maybe it is about the numbers

I completed reading two books of spirituality today: Walking a Literary Labyrinth and Irresistible Revolution. While I really enjoyed Nancy Malone's writing--it often reminded me of the best work of Karen Armstrong or Thomas Merton--between the two the one that's likelier to stick with me longer is the Shane Claiborne book because it irritated me over and over again like an infection. You tend not to remember why you have a scar fondly but you remember it nonetheless.

But what won me over--although to be fair, the fact I kept reading it despite my repeated annoyance with it confirms I was won over long ago--was the following in its final pages:

Certainly, thousands were added to their number in the early church--the poor, outcasts, people fed up with the world. They were the scum of the earth...Our context is quite different. We live among the wealthiest people in the world (top 2 percent), a tough mission field. We are preaching a gospel that declares that it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom. But look on the bright side. After we preach the crowds down, we will not need such expensive buildings...

And yet whether it's the Prayer of Jabez or the war in Iraq, many Christians seem to be hoping that the kingdom of God will come in triumphal greatness, expanding God's territory and taking over the world with glory and power--shock-and-awing the masses, if you will. But that's the very temptation Jesus faced in the desert, the temptation to do spectacular things like fling himself from the temple or tun stones into bread, to shock the masses with his miracles or awe them with his power. And yet he resists. The church has always faced the same temptation, from the time of Constantine's sword to now. We are tempted to do great things like rappel from the rafters in the newest church gym or throw the best pizza party so that kids might bow before the altar.

But amid all the church-growth tacticians and megachurch models, I want to suggest something a little different: God's kingdom grows smaller and smaller as it takes over the world...

Despite the fact that God's Word insists that "God does not dwell in temples built by hands," we insist that God should...God just digs camping. No wonder when I think of my most powerful encounters with God they seem to involve camping of some kind...That is where I have met God. God still dwells there. No doubt there is power in corporate worship, and there are times when I feel God among the masses (and during Masses), but it has had nothing to do with the color of the carpet or the comfort of the chair...

As we build our buildings, human temples are being destroyed by hunger and homelessness. The early prophets would say that a church that spends millions of dollars on buildings while her children are starving is guilty of murder...The more personal property is retained as private space, the more corporate property becomes a necessity. And the cycle continues, for as we enlarge the territory of corporate property, private property remains comfortably sacred...[We] find ourselves less likely to meet in homes and kitchens and around dinner tables. We end up centralizing worship on corporate space or "on campus." Hospitality becomes less of a necessity and more of an optional matter, a convenient privilege...

One of the underlying assumptions is that money from the offerings or tithe belongs to the church. But the Scriptures consistently teach that the offering is God's instrument of redistribution and that it belongs to the poor. Giving to the poor should not make its way into the budget; it is the budget.

Now, as I've pointed out, there is a disingenuousness to an organization with directors and marketing people like Claiborne's Simple Way calling "85 percent of...church offerings is used internally, primarily for staff and buildings and stuff to meet our own needs...border[ing] on embezzlement." But simply because an organization finds itself unable to meet the ideal doesn't mean the ideal isn't worth trying or is inherently worthless. It just means they haven't figured out how to do it yet.  It may be that in smallness and simplicity such ideals are more likely to be realized.

a sermon in the time of humiliating defeat

as many know by now, out here on the rim we lost a major and historic election to unseat governor scott walker for his assaults on workers' rights, the working poor, the just plain poor, and education.  when I made a comment the day after that defeat a friend said she wished she could hear me preach the following sunday.  I realized I didn't need a pulpit to preach and composed the following, recording it last night, and putting imagery to it today.  it won't leave you feeling any better about the result--you shouldn't feel better about the result--but it will remind you where your priorities lie.

teach naked

I haven't done this before but this blog entry from mock, paper, scissors is worth posting a link to. it's a pretty accurate and unsentimental reflection of what a lot of us who have been turned out by states where anti-government starve-the-beast policies have gained sway are experiencing. similarly, I'm also feeling the loneliness of the 1st day of school with nowhere to go...

"life was a war"

earlier this year I realized that, aside from a couple chapters in high school french class, I'd never read victor hugo's massive les miserables. so I picked up a well-worn copy off the free book table at one of the local libraries and began picking my way through it bit by bit. I've reached somewhere in the 100s--looking at it on the table right now about 1/25th of the way through. the description of jean valjean from book 1 is too contemporary to pass up. (again, my emphases.)

"he was an untutored man...but that is not to say that he was stupid. there was a spark of natural intelligence in him; and adversity, which sheds its own light, had fostered the light slowing dawning in his mind. under the lash and in chains, on fatigue and in the solitary cell, under the burning mediterranean sun and on the prisoner's plank bed, he withdrew into his own conscience and reflected.

"consituting himself judge and jury, he began by trying his own case.

"he admitted that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. he had committed an excessive and blameworthy act. the loaf of bread [he had stolen] might not have been refused him if he had asked for it, and in any event it would have been better to wait, either for charity or for work. the argument, 'can a man wait when he is half-starved' was not unanswerable, for the fact is that very few people literally die of hunger...he should have had patience, and this would have been better even for the children [for whom he'd stolen the bread]. to attempt to take society by the throat, vulnerable creature that he was, and to suppose that he could escape from poverty through theft, had been an act of folly. in any case, the road leading to infamy was a bad road of escape. he admitted all this--in short, that he had done wrong.

"but then he asked questions.

"was he the only one at fault in this fateful business? was it not a serious matter that a man willing to work should have been without work and without food? and, admitting the offence, had not the punishment been ferocious and outrageous? was not the law more at fault in the penalty it inflicted than he had been in the crime he committed? had not the scales of justice been over-weighted on the side of expiation? and did not this weighting of the scales, far from effacing the crime, produce a quite different result, namely, a reversal of the situation, substituting for the original crime the crime of oppression, making the criminal a victim and the law his debtor, transferring justice to the side of him who had offended against it? did not the penalty...become in the end a sort of assault by the stronger on the weaker, a crime committed by society against the individual and repeated daily...

"he asked himself whether human society had the right to impose upon its members, on the one hand its mindless improvidence and, on the other hand, its merciless providence; to grind a poor man between the millstones of need and excess--need of work and excess of punishment. was it not monstrous that society should treat in this fashion precisely those least favoured in the distribution of wealth, which is a matter of chance, and therefore those most needing indulgence?

"he asked these questions and, having answered them, passed judgement on society.

"he condemned it to his hatred. he held it responsible for what he was undergoing and resolved that, if the chance occured, he would not hesitate to call it to account. he concluded that there was no true balance between the wrong he had done and the wrong that was inflicted on him, and that although his punishment might not be technically an injustice it was beyond question an iniquity.

"anger may be ill-considered and absurd; we may be mistakenly angered; but only when there is some deep-seated reason are we outraged. jean valjean was outraged.

"moreover society as a whole had done him nothing but injury. he had seen nothing of it but the sour face which it calls justice and shows only to those it castigates. men had touched him only to hurt him; his only contact with them had been through blows. frm the time of his childhood, and except for his mother and sister, he had never encountered a friendly word or a kindly look. during the years of suffering he reached the conclusion that life was a war in which he was one of the defeated. hatred was his only weapon, and he resolved to sharpen it in prison and carry it with him when he left."

the us must claw money back from the top 1%

"My analysis is quite simple and follows the apocryphal statement attributed to Willie Sutton. The wealth that has accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the US income distribution is so massive that any serious policy program must begin by clawing it back.

"If their 25 per cent, or the great bulk of it, is off-limits, then it’s impossible to see any good resolution of the current US crisis. It’s unsurprising that lots of voters are unwilling to pay higher taxes, even to prevent the complete collapse of public sector services. Median household income has been static or declining for the past decade, household wealth has fallen by something like 50 per cent (at least for ordinary households whose wealth, if they have any, is dominated by home equity) and the easy credit that made the whole process tolerable for decades has disappeared. In these circumstances, welshing on obligations to retired teachers, police officers and firefighters looks only fair.

"In both policy and political terms, nothing can be achieved under these circumstances, except at the expense of the top 1 per cent. This is a contingent, but inescapable fact about massively unequal, and economically stagnant, societies like the US in 2010. By contrast, in a society like that of the 1950s and 1960s, where most people could plausibly regard themselves as middle class and where middle class incomes were steadily rising, the big questions could be put in terms of the mix of public goods and private income that was best for the representative middle class citizen. The question of how much (more) to tax the very rich was secondary – their share of national income was already at an all time low."

--economist john quiggin quoted in "income inequality is bad for rich people too" by yves smith from the august 12 edition of salon magazine (my emphasis)

*the above map is available here.

the debt ceiling is an anachronism

I'm not terribly up on financial stuff--that's for my wife, who translates financial legalese into moreorless general conversation for a living after all--and although I did spend a semester studying economics before receiving my 1st adjunctship, it's something I'm happy to leave to her gentle mercies. but this explanation of the debt ceiling from a recent new yorker comes heavily recommended by her and it's understandable even to a money neophyte like myself. the lesson I come away from it with is that, like most gun deaths, the debt ceiling is something wholly within our political power to eradicate or at least to seriously curb and it's only lack of willingness or, as surowiecki puts it about ceiling talk regressivenenss, because "the republicans seem to be more willing than the democrats to let the country default" (read: "more willing to accept collateral civilian deaths") that our summer has been wasted with this irrelevent topic. as surowiecki also points out, "when some tea partiers said they wouldn't vote to raise the ceiling under any circumstances, they became irrelevant to the conversation." to our shame and discomfort we did not let them remain so.

it's complicated in the thick

the woman who took my wife to the state college airport--a friend of one of my cousins--turned out to be the wife of john rigas' son who is also serving prison time, and so I received another edition of the exploits of st. john while we waited for her. regis and adelphia were the saviors of coudersport and the adelphia offices still sit vacant but immaculately groomed, like the bedroom of a child 10 years after her abduction.

he's the local boy made good, or bad, looking from another angle, and everyone has a story about him. he was the businessman who singlehandedly kept this part of the thick afloat while everywhere around it was submerged in recession and a wilted economy. my cousin, whose dad worked for rigas after retiring from maintenance at coudersport city hall, has nothing but good things to say of the man. he mentions that he lost everything he'd staked in adelphia, "but that was my fault. I could've sold when shares were $79 but I didn't want to leave john in the lurch." that john didn't have quite the same concern about leaving his investors that way is best not mentioned.

but it's all about complexity. I'm tempted to say money forgives all, to note that when the rich deign to notice the serfs it's taken by the poor as a mark of greatness in the man who does it, as if remembering the name of the man who drives you from meeting to meeting takes herculean effort.

despite my cynicism, which is deserved, the fact stubbornly remains: while he was in the middle of defending himself in court john rigas did things like visiting people in the hospital without pr flacks or cameras. it's true he was on the hospital board and such a visit likely did take his mind off his troubles, but he could more easily have gone golfing or skeet shooting. and I have been impressed by people remembering my name who had no personal stake in doing so.

my cousin's friend turned out to be a nice enough person in the few moments I spoke with her, although my wife, having spent 2+ hours in a small car with her on back roads may have additional information to say. but it's also true that these same relatives who genuflect to the rich who remember their names also disparage the locals on food stamps who frequent their store considerably more often than anyone surnamed rigas. no number of good deeds done or friendliness shown by these folks seems ever to deserve anything but my cousins' scorn. as everywhere else, it's complicated in the thick.