Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
…The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
– Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.”
Thou didst choose the refuse of the world to be Thy wife.
– Alexander Montgomerie, “Come My Children Dere.”
At Meeting Ground, we have talked a great deal about the appropriate symbol by which to identify the undertaking for which we have borrowed St. Francis’ name of “Little Portion.” We have returned repeatedly to the symbol of people gathered round a table.
Perhaps the intimacy and communion of shared meal, shared time, shared space, shared life of the table-gathering expresses best that for which we hope. We will save ourselves in gathered community.
Homelessness is one manifestation of an invasion of our communities and our consciousness by Third World realities; not an invasion of people but an invasion of brute fact: begging, destitution, filth, desperation.
These realities must be addressed, not just because they erode and undermine the previously less precarious lives which we believed ourselves to be living, not just because they are the fruits of our own policy-making, but because there is no salvation outside a framework which does address them.
Why is this so? Let us look at this from two different points of view.
The Old World Assumption
Historically, we are a people which has, until recently, grown and prospered while preserving a relatively high degree of individual freedom by annexing enormous territory to ourselves, by the conquest of many less avaricious civilizations, and by the use of military superiority to preserve relations of trade and diplomacy and a disproportionate access to raw materials, all to our advantage. All this time, we have preserved in this “New World” nation a system of social organization which makes a fundamental assumption: the protection of privilege is identical with the common interest. This is an Old World idea which we imported to this land, which has until now not seriously been challenged from within our society, and which, as a result, we have built into our social fabric.
Many may be impoverished, exploited, denied opportunity, liberty, and life, according to this idea, so that a few may have unfettered access to power and wealth, which we trust that they will make use of as though they were keepers of a common good, rather than a rapacious club. In times of relative prosperity, the many, usually limited to many of the middle class within our own society, are treated to better times through policies which increase their standard of living temporarily. In bad times, even the middle class must suffer, along with the already suffering working poor and unemployed.
In recent years, the keepers have pushed this great assumption to its logical extreme in the form of supply-side and trickle-down theory, two doctrines which together express the notion that the rich need to get richer for things to get better and that the poor will benefit by and by. Now, with the dismantling of the rival claimant of state socialism, the entire world is virtually ours (read: our keepers’) to draw upon as a labor pool, as well as a source of raw materials.
In the search for ever vaster profits, the keepers have not exercised power in proportion to the trust placed in them by middle class working folks in this country. They have not had to. General Motors announces the closing of a plant in Delaware and the opening of one in East Germany. This is a management decision that it will be “acceptable” if hundreds of American workers share the fate of their millions of brothers and sisters in other countries, working just as hard or harder for less, competing for scarce jobs, being “re-trained” for hypothetical jobs-to-come, entering the “mental health” system, undergoing alcohol and drug rehabilitation, being assigned a caseworker, having the cars (which they built) repossessed, becoming an object of sympathy and charity, going regularly to the parish food closet, suffering heart attacks, having their homes foreclosed upon, moving in with family, living for the first time in their lives in a shelter, taking their own lives in despair or the lives of others in a moment of rage.
Wiser management, even were that on the horizon, could only repair some degree of damage but would not alter the fundamental fact. The keepers, the ruling and owning class, have their own interests at heart. In a society which produces wealth and waste in equally vast amounts, everyone is potential refuse. The auto worker, lulled by years of membership in a relatively privileged segment of international labor, settled for less than solidarity with his oppressed fellow human beings. Now he joins them.
Engaged Spirituality
Let us now look at this same question, not from an historical perspective, but from the point of view of our personal and collective liberation.
In An Asian Theology of Liberation, Aloysius Pieris, director of the Tulana Buddhist-Christian Centre in Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, writes of the false dichotomy of spirituality and social life by which we have been taught to operate:
Chartres cathedral offers us a sculptor’s version of this dichotomy taken for granted in the Middle Ages. Elongated figures of saints thinned out of the world to reach a God above, and the stout, stocky figures of this-worldly artisans and peasants (the worker class from which Jesus came) supporting with the sweat of their brows the leisure class that had the time and energy for liturgies and mystical contemplation, point to a conception of spirituality indelibly sculptured in the cathedrals of our collective unconscious. 1Aloysius Pieris, S.J., An Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), p. 7.
When the common good is identified with power and privilege, by the same logic, spiritual truth is also reserved, a form of wealth to be handled by another set of keepers. An attempt is made to reduce the life of the spirit to a leisure-time activity, just as democracy is degraded to the task of imposing elite opinion upon the ignorant masses.
In this context, the individual is left to seek the truth anew. It is precisely the reclaiming of our full humanity and our full spirituality which is required. But since we have lost our true sense of spiritual purpose and had an artificial, ethereal one put in its place, how are we even to begin to regain it? The answer is to take a difficult and uncomfortable step, that of entering fully into the this-worldly, in order to re-discover that which we have lost.
This is why the life of the spirit has an implicit class option. It has been lost, and cannot be rediscovered apart from the struggle of those in the meanest and most vulnerable conditions. For only a spirituality which is an expression of our full humanity and open to all of us will be capable of saving all.
The Little Portion
Lazarus is the epitome of refuse in the Greek Scriptures. The symbol of our era is Dives at a table alone, possessor of wealth and correct religion, Lazarus out of sight.
The misfortune of Dives is that he is at the end, and forever, separate from Lazarus and from the truth and the communion which Lazarus offers.
Little Portion is an effort and a process, not a program. It will involve street-level organizing, grass-roots leadership, self-help and mutual aid, facing our grief and guilt, our humiliation and human awkwardness. It is a vehicle by which those who join it may explore the liberative potential of gathered community. We will be saved in gathered community.
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Footnotes
- 1Aloysius Pieris, S.J., An Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), p. 7.