33rd Sunday

33rd Sunday

The poor becoming real co-subjects

Prov. 31.10-13,16-18,20,26,28-31;
1 Thess. 5.1-6;Mt.24.36;25.14-30.

Just a couple of comments about the readings. We are coming to the end of the liturgical year and that's why the second and third readings have to do with the end of time. The first reading is a little more problematic in a variety of ways. It would be much easier to deal with if there were a comparable reading about a good husband, some place in the Hebrew Bible. Unfortunately, there's not. So, we simply have to put up with this patriarchal, somewhat patronising view of things. Again, the regular rule for reading the bible is that you cannot turn your brain off when you pick up the book.

Meanwhile, I'd like to talk about the fact that King's College is twinned with a village in El Salvador. The reason for that, of course, is that we are rich and they are poor. It's very simple. And as I said yesterday to the group that was meeting here from all over the province - all those places that have twinned villages there - we're not doing anything special in doing this. The very fact that it seems special is testimony to the fact of how inadequate our Christianity is. Because as Christians, we are twinned not just with the people in this little village in El Salvador, but with everybody. Nevertheless, it does seem unusual and I'd like to refer to the words of a Belgian who'd worked in Latin America for years and years.... Jose Comblin. He made the point that, only when the poor become visible to us that we have really heard the gospel proclaimed. A stunning statement and absolutely true, that should be self-evident. But that's not the way that I was brought up in the Church and that may be true for many of you. Again it's only when the poor have voice, because they are generally inaudible and take on three dimensional reality because basically they are invisible, only when that occurs can we say that we have truly heard the gospel. Anything else, as far as I can see, is an exercise in self-indulgence. It's religion simply as another form of self-aggrandisement. And, God knows, religion, including Christianity, has been used that way often enough, and continues to be. So, it's extremely important that we have our twins from El Salvador here today, whether they live there, or they live in Toronto or wherever they live.

But the process of twinning is not simple, nor is it instantaneous. So I'd like to suggest a sequence in which that process becomes real, namely the poor taking on their own reality for us, for us.

I think the first step happens in a kind of vague and indiscriminate way. It is that we see the poor as objects. "Oh those poor people. Those distended bellies. Starvation. Stick like legs and arms." And so they become objects of our pity. I'd like to distinguish sympathy from pity. As long as someone is an object of my pity, they are precisely that... an object. They do not emerge in their own subjectivity as real people, in other words. And that's alright. We human beings are slow learners. So, this beginning is not a useless step. In fact, it is an essential first move when we see that they are the objects of our pity, because a major step can be made from that point, this is to see that their poverty is, to a large extent, the result of our own greed. Poverty is not an accident and international poverty is not an accident. I'm not an economist but I've lived enough places with enough poor people, and have see enough to find this view of poverty, coming from a number of people far wiser than I, to be in fact the case. For example, in the Caribbean, where I go every summer, we are pauperising the people. In Africa, the part of it I lived in, we pauperised the people. They did not determine what price they were to get for their copper, or their coffee.

So to see a major reason for poverty is a major step. It is not to induce guilt but to show us the shape of our real responsibility. But again, I think, it is only at that stage we still see "the poor". this great, 4 billion member population, living on this planet, at this moment, as objects.

The next step is very difficult, and that is to see the poor as subjects. That's much harder to do. I am surely very unpractised at that myself.

But let me give you a little information about myself. I lived in Africa for a year and experienced moments of generosity that are just unparalleled on the part of people who had virtually nothing. For two years I worked in the States for the federal poverty program, the war on poverty that Lyndon Johnson declared and Richard Nixon dismantled. I ended up spending a lot of time with very poor people. One of the things I discovered is that there is a kind of freedom among those people that I did not find in my buttoned down, upper middle class parish assignment. I wondered about it. There really is this strange phenomenon that when you are marginalized that has all kinds of bad effects but it has some good effects too. It gives you a kind of mobility and a kind of freedom that other people do not have that are too totally slotted into the bourgeois world that I occupy.

But, I'd like to suggest there's more involved here. To be in a place where nobody has cell phones or faxes or are on the internet, is really different because, I find more and more, that we are defining ourselves in terms of our technology. That we know ourselves as human beings in terms of the machines to which we are attached, like so many umbilical chords. It reminds me of the Borg on Star Trek. These half people, half machine entities that walk around. But it's really important to see that all this is a luxury. That kind of self-definition is a luxury. I do define myself in terms of my technology. I have voice mail, I even have an email address. Most of the world does not and I must be very attentive not to say ... Trojcak you are Trojcak because of these mechanical connections to them.

The poor, I think, when you know them as subjects can also tell us that we are not really defined by our possessions. If you don't have any possessions, or very few, then it is very difficult to define yourself by your possessions. Once more in my neighbourhood the property values are the bottom line. This is enormously significant. In other words, I am what I own, and woebetide the woman or man who threatens that. But I am not what I own. The poor, if I take them seriously, can tell me that this is a serious case of mistaken identity.

Another thing that struck me in Africa is that nothing is ever wasted. The ingenuity of people who have nothing to take that nothing and make toys or braziers for cooking on and are doing all sorts of remarkable things, was astonishing to me. We who live in the "throw away" society, as it has been called, can very well assume that the world is an infinitely capacious larder into which I can dip at any time, at any point, for whatever I need and then simply walk away from that. Yet global warming is not an accident. Massive pollution of our air and water is not an accident. And if the poor really are subjects to me, I really believe that consciousness can be born in on me.

And in a somewhat larger way, the poor help to disillusion us. From what? From the notion that we are basically self-created beings. The poor cannot afford that kind of illusion. Nor can they afford the illusion that we are radically independent of each other. Which again, I think, comes with the territory of being middle class, here in North America.

In other words, the poor taken as subjects and not as objects, taken not out of pity but in sympathy, can help me define what it is to be a human being. And there's nothing more important than that. There is no kind of cerebral exercise that we can perform that is going to enable to redefine ourselves in that way. Until the poor become real for us, as our fellow human beings, our co-human beings.

So what is the upshot of all these ruminations? There are many. But I’m led to the question: who's indebted to whom? You know. Talk about third world debt. It's monumental. It's more than, as everybody knows in many countries, than everything that is spent on health care, education, housing, infrastructure. But in fact, who is indebted to whom? When the poor become our co-humans I think the equation has to be radically rewritten.

Finally for us, because this is not a class of sociology or history, much less economics, I don't think it is possible to know this archetypal poor man, Jesus apart from knowing the poor. He was self-described as not having a place to lay his head, who said that if you wanted to be His disciple, you should sell everything you have and give it to the poor and follow me. I don't think that prior to the poor becoming real co-subjects, with us, that Jesus will ever really be known. That's not some kind of melodramatic flourish with which to end this homily. It is the literal truth.

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