Friday, February 06, 2004
(11:22 PM) | Anonymous:
The Radical Inbreaking of God: Or Everyone Needs to Have the Shit Beaten Out of Them by a Homeless Man.
Over at the Dialog listserv the stars have aligned so that our topic is holiness (aka Christian perfection, if that isn't an oxymoron...), especially as John Wesley understood it. Now this conversation normally revolves around the idea of sin-properly-so-called as "a willful transgression against the known law [will] of God." I find this to be boring and unhelpful in our age where our fundamental orientation is to sin and to do so ignorantly. Let's face it, salvation does not happen in the afterlife, as if there is one, but happens in this life or it is not truly a liberating happening. Now this life and therefore our sins are governed by our fundamental attunements, the systems in which we tarry in, which is of course Capitalism. As such the only 'sins' present-to-hand are those of the pietistic sort, i.e. don't cuss, have sex, smoke, think bad thoughts and so on and so forth. Yet the truly mortal aspect of sin, which I think is an attunement as opposed to an action, is never seen. The child we kill for the shirt we wear is conveniently never a part of my life in any face-to-face way, we have effectively killed the other by avoiding their gaze and as such we have killed God.I really like what Bishop Romero has to say concerning this:
In the first place, we [the poor of Latin America] have a better knowledge of what sin is. We know that offending God is death for humans. We know that such a sin really is mortal, not only in the sense of the interior death of the person who commits the sin, but also because of the real, objective death the sin produces. Let us remind ourselves of a fundamental datum of our Christian faith: sin killed the Son of God, and sin is what goes on killing the children of God. We see the basic truth of the Christian faith daily in the situation in our country. It is impossible to offend God without offending one's brother or sister. And the worst offense against God, the worst form of secularism, as one of our Salvadoran theologians has said, is: "to turn children of God, temples of the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ in history, into victims of oppression and injustice, into slaves to economic greed, into fodder for political repression. The worst of these forms of secularism is the denial of grace by the objectivization of this world as an operative presence of the powers of evil, the visible presence of the denial of God.
Dave Belcher has suggested that the desire of Capitalism, to have more stuff and to never be full, should be pointed instead towards God. Kind of an Augustinian approach that has its merits. I think, however, that this desire can only be played out in the action of Being-with-poor-people. If, as Derrida so cleverly says, "every other is wholly other" than our desire should be for that other. Of course Derrida's clever statement would not agree with my position that poor people are more other than, say, George W. is and there is much to be made about the fact that poor people serve a very useful function in Empire, mainly keeping the system balanced. Yet, Jesus says that he is in the poor and the Church gives testament to this fact in its praxis and in the liturgy. I give testimony to it in the form of a story.
I have worked at the Salvation Army homeless shelter off and on for two years. For the most part this served the dual function of being a means of grace for me and a source of income. I'd say, as far as employees go, I treated the clients very well and made some important friendships but I would always be the yuppie-to-be working at the homeless shelter. Though I tried to not see myself as somehow different, it is hard when you actually have clean clothes to wear and your friend does not. My main job is to keep the peace, to make sure drugs aren't being sold and drunks are either behaved or thrown out and to that extent I have to do rounds around the building. One particular night I had a client come in who apologized to me for being a dick earlier in the week (I had called the cops on him for stealing) and then he asked for a sandwich and was on his way. When I began my rounds I ran into him outside, rummaging through a sack of clothes and arguing with another client and being the self-assured person that I am I told them they had to clear out of the alley and that I needed to see the bag of clothes he was rummaging through since it looked to be a donation to the thrift store. The man than proceeded to threaten me, when I brought his attention to the fact that he didn't need to threaten me he came chest to chest with me and I was breathing in his dirty breath that had the strong scent of alcohol and black and mild cigars. My adrenaline peaked and I was in flight or fight mode as he preceded to call me a "pansy ass nigger" and pushed me around, into the brick wall, farther down the street screaming the whole time, ”You think you a fucking big man, with your big chest you fucking pussy!?" He did let me walk away though. That was an other, that was an inbreaking, that was God and though it troubles me to say it, that was Jesus, the Christ. To this day I am unsure if I acted as his Mary or his Pilate.
