February 28, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Joel 2:1-2,12-17 - Sanctify a fast!
or Isaiah 58:1-12 - Is not this the fast: to share your bread?
Psalm 103 Benedic, anima mea
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 Be reconciled to God
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 Prayer, fasting, almsgiving
Andrew Greeley, the Roman Catholic priest, author, sociologist, used to love to rag Cardinal Cody of Chicago, so he wrote naughty novels and got rich from them. True to the Irish washerwomen in his ancestry, he didn't mind washing the Church's linens, including its bed linens, in public. When His Eminence joined protestant and Jewish leaders in declaring that all Chicago's problems in housing, education, health care, employment and poverty, could be solved through enough goodwill and generosity and cooperation, Greeley declared it "Pious nonsense." "The heart of the quandary of poverty is not goodwill or spiritual dedication," he insisted, "it is rather an issue of ways and means, of resourceful intelligence, creative imagination and determined experimentation." He rightly saw that the religious leaders implied that the affluence of the rest of us is responsible for the poverty of the poor. "Only a very few people profit from poverty," Greeley said.
Up till there I had pretty much agreed with Greeley. It's not enough to have your heart in the right place about the disaster of poverty; some action--in some cases inaction--is needed on our part if we are to get hold of the problem of poverty and all that follows from it, if we are to grapple with injustice and wrestle it to the mat. But to declare (as I suppose any millionaire like Greeley would declare) that very few people profit from poverty is arrant nonsense. It is true only in the sense that the percentage of people who own most of the nation's wealth--most of the world's wealth--is small indeed. The oppression of the poor, the deprivation of the world's masses, their depression into hunger and want, is a direct result of a few people owning too much.
The experience of the early Christian community recorded in the fourth chaper of the book of the Acts of the apostles is that when the believers were united in heart and soul, no one claimed anything for themselves, and everything they owned was held in common. They were common-ists. According to Luke, just the way Jesse Helms pronounces "communist." "None of the members was ever in want, as all those who owned land or houses would sell them and bring the money to the apostles; it was then distributed to any members who might be in need." This experience in the Spring time of the Church has always also been looked to as the charter for the coming Revolution, which must come if the Kingdom is to arrive in answer to our prayers. It was the true Springtime fast, the true Lent, of the apostolic church. It is also alas for us "the lost traveller's dream, under the hill."
Early on, Christian duties were thought to be "prayer, fasting, and almsgiving," -- indeed, they precede the Church by thousands of years as the duties implicit in all true religion. But all three are considered to be the restoration of stolen things, not the generous gift of them to the deserving, out of our rightfully owned bounty. We pray to restore our right relstionship to God, stolen by our own disobedience; we fast to restore our right relationship to the world around us (which we tend to eat up)--indeed we define ourselves as 'consumers' in relation to the animal and vegetble worlds, and we give alms to restore our right relationship to our neighbor, stolen from both of us by our willing aquiesence in the capitalist system. A Christian should speak of herself as a Restorer, not a Consumer. José Miranda points out in "Marx and the Bible," that since at least the sixth century A.D. "a bald fact has been systematically excluded from theological and moral consideration, 'To give alms' in the Bible is called 'to do justice.'" The church's ancient Fathers and Mothers saw this with greater clarity than we do. John Chrysostom, on inherited wealth: "its beginning and root have necessarily come out of injustice." And Jerome: "The rich person is either an unjust person or the heir of one." And Basil the Great: "The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes, the money which you board up belongs to the poor." Ambrose: "God willed that this earth should be the common possession of all and he offered its fruits to all. But avarice distributed the rights of possession." And Augustine: "Assisting the needy is justice."
Throughout Christian history, saints kept their watch for the commonwealth of God, and from time to time, a prophet, sage, or martyr, proclaimed it with his life or her death. Antony fled to poverty and the desert to find Christ's dominion there. Benedict led folks to common life and common prayer. Francis took Poverty for his bride, abandoned his father's fortune and wrapped himself in rags. Thomas Müntzer was a radical Reformer who led the Peasants' revolt in 1525, which so frightened Luther that it scared protestants away from social justice for five hundred years. He was caught and tortured for his communism, and beheaded. Thomas More wrote "Utopia" and preached the same ideas, but only as parlor discussions for the clergy, and lost his head not for his common-ism but for his meddling in the King's business. Nowadays, it may be said of Christians in general what Hajo Holborn said of Germans in a seminar on the Reformation at Yale: "they did not have revolutions because the police would not let them."
Isaiah asks, "Isn't this true fasting? To break the bonds of injustice? to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke, every shackle, is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into your house? When you see people without clothing, to cover them, and not to hide your face from such a sight--your own naked flesh. This is what I call true fasting."
Merely to forego delicate foods which probably aren't good for your health anyway is not true fasting. Instead, some powerful act of solidarity with the world's starving masses and your closest starving neighbor requires more than adjusting our calorie intake in the Spring time. The Spring tonic of solidarity means trying to get into what it is like to be a truly poor person, dependent upon God daily, hourly, and not upon our Me First World circumstances. Nor even upon Third World Dependency status. Tokens, on the level with the cross of ashes on your forehead: Go without CNN for the season of Lent, instead, and sit on the floor instead of a chair. Walk everywhere you go for the next 40 days---most of the world does not sit inside upholstered transport machines to get about. Jesus, a poor man, had to borrow a donkey the one time he is recorded as having used one. Try doing without your reading glasses--most of the poor with bad eyesight have no access even to the luxury of dime store specs. Guests have brought bags of old eyeglasses here to Managua, gathered up from families of the deceased no doubt (they won't need them; others will be reading their account books) and we give them away to those who find themselves a pair they can squint through. Say some prayers for people who don't have time to pray--get a copy of the Koran and read a page a day in Lent, and offer it to Allah as a good work for the souls of Muslim children in Iraq whom U.S. missiles murdered or maimed this Lent. Pray Hail Marys if you're a protestant, and Shout Hallelujahs if you're an Episcopalian, to see if you can be in solidarity with a fellow believer from across the religious railroad tracks, where you have forbidden yourself to go. Can you tell the difference between a rich beggar and a poor one? Exercise that discernment and give as much money to a poor beggar on the street each week as you give to your rich parish church, which begs on Sunday morning. See if God notices. Take food from your refrigerator and put it in a bag and pretend you're Lady Bountiful, take it to give to the first hungry person you meet. You may have to travel some dangerous distance from your comfort to find Jesus lurking in the 25th chapter of Matthew.
I know only one U.S. millionaire who gave away all his money to live as a poor man in Nicaragua, and then dedicated himself to housing for the homeless in Seattle. But until the Revolution enables us, all our Revolt must be token. So: find token ways of entering into the humiliation of poverty and deprivation. The Church's Lent (length-ening Spring) began as a way of entering into solidarity with catechumens, who were turning from the World to Liberation in Christ. Today, it must be for us a season of solidarity with the ones whom the world has left out, and left behind. But bigger than tokens (the cross of ashes on your forehead is a token, burnt from last year's triumphant palms) is solidarity. All triumphalism must be turned to ashes for our Lenten humiliation (that is, our turning back to the humus, the earth.) That is the work of a believer in this time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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