they shot Monseñor Romero in broad daylight. It didn't matter that her brother almost died as well. It didn't matter that they were washing blood out of churches.

Now Carmen has her legal permanent residency in the US. I asked her if she ever thinks about going back. She went back to visit, one time, but she says she will stay in the US. The guerra is over, but she has moved on; her family is here, and she has only one aunt in El Salvador. She won't be going back and buying a big house and retiring in luxury.

We finished lunch, and she asked me to say gracias to my esposa for the pizza.

Up until now, I barely noticed Carmen, and when I did, I saw only a cleaning woman with a big smile that looked a little tired around the edges. But now, I see so much more: courage, nobility, strength, beauty. I see a woman who survived a war, who nursed her brother back from death's door with her own hands, who fled for refuge to this country, because it is a great country, and because despite the fact that we have a penchant for being on the wrong side of history, for supporting corrupt dictatorships and giving guns to military juntas to use against unarmed peasants, we also have opportunity here, even if that opportunity is often two-tiered and racist.

She deserves better than scrubbing my floors. I should be scrubbing hers.

I told Fr. Hans that I hope he will go back one day and ask those people about their stories. Not because I want to be proved right (although I do), but because you see people in different ways if you listen to their stories than if you just come and serve and leave, and all you ever hear is them humbly saying gracias.

We have so much more to learn from them.

"Si me matan, resucitare en el pueblo salvadoreño"

"If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorean people."

--Monseñor Oscar Romero

Tabor and Hiroshima

2005-08-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

On August 6, the Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of Transfiguration, when Jesus ascended Mount Tabor, and his disciples saw his true glory: "His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as the light." The Church Fathers say that this was a vision of the uncreated light, a light that transforms Jesus' human body without altering or destroying it, like the burning bush that Moses saw.

But on August 6, we also remember another kind of light, a light that shone over Hiroshima in 1945 with the brightness of a thousand suns. 75,000 people saw this light for the briefest instant before the blast of heat that followed incinerated their bodies, leaving their shadows etched into the walls as the only record they ever existed. Tens of thousands of others were burned by this scorching light, poisoned by radiation, or buried under falling rubble. Nearly all of those killed that day were noncombatants--women, children, and the elderly. Hiroshima was a civilian target, not a military one, chosen for its high concentration of people so as to maximize the effectiveness of the bomb.

It was the greatest single atrocity ever committed in wartime.

We now know that, contrary the way they have been portrayed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wholly unnecessary from a military perspective. Japan had been offering through Russia to surrender to the US, with the only condition being that they be permitted to keep their emperor. America refused, demanding "unconditional surrender," but also eager to try out its new "doomsday weapon" that would make America the world's first superpower. After dropping the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when Japan still refused to budge, America accepted a surrender on September 2, 1945, under terms that allowed Japan to keep its emperor, a surrender that could have been negotiated under essentially identical terms on August 5.

A light that transfigures, a light that consumes: rarely has the choice been put in as stark of terms as it is on August 6. "Behold, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live" (Deut 30:19).

In my meditation this morning, I was reflecting on the subject of blessings and curses. Psalm 129 repeats the refrain "Often have they assailed me since my youth." a memory of past injuries that has become a defining storyline, an identifying narrative. The question is, when we have been assailed, attacked and wounded, what does it do to us? How does it change us, harden us? What do we wish for our assailants?

The psalmist's answer is that they should become like wheat-grass that grows on the rooftop, withering, producing no harvest, nothing for the reaper or the binder of sheaves; that their lives should prove fruitless, of no benefit to anyone, that the Lord's blessing should be withheld from them. I think of all those who bullied me when I was a child, who teased or physically assaulted me, as well as those who have attacked me in adulthood: when their faces swim up out of memory, my most consistent response is the secret hope that they have failed in life, that one day I will meet them again and be vindicated, proven superior. And I wonder, is this really our best hope, that the lives of those who injure us should come to nothing?

This curse, this withheld blessing, is my personal Hiroshima.

It occurs to me that in the history of the nation Israel, Israel's primary enemies, the Ishmaelites and the Edomites, are the legacy of two withheld blessings: Abraham's preference of Isaac and his refusal to acknowledge Ishmael, and Isaac's blessing given to Jacob and not to Esau. These two withheld blessings created generations of enmity, warfare, and death.

What kind of world are our withheld blessings creating?

Often have they assailed me since my youth,
This is my refrain,
Often have they assailed me since my youth,
But they have not made me like themselves.
The plowmen plowed my back
They made their furrows long:
Let a harvest of peace spring forth.

As for my assailants, let them flourish like a well-watered field
So that the reaper rejoices
And the arms of the binder of sheaves overflow.
Let them produce something of value,
Something of enduring benefit to the world,
For if they do not, it is to everyone's loss, including my own.

Let the blessing of the Lord be on them and us,
That they and we may flourish together
And that the power of the curse may be broken.

Possession

2005-08-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Psalm 24
Journal entry dated March 17, 2005

"The earth is the Lord's, and all that it holds."

What does it mean that the earth belongs to the Lord? At some level, this is a radical challenge to our notions of private property. It means that nothing truly belongs to us. It has been given to us for our use. The idea of ownership, the conception that this thing or place (or person) is exclusively mine and no one else's, is at the heart of all kinds of conflict between human beings.

That little word "mine" touched off our first infant squabbles, and has sent God knows how many millions to their deaths in wars and conflicts the cause of which no one remembers, other than to say that they were about possession.

"Not mine" - a spiritual discipline

The Selah Project

A world without desperation

2005-08-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Psalm 23
Journal entry dated March 16, 2005

"In the house of the Lord will I dwell for the rest of my days."

What does it mean to be a guest in the house of the Lord? The house of the Lord is the place where there is no lack, where a generous table is spread and there is food enough for all. The house of the Lord is the place where there is no fear, where the enemy does not come in to kill and to destroy.

This psalm is well-beloved by the comfortable and the complacent, by the Hallmark and Precious Moments spirituality crowd, by lovers of Thomas Kinkaid® everywhere. Part of me feels the need to rage against this psalm, or at least against this kind of self-satisfied appropriation of it. Wake up! The world is not like this for the vast majority of its inhabitants. Their cup does not run over. They know lack, and they know fear.

To be a guest in the house of the Lord is to inhabit that space where there is no fear or lack of anything. This is God's hospitality towards us, which we are called to imitate. It would be easier to do good in a world where there was no fear and no lack. Perhaps some would still steal, but no one would steal because he or his family was hungry. Perhaps some would still use violence, but no one would use violence out of fear of others. Or maybe a world without fear or lack would mean a world in which theft and violence have disappeared altogether. A world without desperation. What would a world without desperation look like?

The Selah Project

A profound admission of defeat: Antiochian Church reportedly withdraws from NCC

2005-07-29T04:23:00.000-07:00

If the below report is indeed the case, it is a sad day for the Orthodox. It represents a massive failure of Fr. Florovsky's vision of an engaged Orthodoxy, a vibrant Orthodox Church serving as salt and light within the ecumenical movement, encouraging its better aims and curbing its less desirable tendencies. It is a profound admission of defeat. The rationales that are offered are paltry and sloganistic, lacking theological substance. "General liberalism?" News flash: NCC has had liberal leanings since its inception in the 1950's. The Bob Edgar incident referenced by the author happened half a decade ago. What has changed? Why now?

This is a victory for no one. It looks to me like the beginning of a very long retreat.

Breaking News: Orthodox Leave NCC
Dearborn, Michigan. July 28, 2005.

This afternoon the General Convention of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America voted overwhelmingly to leave the National Council of Churches of Christ. The General Convention is holding its annual meeting this week in Dearborn, Michigan.The action was not a temporary "suspension" of membership, but a formal withdrawal from the NCC. The clergy unanimously approved the withdrawal, followed by a unanimous vote of the lay delegates supporting the move. An announcement of the final vote was met with thunderous applause by the Convention.

Reasons given for the withdrawal include the general liberalism of the NCC, whose General Secretary, Bob Edgar, withdrew his signature from a statement defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Metropolitan PHILIP, head of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, was reportedly outspoken in calling for the church to withdraw from the NCC, stating that the relationship had proven fruitless.

Rules of Non-Parliamentary Procedure

2005-07-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

For The Orderly Conduct of Orthodox Parish Meetings

So that all Greek/Russian/Antiochian/Serbian/(insert your ethnicity here) Parish Meetings may be conducted in an orderly manner, with due respect for propriety and dignity, the following rules are hereby established by universal consent (with the majority dissenting):

Point of Personal Outrage: At any time during a meeting when a participant becomes extremely upset, he or she shall have the right to interrupt any other speaker, will not be required to wait for recognition from the Chair, and has the obligation to speak at a volume considerably higher than required for normal Conversation.
Point of Irrelevant Interjection: Irrespective of the motion on the floor, the participant shall have the right to monopolize the meeting for not more than five minutes as he or she discourses on a point the relevance of which escapes all other participants.
Point of Personal Attack: In response to a point raised by another speaker, the participant shall have the right to reply by launching a personal attack. At no time shall the point itself be addressed.
Point of Ethnic Purity: The participant shall of the right to impugn the ethnic identity of any other participant, alleging that he or she or their families have not maintained adequate “Greek/Russian/Arabic/whatever-ness”.
Point of Contempt: The Participant shall have the right to grunt, throw papers down on the table, shake his or her head vigorously, or otherwise demonstrate contempt for the proceedings.
Point of Harassment: The participant shall have the right to introduce irrelevant motions for the sole purpose of delaying the meeting. It is only permissible to resort to a point of harassment when the outcome of the vote is obvious.
Point of Redundant Information: This is not to be confused with the more familiar “point of information”. Whereas a point of information is a request for information from the chair, a point of redundant information entitles the participant to tell those in the meeting something they already know.
Point of Redundancy: This is a motion that entitles the participant to make a point made by another participant no more than five speakers earlier.
Point of Pious Posturing: This entitles the participant to make reference to any item in the Bible or Orthodox Teaching that allegedly supports his or her point of view. A correct quotation, however, immediately disqualifies the point.
Point of Grudge: Entitles the participant to raise an issue debated by the organization not less than five years earlier, for which the participant has not yet forgiven those involved.

(adapted from "Chioros' Rules of Non-Parliamentary Procedure for Meetings of Greek Organizations," by Michael Chioros)

No one else

2005-07-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Psalm 22
Journal entry dated March 15, 2005

"Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and no one else will help me."

This psalm is a cry of anguish and abandonment. In the line "no one else will help me," we hear an echo of the words of the paralytic, άνθρωπον ούκ έχω, "I have no one." In desperation the psalmist is pleading, on behalf of all the forsaken of the world, that God will not abandon him as well.

"No one else will help me" is a statement precariously balanced between hope and despair. While other translations simply read "no one," "no one else" is a kind of breathless anticipation, the first part of a question that ends, "will you?" It is a prayer of not-yet-complete abandonment, of not-quite hopelessness.

"Someone else will help you;" this is, more often than not, our response to those who have been abandoned like the psalmist. Someone else will do it. It is someone else's job, someone else's responsibility. We create this experience of isolation every time we say "someone else." And we begin the creation of a new world, a better world, when we stop saying "someone else," and start saying "I".

When I look at you, I see me

2005-07-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

This morning, I was meditating on Psalm 122, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem." Historically, this is a prayer that God should grant peace and prosperity within the walls of Jerusalem, but not outside them, or at least not outside the borders of Israel. Interesting to note that Israel never had any allies among the surrounding nation; it was a nation surrounded by hostile forces, hemmed in on every side. Jerusalem enjoys security in inverse proportion to that of other nations, to the extent that their walls lie breached and in ruins and their people live in fear and insecurity.

Eschatologically speaking, however, Jerusalem represents a kind of "everycity," Mother Sion, the dwelling place of all nations, where everyone is assured of a place. To pray for the peace of Jerusalem within this eschatological vision, then, means to seek the same for every city as for Jerusalem: peace and prosperity and blessing and happpiness. The psalmist prays for the peace of Jerusalem "for the sake of my relatives and friends," and this involves the recognition that every human being is actually my relative and potentially my friend.

In a sense, what we are talking about here is two competing visions of prosperity. The first is a prosperity that comes at the expense of others: others have to fail so that I can succeed. The other vision says that no one will live in peace and security until everyone does, that anything that lowers the dignity of another person degrades me as well, that my neighbor's success is my success. I would like to claim to be a believer in the second version, but which is truer to the way I actually live? Don't I often secretly gloat at the misfortune of others, cherishing the notion that this proves that I deserve the spoils of victory, that I am not a loser in the game of life?

After this, I caught the train downtown and then walked the rest of the way to church. While I was approaching the Green Zone (the fenced courtyard around my parish), somebody whistled at me. I looked over across the used car lot to see someone waving at me. It was Hector. So I went over to say hi.

Hector is an alcoholic living on the streets in this neighborhood. I first met Hector as I was passing by the entrance to a little Protestant church on my way to church a few months ago. Hector was standing outside, and started trying to get me born again in good evangelical fashion. Maybe this was a fit of the religious fervor that sometimes goes with bouts of sobriety. I listened politely for a minute, then pointed out it was tough for me to buy his concern for my eternal soul when he hadn't bothered to ask my name. So we made our introductions. I saw him again after bible study one night a few weeks later, drunk and slurring his speech, lapsing frequently into Spanish. I gave him some money for bus fare to get someplace I can't remember, and we talked about his struggle with alcoholism and homelessness. I hadn't seen him since.

Hector was glad to see me. We talked for a minute about how things were going. He told me he has really been trying to get God into his life. Then he looked me up and down (I was wearing a cassock at the time) and said, "You know, I used to be a seminarian. I studied for five years. I needed to finish seven in order to get ordained, but then I started drinking. When I look at you, I see me. I see what I might have been."

I thought about what Hector said for a long time after I said goodbye and walked into the church. The question is, when I look at Hector, do I see myself? Am I that honest? A few different turns, a couple of additional setbacks, and my life could have been very different. I could have been an alcoholic on the streets. I could still be one. I know enough people like Hector to have disabused myself of the notion that there is some great moral chasm between him and me. The line between those who "make it" and those who are ground up in the machine is ever so fine. Sometimes it all just seems random.

If I was Hector, and he was me, what would he say to me? Would he invite me into church? Or would he worry about upsetting the old ladies who don't like seeing strange faces, particularly those with bloodshot eyes? Would he worry about inviting me, like I was worrying about inviting him?

In his beautiful essay "Call Me by my True Names," Zen master Thich Naht Hahn writes:

In Plum Village in France, we receive many letters from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It is very painful to read them, but we have to do it, we have to be in contact. We try our best to help, but the suffering is enormous, and sometimes we are discouraged. It is said that half the boat people die in the ocean; only half arrive at the shores in Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who are raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries try to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continue to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.

She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I am now the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I cannot condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

"When I look at you, I see me. I see what I might have been."

I invited Hector to come to Liturgy, which started in about an hour, or at least to stop by for coffee hour afterwards. He said he would. Then he embraced me, and I went in.

But I didn't see him in church, or afterwards.

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope, the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people, dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life. My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.

--Thich Naht Hanh

The Lord's triumph

2005-07-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Psalm 21
Journal entry dated March 14, 2005 (Clean Monday)

"Rejoice, Lord, in your triumph!"

What does the Lord's triumph look like? This psalm begins and ends with a reference to the triumph of the Lord. The psalmist envisions this triumph as a great slaughter of the enemies of the king, to the point of ethnic cleansing: "their race you wipe from the face of the earth." For centuries, millenia actually, the Lord's triumph has been regarded as a victory for "our" side, as if God were merely some provincial deity, as the psalmist consider God to be. Can we re-envision the triumph of God as a universal human triumph? As a triumph of justice over injustice, compassion over cruelty, goodness over evil? Can we cease to understand the triumph of God in narrow, national terms, and regard it instead as a victory for the human community?

Easier said than done. Owning up to this psalm means admitting that there is something within me that would gladly point bows in the faces of those who endanger my way of life or standard of living. The first step towards the triumph of God is acknowledging this capacity.

If the Lord's triumph were to occur today, if the values of God's kingdom were to universally prevail, would I be among those who rejoice, or those who mourn and weep?

Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep (Luke 6:21).

Tainted charity

2005-07-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

I didn't see this coming.

Today, when I walked past the library at the corner where I live, Larry was lying passed out on the grass. "Boxcar Larry," they call him around here, or "Wolfman," for his hairy face. Sometimes, Larry walks around talking to himself, gesticulating wildly. Other times, he can be fairly lucid. Somebody in our neighborhood has a really sick sense of humor: every time Larry passes out on the library lawn, this person pulls the hose over from the library, leaves it next to him, then turns it on and runs. Larry wakes up soaked.

Some welcome wagon. "Welcome to the neighborhood. Now get the hell out."

I stopped for a minute to talk to Milton, sitting in his wheelchair outside the library, and while we were talking, Larry woke up, soaked, the hose lying next to him. He coughed for a long time, then lay back down in the wet grass. I went over to ask him if he was OK. He asked if I had any money, and I said no, and then he asked if I had some food. I said I'd go up to my apartment and see what was cooking.

The she-guerilla was making heirloom tomato spaghetti. Mmm, mmm.

I took some out to Larry, and we got to talking. He's very intelligent, studied history in college. We talked about the war in Iraq. He said he thinks Tony Blair was behind the bombings in London. I said I didn't really think so, but there is no question he will benefit in terms of political capital. We got to talking whether Alex Haley's biography of Malcolm X or Spike Lee's movie was the more accurate portrayal of his life.

Then things went south. In a big way.

I asked about Larry's cough, and he told me that he has an infection and needs to get a prescription filled for penicillin; he has prescription waiting at a drugstore downtown. He's on some kind of assistance program, so the drugs only cost a five-dollar copayment. I told him I didn't have any money to give him, but that maybe we could go to the drugstore across the street (another franchise in the same chain) and try to get the prescription transferred, and I'd buy it with my credit card.

Larry kind of stiffened. He said that if I didn't trust him with the money, I should just come right out and say so. He told me that the only thing a homeless person really has is independence. I started explaining again that I didn't have any cash, but he cut me off.

"You know, I really don't think I like this conversation. I don't like it at all. I don't need your charity. This is all about you trying to feel better about yourself, isn't it? I probably shouldn't be eating this food. I shouldn't eat it at all. It's contaminated. Tainted with your, your... charity."

And he threw the spaghetti, the bread, the fruit, the coffee, all of it into the street. He was really agitated at this point. Told me to get away from him, jumped up, grabbed the sweatshirt he had been lying on, swung it around violently, narrowly missing my face, and stalked away, yelling "It's all a game to you isn't it? Just a big game!"

Milton wheeled over and started yelling at him to calm down, but Larry continued past him up the street, screaming at the top of his lungs. Meanwhile, the birds swooped in and started eating up the spaghetti. So it didn't go to waste, at least. I suppose, in the long run, nothing ever does.

Milton came back and apologized for Larry. "He should show some respect," he said. I pondered that for a minute, and all I could think of to say was, "Nobody respects him, so why should he respect anybody?"

Now I am sitting here, still working it over. The clinical part of my brain says that Larry is most likely displaying the symptoms of mental illness. He has many of the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia: "flat" aspect, neglect of personal hygiene, speaking to unseen personages, suspicion that other people are out to get him.

But there is another side of this. Part of me knows that Larry nailed me, and that's why I'm still stuck on it. The reality is that there is a selfish motivation that underlies all my seeming altruism: the desire to be in control. This is the eternal problem with the charity model: rather than remedying the disparity of power between giver and receiver, it actually reinforces it. What does it say about me that I gravitate to relationships with people who are down and out, and have all my life? That I like being powerful? That I'm insecure and need to feel in control? In my relationships with "the poor," I hold all the power. I can walk out of the relationship at any time, and lose absolutely nothing. But those on the other side have much more to lose. So they are careful not to argue with me, cheerfully agreeing with almost anything I say. And they are careful to show their gratitude. If I happen to be feeling good that day, I take time to share, to listen, to care. If I'm feeling bad, I stay home. They have to take what they can get, when I want to give it.

Larry was right. It is a game for me, and I hold all the cards.

So now I am trying to sit with this lesson, trying to hear deeply what Larry said to me today.

I am sitting here with the taste of tainted charity in my mouth.

Rejected Stones

2005-07-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Every human society
Is an unsteady stone structure
Built from fewer stones
Than are actually at hand

The landscape outside its walls
Is littered with rejected stones
Wrong shape, wrong size, wrong color
Deemed expendable by the architects

There is Mark, the would-be writer
Who instead uses his words
To hustle passers-by
For his daily bread

And Jeannie, the beautiful artist
Young, vivacious, talented
Struck with schizophrenia
At the age of twenty-eight

And Buck, the wounded veteran
Disabled and out of work
Hero for a day
Then forgotten for a lifetime

And Jesus, the great Reject
Whose design for a kingdom
Never did fit in
With the plans of the architects

The day that the Lord has made
Is a day of salvation
Which is to say a day of salvage
A day of reclamation

Of reintegrating these stones
Not from some misguided charity
But out of the true recognition
That they are indispensible

Misplaced cornerstones
Essential if we are to construct
The temple of living stones
The community designed by God

But they lie unnoticed and invisible
Because they are unwelcomed
For it is as Jesus said
You will not see me until you say

Blessed is the one who comes
In the name of the Lord.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Save us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

Psalm 118

Tammy's redemption

2005-07-12T20:41:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was saying prayers for the departed, and Tammy popped into my mind. I hadn't thought about Tammy for a long, long time.

I first met Tammy at the food outreach we used to have when I lived out in the country. We started out hauling USDA surplus commodities up to the mountains and handing them out. Just about anybody can do this through the FEMA program; just contact your local food bank. With some volunteers, we would sort and bag the commodities and give them to folks in the mountains, lots of senior citizens living on social security, people on disability, pregnant teenagers living in trailers, people who weren't making it in the city. At first people would just come and take their two or three bags of groceries, say thanks, and leave. Then a soup kitchen in the city offered to make us a free meal to serve with the food. And a local bakery started giving us fresh-baked bread. My wife arranged to get us some organic produce donated through the local CSA. After that, people came and stayed awhile, and talked, and told us their stories.

Tammy was already quite bad off when we met her. She was using a walker, hobbling along very slowly, gasping for breath just from the short walk across the parking lot, looking pale and slightly sallow. She was only about fifty, but she looked twenty years older. Most of her teeth were gone. Life looked like it had been real hard on Tammy.

As we got to know her, she started to tell us her story. About life with her first husband, who used to beat her up pretty bad. And about the alcohol. How she and her husband would drive to a bar and leave the kids asleep in the van while they stayed up drinking until the wee hours of the morning, then drove home drunk. How her oldest son had disowned her after a childhood of alcoholism and neglect.

Now she had a new husband, who didn't beat her, and she had stopped drinking. Together they had a son who was only about eight. But Tammy's health was deteriorating. She had diabetes, and cirrhosis of the liver, and hepatitis, and other health problems. Tammy was not long for the world, and she looked it.

One day, out of the clear blue, she asked if she could come to church with us. We hadn't made a big deal about God or church at the food distribution, figuring it was better, as St. Francis once said, to "preach the Gospel, and if absolutely necessary, use words." A few people asked us now and again about our church, and some even said they would come, but no one ever did.

Not until Tammy.

She came to Church that Sunday, and it was hard to see her. She had put on her very best dress, and garish makeup. To be honest with you, she looked just awful. And yet there was something touching and deeply vulnerable about her as well, so serious in her dress-up clothes, like a child intent on acting out her part in a grown-up ceremony, like a flower girl in a wedding dropping every petal with care. She took a Liturgy book and tried to follow, watching other people to see when to stand up and sit down. She was trying so hard to get this right.

At the end of the Liturgy, we gave her some of the blessed bread, and anointed her with oil from one of the oil lamps. We invited her to come have breakfast with us.

On Thursday of that week, I was traveling in Mexico after visiting St. Innocent Orphanage, a ministry of Project Mexico. I hadn't had cell phone reception for days, but we passed near the border at one point, and the phone beeped that I had a message. Tammy was in the hospital.

By the end of that day, she was dead.

A few days ago, I wrote a post about redemption, in which I said, "the search for redemption is an ache, a yearning for a pathway out of a world in which it seems there are no good choices." I think this is what Tammy came to church seeking that day: redemption. Redemption and reconciliation. After a life that had seen more than its share of bad choices, she was determined to get this one thing right. I think she knew it was her last chance.

I thought about Tammy for a minute, and said a prayer for her. A prayer that she had found what she was looking for.

Defenselessness

2005-07-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

Psalm 20
Journal entry dated March 13, 2005

"Some rely on horses, others on chariots, but we count on the name of the Lord our God."

Some rely on tanks, others on machine guns; some rely on bombs, others on missiles; some rely on the weapons and implements of war, but we count on the name of the Lord our God.

To the psalmist, confidence in the name of the Lord does not mean divesting oneself of the weapons of war, but simply not placing one's faith in them. There is an exuberant pre-exilic confidence about this psalms, a kind of unexamined and as-yet-untested assurance that God will always send help from Sion, that God's armies will always triumph.

Some rely on nuclear weapons, others on missile defense systems, but we...

...what do we rely on?

Do we have the faith to make ourselves defenseless, to disarm ourselves even in the face of imminent threat?

Presumption

2005-07-09T21:37:00.000-07:00

Psalm 19
Journal entry dated March 11, 2005

"Above all, free your servant from presumption."

"Above all;" this is a strong statement, as much as to say that presumption is the worst kind of sin. What is presumption? An arrogant assumption of understanding. We are presumptuous when we jump to conclusions about situations or people, when we assume that others' intentions or motivations are transparent to us. Presumption is blindness that says, "I see." Presumption begins with the inability to fully understand ourselves, carries over into our inability to understand others, and arrives at our inability to understand God.

The opposite of presumption is listening. Presumption is summary judgment--it is the Sanhedrin saying, "we have no need to hear any more," and rendering its verdict: "guilty." Presumption is a period at the end of a statement, while humility is a question mark at the end of a query: "I'm not sure I understood that; could you tell me more?"

To be freed from presumption is to escape the prison of narrow-mindedness (or as the Greeks say, stenopsychia, "narrow-souledness") in order to enter into the ever-expanding universe of inquiry and curiosity, to embark on a journey of discovery.

Redemption

2005-07-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

Psalm 111
Journal entry dated July 8, 2005

"He has sent redemption to his people."

In this psalm, redemption is connected to God's works, including that of giving to his people "the lands of other nations." Redemption for one group often looks like destruction and annihilation for another. A redemption that means new hope, new possibility for one people means ethnic cleansing, reservations, refugee camps, and displacement for another. And these uprooted peoples will eventually seek their own redemption. War is a conflict of opposing redemptions.

Although we claim to believe in a universal God, we are not really very different from the worldview of the psalms, where God is more or less a national deity and redemption means victory for our side, redemption for "us not them." Is it possible for us to envision a redemption more universal in scope, a redemption from war and violence rather than through them? In what ways does the redemption I am pursuing--my personal quest for security, stability, and happiness--create insecurity, instability, and suffering for others?

The search for redemption is an ache, a yearning for a pathway out of a world in which it seems there are no good choices, in which we cannot choose food and clean water enough for everyone, and shelter and security for all. Any redemption that scatters human flesh across the streets of London or New York or Baghdad or Kabul is no redemption at all. It is a false path, leading back to where we started.

A wound in the earth

2005-07-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

Psalm 18
Journal entry dated March 19, 2005

"I ground them fine as dust in the wind; I trampled them like mud in the streets."

Psalm 18 is a psalm of vengeance, unabashed in its glorification of violent retribution. It is the song of triumph of the king who has killed his foes and brought nations into subjection.

How to pray this?

Somehow, I keep going back to the images of dust and mud. The image of earth. Dust and mud are both images of fruitless soil, earth that has been trampled until nothing grows there. When the rains come, the earth turns to mud and erodes away without the rootweb of vegetation to hold it. When the heat comes, it bakes dry and blows away. Dust and mud are images of erosion. They are images of a wound in the earth, of a place where nothing grows.

And the only way to heal this wound is to stop trampling on it, to change our paths, to change our way of walking.

Outcasts

2005-07-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Psalm 17
Journal entry dated March 9, 2005

"Show me your love, O savior of outcasts"

What is an outcast? A person who does not worship the gods of a particular age, or upon whom they do not smile. War, the state, capital, productivity, competition--anyone who rejects these gods, or anyone whom they reject, becomes an outcast. Outcasts are those whose life and story does not support the dominant retelling.

If God is the savior of outcasts, it means that God is seeking such people, bringing them together in order to create a new community, a new story.

Where are the outcasts in our churches? Have we created a welcoming space for them? Or do we spend our time aiming to please the well-adjusted middle and (reverent pause) upper-class people around whom we design our gala events and our imperial churches? If God is the savior of outcasts, will God save us? If we are not outcasts ourselves, can there be any reason other than the fact that we have not sufficiently challenged the values of a sinful and adulterous generation, that we pose no threat, that we are regarded as harmless?

Offerings of blood

2005-07-04T19:09:00.000-07:00

Psalm 16
Journal entry dated March 8, 2005

"Never again will I make them offerings of blood"

In this psalm, the psalmist renounces the false gods of his age. What are the false gods of our age, to whom we make offerings of blood? There is, of course, the god of war, Mars, the blood-soaked planet, demanding ever more victims. There is the god of productivity, upon whose altar we sacrifice all those who cannot keep up, in the name of consumer demand. The god of competition is an especially bloodthirsty deity, to whose worship we train our children from an early age.

The gods of a particular age are cultural loci, representing the shared values of a society, the pillars upon which it is founded. To call these gods into question or renounce them altogether is a dangerous act, threatening the community with non-existence, and is therefore always punishable by banishment or death, as the early Christians were punished when they refused to go to war or swear allegiance to the state.

Who are the gods of this age, demanding their offerings of blood, whom we must renounce in order to join ourselves to the Lord?

It's here!

2005-07-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

People have been anxiously awaiting the next installment in the story of the magical adventures of this young boy. No, it's not Harry Potter, it's my son's story blog, which he just updated!

God's holy mountain

2005-07-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

Psalm 15
Journal entry dated March 7, 2005

"Lord, who has the right to make his home in your tent, to dwell on your holy mountain?"

What does it mean to dwell on God's holy mountain? The mountain is an image of ascent. Like the Kingdom of God, the mountain of God represents a movement towards a better world. On God's holy moutain, human relations are undistorted by falsehood and slander, the basis of abusive and exploitative relationships. On God's holy mountain, no human being mistreats another. On God's holy mountain, the poor and needy are not oppressed by those who exploit their insecure position for their own gain. God's holy mountain is a shining image of a better world rising up before us from the plain--Sodom and Gomorrah, the "cities of the plain."

The image of God's holy moutain asks us the question whether we have the courage to speak the difficult truth rather than the convenient lie; whether we have the will to cease slandering and sabotaging others, and instead support and uphold their dignity; whether we have the compassion to extricate ourselves from exploitative relationships, to raise up the fallen so that we may look one another in the face as equals.

God's holy mountain is that part of the world that is straining towards heaven.

Back on the wagon

2005-07-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

So tonight I tried to buy drugs.

Well, it's not what you think. See, our friend Sheri came over for dinner tonight. She's been sober now for almost three months, but she doesn't have any money; she's been denied welfare for two months in a row on technicalities. Mark, her partner who is in prison, sent his personal effects to our house in a big box with her name on it. Sheri told us that there should be some valium and klonopin tablets inside, which are worth two bucks apiece on the street. She wanted to open the box and get the pills, so she could sell them and get some money for smokes and morning coffee.

So I offered to buy them from her. Kind of a toilet amnesty, you might say.

But when we opened the box, we found no pills, just clothes and papers. So I guess I'm back on the wagon. I gave her some money anyway.

We had a nice dinner together. And at the end, we got talking about books we were reading, and E. mentioned Anne Lamott. Turns out Sheri grew up with Anne Lamott, went to school with her. Anne Lamott got clean and sober fifteen years ago, and now she writes books about the experience. Sheri is just getting cleaned up now.

Small world.

A sacred trust

2005-06-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

It isn't every day that somebody I've never met calls me to say that they have thirty minutes until the bank forecloses on their house, and they need over three thousand dollars to save it.

OK, I admit, today is the first time that ever happened to me.

The call came totally out of the blue. Before I even had time to say hello, there was a seventy-year old woman pleading with me to help her, that she was about to lose her home of forty-six years that she and her husband built with their own hands. She was a member of my church years ago, though I've never met her.

So I told her I'd see what could be done. The first thing I did was to call her bank, hoping that things weren't as dire as she was claiming. Unfortunately, they were. I got on with the vice president of the bank, who told me that, yes, indeed, they were foreclosing on her house in twenty minutes.

"Sir, I am pleading with you to give me twenty-four hours to see if our church can get together the funds to make this payment, so we don't have to put a seventy year old woman on the street."

"I can't do that."

That is so fucked up. How do you live with yourself? How do you sleep at night?

"Sir, isn't there anything you can do? You are, after all, the vice president. You must have some authority."

pause

"I'll give you till five o'clock."

So I started making phone calls. I called the church, and some people I know, and a couple of church organizations. I got some resistance. I didn't know this woman, but some other people did, and the whole story started tumbling out.

"...son is a doctor, but he's a drug addict and out of work..."

"...daughter isn't working, can't hold down a job..."

"...we've been through this before with her..."

But after I talked to people for a minute, I noticed something interesting. They told me "No. No, I don't think so. No, I don't think this is a good idea. No. OK, how much?" It really didn't take all that much persuading. People had reservations, but ultimately, nobody thought a seventy year old woman on the street was a good solution to this problem. Everybody knew this wasn't a perfect situation, but everybody wanted to get involved anyway. I was so proud of them.

By two o'clock, I had promises and pledges for most of the money.

Now came the hard part. I had promised those who agreed to donate that I would drive down and talk to this woman, and see if there was any realistic hope that, if we helped her this time, she would be able to go on making the payments. I knew the neighborhood she lived in from the address, a run-down, lousy part of town. Her house was poorly maintained, with a broken-down Jeep out front. Inside, her son's medical diplomas were hanging on the wall, an impressive collection, many with "cum laude" and other additional honors. She told me her son was in the hospital, that he had been in and out of the hospital for the past several months. She told me she had mortgaged the house to pay his medical bills. I asked her if she had a copy of the latest mortgage statement from the bank. She brought it over to me, and my jaw dropped.

The principle balance was over $450,000.

My head was spinning. I had assumed this was a $50,000 or maybe a $100,000 mortgage. I had assumed that the money she owed was payments she had missed over at least two months. Turns out it was just one month's back payment from the month of April. She has income of about $600 a month from Social Security. There is no way she can handle these payments herself. And I'm not really sure she has any more equity to squeeze out of the house. Was her son really in the hospital? Did the money really go for doctor bills? Or just a serious cocaine binge? All the blow you can snort for, say, six months?

She kept assuring me that her son would be back from the hospital tomorrow, that he would take care of everything else, if we could just help her this one time, just this one time. While she was talking, a tape was playing in my mind.

my

drug addict

junkie

loser

son

will take care of it

I walked out of there with no idea what to do. The money people had pledged was a sacred trust. That money could be used for other people in need, other situations just as dire, just as urgent as this one, maybe more. People were counting on me to make a good decision. If I spent this money, and all it ended up buying was another month before foreclosure, then it was all a waste.

I went back to my office, and stared at my phone for half an hour. And then I picked it up and made the call.

I was 4:33 PM.

Did I do the right thing? I don't know. I honestly don't know. But there is one thing I do know.

I will be able to sleep tonight.

The alcove of God's house

2005-06-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

So last night I was walking home after a wake, when I saw Milton in his wheelchair at the corner on the other side of the street. We don't see Mark and Sheri on the corner anymore. Mark is back in prison; he failed to report for his parole, and it finally caught up with him. Sheri, on the other hand, is doing incredibly well. She went into a treatment program, and now has almost three months clean and sober. She's coming over Friday night for dinner. I'm so proud of her, but I worry what will happen when Mark gets out of prison, worried that somehow he will sabotage her progress, worried that she'll end up back on the streets with him.

Milton didn't see me, and it was late, so I started to just continue on up the street, then changed my mind and doubled back, and we talked for awhile. A year ago, Milton wasn't truly homeless, but what social workers call "underhoused," doing odd jobs to get by and living in a friend's apartment. That all changed one day last year, because he decided to do a good deed for a kid. A kite had gotten stuck on the roof of the local library. Milton was a good climber, proud of his agility and upper body strength, so he climbed up onto the roof of the library and got the kite and threw it down, to cheers from the kids. He was starting to climb back down, and then he fell. He hit the ground and felt his leg snap just above the ankle.

It's amazing how everything can change, life as you know it can end, with a sound so soft that no one can hear it but you. "This is the way the world ends," said T.S. Eliot, "not with a bang, but a whimper."

They took Milton to the general hospital to fix his leg, which had a compound fracture, the bone protruding through the flesh. This isn't the nice hospital where rich people go for their illnesses and operations; its the one where they take the poor and minorities, where the emergency waiting room is always full, where they are chronically understaffed and short on supplies.

Milton got a staph infection in the wound while he was there at the hospital, and his leg never really healed. He has had thirteen operations to try and repair it after the infection. The doctors are now talking about operation number fourteen, trying to repair his achilles tendon, which has shrunken and become so tight that he can't move his foot. His left leg, which was broken, is now a full two inches shorter than his right. The infection has gone into his bones; we had a laugh together about him being "bad to the bone." A very short, bitter laugh.

Recently, he asked the doctors about pain medication because his foot had been giving him a lot of pain. The doctors told him they couldn't give him any of the good medications like oxycodone (they cost too much), but they could put him on methadone, a heroin substitute used to treat addictions, that is itself fairly addictive. Instead, he decided to take his chances with beer, just enough to take the edge off, he told me.

Milton has been trying to go on permanent disability, but SSI has denied his petition. Now, he sleeps in the alcove of the local Baptist Church at night. He goes late and gets up early, so he doesn't think they have noticed he's staying there, but if they have noticed, they haven't kicked him out yet. Milton said that it's God's house anyway, and God never tries to kick him out.

Milton told me that, when the time comes, he doesn't really need a mansion in heaven, not even a little one. He just wants to curl up in the alcove of God's house, somewhere where he can be safe, somewhere where he doesn't have to hold onto his wheelchair at night while he sleeps, so it doesn't get stolen like last time.

I told Milton I had to get going, and he said it was time for him to move along as well. Time to start heading for God's house.

I told him to say hi from me.

Happy name-day to me...

2005-06-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is indeed the feast day of St. Sampson the Receiver of Strangers, and thus the name-day of the Guerilla Orthodoxy blog.

In Greece, you have to buy everybody dinner on your name day. So go ahead, take yourselves out and send me the bill!

Actually, I would like to say thanks to everybody who reads this blog, and especially those who write comments. It has been a learning journey for me. Thanks for making it so.

Sampson

Atheism

2005-06-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

Psalm 14
Journal entry dated March 6, 2005

"The fool says to himself, 'there is no God,'"

The atheism of which the psalmist speaks here is not philosophical atheism, but the practical atheism of injustice. "There is no God" means that there will be no reckoning, that I have no obligation towards my neighbor, that I am free to do as I please. And in the view of the psalmist, this leads to a world of corruption and depravity.

The psalm raises a question about who we are: is it only the fear of punishment, the threat of a reckoning, that maintains good order within society? Is it true that if you take God, heaven, hell out of the picture, people will necessarily behave barbarously towards one another? If we believed that there was no God, how would our behavior change?

Probably it would change very little. We would still get up in the morning and go to work, come home at night and watch television, eat, sleep. Perhaps we would even go to Church on Sundays, because there are many reasons to go to Church other than believing in God. We would still give a little charity, because it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Within the world of this psalm, "there is no God" is the denial of the possibility of a better world. To say "there is no God" is to mock "the hope of the poor." "There is no God" is cynicism, the greatest failure of the spiritual life.

Doubt

2005-06-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

Psalm 13
Journal entry dated March 5, 2005

"How long must I bear this doubt in my heart?"

The doubt of which the psalmist speaks is predicated upon external circumstances, upon the apparent triumph of the wicked. And on some level, we must admit that this doubt is a natural result of looking long and hard at the world as it truly is. When we see the wicked prevailing, the powerful preying upon the weak, the rich exploiting the poor, hunger, misery, enmity, death--then doubt becomes a way of struggling for faith.

Those who never seem to doubt, those who never question, either refuse to look closely at the world, or else have aligned their interests so closely with it that they see nothing which is capable of producing doubt. In a world of injustice, doubt may be the only way of keeping faith, while those who never doubt may have more in common with those who say "there is no God" than anyone else, since both remain untroubled and undisturbed in a world of intolerable and inexplicable cruelty. Doubt may almost be said to be an expression of hope, or at least of waiting, holding out, not for better explanations, but for a better world, waiting in the hope that doubt, too, has an end.

Lest this degenerate into a kind of smug "liberal chic," the question must be asked, "What am I doing to contribute to the creation of a better world?"

Holy defiance

2005-06-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

Psalm 11
Journal entry dated March 2, 2005

"In the Lord I take refuge! How can you say to me: take to the hills like a bird!"

"In the Lord I take refuge." This is the psalmist's response to those who are urging him to "take to the hills like a bird" in view of the threatening behavior of the wicked. It is a statement of courage, and perhaps even more, of defiance. "In the Lord I take refuge" is as much as to say, "Let them do their worst, but as for me, I will not be intimidated, I will stand my ground as a witness to the evil of their doings." As Woody Guthrie sang, "We shall not be moved."

This holy defiance, this willingness to stand in the place of threat, this refusal to retreat to safer ground, seems to be a characteristic of so many great people: Mother Maria of Paris and Fr. Demetri Klepenin, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Archbishop Oscar Romero and Sister Dorothy Stang. All of these, in the face of imminent threat, responded to those who urged them to seek safety, "the Lord is my refuge."

To live in the spirit of this psalm is to inhabit dangerous spaces fearlessly, in the cause of justice.

The Lord reigns

2005-06-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

I want to skip ahead in the "Selah Project" to an entry in my journal written today, in order to talk about a book that I just finished reading, Losing Moses on the Freeway: the 10 Commandments in America, by Chris Hedges. For those who are interested, the poem "Decalogue" was partially inspired by an interview with Chris Hedges I heard on NPR. A few days later, some good friends gave me a gift card to a co-op bookstore in town, and I bought the book and read it.

I think the best chapter in the book is chapter two, "Idols." I want to give a couple of quotes from the book, followed by today's reflection on Psalm 97, which draws from Hedge's book and thought.

And yes, I highly recommend the book.

"We depend on our idols to to give us order and meaning. We depend on our idols to define our place in the world. Idols give us a world that appears logical and coherent. Idols free us from moral choice. Idols render judgment. We follow. We conform.

"When we see the hollowness of our idols, how they have led us to waste time and energy, when we smash these false gods and peer at the uncertainty of life, those who continue to revere the idol turn against us. We are expelled from the cult, stripped of its identifying power and left alone. It is easier to remain silent, to pay homage to a false god even after this god is exposed as a fraud. Those who worship idols deal harshly with those who become apostates.

"No institution or cause will remember or reward us for the sacrifices we make. There are no shortages of lives wrecked by idols. Those who spend their final years waiting forlornly for a call from children they were too busy to know because they were too busy building careers, must peer into the empty face of the idol they worshipped. Idols, when they are finished with us, discard us. They keep us from God."

Psalm 97
Journal entry dated June 22, 2005

"The Lord reigns! Let the earth rejoice! Let the distant shores be glad!"

This exclamation "the Lord reigns!" is found throughout the so-called "royal psalms." In this psalm, God's reign is described as universal in scope, and is contrasted with the worship of idols. God's reign is identified with justice, which constitutes the foundation of God's throne, the basis of God's rule. God's reign, God's kingdom, is present wherever justice is found.

The draw of idolatry, its allure, has always been its promise of comfort and security. The children of Israel, liberated from slavery and led by Moses into the wilderness, immediately began to long for the comforts they had left behind, for the "fleshpots of Egypt," for the "cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic" (Num. 11:5). The making of the golden calf, one of the objects of Egyptian worship, is an expression of this nostalgic yearning for comfort and security.

In order to discover within ourselves the idolatrous strongholds that must be rooted out in order for God's reign to become truly universal, we have to ask ourselves, "what are the places in our life that promise us comfort and security?" These are the zones where we are most likely to sacrifice justice on the altar of the false gods; that is, of self-interest, for all idolatry is, in the final analysis, self-worship. Tearing down these shrines is a frightening prospect, an act of self-deconstruction that leaves us feeling uncomfortable and insecure, yet it is only by this process of deconstruction that the reign of God is extended and becomes truly universal within us.

What are these loci of security and comfort in our lives? Our jobs, which not only provide us with economic security, but also with a feeling of personal identity and worth. Patriotism, our national identity, which provides us with a sense of security for which we are often willing to sacrifice the security of others. Our churches, which have at times been guilty of holding up obedience as a higher value than justice, in blatant disregard of the teachings of the Gospels and the prophets. In all these contexts, we are more likely to "look the other way" when we encounter injustice rather than risk our security and identity by challenging it. We understand that the potential cost of speaking out is disownment, the loss of both security and identity. In biblical terms, we "harden our hearts" like Pharaoh, resisting our impulses towards compassion and justice in order to preserve a status quo that is favorable to us.

I think that the temptation to idolatry is especially strong for those of us for whom religious identity and vocational identity coincide. Within this context, to challenge institutionalized injustice jeopardizes, not only our membership in the religious community, but our economic security as well.

There was once a time when I put my place in the church on the line by marching in a rally against the Iraq war. And this was, simultaneously, one of the most frightening and liberating experiences of my life. It was a moment of personal deconstruction.

Senate Apologizes for Failure to Pass Anti-Lynching Law

2005-06-14T07:10:00.000-07:00

Today the Senate formally apologized for its failure to pass an anti-lynching law in the first part of the twentieth century, despite nearly 200 such bills being introduced, and seven presidents calling for the passage of the bills.

4,743 lynchings were recorded in the South in the period between 1882 and 1963.

Decalogue

2005-06-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

I see them displayed
On the walls of courthouses
Where justice is dispensed
Like soft serve ice cream
In two colors
Where lynching is a proud tradition
Like guns and Confederate flags
In the back of pickup trucks

I see them displayed
On the walls of schools
That look much as they did
Before desegregation, integration
Deapartheidization
Words in black ink
On creamy white paper
And no one ever wonders
Or even seems to notice
The contradiction
Between word and reality

I see them displayed
On the walls of churches
Where people sit in air-conditioned comfort
Listening to comfortable sermons
While bombs fall on children
Hard steel meeting soft flesh
Irresistible force
Meeting an all-too-movable object

And I see myself engaging
In acts of holy vandalism
Like Gideon-Jerubbaal
Destroying the idols of my fathers

Tearing them down from the walls
Smashing the glass of the frames
Like fire extinguisher panels
That say "Break Here in Case of Emergency"
Ripping the creamy paper into shreds
And scattering the pieces to the winds
Like ashes

Taking a sledgehammer by night
To granite courthouse monuments
Smashing them to bits
As Moses did long ago
In protest at the desecration
And the people saw and were ashamed

But we have no shame
We can worship the golden calf
And still revere these tablets
And so we have made them
Into the ultimate idol
The icon of the god
Of the oppressors

Until we have made a contribution
To the creation of a world
Where everyone is assured of a place
Until they are written
In our hearts
We have not earned the right
To display them
On our walls.

Arise, then, Lord!

2005-06-05T21:02:00.000-07:00

Psalm 10
Journal enrey dated March 1, 2005

"Arise, then, Lord! Lift up your hand! O God, do not forget the poor!"

This call for God to rise up, to lift up his hand, is a prayer for a decisive victory of justice over injustice, fairness over exploitation, equality over oppression. It is a call for decisive intervention. My initial response is, "Does this ever happen? Does God act to rout the wicked apart from our struggle? Are the wicked ever truly routed?" I am wondering what prayers like this really mean. What would it look like if God were to arise, to lift up his hand? It would look like the overturning of power structures, the upending of pyramids of dominance.

The key word, perhaps, is "then." Not "then" as in "some other time," for the psalmist clearly means "now." "Then" means in view of everything the psalmist has previously recounted: the powerful preying upon the weak and vulnerable. "Arise, then, Lord!" is a cry that expresses the unbearable tension of the present situation, its unacceptability.

The question that the psalm puts to us is whether we see and hear what the psalmist sees and hears: violence, oppression, unbridled consumption of limited resources. Do we experience this unresolved tension, or has it resolved itself for us? When we look at the world, do we say, "Arise, then, Lord!" or do we yawn and say "All is well"? Are we in our own element or out of it, a fish in water or out of it? Is the world an authentic or a deceptive cadence, a suspension awaiting resolution, a dissonance straining towards harmony?

Justice

2005-06-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

Psalm 9
Journal entry dated February 28, 2005

"He governs the world with justice, he judges the people with fairness."

This psalm claims that God is "enthroned from eternity," that he has "set up his throne for judgment." God is portrayed as "a tower of strength for the oppressed," one who "never ignores the cry of the afflicted," so that "the poor shall not be forgotten forever, the hope of the needy shall not be in vain."

The psalm is telling us that God's reign is present wherever justice is found, wherever the rights of the oppressed are upheld, wherever fairness is dispensed, wherever the most vulnerable are protected.

Where is the reign of God in my life?

I am noting a shift in my thinking since leaving the small town for the big city, a movement from a "help" centered model to a justice centered model. And I wonder about this. "Justice" can become so abstract, so comfortably theroretical, that it demands nothing from us except perhaps a certain liberal hipness. "Help," of course, has its own drawbacks.

What am I doing to further the reign of God in my own concrete situation? In a world of injustice and exploitation, is it enough to believe in justice as a principle? Short of running naked and screaming through the streets like Jeremiah, how does one uphold justice?

What is man?

2005-05-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

Psalm 8
Journal entry dated February 27, 2005

"What is mortal man, that you should even think of him, the son of man, that you should even care for him?"

This question represents, not only the turning point of this psalm, but the axis upon which the human quest for self-understanding revolves. People have the wrong idea when they think that the purpose of religion is to answer the question, "What is God?" for, as this psalm makes clear, this is a question utterly beyond our ken. Religion seeks to answer the question "What is mortal man?"

The psalm proposes two answers to the question of human existence and identity. The first is that human beings are utterly insignificant in relation to the vastness of the universe, a speck of dust carried by the wind, a puff of smoke rapidly dispersing, a momentary disturbance seeking to resolve itself into some greater harmony.

The other answer is that humans are immensely dignified, "little less than a god, crowned with glory and honor." The psalmist also introduces here the notion of "dominion" that has proved so troublesome in human history. While accepting the essential premise of the psalm, that human beings are bearers of dignity, we must also have the courage to craft a new language of dignity, a new terminology in which humans are dignified, not by achieving dominance, but by preserving harmony and balance.

Almost nothing--almost a god. This is the human dilemma, the existential quandry, the two poles that define human existence. As St. Philaret of Moscow wrote, "All creatures are balanced upon the creative Word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them, that of their own nothingness."

If I have done wrong...

2005-05-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

Psalm 7
Journal entry dated February 26, 2005

"If I have done wrong, if my hands are covered with guilt..."

This psalm is full of an ebullient confidence, bordering on arrogance, that the psalmist is blameless, and that God will therefore vindicate him "according to the justice and innocence that are mine." "If" here is clearly a kind of contrary to fact supposition--"If I have done wrong (but of course I have not)." "If" is simply a show of confidence, like the statement attributed to Madeline Murray O'Hare: "If there is a God, let Him strike me with lightning right now." "If," in other words, means "not."

But in a modern setting, perhaps as a result of global communication, this confident "if" loses its certainty and becomes haunting. "If my hands are covered with guilt, if I have returned evil for good..." Can I really say with any absolute certainty that there is not blood on my hands? I did not pull the trigger, perhaps, but I paid others to do it for me.

"Oh," I say, "but I am a peacemaker, a pacifist." Did I go out into the streets screaming, tear my clothes, weeping and wailing? No. I shook my head and clucked my tongue at the headlines, and turned to the comics. And this silence became my consent. For when it comes right down to it, I am a beneficiary of those who are paid to pull triggers in my name.

"If I have done wrong... then let the enemy pursue me and overtake me." This is the "then" that corresponds to the "if." The enemy, the one who was formerly in my crosshairs, will put me in his crosshairs, will do to me what I have done to him.

Is there not some other way, some other option than this arrogant "if" and this terrible "then"?

How long?

2005-05-04T20:12:00.000-07:00

Psalm 6
Journal entry dated February 24, 2005

"My soul writhes in anguish, but you, O Lord, how long?"

"How long?" is the prayer of those who wait, who wait for a world to be revealed in which the oppressor no longer oppresses, in which enemies are reconciled, in which evildoers cease from the evil of their doings. It is an exclamation of impatience that describes the present situation as unacceptable. This prayer invites us to place ourselves in the heart of the tension between present circumstances and the future Kingdom, to experience the urgency of those who suffer.

To put this in another way, to the extent that we lack this sense of urgency, to that extent we have aligned ourselves with the oppressors and evildoers, to that extent we show ourselves comfortable with the present situation, and therefore as belonging to it.

The land of life and prosperity

2005-05-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

Psalm 5
Journal entry dated February 23, 2005

"Lead me into the land of life and prosperity"

This is a prayer that people might be permitted to experience life in its fullness. Human enmity and the machinations of the wicked have created an environment that threatens life and prosperity; life and prosperity are threatened by people of "blood and deceit." We pray, then, that God may lead us forth from this death-dealing realm, where human dignity is compromised, where justice is disregarded, where life is threatened, into the land of life and prosperity, that place where life is cherished and safeguarded, where we are given the opportunity to realize our full potential, where people live in fidelity to their truest selves, rather than serving the interests of those who exploit them, existing as adjuncts to the prosperity of others.

"Lead me into the land of life and prosperity" is a prayer that we may live without exploitation, without taking advantage of others or using them for our own ends.

We are deprived of life and prosperity by people of blood and deceit. Deprived of life by unsafe working conditions, unhealthy living conditions, stress, overwork. And deprived of prosperity by being forced to live in relationships of exploitation. This deprivation of prosperity is not merely a loss of economic opportunity; it is "deceit," being forced to live in a way that is false to our true identity. At its basis, every relationship of exploitation is a lie, a falsification of our being. The lie is, "You were made for me, you belong to me, you are mine."

To be on the path to the land of life and prosperity, then, means we must renounce the lie and embrace the truth about ourselves: that we are endowed with dignity and created for freedom. "Give me space and freedom" (Psalm 4:1).

Let justice be your sacrifice

2005-05-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Psalm 4
Journal entry dated February 22, 2005

"Let justice be your sacrifice, and trust in the Lord."

"Let justice be your sacrifice;" this is a theme found in Isaiah 1, as well as in the teachings of Jesus, that the establishment of just relationships is the sacrifice desired by God, the elimination of oppression and exploitation.

What does a sacrifice of justice look like? Following on yesterday's reflection, it means the creation of a dignified space, where the children of God hold their heads up high. It means the elimination of relationships of dominance.

You let me hold my head up high

2005-05-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

Psalm 3
Journal entry dated February 21, 2005

"But you, Lord, are my shield, my glory, for you let me hold my head up high."

This psalm presents God as the one who gives dignity to the human situation. O perhaps better, God, the "lifter of my head," is the restorer of human dignity for all those who have been placed in a humiliating posture of subservience and abasement. God is portrayed as both "glory"--the one who gives dignity to human beings created in God's image--and shield, as the defender of this dignity against the onslaughts of those who would deprive people of dignity, stripping them of security, well-being, hope, self-determination, and even life itself.

To seek God's kingdom, then, requires the creation of a situation that allows people to hold their head up high, that recognizes and safeguards their dignity.

Perhaps what prevents us from creating this dignified space is the fact that people who hold their heads up high are much more difficult to control, to keep in line. On some level, human dignity is even inimical to the smooth functioning of society, at least society in its present incarnation. Tonight, we watched the movie "The Magdalene Sisters," the ultimate expression of a humiliating situation in which people are stripped of their dignity in order to be controlled.

Serve the Lord with awe

2005-04-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Psalm Two
Journal entry dated February 19, 2005

"Serve the Lord with awe; with with trembling pay homage to him."

Psalm Two is a song of the great messianic king. God is portrayed as the powerful ruler who puts the allied nations to flight. In the worldview of this psalm, one serves God primarily out of fear, out of the recognition that God is the superior force. God strikes the nations with terror; they pay homage to him because the only alternative is wrath and destruction.

Whether we like it or not, this conception of God as the one to be feared is with us; its roots go down deep into our conscious and unconscious being. Fear is the basis of much of our motivation, the only thing that keeps us in line. In a society that is structured upon relationships of power, perhaps no other conception of God is available than that of the great King, the superlative power, the pinnacle of the pyramid. The family, the community, the state, relationships between states: all are founded upon dominance, with God as the chief dominator.

The question then becomes, if we reenvision and realign our human relationships, can we learn to relate to God in terms other than power and fear? "Serve the Lord with... what?"

Dignity. Wholeness. Joy.

Joy and fear cannot coexist.

All that he does succeeds

2005-04-30T14:20:00.000-07:00

Psalm One
Journal entry dated February 18, 2005

"He is like a tree planted near flowing waters,yielding fruit in due season. All that he does succeeds."

What does a successful life look like? This is the question with which we are confronted in this "gateway to the Psalms." A successful life is a rooted life, a thriving life, an abundant life. It contrasts with the life of the wicked, which is like "chaff blown about on the ground like the wind;" empty and rootless, scattered hither and yon, rushing frantically from one place to another with every gust of wind. One would be hard pressed to find a better image of the modern consciousness with its anxieties and neuroses.

Somehow, this question of the successful life is connected to the threefold negative at the beginning of the psalm: "Happy indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked, lingers not along the path of sinners, sits not among the cynics." Perhaps these can be said to represent three levels of failure: listening to the words of those who have rejected abundant life, walking along their paths, and finally succumbing to cynicism. If this is so, then it is cynicism, the failure of hope, that is the greatest failure of all, the greatest obstacle to the successful life.

The Selah Project

2005-04-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

Over the next month or so, I am going to be posting a series of reflections on the Psalms from my journal. I have been meditating on the Psalms for the past several months, using the practice of Lectio Divina (sacred reading) recommended by the Monks of New Skete in their book In the Spirit of Happiness, and also using the New Skete translation of the Psalter.

I'm not quite sure where this is leading, but I am feeling a need to write these reflections out, seeking patterns and convergences, trying to define the path that is being delineated. I will be very interested in your input in this process of "reflecting on reflections."

The Spirituality of Gilligan's Island

2005-04-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

So I got to thinking about Gilligan's Island (or "Gilligan's Isle," according to the song about the "three hour tour" etc.) this morning while reading the Psalms, specifically Psalm 49, "Why should I fear troubled times?" I got to pondering the underlying meaning of the place.

Don't laugh; I'm serious.

Here we have an extremely wealthy couple (the Howells), a famous movie star (Ginger), a highly intelligent person (the Professor), a person who is none of these things but who is nonetheless very sweet and kind (Mary Ann), together with the Skipper and the lovably clueless Gilligan. When they are shipwrecked on the island, what happens? Suddenly, all the things that separate them from each other, all the things that would have ensured that under ordinary circumstances they would never have spent five minutes in each other's company, are gone. Or not so much gone as rendered irrelevant. The Howells still have trunks full of money, Ginger still has her slinky gowns and drop dead good looks, the professor still has his intelligence, but they cease to mean anything. And people like Mary Ann and Gilligan, who are meek and gentle and kind, qualities that the world neither values nor has any place for, have a contribution to make, a place in this new, accidental community.

The show was a laugh a minute, funny as anything, but underneath the laughter was an incredibly serious message, that can be summed up in the verse from the Psalms, "Why should I fear troubled times?" That is to say, if you take away everything that can be taken from us, what remains? Who are we underneath all that stuff? If you remove all the things that separate us from each other--money, fame, intelligence--or otherwise render them meaningless, what is left?

Kindness. Gentleness. Meekness.

When Christ says in the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," maybe this is just a way of saying that in the Kingdom of God, the meek will finally have a place. God knows there is no place for the meek or meekness in this world. In this sense, maybe Gilligan's Island is an image of the Kingdom, of a community without class, without wealth, without power.

I suppose this has particular interest for me given a major new development in my own life. A couple of months ago, my father called me to tell me that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He goes in for surgery on Monday. Troubled times, indeed. And suddenly, I find myself in the middle of a process of sorting, like a castaway sifting through the wreckage, discovering many formerly valuable things to be worthless, and many things not previously considered valuable to suddenly be precious.

So if you think about it, say a prayer for Norman this weekend. And ask yourself the question: if you were stranded on a desert island with a motley band of castaways, what would be your contribution? Who are you under all that stuff? When everything that can be taken away has been taken, what is left?

And love is not the easy thing...
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind

--U2

The Life of Mary of Egypt - An Alternative Retelling

2005-04-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

A recent article about religious leaders in Jerusalem uniting to call for a crack down on an "immoral" display of homosexual behavior led to this reflection on the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt.

Who knew the Jerusalem Post had archives going back to the fifth century?

RELIGIOUS LEADERS BAND TOGETHER TO STOP "IMMORAL SPECTACLE"

The Jerusalem Post
September 3, 487 AD

JERUSALEM - In a rare show of unity, religious leaders from the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches came together today to oppose what they called a "spectacle of immorality" that occurs in Jerusalem each year in conjunction with the Feast of the Veneration of the Holy Cross. It is a well-known fact that, together with the waves of pilgrims that sweep over the Holy City for the annual festival, comes a stream of more unsavory characters:actors, jugglers, magicians, and prostitutes, who come to entertain those who transport and feed the pilgrims, and occasionally, even some of the pilgrims themselves. In a coordinated effort, both churches announced a general embargo on prostitutes, troubadours, and "other funny-looking people" throughout the period leading up to the festival, which draws tens of thousands of travelers from all over the world. Those suspected of engaging in "immoral" behavior will be immediately arrested and deported from the city.

"This is the Holy Land, not the harlot land!" exclaimed His Beatitude Gregorios the non-Chalcedonian Patriarch of Jerusalem. "If we let people who follow the wrong way come here, we will lose this city... and there'll be no holiness left here. We will stop it!"

"Every year, we are overrun with these immoral people, both female and male prostitutes," agreed His Beatitude Georgios, the Chacedonian patriarch of Jerusalem. "We know from the Holy Scriptures that God created Adam and Eva, not Adam and Stephanos!" He paused for a moment, looking confused, then said, "Where did that come from?"

The Jerusalem Post conducted an exclusive interview with a young woman who was arrested on suspicion of prostitution in Gaza when her boat came into port, and who was scheduled to be deported the following day. The woman's name was Maria, and she had arrived with a ship from Alexandria; she herself admitted her behavior with the sailors at sea, "There was no kind of perverted and unspeakable lust that I did not perform with them."

JP: "Why did you come to Jerusalem?"

M: "I came for the good time, you know?

JP: "Is that all?"

M: "I... well, I wanted to see it. I've heard so much about it and, I don't know. I felt... called, somehow."

JP: "Do you think you'll ever be back?"

M: "Me? No! No, I've had enough of these bigots. I'm going back to Alexandria, where I belong."

JP: "And what will you do there?"

M: "Live hard, drink up, die young! What else is there?"

In other news, a riot in Jerusalem yesterday left three people dead and scores of others injured when an argument broke out among religious factions over whether "who was crucified for us" should be added after the words "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal" during a public prayer service for the cleansing of the Holy Land from immorality. Spokesmen from both the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches declined comment on the incident.

Why I distrust the idea of a "religious left"

2005-04-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

So for anyone who hasn't yet figured this out, I am an Orthodox Christian who lives and writes from a socially liberal perspective. One of the first people to stumble across this blog, Alana at morningcoffee, pegged me as a "Sojourner Magazine" type, by which I suppose she meant a lefty in the nicest possible way. The fact is, however, that although I have read an issue or two of Sojourner Magazine, and have even gone to hear Jim Wallis speak, I am profoundly uneasy about the whole emerging "Christian Left" movement with which Sojourners has recently become associated.

I suppose my reservations go, at least in part, to the track record of the religious right in this regard. The religious right, in my view, has been cynically commodified by the pro-business, big corporate lobby. People of deep faith, many from lower income brackets, are having their genuine religious impulses exploited for the gain of others who care little for their values. They are being encouraged to vote against their own economic interests by politicians who talk blithely about "morality," "the family," and the "sanctity of life," as if they were really concerned about these issues (although anyone who looks at their way of life would quickly conclude otherwise). The reality is that their true consituents are the ones who get invited to the gala banquets and white tie fund-raisers: the rich, big business moguls. This harnessing of religion to political expediency is an incredibly ugly thing, and I don't think it gets any prettier if it is done by people on the left.

And yet there is another, deeper reason that I am wary of this "Christian Left" rhetoric: I think it has a profound tendency to degenerate into a kind of "liberal chic." It is far too easy to become a "Rolex liberal," to set oneself up as an "outsider," while still reaping all the benefits of being on the inside. We can be quite well off financially, have nice homes and nice cars, take far more than our share of the world's resources, all the while protesting that we support fair trade, that we opposed the war in Iraq, that we really are good people after all. Isn't that great? We get all the benefits of an oppressive structure, all the bonuses of the three Ws (wealthy, white, western) with none of the guilt! We can have our cake and eat it too! As for those others, well, let them eat cake too!

Just not our cake.

In this abusive system of relationships of which we are a part, no one can claim to be an outsider, no one can claim to be innocent. We are all responsible, every last one of us. Maybe we don't own the sweatshops, maybe we didn't exploit the workers ourselves, but we were all too happy to take advantage of the bargain prices while ignoring the surcharge of human misery. Maybe we didn't drop the bombs or pull the triggers, but we paid others, kids from poor Southern ghettos and bankrupt Midwestern farms, to do it for us.

"Oh," some part of me says, "but I am a pacifist. I opposed the war." Did I tear my clothes into pieces and run naked and screaming through the streets crying "Stop it! Stop it!" like the prophet Jeremiah? Did I do anything at all?

No. I shook my head and clucked my tongue, and turned to the comics.

Dr. Paul Farmer, an MD working in Haiti who speaks to issues of global inequity from a liberation theology perspective, once said that the problem with "WLs" ("White Liberals") is that we believe that we can have it all, that we can create a better world without giving up the privileges to which we have become accustomed. We don't understand that there is a place for sacrifice, and even for shame.

I was reflecting this morning on the fact that, in the Psalms, shame is part of the cycle of violence: first we defeat our enemies and "cover them with shame," then they rout us and put us to shame, so we pray that God will give us strength to put them to shame again, and on and on it goes. Shame waters the seeds of violence that lie dormant within us. But is there a place for shame in creating a more compassionate structure of relationships? Put in another way, have we become so shameless, so utterly brazen, that we can "take almost everything, and then come back for the rest," as one Ani DiFranco song puts it, while still believing ourselves to be liberal, progressive, and perhaps even morally superior?

Pentecost

2005-04-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

A poem I wrote a long time ago, about hearing and almost understanding...

A sudden wind blows, shattering
The morning stillness, scattering
The desiccated leaves that lie
Like gravemounds, neatly raked.

They hiss, insistent, clattering
Across the pavement, chattering
With whispered sibilances
In some long-forgotten tongue.

And I, straining to hear
Feel that I could almost catch a word or two

But then,

The wind shifts
The spell breaks
The leaves scurry away
With a dry and mirthless chuckle.

What is my responsibility?

2005-04-10T22:04:00.000-07:00

Today, as I walked out of the church parking lot on my way to catch the train home, I noticed a kind of scruffy looking guy coming towards me, pushing a bike. He didn't ask me for anything as I passed him, so I didn't stop. I've offered help to people in the past, only to discover that they weren't really homeless or in need at all, just scruffy looking; that can be kind of embarrasing for everybody involved. I looked back as I reached the corner and waited for the light to change; he had stopped next to a trash can on the street and started poking around in it, like he was looking for recycling. As I crossed the street, I was thinking to myself, "What is my responsibility? He didn't ask for help. Should I go back and offer?"

When I looked back at him from across the street, he was still fishing in the trash, but now he was chewing on something.

Now, fishing for recycling in the trash is one thing; fishing for food is something else. So I went back and asked him if he was OK, if he needed something to eat. He told me he hadn't eaten in a day or so. I looked around on the street, but there was just a liquor store on the corner, nowhere nearby to buy him any decent food. So I told him to wait a minute and walked back to the church.

When I walk onto the grounds of the church, the thought that always comes to mind is "welcome to the Green Zone." My church is in a low-income, inner city environment. It has nice grounds and a pretty little courtyard with a a fountain, facilities that stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the neighborhood. It is surrounded by a a high, wought iron fence that bends out at the top, with sharp iron points. Everything about it says "keep out--you don't belong here."

In the kitchen, they were getting ready for a luncheon after a 1 PM baptism, a real high-end affair, it looked like. So I asked Jack, the caterer, if the food was ready yet.

"No," he said. He was a little bit harried, rushing around to pull stuff together for the luncheon.

So I told him there a guy outside who hadn't eaten in a awhile.

He paused a second. "I meant yeah," he said, "just gimme two minutes."

In two minutes, I had a paper plate with crab cakes, a spinach and arugula salad with marinated pears, and a big dinner roll. Quite the haul. I took it out to the guy, who started eating as soon as I handed it to him. "Sorry to be rude," he said around a mouthful. He told me his name was Kevin. He talked with some kind of Irish or Welsh accent, although he told me he was from Maryland.

I don't know what Kevin's story is. He was hungrier than many people I meet on the street. People who panhandle often get a fair amount of food, although most of it is fast food with lots of fat and salt and little nutritive value. Others are getting their caloric intake from alcohol, or are strung out and aren't really all that interested in eating. Maybe he's new to the street. Maybe he's still embarassed about his situation. Maybe he's trying to cling to some shred of dignity.

I told Kevin we'd be having lunch at the church for a community outreach project on Saturday; maybe he could join us for lunch. He said he would.

I hope he does.

Cussing in church

2005-02-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I used a four letter word in church. During the sermon, that is. See, I was given the opportunity to preach yesterday. I've never done anything like that before, and I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

The context: I was preaching on the Gospel of the Pharisee and the Publican. I wanted to make the point that the opposite of mercy, according to this text, is not cruelty, but contempt, a failure of optimism, a belief that people do not change.

"What does it mean to be like the Pharisee? It means believing that people never change, that enemies must always be enemies, that betrayers must always remain betrayers. We become like the Pharisee when we are so damn cocksure that we know the ending of other people's stories, when we have no more capacity for surprise."

I went on to say that, according to the Gospel, this is the most damning and damnable aspect of our personalities: contempt for other people.

I suppose at some level I'm afraid of being criticized for what I said, which is why I'm still thinking about it, even writing about it. But as I was walking to church yesterday morning, sorting out what I wanted to say, this just came to me as the most powerful way of communicating a point I wanted to make.

I remember a story about an old monk addressing a churchful of seminarians about monasticism. He kind of glared around at the students, then opened by saying, "Some of you think you know about monks. Most of what you think you know is a lot of bullshit."

I've always aspired to this kind of boldness. Now I'm trying to figure out if what I said was bold, or just stupid, if it strengthened the point I was trying to make, or detracted from it.

I'm interested in others' thoughts on this.

Sister Dorothy Stang: 1931-2005

2005-02-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

"They stopped her car, and she got out and they were pointing guns at her. So she took out her Bible and said, 'This is my weapon,' and started reading to them."

The world has lost a great advocate for justice. Sister Dorothy Stang, who spent forty years fighting for the rights of peasants in Brazil who were being forced off their land by cattle and timber barons, was ambushed Saturday by masked gunmen who shot her at least six times at close range.

Dorothy Stang stood in solidarity with the poor in the rich tradition of liberation theology. Liberation theology, for those who are not familiar with the term, is basically patristic theology, the teachings of Sts. Basil, Gregory, and Chrysostom on wealth and poverty, within a South American context. It is a theology that rejects the Manichean separation between "spiritual" matters and the bodies of the poor, insisting that the proclamation of the Gospel in an oppressive and death-dealing environment cannot merely offer a comforting hope for the future, but must proclaim liberation in the here and now. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’" (Luke 4:18-19).

"She had a soft voice that belied her will of steel. She was an extremely strong woman who wouldn't be silenced, ever, about anything. They finally silenced her for good because they couldn't silence her in life."

What Dorothy Stang's killers failed to understand is that her voice cannot be silenced with bullets. Like Archbishop Oscar Romero and other martyrs of South America, she will continue to give inspiration to legions of others. Her struggle for the rights of the oppressed will go on. The blood of the martyrs is still the seed of the Church.

Way down south where the Maya reign
Zapata readin' poetry in his grave
They say we're stealin' from the best to feed the poor
Well they need more.

--Amy Ray, The Indigo Girls

Please consider sending a letter to the governor of the state of Para, Simão Jatene, asking him to bring those responsible for Sr. Dorothy's death to justice. Go to the governor's website to write a letter by email. Hints for Portuguese: "Nome do remetente" is your name. When asked "Local de Residência," select the third option, "Outro País," and scroll down to find your country of residence. "Area de interesse" is "outros," the last option on the list (other, since they do not offer a justice subject). In the "assunto" line (subject), write "assassinato de Ir. Dorothy Stang, 12 de feveiro." "Mensagem" is your message, which can written in English. (Contact information courtesy of Maryknoll.org)

A Harvest from the Desert

2005-02-15T09:09:00.000-08:00

One of the ugliest facets of poverty is the way in which the insecure position of the disadvantaged is exploited for financial gain. There are few grocery stores in poor neighborhoods, but there are plenty of "convenience" stores that sell non-nutritious foods at vastly inflated prices, and specialize in the more addictive forms of alcohol. There are almost no banks, but there are plenty of "payroll loan" operations that cash checks and offer "advances" at huge rates of interest, sometimes as much as 25% or more. Then there is the steady stream of "O% interest balance transfer" credit card offers through the mail, targeted specifically at low-income families who are juggling credit cards in a desperate struggle to make ends meet, with interest tiers and repayment terms deliberately designed to make them nearly impossible to pay off. And all the while, the current administration is tightening bankruptcy laws so that lending institutions can take even more of the money of those who fall prey to their tactics, a vicious cycle of "double-victimization." Perhaps, with all the current talk about the "politics of morality," it is worth remembering that the sin most consistently condemned in the Scripture is the lending of money at interest.

These "poverty surcharges," the hidden costs of being poor, have been documented of late in great books like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America. And yet predatory lending practices are, of course, nothing new. St. Basil the Great, one of the most powerful voices for social and economic justice in the early Church, railed against those who seek a "harvest from the desert" and "make the hardships of the miserable an opportunity for profit." His words are well worth considering as we strive to envision and enact a more just and humane social order, as we "seek the Kingdom of God and God's justice."

Tell me, do you really seek riches and financial gain from the destitute? If this person had the resources to make you even wealthier, why did he come begging to your door? He came seeking an ally, but found an enemy. He came seeking medicine, and stumbled onto poison. Though you have an obligation to remedy the poverty of someone like this, instead you increase the need, seeking a harvest from the desert. It is as if a doctor were to go to the diseased, and instead of restoring them to health, were rather to rob them of the last remnant of their strength. Thus, you make the hardships of the miserable an opportunity for profit. And just as farmers hope for rain so as to multiply their crops, so you eagerly seek out deprivation and want, so that your money might produce a better yield. Do you not know that you are taking in an even greater return of sins than the increase of wealth you hope to receive through interest?

The one who seeks the loan is trapped in a terrifying helplessness. When he looks to his poverty, he despairs of ever making repayment, but when he looks to his present condition of need, he makes bold to take out the loan. In the end, the borrower is defeated, bowed into to submission by want, while the lender departs only after having bound him fast with contracts and pledges.

--St. Basil the Great - "Against those who Lend at Interest"

How could you do nothing
And then say "I'm doing my best"?
How could you take almost everything
And then come back for the rest?

--Ani DiFranco

Blessed is the one who comes...

2005-02-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

So tonight, we had our homeless friends, Mark and Sheri, over for supper. It wasn't a good night. They'd been fighting, and were tense when they arrived. Mark was just diagnosed with a serious heart problem: he's apparently had a couple of mild heart attacks recently, and his blood pressure is through the roof. Heroin use, I am learning, has a lot of residual health effects, one of which is infections in the heart as a result of cotton fibers in the "cut."

After dinner, Sheri went out to smoke a cigarette. She's been off alcohol for about three weeks now, but she's been struggling lately. Mark can be a pretty controlling person, and she said she really feels the need to get away for awhile, like she needs some space. She finished her cigarette, then told me she was going to take a walk. She didn't come back for dessert.

Mark was furious. He ranted and raved for a little while, then stormed out of the house with a threat to "bury the bitch." We were really worried. I went out later to try to find Sheri, but she was nowhere to be found. The guy at the liquor store told me that she'd been in to buy vodka about twenty minutes ago. He said, "I thought she quit." I told him to remind her of that the next time he saw her.

I went down to their tent. Mark was there; Sheri still hadn't returned. Mark started up with the threats again, and I said, "Mark, you are my friend, and I know you are upset right now, but if you keep talking like this, I am going to have to start taking you seriously, and then I am going to have to take steps to protect Sheri from you." I told him that if she comes back tonight and he's mad and she can't stay there, he should tell her to come to our place. He said he would.

Mark had a violent father. He hated his dad, and yet at a certain level I think he still believes the lies he learned as a child: that violence is the only way to get through to people sometimes. And Sheri had an abusive step-father, who conditioned her to the patterns of living with an abuser. The most difficult thing about trying to live in community with people like this is the recognition of how difficult it is for them to get back on their feet. You try to address one need, and it's like picking at a loose thread in a sweater: it just goes on and on forever. They need so much more than food and shelter, the basics; they need to learn a whole new way of living. They need models of the kinds of healthy relationships that they never experienced. You could spend your whole life working with just one person. And in the end, it might not be enough.

Jesus said, "You will not see me until you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'" In this passage, seeing is tied to the act of welcoming. We will not see Christ, cannot perceive His presence in others, until we can acknowledge their presence as blessing, and not as burden, or inconvenience, or disturbance of our full calenders and carefully planned out schedules.

So maybe Sheri will show up late tonight, drunk and needing a place to stay. We'll be glad to see her if she does. Glad to know she's OK.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

The Woodsman

2005-02-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

It's after midnight, but my mind is whirling and I can't sleep. I just watched what was perhaps the most disturbing and powerful film I have ever seen: "The Woodsman" with Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. "The Woodsman" is a movie about a man who molests children, serves twelve years in prison, and then reemerges and tries to resume his life. It is a film that asks us the question, "What do we see in others, how deeply are we prepared to look?" And the answer is that we can see into others only so far as we are willing to look into ourselves.

At some level, the film is about how seriously we believe in the possibility of redemption. The title of the film is taken from the story of "Little Red Riding Hood," with the woodsman being, of course, the one who cuts open the big bad wolf at the end of the story and lets Little Red Riding Hood out, alive and unharmed. What underlies this is the question of whether redemption is a possiblity only in fairy tales. As a cynical cop puts it with eloquent bluntness, "They ain't no fuckin' woodsman in this world." Ivan Karamazov couldn't have said it better.

I think this film is disturbing at much the same level of "Dead Man Walking," in that it somehow allows us to feel a human connection to a person who has committed terrible acts, without minimizing or excusing their crimes. These are films that help us to recognize, as Sister Helen Prejean once said, that "no person can be reduced to the worst act of their lives."

Maybe I'll try to write more about this later, when I can collect my thoughts. But I highly recommend this film. See it, if its still showing in your neighborhood.

Modesty and power

2005-02-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

After my previous post The Ruin of Joseph, I have been ruminating on the subject of "obscenity" and "modesty," and how these terms relate to the excercise of power within our society. Here are a few preliminary thoughts...

Our definition of "modesty" is by no means fully correspondent with ancient views. The reality is that the Greco-Roman world in which Christianity emerges was far more relaxed in its views about the body than we are, as was the world of ancient Judaism before it. Most people know that in the early Olympic Games the athletes competed in the nude (though only men competed and attended). What is less well known is that the Spartan games had both male and female contestants competing in the nude. Women in Crete went bare-breasted in the summer during the Minoan times. The prophet Isaiah preached naked in the streets of Jerusalem. In the early Church, Christians were baptized in the nude. Jesus Himself is depicted being baptized naked by John in the Jordan (some of the older, bolder icons dispense with the loincloth), and we have no indication that these public baptisms were segregated by gender. St. Peter was fishing naked within shouting distance of the shore (interestingly, E. once saw an Egyptian fisherman fishing in the nude on the Nile in Egypt, a country not known for its liberal tendencies in terms of dress). Simply put, though they may have covered up a little more, people in the ancient world were not nearly as uncomfortable with the sight of the human body unclothed as we are today. Can any one of you imagine working out in the gym naked (that is, after all, what the world "gymnasium" means: a place to "exercise naked")? Or working naked (gives a whole new meaning to the term "casual Friday")?

Sometimes, Americans comment on the "topless beaches" in Europe as a sign of the decadence of European culture. But in reality, every beach is a topless beach; I have no idea why, when we say "topless beach," we mean a beach where women take off their tops, but don't make any reference to men. The fact is that this kind of thinking only reinforces the notion that the female breast exists primarily as an object of male sexual fascination. The female breast is for feeding babies. Our well-intentioned attempts to reinforce "modesty" in this regard lead to women beimg cited in some places for indecency when breast-feeding in public. The female breast is not indecent. It is not immodest.

I think one of the most powerful moments in Frank Schaeffer's novel Portofino is when the narrator, a young teen, sees a young woman on a train in Italy, breastfeeding her baby with her entire breast exposed. The boy stares; he has never seen a woman's breast before. The woman notices him, says something in Italian to her husband, who turns, smiles at the boy, and offers him a piece of sausage. I remember this scene because it is part of a powerful awakening on the boy's part, a recognition that there is a whole world outside of the closed circle of shame that has been his only way of relating to the world up until then.

So a final thought, one that has been percolating in my mind for a long time, and is still mostly unfinished. I think that when religion loses its prophetic quality and its bearings in justice, when it becomes instead an agent of preservation of the status quo, it tends to gravitate towards issues related to sexuality and modesty as primary virtues and vices. To put this in even stronger terms, I think that talking about sex and modesty is really another way of talking about power. In the Gospels, we find the Pharisees trying again and again to engage Jesus in a discussion of sexual morality (the woman taken in adultery, the "lowborn" woman in the house of Simon who washes his feet). The Pharisees derive power and establish their position in society by setting themselves up as the arbiters of sexual morality. But Jesus steadfastly refuses to be drawn into the discussion, insisting instead that there are far worse sins: hypocrisy, abuse of power, exploitation of the weak.

Sometimes "modesty" may simply be a synonym for "discretion," in the Victorian sense of the "discreet affair." The wealthy can afford to be discreet in their vices, to take measures to ensure that their trysts do not have unwanted consequences, while the poor wind up pregnant out of wedlock, "trailer trash" with babies on their hip, and become the target of politicians from wealthy constituencies who attack them as immoral "welfare queens." In this sense, generic talk about "morality," that seems at first to apply to everyone, is really talk directed primarily at the poor (when was the last time you saw a billboard about teen pregnancy in an upper-class neighborhood, as I used to often see in poor Hispanic neighborhoods?). Sexual vices are regarded as the vices of the "lowborn," and are strongly condemned, while the vices of the "highborn" (greed, gluttony, injustice) receive only passing reference. The rich don't need to flaunt their bodies, they can flaunt their cars and their houses, their Rolex watches and their Gucci shoes. And these too are issues of modesty.

Abu Ghraibs of the Soul

2005-02-02T08:37:00.000-08:00

Q: What makes possible an Abu Ghraib?

A: A culture of secrecy.

A secret is a powerful thing. Secrets bind us to each other, give us power over others. Abu Ghraib was once a terrible secret shared between those who perpetrated these acts, and those who witnessed them or otherwise knew about them. The photographs that were taken that night were intended as evidence, but not of the crimes of the few; they were evidence that nobody intervened to stop them. The pictures were a sign of the the bond of secrecy that was forged between perpetrators and accomplices, a reminder of the fact that no one who was there or who knew could claim to be innocent.

A culture of secrets is a necessary aspect of every rigid authoritarian structure. Keeping things covered up preserves the hierarchy, the ascending pyramid of dominance, by preventing investigation or accountability at the higher levels. Within such a structure, knowledge becomes a valuable and powerful commodity which, like financial capital, is supposed to remain safely in the hands of the few. And disclosure thus becomes a dangerous act, a kind of "intellectual socialism," threatening the very existence of the system.

No one would ever have known about Abu Ghraib had not a few photographs leaked out into the public view. And now, what steps are being taking to ensure that this never happens again? Security is being tightened, so that no digital camera makes it into that facility, or any other like it, ever again. Cut your losses, punish the low-level offenders, but preserve the system intact at all costs.

Q: What makes possible a clergy sex abuse scandal?

A: You guessed it...

Let us be honest for just a moment and acknowledge that the Church has its own Abu Ghraibs, both historically speaking and to the present day. There are those in our midst who have forced people into degrading postures of subservience and sexual humiliation.

Let's call it what it is: torture.

What makes these acts particularly devastating is not only their horrific nature, but also the bond of secrecy that is created between perpetrator, victim, and accomplices. Nobody speaks up, because nobody wants to be implicated. And this silence becomes a form of recurrent abuse, an ongoing process of victimization.

How will we make sure this never happens again? Will we too punish the low-level offenders, cut our losses, and preserve the system intact at all costs?

Once upon a time, openness and transparency were the only culture the Church knew, the air that it breathed. Confession was performed publicly, in front of the the entire congregation, as were penances for crimes against the community. But somewhere along the line, perhaps at some point during the Byzantine experiment, perhaps even earlier, a few in the Church learned that there was power to be gained over others through secrecy.

Jesus said, "Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing is secret that will not be made known." It is only very recently that the eschatological force of this passage has come home to me. The Kingdom of God comes overturning all the power structures of this world. And a culture of secrets is nothing if not a power structure, an ascending pyramid of dominance.

In the wake of the scandal, some have suggested that Abu Ghraib should be torn down, that perhaps it is haunted by the ghosts of an earlier generation of tortured and torturers. But razing Abu Ghraib, even if we were to dislodge every stone so that "not one stone is left standing upon another," will not do us a bit of good if we do not succeed in dismantling these interior structures of dominance.

When the Kingdom of God appears, everything becomes transparent, so that no one will ever again be able to use secrets to gain power over another. And that Kingdom is present in our midst here and now to the extent that we invest ourselves in openness and disclosure, to the extent that we succeed in demolishing these inner prisons, these Abu Ghraibs of the soul.

Fairweather Fans

2005-01-27T20:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, my friend Mark, who is a writer and homeless, asked if I would type up an article he wrote about the local baseball team so he could send it to the papers. The article, titled "Fairweather Fans," is a lament over the fact that fans of the local team have been giving up and switching to other teams after a few losing seasons, losses sustained as a result of poor choices made by the new owner.

"I'm not about to abandon our team over bad decisions made from lack of experience," he wrote. "It's easy to love a winner. But it takes real fan loyalty to ride out season after season of letdowns. Who in the world would want to be part of an organization that won't even support its team when it's down?"

I'm not really much into sports, or competition in general for that matter, so I didn't get much out of the article. I just typed it up and printed it out. But then, as I reread the piece, proofing it for typos, I began to hear another voice whispering, another meaning seeping through those words.

A guy makes a few bad decisions, and you just abandon him? You give up on him? Sure, its easy to love a winner. But when things are down, that's when team loyalty really means something. That's when you gotta believe that winning season is still out there. You gotta believe.

It's easy to love a winner.

I'm still on your side, brother. I'm holding out for that winning season. Praying that it finally comes.

I still believe in you.

On a lighter note...

2005-01-24T21:39:00.000-08:00

So in an earlier post, I remarked that "the will to power is the subtlest form of Satanism, and the one most practised by apparently religious people."

Then along came this article about a gesture made by our beloved president, that was, shall we say, highly suggestive in the minds of some.

In response to this article, one of E's left-leaning friends wrote, "George Bush a satanist? Could be. Lots of people worship themselves."

"The Lover of Truth" - a guest post by Johanna

2005-01-23T18:55:00.000-08:00

I once wrote in an email to Johanna, "I think every person who writes a blog hopes that it will be read by intelligent people with interesting ideas of their own." Johanna's comments have been so incredibly beautiful and thought-provoking that I wrote to ask if she would like to try her hand at a full-length post. This is the result.

I hope we will be seeing more of Johanna's writing in the future.

Having mulled this over a while, I’ll see what comes up. But first, I’d like to quote the great Indian sage, Ramakrishna, who puts much of this succinctly… and it’s also in direct relationship to the recent large conversation over at Morning Coffee, and in general to what appears on Guerilla Orthodoxy.

"To worship God in order to generate material success or to be victorious in some litigation is not the sign of a true practitioner, who simply remains open to whatever gifts of abundance flow spontaneously and mysteriously from Divine Reality. This attitude of grateful receptivity does not preclude working hard at some honest occupation. Yet even when engaged in personal effort, the lover of Truth experiences the miraculous flow of Divine Sustenance, and therefore can never be obsessive about earning or saving money. Such a person becomes constitutionally incapable of being obsequious, servile, slavish, or deceptive in order to receive material or emotional compensation of any kind. The ecstatic lover cares only for Truth, not for money, adulation, or power.

"Nevertheless, surprising abundance often comes to such a person. The true lover humbly regards even minimal subsistence as a gracious gift from the vast storehouse of Divine Abundance. These true lovers no longer even instinctively reach out to grasp, becoming instead sheer receptivity. They are capable of receiving Divine Grace through a single glance, breath, or heartbeat – even through tribulation.

"The Bhagavad Gita describes this person as 'one who remains spontaneously content with whatever comes.' The person who loves Truth alone, free from any self-centered motivation whatsoever, can gratefully receive the gifts of basic sustenance or immense wealth from any direction whatsoever. By not desiring it, this person purifies it and uses it generously for the common good."

Now for the Three Temptations…

First, self-preservation, self-interest, self-importance, that primal instinct of humans to cling to life, as if it is all there is. Totally ordinary to do this, by the way. I operate on this basic assumption most of the time, if I’m really clear about what I’m doing. And realizing that makes me aware of how little I trust in or even remotely understand the Christian mystery of resurrection. But it does give me a clear direction to open myself to, even if I don’t have much of an idea of how to do that. It’s not so much something I decide as it is an attitude of ceaseless self-inquiry.

Second, the will to power. I was so struck by the particular choice of your description, that "kiss my hand, acknowledge my dominance" thing from the Church. What immediately came to my mind was something about attachment… if you are attached to the exoteric form of these gestures within the ritual, it can seem extremely offensive. But within the practice of cultivating obedience to and true faith in God it is merely another opportunity to play with and test your relationship to all of that. Esoterically, mystically (and this is one of the very wonderful things about Orthodoxy, that these levels are real and alive within the heart of the Church) it is not merely obedience to some outside authority; what we really obey is our deep understanding that truly we do not have life on our terms. Where I see it working for me is when I can have the humility to mold myself to what is, rather than demand that what is mold itself to my desires. It’s kind of like one of the basic tenets of pure rock climbing: "Never alter holds. Leave them as you found them. If you can’t do a problem as it stands, come back later when you can."

Third, messianic destiny. Yea, we all have that drive to "throw ourselves down and prove how special we are," to some degree or another. Is my even posting this diatribe just another form of that? I know it is just so hard (but ultimately so freeing) to admit to ourselves how great God is, how completely inexplicable and how incredibly small we are, for all of our pretensions of greatness and human attainment. To totally strip down the security of our personal beliefs and stand naked in our vulnerability before Existence… this is not an easy or comforting state. This is fear of God, a most profound declaration of not knowing the answers.

...and hast revealed them to babes

2005-01-19T22:10:00.000-08:00

So the other day I was in a high school Sunday School class, and we were talking about the feeding of the five thousand. I wanted to make a point about how this miracle is an image of the Kingdom of God, where everything is shared, where there is always enough for everyone, and where no one ever goes without. I wanted to contrast this image with the way things actually work in the world in which we live. So I asked the kids a question: "Under ordinary circumstances, if you had five loaves and two fish and five thousand hungry people, who would end up getting the food?"

The answer I was expecting: "The strongest" or "the fastest."

The answer I got: "The ones with guns."

Well, duh.

In other news, a new website recommendation: Public Theology. A tres cool site with lots of interesting articles on religion and civic discourse. Check it out.

Also, two new books on the coffee table: Telling Tales, a collection of stories edited by Nadine Gordimer, with essays by the likes of Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, and John Updike. Even better, all the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to AIDS education and treatment. And Small Wonder, a gorgeous collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver I am slowly re-reading, savoring, because I need all the optimism I can muster to get through the inauguration tomorrow.

The ruin of Joseph

2005-01-17T23:39:00.000-08:00

Last month, retiring Senator Zell Miller made a speech on the floor of the Senate about "obscenity" in the media (think "wardrobe malfunction"). You remember Zell; he's the Democratic senator who endorsed George Bush at the 2004 Republican convention. The speech has been making the rounds on the Internet; maybe you've seen it. In support of his position, Senator Miller quotes extensively from the Prophet Amos, including the verse that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved to refer to, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24).

It is interesting to note, however, that the good senator omits any mention of what was without a doubt Amos' greatest and most overriding concern: the vast disparity of wealth between rich and poor, the willingness of a few to indulge in obscene luxury at the expense of the many who live in poverty and squalor. This is the "ruin of Joseph" over which Amos laments.

Unfortunately, nobody, whether Democrat or Republican, seems too interested in outlawing this kind of obscenity these days.

Food for thought:

"Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals--they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way"
Amos 2:6-7

"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, 'Bring something to drink!'"
Amos 4:1

"Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins-- you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate."
Amos 4:11-12

"Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away."
Amos 6:4-7

"Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, 'When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.'"
Amos 8:4-6

Bottom line: Martin Luther King got Amos' message. Zell still doesn't get it.

Happy birthday, Dr. King.

The three great temptations

2005-01-13T01:15:00.000-08:00

From a journal entry dated December 26, 2003

I am reflecting on the story of the temptation of Christ in the Gospel of Luke. Realizing that the three temptations represent three major openings of the psyche, whose roots go down deep into us.

The first temptation is that of self-preservation or self-interest, and ends with Christ saying, "One does not live by bread alone." Yet how many of our relationships are compromised or even determined precisely by bread, by manipulative attempts to ensure our own survival and well-being? If we were to imagine all our relationships as stones making up a wall, at the very base of this wall would be one great stone engraved with the words quid pro quo. Even our relationship to God is shaped by our conception of God as being Αρτοδότης, the "bread giver." The book of Job is essentially asking the question whether anyone really loves or serve God gratis.

The second temptation, the will to power, also goes deeper than we know. Society is a hierarchy, and every meeting, every relationship contains this subtle and not-so-subtle jostling for power. In the Church, this is often quite overt: kiss my hand, acknowledge my dominance. Interesting that Satan says that this authority belongs to him, and not by usurpation. Satan is the author of dominance, while God relates to the world and to Godself only through kenosis or self-emptying. The will to power is the subtlest form of Satanism, and the one most practiced by apparently religious people.

The third temptation: messianic destiny. Throw yourself down, and prove how special you really are; throw yourself down, and everyone will see that yours is not an ordinary life. We are quite terrified of living an ordinary life. Our superheroes are projections of this deep need to feel and be extraordinary, special, different. How much of our motivation lies in this secretly cherished desire to someday be revealed as the hero, the protagonist of the story?

On the Coffee Table (and elsewhere)

2005-01-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed the new sections to the lower right: the first is "Siteseeing," recommendations to other weblogs and sites of interest (any reader recommendations?). The other is "On the Coffee Table," a list of books I am currently reading (and which are actually scattered between the coffee table, couch, bedside table, and various other locations).

I recommend the new book by the Monks of New Skete, Rise Up with a Listening Heart, but their previous book, In the Spirit of Happiness, remains far and away the best contemporary work of Orthodox spirituality, bar none. This book helped me to take the next step in my inner life at a time when I really needed to do so.

Gilead is a lovely book, wistful and wise. It is a story about listening, about our efforts to bridge the "great chasm" that separates us from each other like Lazarus and the rich man. As Rev. Ames, the narrator, says in the opening pages, "See and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand... You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it."

Ain't that the truth.

The Rape of Nanking I commented on in my previous post "The greatest miracle." It is utterly devastating to read, but I believe ultimately redemptive in its candid search for the roots of violence.

The Castle by Franz Kafka I have only just started. I met a homeless fellow a few days ago, bought him a cup of coffee and a pastry, and we had the most fascinating discussion ranging from Dostoevsky to Kazantzakis to Camus, but he highly recommended Kafka's unfinished work The Castle as the greatest work of modern fiction. So I'm checking it out, and hoping to discuss it with him the next time we meet.

And while we are on the subject of recommendations, my "best film of 2004" award goes to The Motorcycle Diaries. In fact, I have to confess that it was this movie that was the inspiration for the rechristening of this blog as "Guerilla Orthodoxy" (it was originally titled "Orthodox Action"). A lusciously filmed movie cinematographically speaking, detailing the famous journey of Ernesto "Che" Guevara across the South American continent. The movie depicts Che as being above all open-eyed, seeing everything that is happening, the vast injustice then sweeping South America, as it still is today. Although at a superficial level the movie expresses a kind of disdain for the Church, at a deeper level Che is portrayed very much within the categories of South American hagiography, acquiring a kind of saint-like persona through his deep identification with the suffering of the people. See this film.

So what are you reading? More importantly, what are you reading that is changing you?

PS Note that all of the books are linked to Powells.com, the largest of the indie bookstores, a good place to get books from, and a thoroughly cool place to visit. But even cooler is supporting your local independent bookseller. Kick the Amazon habit.

The greatest miracle of all

2005-01-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

While he was still speaking, someone came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the teacher any longer.’ When Jesus heard this, he replied, ‘Do not be afraid. Only believe, and she will be saved.’ When he came to the house, he did not allow anyone to enter with him, except Peter, John, and James, and the child’s father and mother. They were all weeping and wailing for her; but he said, ‘Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him, knowing that she was dead.

Luke 8: 49-53

This text was the subject of my morning meditation. I'd love to say that I found some kind of deep, meaningful insight into the passage, but to be honest the only part that resonated with me was, "they laughed at him." Interesting to note that this is the only place in the New Testament where anyone ever laughs. And upon reflection, I have to say that this is probably the kindest response one could imagine from a family that has just lost a child, only to be told that she was merely sleeping. It's a wonder they didn't turn on Jesus in a furious rage, venting all of their grief and anger at God against this itinerate preacher who claimed to speak in God's name. As it was, their weeping was turned into laughter for just one moment, but it was harsh and bitter laughter, the kind reserved for fools and madmen.

They laughed at him because they knew. They knew she was dead. And they understood the finality inherent in that word dead. They knew that this is how the world works, that little children who are dead don't get back up again.

For some reason, I got to thinking about Bart as I read this passage. When I first met Bart, he was puffing and wheezing, gasping for breath after just the short walk from the parking lot to the place where we were handing out USDA food commodities. Agent Orange had eaten up one of his lungs and most of the other one after Vietnam. Bart would stop by sometimes after that and we'd have coffee and talk. He told me he'd been a wild kid with a fast car growing up, doing crazy kid stuff, but secretly he'd wanted to be a Baptist preacher when he grew up. Then he got drafted and went to 'Nam and saw things there that nobody should ever have to see, and one day he shot a little kid who was running towards him and his buddies with a live grenade strapped to his crotch.

Bart never became a preacher. He worked as a truck driver when he got back, because all he ever wanted after that was just to be alone and drive and drive, to sit silently behind the wheel and put miles between himself and wherever else he'd been. Bart is someone who can tell you how the world works. He can tell you that little kids who are dead don't get back up again.

Do not be afraid. Only believe.

Some people will tell you that they can't rationally accept the miraculous stories about Jesus healing the sick and raising the dead, but they have the greatest respect for his teachings. My response to that is, frankly, to laugh. Have you ever read the teachings of Jesus? How the rich will one day be brought low and the poor and hungry will be satisfied? How the first shall be last and the last first, the least shall be greatest and the rulers shall serve, how all the power structures of this world will someday be overturned? How people should love their enemies and not respond to violence in kind and give to everyone who asks or is in need? Now that's irrational. To effect such a radical restructuring of societal values would require a greater miracle than raising the dead.

Currently, I am reading Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, which details the unspeakable horrors the Japanese army visited on the people of Nanking in 1937, slaughtering over 300,000 people in the space of just a few weeks, and leaving hundreds of thousands more with physical and emotional scars that never healed. Chang took her own life a few months ago, an action that led many people to speculate that she was a victim of "compassion fatigue" or "secondary trauma," that she entered too deeply into the sufferings of those about whom she wrote, identifying so closely with the victims that in the end she became one herself. And so some will conclude that it is better not to look too closely, better to view such events, if at all, through a soft and unfocused lens, better not to see too clearly. Better not to know too much.

Do not be afraid. Only believe.

The reality is that I am still afraid, and I don't yet believe, at least not in any definitive sense. I don't even have any idea what such faith might look like. Like so many others, I am grappling with the scope of the tsunami in Asia, stretching my mind to fit around the unthinkable human proportions of this catastrophe. And at the same time, I am struggling to avoid the impression that life is just random tragedy after random tragedy, or worse. After all, those who perished in the tsunami were disproportionately the poorest of the poor, living huddled in ramshackle huts along the shoreline trying to eke out a meager living from the sea. And the rape of Nanking wasn't random, nor was Hiroshima, or My Lai, or 9/11, or the bombing of Baghdad. So many, many little children. And I wonder, is it possible to look unflinchingly at the world as it is, and still go on believing?

Jesus said that one day the tears of those who weep will be turned to laughter, not the bitter laughter of those who know too well how the world works, but the gentle and spontaneous laughter that comes from unexpected joy, the laughter that surprises us while tears are still streaming down our faces.

And if that can ever be, it will be the greatest miracle of all.

Jesus in the song you wrote
The words are sticking in my throat
"Peace on Earth"
Hear it every Christmas time
But "hope" and "history" won't rhyme
So what's it worth?
This peace on Earth

--U2

To donate to help the victims of the tsunami in Asia, please visit the website of Inter-Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC).

The vampire's mirror: the parable interpreted

2005-01-02T22:11:00.000-08:00

I wrote the parable "The Vampire's Mirror" as part of a continuing reflection on the theme of invisibility (cf. the poem "Transparency"), and more specifically about a phenomenon that I would call "cultural reflectivity." Cultural reflectivity is the extent to which one sees one's own reflection in the prevailing culture, the extent to which one's values, ideas, and assumptions are reflected in one's surroundings. There are some groups for whom there has been a more or less deliberate attempt to ensure that their existence is not reflected in the culture, to erase their presence from the societal mirror, as the presence of women, people of color, and so many others has frequently been erased. In the ancient world, slaves and non-citizens were referred to as "aprosopoi," which means "faceless." But it means more than this. Prosopon in Greek means both "face" and "person." To be one of the aprosopoi means to have been depersonalized, dehumanized, devaluated. It means to be one of those whose presence is never mentioned in the story by which a people defines its identity.

And yet the vampire's mirror is about something more than this. Specifically, I wrote the story in response to some statistics that were referenced by a friend of mine, a psychologist, regarding the relatively high rates of depression, disease, and suicide among gay and lesbian people, as a way of thinking about how this invisibility affects those who suffer it.

Vampires are invisible because they are dead, because their very presence constitutes an unwarranted intrusion upon the land of the living. And I think that this cultural invisibility contains within itself the seed of a kind of death. It has all the approbative force of a societal mandate: "you should not be here, you do not belong here." Is it any wonder, then, that those whose presence has been thus erased fulfill this collective mandate in their own lives? When gay and lesbian people engage in self-hatred, self-destructive behavior such as use of drugs, risky sex, and suicide, they are in effect acting on our orders. "You are dead." They fulfill the mandate we have given them: to disappear.

Although their lives are undeniably a part of the human experience, gay and lesbian people are surrounded by books, billboards, magazines. television programs (and yes, churches) in which they do not exist, in which there is no sense in which their presence is reflected. They are invisible.

And for this reason, when I read about the litany of physical and psychological maladies afflicting the general homosexual populus (though by no means all homosexual people, as I should hasten to point out), my immediate response is "To what extent am I responsible for this?" As Fr. Zossima taught us, we are to make ourselves responsible for everyone and everything. I wonder to what extent I, by silence and complicity, have contributed to a cultural landscape that could inspire such self-loathing in homosexual people. I wonder how I could contribute to a world wherein they would value themselves enough to make positive and healthy choices for themselves and those they love.

St. John Chrysostom wrote regarding the parable of Lazarus and the rich man that the greatest pain afflicting Lazarus was that "he could not see another Lazarus." He stood outside a world of plenty looking in and seeing no reflection of himself, nothing there that confirmed that he ever existed. People who passed him at the gate looked past him, beyond him, through him.

I wonder how it feels to be invisible.

The vampire's mirror: a parable

2005-01-01T19:15:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows that a vampire cannot see himself in the mirror. If a vampire stands in a crowd of people at a party, looking over their shoulders to see into the mirror on the wall, he will see everybody else's reflection, but not his own. He will see people happy and not so happy, people arguing and flirting, people striking up conversations that will lead to long-lasting friendships, people making connections.

The vampire tries to mix and mingle at the party, tries to blend in. He eats hors d'oeuvres and laughs and chats politely. But he keeps looking over his shoulder at the mirror, hoping to find himself among the guests. He never does.

The mirror speaks to every person who passes by: "This is who you are. You are tall or short, pretty or plain, male or female" To the vampire, however, the mirror says, "You should not be here. You do not belong here. You are dead."

A Christmas Carol

2004-12-17T22:46:00.000-08:00

In our household, one of our newer Christmas traditions is to read Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" during the run-up to the holiday. Some of you may even remember a reference to Dickens' work back in my post about Sandy. I love A Christmas Carol, and get choked up every time I read it. Schlocky as it is in some parts, it has moments of intense beauty and overwhelming power.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business."

Interested as I am in the idea of narrative theology, I enjoy piecing together elements of theology from the story. It's interesting to note that Dickens' description of the ghosts as tormented by their desire to perform some act of good and having "lost the power forever," is very nearly a restatement of the ideas of St. Isaac of Syria about Hell, who writes that the denizens of Gehenna are "scourged with the scourge of love;" namely "bitter regret" for their sins against love (see also Fr. Zossima's idea of Hell as "the suffering of no longer being able to love" in the Brothers Karamazov).

Sentimentality aside, Dickens writing has remained influential because of its immense moral force and clarity. But the Orthodox Church had someone who spoke with the same piercing moral insight a thousand years before Dickens: St. Basil the Great. In fact, when I read St. Basil's writing, he strikes me almost as a kind of "Dickens before Dickens." For instance, consider the following two excerpts from Basil's homily To the Rich:

Wherever you turn your gaze, you will clearly behold the apparitions of your evil acts: here the tears of the orphan, there the groaning of the widow, elsewhere the poor whom you have trampled, the servants whom you have brutalized, the neighbors whose property you have encroached. All your deeds rise up before you; the wicked chorus of your wrongdoings besets you on all sides. Just as the shadow follows the body, so also one’s sins closely follow the soul, forming a clear outline of one’s actions. There is thus no possibility of denial there; every mouth will be stopped, and especially that of the arrogant. Each one’s works will bear witness; without a word being spoken, they will make our deeds plain. How can I summon before your eyes the fearful things that await you?

The "apparitions of evil acts" sound like the Ghost of Christmas past (and future) to me. And check out this description of the end of the greedy person:

Perhaps the servants will not even dress you in burial finery at the last, but will desert the graveside, having already transferred their allegiance to the heirs. Perhaps they will even turn philosophical on you: “It is not right,” they will say, “to adorn a dead body, and to give a lavish burial to someone who no longer feels anything. Would it not be better to dress the successors in this elegant and beautiful clothing, rather allowing such precious garments to rot together with the corpse? What need is there of an officious headstone and a lavish burial, expenses that cannot be recovered? These funds should rather be used by those who remain for their own needs.” These things they will say, at once avenging themselves upon you for your tyranny, and ingratiating themselves with those who succeed to your fortune.

(translation in plain English: "They will dump your sorry ass in a hole naked, and won't even take the trouble to cover you up." Cf. Stave Four for the similar end of Ebenezer Scrooge)

I suppose the point here is that these themes are universal, not bound to any given time or place: the blinding power of greed, regret at what might have been, the recognition that those who live alone and unloving die alone and unloved. And the immense existential optimism that we have the power to change, to repent, to create a more just and humane future than that which might otherwise have been. To make God's Kingdom present, in some small way, "on earth as it is in Heaven."

So on this night before Christmas, check out A Christmas Carol from the library and read it. Read it for your kids. Read it for yourself.

And yes, God bless us every one.

Takes one to know one

2004-12-14T23:01:00.000-08:00

So tonight, when I got off the train and started the weary walk up the street towards home, Sheri called to me from the other corner where she was panhandling and came running across the street to catch me. She's noticed I've been working too much lately, coming home late, looking tired and irritable. She wanted to make sure I was doing OK, tell me that I shouldn't be working so hard, remind me that I have a family and I have to take care myself and them. She planted herself between me and the direction I was heading and didn't let me go by until she'd said her piece.

At one point, I felt like I was in the middle of an intervention.

I listened for a minute or so, nodding my head agreeably, and then casually changed the subject. It was a subtle, even artful move, worthy of someone in the "helping" profession, someone who has taken classes where they talk about "transference" and "appropriate distance." I asked her how she was doing, how it was going in their new place (a tent at somebody's apartment around the corner). I knew I was subtly reorienting the conversation, shifting the focus from my problems to hers, realigning our roles as the helper and the one being helped. "Here is a person who is homeless," I'm thinking, "struggling to recover from drug and alcohol addiction, and she's worried about me working a little late?" And yet somehow I also knew that I was handling the whole thing all wrong, that there was something here that I needed to sit with for awhile and not move away from so quickly.

After all, my workaholic tendencies are really just a form of "clean addiction," just another way of being hooked. Maybe in this case it takes one to know one; it takes an addict to recognize the subtle signs of addiction. And I am an addict, I admit that. I am addicted to praise, addicted to admiration, addicted to success. I need it bad and I need it often, like a needle in my veins. This is a socially acceptable addiction that we have chosen to bless and reward. But its results are no less corrosive to our society, no less harmful to our families.

For all of us who are seeking, not merely to "help" the poor, but to truly live in community with them, there is a constant temptation that can be summed up in this word "help." In fact, the whole notion of "helping" others can itself become a kind of powerful drug that is incredibly addictive. We become "helping junkies," get to the place where we need a "compassion fix," where we need to help someone quick so that we can have that wonderful feeling of being strong and powerful, like a benevolent minor deity. If you are involved in this kind of work, you know exactly what I mean. There is a way of "helping" others that not only does not eliminate the distance between the giver and the receiver, but actually reinforces it. The whole thing then becomes purely a question of power and who wields it, just another level of control, another layer of dominance. Our relationships become one-directional, like looking out at the world through mirrored sunglasses, so that no one can see the pain, or hurt, or confusion, or doubt in our eyes.

What is lacking in all this is a sense of shared vulnerability. And in the final analysis, vulnerability is the only thing we all share in this life. A deacon of our Church once said to me that it is our strengths, the things we do well, that separate us from each other, while it is our wounds and our weaknesses that unite us as one community before the one Bread and the one Cup. And if we are to remain part of this community, we cannot always be the Good Samaritan. Sometimes, we have to be the man lying wounded by the side of the road. Sometimes, we have to risk being vulnerable.

You got my back, sis. Thanks.

Transparency

2004-12-09T13:35:00.000-08:00

We are the invisible ones
the faceless people
the nameless inhabitants
of a forgotten landscape.

We are the anonymous "poor"
the ubiquitous "needy"
created according to your fancy
as whatever you need us to be.

You make us innocent as angels
or devious as demons
and like both angels and demons
we remain unseen.

If it is true what Christ said
"Blessed are you poor..."
perhaps this is because
we have learned what it means

to be transparent.

Goodbye to old Buck

2004-12-05T20:57:00.000-08:00

The story of how I met old Buck can be traced back to a bit of lead smaller than the tip of your little finger.

It was the Korean war, and Buck was a poor, semi-illiterate kid from Arkansas, fighting together with other poor boys from Georgia and Tennessee and Alabama. The poor fighting the poor, as war always is and always has been; no governor’s sons or future presidential candidates in this bunch. He would eventually prove to be the only member of his unit to survive the war, a purple heart and a bronze star later.

That bit of metal that changed his life, traveling at a precise trajectory, entered his left leg in the groin area, and blew out his hip joint before exiting. Doctors pieced his pelvis back together, gave him a new, artificial hip, but his leg was never quite the same. He’d had a young, strong body, the only thing he’d ever been able to count on. But by the time he reached his forties, his hip was giving out, he couldn’t walk, and he became permanently disabled, unable to continue the hard physical labor that was the only work he’d ever known.

And so Buck became one of the legions of disabled vets in this country. He stopped working and started taking a monthly government check. His disability checks were nothing to write home about, though; they would barely cover rent for a decent apartment in any major city in America, not to mention food and clothing. So Buck moved out to a rural area where land was cheap, and got himself a little trailer to live in. It wasn’t much, but it was his. It was home.

Every now and then, though, he had a hard time covering expenses. He never had anything left over at the end of the month, and half the time came out owing something to somebody. All this led to his power getting shut off one month in the middle of winter. Now not having power in the country doesn’t just mean doing without lights and heat, it means doing without water, since all water is well water supplied by electric pumps. And so it happened that one cold winter night, when Buck was trying to heat his trailer with an improvised fireplace, a log rolled out and set his trailer on fire, and he had no way to put it out.

It was over in a matter of minutes. He didn’t even manage to save the clothes on his back, since they were on fire when he jumped out of the trailer.

I met Buck a few years later, when he was living in a decrepit little camper, the kind you see on the back of battered old pickup trucks, without heat, without light, without a stove or an oven, without a refrigerator, without running water, limping around on a worn-out crutch padded with duct tape. Scrawled in paint on the side of his camper was a crude American flag and the phrase, "God said it. I belevd it." No word as to whether or not that settled it.

In the years I knew Buck, I got a taste of how excruciatingly difficult it is to pick yourself up again in this country once you’re down, our Horatio Alger myths notwithstanding. But we managed to accomplish a few things together. We got him a copy of his birth certificate for identification, since all of his records and ID had been lost in the fire, and it's nearly impossible to get services without ID. We got him a reconditioned RV to live in with heat and light, a stove and a refrigerator, a toilet and a shower. Almost unimaginable luxuries. We even got him an operation and a new hip replacement.

I will never forget the day when I was talking with Buck about just ordinary stuff, sitting in his RV, when he suddenly broke down under the weight of all those years and wept like a child, sobbing, “I’m a fucking failure. A fucking failure.”

I tried to tell Buck he wasn’t a failure. He’d fought to defend his country. He was a war hero. He’d worked hard. He’d made a contribution. He was a child of God.

I don’t think I quite convinced him.

I got a call on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving from Buck’s son. His tough, wiry body had finally succumbed to the colon cancer that went undiagnosed until his colon burst.

Remembering old Buck, I cannot help but think of the thousands upon thousands of kids who are being trucked off the battlefield, without limbs, without hands, without eyes. In forty years, when the Iraq war is a paragraph in the history books and all the threadbare flags that now bedeck our car antennas have rotted in the landfill, these men (and women) will still be with us, haunting us like ghosts from a forgotten past. It’s enough to make me want to engage in some kind of massive act of protest, to spit on every bullet ever manufactured, every munition, every fragment of shrapnel, to suck out every last bit of moisture from my body, every drop of my contempt, until all that is left is dust, and from the dust a song, not of battle, but of reconciliation, of peace on earth and good will among all people.

Goodbye brother. You did not fail us.

We failed you.

If only...

2004-12-05T20:36:00.000-08:00

We used to value above all else money and possessions; now we bring together all we have and share it with those in need. Formerly we hated and killed one another and, because of a difference in nationality or custom, we refused to admit strangers within our gates. Now, since the coming of Christ, we all live in peace. We pray for our enemies and seek to convert those who hate us unjustly.

St. Justin Martyr

Blogs I'm reading...

2004-11-30T21:51:00.000-08:00

So I should preface this by saying that my very favorite blog ever, "Nobody's Doll," went to that big server in the sky some months ago, and I still haven't fully recovered. It was Kirstie Baker, if that was really her name, who first got me interested in the idea of blogging. Her incisive posts after 9/11 were a big part of what got me though that very black, black time. Come back, Kirstie!

The weblog I read the most on a regular basis is RealLivePreacher. I found RLP linked from somebody's website (I have no idea whose) who wrote, "I'm not a Christian, but this guy almost makes me want to become one." Painfully honest and beautifully written. I recommend starting with the early essays from the archive. All of you should immediately stop reading this and go check out Gordon's blog (I'm just a "Back" keystroke away).

My most recent blog discovery is The Light Fraction, a blog focusing on "organic farming, social justice, and Orthodox Christianity," written by a soil scientist. I really enjoyed reading through this; it is just the right mix of warm and lighthearted and funny and serious and well-reasoned. The February archive has a really fascinating discussion of evolution and "intelligent design," a subject that has recently become big news again. I like it because its Orthodox and openminded, and that, unfortunately, is hard to find.

Vietnam Revisited

2004-11-29T20:33:00.000-08:00

The following is a guest editorial written by my friend Mark, who is homeless and lives on the streets with his wife Sheri. Anyone who would like a more detailed introduction to Mark and Sheri can click here and here.

I think Mark's essay is important not merely because he opposes the war in Iraq, a subject upon which he and I happen to agree. Mark's writing reflects a view of the Vietnam and Iraq wars--and indeed, of the world in general--from the perspective of those who have been left behind in the global quest for wealth and dominance. He offers a "view from the side of the road," a perspective that is always welcome on this weblog.

S.

VIETNAM REVISITED

Thirty years ago, the US got involved in a war in Vietnam, a small country in Southeast Asia. It was destined to be the first war the US would lose. Vietnam claimed roughly 68,000 American lives and would continue for 10 years. How many of us remember or even know why we fought that war? Our President was all over the news at the time, telling the people of America about a Communist threat in Vietnam; after all, didn’t they have the Soviet Union backing them? We were told over and over that if we didn’t stop the Communists in Vietnam, we would end up fighting them right here in America.

We lost the war in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union would eventually collapse of its own accord. Today, we even have a dialogue with Vietnam. I believe we should ask ourselves, “How real was the threat the Communists represented? Did our government, along with defense contractors and other private businesses, create a scare and waste 68,000 American lives for their own personal agenda?” The reason I bring all this up is that we now seem to be in a similar situation in Iraq. Are the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam real or imagined?

In 1991, George Bush Sr. launched “Operation Desert Storm,” which was supposed to be the liberation of Kuwait, the pretense being that if we let Saddam Hussein take over Kuwait, who would be next? After all, Iraq was accused of committing atrocities against its own people, and was said to be in possession of weapons of mass destruction. But how did the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 really benefit the US? The answer is found in companies such as Bechtel and other US corporations that received large contracts to rebuild what we destroyed while helping to “liberate” the Kuwaiti people. Is it coincidence that oil is Kuwait’s main export, and George Bush Sr. is an oilman?

Fast-forward 12 years. It’s now 2003, and we have George Bush Jr. as President, who (coincidentally) is also an oilman. Are we starting to see a connection here? Bush Jr. is now telling us that Saddam Hussein is a terrorist, that he has weapons of mass destruction and is a worldwide threat, and that it is the duty of the US to stop him now in Iraq so we don’t end up having to fight him on US soil. Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

Why haven’t we found any weapons of mass destruction yet? Also, like Vietnam, why are most of the attacks on American soldiers coming from the people we are supposedly fighting for? Obviously, there is something very wrong here that we have missed. We have for all intents and purposes destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure, and companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Dick Cheney, have $20 billion worth of contracts to rebuild what we destroyed. Already, Halliburton Co. has been found cheating the US—our own people! How will Iraq be able to repay $20 billion to the US? Iraq’s only resource is oil; a coincidence?

Our government would lead us to believe that the US wins all the way around. But what of all the American lives we are losing? Who is really going to benefit in the long run? Why do we let our government, at the cost of American lives and in the name of freedom, use us as pawns in their own personal board game, one that seems to be a combination of Risk and Monopoly?

On the whole, we Americans have become far too complacent in managing our country’s affairs. But the government is only part of the problem; we are the other side of the equation. We are so wrapped up in our lifestyles—our cars, clothes, toys—that we are reluctant to rock the boat, for fear of losing what we have. If we continue on this road, we will eventually lose everything, one civil right at a time. As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as intelligent and progressive. But are we? Intelligence requires logic and the ability to reason, yet most Americans accept the information they receive through the media as Gospel. It is said that magic is based upon illusion, that people generally believe what they see and hear. Knowing this, why wouldn’t the America people question what we are told by the media and the government, especially if it seems to defy logic?

We as a people need to wake up and see things for what they really are, and then we need to change them the only real way we are able: at the polls. We have the power to vote these criminals out of office. That’s what makes America great. So remember, “knowledge is power.” Do your homework and help America get back on track and back into the hands of the people, where it belongs.

La Pregunta

2004-11-22T22:43:00.000-08:00

My mother told me:
if you stone the white fledglings,
God will punish you;
if you hit your friend,
the boy with the donkey face,
God will punish you.

It was God's sign
of the two sticks;
And the commandments of God
fitted into my hands
like ten more fingers.

Today they tell me:
if you do not love war,
if you do not kill a dove a day,
God will punish you;
if you do not strike the black,
if you do not hate the Amerindian,
God will punish you;
if you give the poor ideas
instead of a kiss,
if you talk to them of justice
instead of charity,
God will punish you,
God will punish you.

Mamma, is that really our God?

Jose Gonzalo Rose