I'm reading the book Amazing Grace, by Johnathon Kozol. I feel like I read it with my mouth open, not sure what to do with the words that are entering my brain- where to put them. In these days post- 'trina where people are saying things like, "Is this really America". I read the stories in this book, of people living in New York, and I think, this book has been out for almost ten years. "Is this America?" I want to share a part of what I read recently, about the author talking to a minister.
"Although Mott Haven is routinely called the deadliest neighborhood in New York City, he tells me that the homicide rate may be as high, or higher in Hunts Point. 'I remember a young couple in my congregation with a teenage son and two young daughters. They joined our church for Easter and rededicated their existence to the Lord. Two weeks later, the son came home and found his father down in the living room, his mother in the laundry room down in the basement, both shot dead. What message do I give these three young people? I know that no words I can speak will ease their pain."
I ask him how he understands his mission as a pastor in this neighborhood.
"We are not literal fundamentalists here at Bright Temple," he replies. "We see God as a liberating force who calls us to deliver people from oppression. The apparent consensus of the powerful is that the ghetto is to be preserved as a perpetual cathc-basin for the poor. It's not about annihilating segregation or even about a transformation of the ghetto, but setting up 'programs' to teach people to 'adjust' to it, to show a 'functional' adaptation to an evil institution. That is pretty much the good behavior that the segregated asks for in the segregated.
"As a religious man, I see it as my obligation to speak out against this, not to bend the poor to be accommodated to injustice but to empower them to fight it and try to tear it down. We are not about amerlioration here. As a church we speak prophetically. We speak not of 'misfortune' but 'injustice'. We also look at the unjust.
"Do people in the neighborhood', I ask, "use language like 'injustice"?
"He presses his hands flat on his desk. 'How often do you speak of the the air? If something touches every aspect of existence, every minute of every hour of your life, it needn't often be spelled out. But it is always there, a quiet understanding.
1 comment:
Good and thought-provoking post.
Earlier this year I read The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance by Dorothee Soelle and she uses the term "resistance" to describe our lifestyle of opposition to social injustice, environmental exploitation, globalization and the economic raping of the third world, and human violence of all kinds.
She used the metaphor of Israel's life in exile in Babylon rather than the Exodus, choosing being in opposition to the status quo rather than expectations of triumph.
As when I lived in Tanzania, the evil we face (sickness, poverty, injustice - sins of every type) may seem too great and we become discouraged if we are trying to "beat it." But when we are simply opposing it not because we expect to win but because of who we are, then we tend not to be overwhelmed by the darkness.
She would say we "resist."
I like the idea that we believers are an outpost of the Kingdom of God in enemy territory and maneuvering within their line of fire. It is the ancient Christian idea of altera civitas - another city. We are aliens in a foreign land.
tibi gloria, Domine!
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