11/22/18

On the way to work this morning, I was asked by three different people if I had any money. The first started to tell me they'd just gotten out of jail, but I was in a hurry to catch the max and all I had was a $20 bill, so I said, "Sorry, can't help" and rushed off. The second was at the max stop, asking if I had any change or a cigarette. Again, I said no, sorry, and he started a conversation with another man waiting for the max. The third was also at the same stop. He came up and said, "Hi, Happy Thanksgiving." I returned the hello, and he proceeded to tell me a story about having cancer and how chemo was making him shit himself and asked me for money for a room. I looked at him, and so many things raced through my head, everything from being annoyed at constantly being asked for money on my way to work at 5:30 in the morning to thoughts of compassion for people who have such impoverished and difficult lives. Even if he just wanted money for drugs or alcohol, living on the streets is hard. Nevertheless, part of me thought, "I work hard for the little I have. Hell, I'm on my way to work on a holiday right now! Screw these people!" But another thought, "Do I really want to live in a world where nobody trusts anybody else or is willing to help another person because they don't care or just think everyone is up to no good?" And then I recalled something I'd read the day before, a homily from the late Theophane Boyd in Sundays at the Magic Monastery: Homilies from the Trappists of St. Benedict's Monastery about 'staying awake' to the preciousness of every person and to when God, in the form of the injured person on the side of the road in the parable of the Good Samaritan, shows up in our lives. Maybe it was that, or the fact that I work in the Providence cancer treatment centre, but I gave the third man all the money I had knowing that he could very easily be bullshiting me, but also knowing that if I refused a third time, I was turning my back on my own goodness and asleep to/closing myself off from others. He looked surprised at what I'd handed him, then thanked me, saying that he could see I was hesitant and questioning his story, but that he appreciated how I didn't judge him. And that last part surprised me. Because at that moment, I'd made a decision not to judge him, and he saw that. And for a brief moment, my guard was let down and I saw a glimpse of what Boyd was trying to convey about letting 'him' in and how easy it is to not see others, let alone love them as ourselves. But how many times do I simply say no? How many times do I just keep on walking right past the injured person on the side of the road? How many people a day do I say no to, or get short with, or say 'that's not my problem' to? Far too many.

11/5/18

The upcoming election brings to mind a quote from Henri Nouwen I read from Here and Now that truly applies to both my approach to spirituality and politics:

To make compassion the bottom line of life, to be open and vulnerable to others, to make community life the focus, and to let prayer be the breath of your life—that requires a willingness to tear down the countless walls that we have erected between ourselves and others in order to maintain our safe isolation. This is a lifelong and arduous spiritual battle because while tearing down walls with one hand, we build new ones with the other. After I had left the university and chosen a life in the community, I realized that, even in community, there are numerous ways to play the controlling games of individualism. Indeed, true conversion asks for a lot more than a change of place. It asks for a change of heart.

It really spoke to me the first time I read it, and reflects the heart of what New Testament scholar and theologian Marcus Borg calls Jesus' politics of compassion, whose works I recently discovered:

The dream of God as we see it in Jesus—his alternative social vision—is usefully crystallized in three complementary ways. First, I call it a "politics of compassion." For Jesus, compassion was more than a virtue for the individual. It was the basis of his criticism of the social system of his day. Compassion was also the paradigm or core value of his social vision: Jesus' understanding of God as compassionate led to a social vision grounded in compassion. It stood in sharp contrast to the core value of the social vision of elite theology, which was a politics of holiness and purity centered in the temple and legitimating the social order. Compassion as a core political paradigm suggests a political order that is life-giving, nourishing, and inclusive.

Second, the most effective shorthand nonbiblical language known to me for the dream of God and its opposition to elite theology and politics has been supplied by Walter Wink. Elite theology and politics lead to "domination systems." The opposite is 'God’s domination-free order." This—"God's domination-free order"—is the dream of God. . . .

Third, one may speak of Jesus’ social vision with one of his most frequently used phrases: "the kingdom of God. . . ." The kingdom of God is what the world would be like if God were king, rather than Herod or Caesar. In such a world, the poor would be fortunate, the mighty put down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty-handed. Domination systems would be replaced by God's domination-free order. (The God We Never Knew)

It was this kind of approach to spiritually from a Buddhist POV that initially got me interested in politics and pointed me towards a politics of compassion rather than a politics of purity, and what then got me to appreciate the radicalism embodied in the story of Jesus.

Our political order seems anything but life-giving, nourishing, and inclusive right now because the god of capitalism is the profit motive, Mammon in the abstracted-flesh, rather than compassion and love. I believe it was this realization behind these words from Oscar Romero dated 1/21/79:

No one can serve two lords.
There is only one God,
and that God will either be the true one,
who asks us to give things up when they become sin,
or it will be the god of money,
who makes us turn our back on the Christian God.

Perhaps it's a utopian dream, but I long for a world that mirrors that of the early Christian community depicted in Acts 4: 32-35:

The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need.

11/4/18

I'm a big fan of Thomas Merton's writing, and I think this quote from Faith and Violence is as relevant now as it was when he wrote it in 1968:

The real moral issue of violence in the twentieth century is obscured by archaic and mythical presuppositions. We tend to judge violence in the terms of the individual, the messy, the physically disturbing, the personally frightening. The violence we want to see restrained is the violence of the hood waiting for us in the subway or the elevator. That is reasonable, but it tends to influence us too much. It makes us think that the problem of violence is limited to this very small scale, and it makes us unable to appreciate the far greater problem of the more abstract, more global, more organized presence of violence on a massive and corporate pattern. Violence today is white-collar violence, the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man.

The theology of violence must not lose sight of the real problem, which is not the individual with a revolver but death and even genocide as big business. But this big business of death is all the more innocent and effective because it involves a long chain to individuals, each of whom can feel himself absolved from responsibility, and each of whom can perhaps salve his conscience by contributing with a more meticulous efficiency to his part in the massive operation.

[...] Modern technological mass murder is not directly visible, like individual murder. It is abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt-feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate. It is this polite, massively organized white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction, not the violence of a few desperate teen-agers in a slum. But our antiquated theology myopically focused on individual violence alone fails to see this.It shudders at the phantasm of muggings and killings where a mess is made on our own doorstep, but blesses and canonizes the antiseptic violence of corporately organized murder because it is respectable, efficient, clean, and above all profitable.

In contrast, he points towards a theology of love that must seek to deal with evil and injustice without compromising with them, and which "will have to take note of the ambiguous realities of politics, without embracing the specious myth of a 'realism' that merely justifies force in the service of established power." And more importantly, "Theology does not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established. A theology of love may also conceivably turn out to be a theology of revolution. In any case, it is a theology of resistance, a refusal of the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation."