Radical Compassion

I just finished a book by a Jesuit priest who has spent his life working among the urban poor, Gary Smith.  You can read about him here.

It was a moving book that brought me to tears a few times and convicted me as well.  As usual, here are some notes from the book, "Radical Compassion:  Finding Christ in the Heart of the Poor."

Pg. 4
I write this book so that the reader will have a better understanding of the poor.  I write it, too, to keep out in front of me a fundamental chord in my song: that the church, when it becomes poor and internalizes the suffering of the poor, understands compassion and the demands of justice.  The just and compassionate church becomes the incarnation of the heart and song of Christ.

Pg. 24
There is something wrong.  The reality of homelessness, inadequate housing, and the lack of affordable housing is a national disgrace.  This reality undermines the life and dignity of so many of our brothers and sisters who lack a decent place to live.  It destroys lives and families.  The crime of homelessness is not that people live in filthy camps under bridges, or that families sleep illegally in their cars, or that the homeless and the near homeless panhandle.  The crime is that homelessness exists.  And the reason people are homeless or that people pay three-fourths of their income on housing is that there is not adequate affordable housing.  It’s nuts.  How can a city countenance the development of off-the-charts-expensive condos and allow housing for the poor to diminish?  How can politicians back tax cuts when the infrastructure of affordable housing is falling apart?

Pg. 31
When I observe our culture’s treatment of those who suffer mental illness, I have alternate feelings of shame and anger.  I am ashamed of a culture where people are discarded and neglected like trash, where helpless human beings are routinely discharged into a hostile community.  And I am angry that this culture makes weapons defense, big-business interests, and opulence its priorities, while allowing its mental health system to be powered by a minimalism of care.  Mental health programs are, in my experience, understaffed and underfunded, and mental health workers – for the most part, dedicated and caring human beings – are swamped with caseloads that diminish time for individualized support.  It is madness within madness. 

Pg. 55
First of all and last of all and most of all, we are into a relationship with Jesus.  It is a relationship that changes our lives.  His dreams and passions have become ours.  He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naiveté at best and folly at worst.  He has turned our world upside down.

Pg. 57
Jesuit Jon Sobrino was a housemate of the six slain Jesuits but was in Thailand when the murders too place.  He wrote, “A poor Church is, by its very nature, more compassionate, and a compassionate Church, is by its very nature, poorer.
Among the poor, we learn to internalize their suffering, and we are transformed into the heart of Christ.  We adopt a viewpoint that forever passionately directs our behavior.  Sobrino said: “Our compassion is a very specific form of love: love in practice, which arises when one is confronted with the unjustly inflicted suffering of others and acts to eliminate it for no other motive than the very existence of that suffering – and without being able to offer any excuse for not doing so.”
The poor teach us to be truth tellers: to speak to what must be done to transform oppressive structures even as we are meeting individual needs.  The poor teach us of compassion:  to feel another’s heartache even as we are creating concrete practices of relief.  The poor teach us to embark on the sacred search for indignation: to discover our anger in the face of the greed, malice, and human indifference that give birth to suffering and to speak to it.  Now, we must yell about it.  As Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero rebuked his government, “If you strike my people, you strike me.” 

Pg. 72
Roe died last night in the Foster Hotel.  Forty-three.  His death was probably a result of his chronic alcoholism – he had a seizure that led him to choke to death on his own vomit.
He was an introvert who kept his distance from everyone, yet whom everyone liked.  He was good, thoughtful and kind.  People were at ease around him. But he had this soul-wrenching pain, too, a pain that hurled him into dark cynicism and, periodically, into raging bouts of drinking.  His nervous system was under attack to much from the drinking that he constantly lived under the shadow of seizures.  He lived also with the inner ghost of Vietnam, which he referred to as his “psychic black hole,” an experience that he would talk about only with me, and only in his most communicative days.  Whatever happened in that war left him emotionally scarred.  Not an uncommon story for most Nam vets.  Many, like Roe, stuffed memories inside themselves.  It was like burying too many corpses just below the surface of the ground; eventually all that awful poison would eat its way out.  When the poison of Roe’s buried memories leaked out, it led to another attack of self-destructive behavior.

Pg. 97
Among the poor, the church learns to be indignant at the sight of discarded human beings, and it is taughtto passionately challenge systems and structures that produce such human beings.  It is one thing to practice charity, to give a poor person some bread or to treat the same person with respect.  It is quite another thing to challenge a system in which people are hungry, in which some can be so rich and many are poor.  As Cardinal Sin of the Philippines once said, “Love without justice is balony.”

Pg. 120
Sometimes the church, out of its duty to advocate for the poor who are incarcerated, must take stands that run at right angles to the methods of the state, whether it is fighting for proper diets or challenging abusive policies… The imprisoned are the poorest of the poor.  If the heart of God is to e found anywhere, it is to be found in the hole.

Pg. 173
I was asked by one of our staff persons, who is gay, if I would consider officiating at the annual Memorial Day service that the gay community holds down at Riverfront Park in a designated are overlooking the Williamette River.  I agreed to do the service, thinking how ironic it was that I should be doing it – given my latent homophobia.  As a priest, of course, I knew I should be there with these men and women.  As a child of our homophobic culture, I had mixed emotions.
For most of my life I had my own versions of the stereotypical prejudices toward homosexuality, a result of the usual macho-guy baggage.  I told dirty jokes, made snorting observations of gay couples (“Look at those fags”), and was indifferent to the theological and existential questions of gay men and women.  Questions may be the wrong word; how about agony?  In my guy-talk world, Jesuit and otherwise, I had a repulsion for any kind of romantic relationship that was not clearly defined as heterosexual.
I am not sure at what poing my attitude began to change; it could have been the result of any number of things: the close friendships I had formed with a couple of gay men and women, the long talks with gay Jesuits, the acquaintance of street people who struggled to understand themselves as homosexual.  Whatever the catalyst, I came to find it less and less possible to relate to my gay friends on the basis of past viewpoints, I was unwilling to be seduced by homophobic attitudes.  So, as I joined the crowd at Riverfront Park on Memorial Day, I was conscious of both my history and my care and appreciation for the brothers and sisters who had asked me to be there.

Homosexuality and Gluttony

I’m working through Greg Boyd’s book “Repenting of Religion:  Turning from Judgment to theLove of God.”  As with most of Greg Boyd’s book, the ideas challenge both main-stream evangelical thought (or more accurately – pop culture theology) as well as my own personal life.  In the chapter “Forbidden Tree” he discusses how the sin of wanting to have the knowledge of both good and evil is the sin of placing yourself in judgment over another; doing what only God alone is positioned to do – declaring what is good and/or evil about another person.  Boyd argues that we destroy our Christian witness by casting these judgments all over society and the only appropriate time to make these judgments upon another person is when they’ve invited us into a relationship with them in which we can share these opinions with them, what he calls a “covenant relationship.” 

Religious people, Boyd argues, often create religious idols of their beliefs.  We get self-worth from doing certain “good” things and avoiding “bad” things.  While religious people would look down on someone who gains their self-worth from their money or sex-appeal, Boyd argues that drawing our worth from anything other than the love of Christ (money or religious rules) is idolatrous, no matter what religious jargon we use to justify what we’re doing. 

You’ve likely noticed that religious people tend to make a big deal about sins they don’t struggle with, but others do, while minimizing the sins they struggle with more regularly.  In so doing, they overlook and rationalize their own sin while over-emphasizing and demonizing the sins of others and, in so doing, excluding them from their churches.  The perfect example of this the demonizing of homosexual sex while ignoring gluttony. 

This entire section is powerful and pertinent to some conversations among evangelicals.  I will start by typing out the first few paragraphs before uploading scanned images of the next few pages. 

“Religious idolaters, of course, don’t recognize their idols as such.  On the contrary, part of their religious strategy for getting life is to contrast their ‘true’ beliefs and ethical behaviors with the idols to which secular people cling.  But as a matter of fact, religious idols are just as idolatrous as secular ones.  Indeed, this is the most prevalent and enslaving form of idolatry throughout history….
The standards used to judge others invariably favor the religious people doing the judging.  These standards are, after all, part of their strategy for getting life.  Hence, the sins a particular religious community is good at avoiding tend to be the ones identified as most important to avoid in the mind of that community, while the sins a community is not good at avoiding tend to be minimized or ignored altogether – regardless of what emphasis the Bible puts on these sins.
To give an example, few churches target overeating as sin.  Yet the Bible as a good deal to say about the sin of overeating (gluttony).  In the Jewish culture of Jesus’ day, the inability or unwillingness to control one’s eating was viewed as being on a part with the inability or unwillingness to control one’s sex drive.  Lust and gluttony were two major evidences that a person was undisciplined, governed by ‘shameless passion’ (Sir. 23:6; 4 Macc. 1:3,27).

If this section intrigues you, I strongly recommend that you read the rest of the book.  I’ve pulled another quote from pages 16 and 17 that sums up the goal of the book. 

“Whatever else Christians are known for, they are generally not known for their distinctive love.  Rarely are people drawn to the conclusion that Jesus is Lord simply because of the radical, God-like love the see among Christians and experience from Christians.
Why is this?  What keeps us from living in the place I described above [proving God is real through our love of others]… We position ourselves as judges of others rather than simply as lovers of others.  Our judgments are so instinctive to us that we usually do not notice them.  Even worse, they are so natural to us that when we do notice them, we often assume we are righteous for passing judgment?  Because of this, it is easy to overlook the fact that our judgments are blocking our love, keeping us asleep, preventing us from living in the truth God created us to live in.

We have failed to understand and internalize the biblical teaching that our fundamental sin is not our evil – as though the solution for sin was to become good – but our getting life from what we believe is our knowledge of good and evil.  Our fundamental sin is that we place ourselves in the position of God and divide the world between what we judge is to be good and what we judge to be evil.  And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created and saved us to do, namely, love like he loves.
Because we do not usually understand and internalize the nature of our foundational sin, we usually think our job as Christians is to embrace a moral system, live by it, and thus to be good people in contrast to all those who are evil.  In fact, I shall argue, God’s goal for us is much more profound and much more beautiful than merely being good; it is to do the will of God by being loving, just as God is loving.  More specifically, I shall show that God’s goal for us is to discover a relationship with him and thereby a relationship with ourselves and others that returns us to a state where we don’t live by our knowledge of good and evil.  Indeed, the goal is nothing less than for us to participate in the very love that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share throughout eternity.”

Pg. 89 into 90
[The Pharisees] are vigilant about their own beliefs ad behavior as well as those of other people.  The Pharisees looked better than Jesus’ disciples and the Pharisees knew it.
In fact, however, this hyper vigilance is evidence not of genuine spiritual health but of an inner emptiness and sickness.  It is evidence of a spiritual pathology.  The very attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives by their beliefs and behaviors rather than God prevents them from ever getting their emptiness really filled.
Not that the emptiness cannot be placated for periods of time; it can.  If people’s idolatrous religious strategies for getting life are successful, as they were with the Pharisees, these people will derive some surrogate life by believing they do all the right things, embrace all the right interpretations of Scripture, hold to all the right doctrines, engage in all the right rituals, and display the right spirituality.  They will get even more surrogate life by looking down on those who don’t do and believe all the right things as they do.  Indeed, they may experience even more surrogate life by entertaining a “holy anger” toward those who do not conform to their way of thinking and behaving (a fact that perhaps explains the remarkable divisiveness within Christianity).  But the positive feelings offered by religious idols are fleeting.  The emptiness returns, driving religious idolaters to further futile attempts to get life by their religion.

Pg. 192
For as a matter of fact, none of us have “arrived.”  It’s just that, for self-serving reasons, we’ve decided to categorize some sins – our sins – as acceptable and other sins – their sins – as condemnable.

If we view ourselves and everyone else through the lens of the cross rather than our knowledge of good and evil, we will see that our self-serving categorizations of sin are as unnecessary as they are illegitimate.  In Christ, we all stand condemned and forgive and righteous.  Hence, the prostitute, the greedy, the murderer, the obese, the homosexual, the rude, the unbathed, the drunk, the poor – even the Pharisee if he is willing – are to be welcomed back to the garden with enthusiastic celebration.

Pg. 197
If, for example, a church treats gays with the same compassion religious judges treat their own overweight people, its leaders will likely be condemned as “compromising the Word of God” by these judges.  Such a church is sinning against the (self-serving) knowledge of good and evil from which the religious judges feed.  Consequently, the judges will likely feel as though their god has been assaulted, and, as a matter of fact, it has!  As idolatrous people often do when their gods are threatened, they may rate.  They did so with Jesus and there’s every reason to believe they will do so with communities that look like Jesus.