Sermon for Ken Lovett's final Sunday, by Peter Hill

Good morning.

            My sermon today will be about the following topics: appreciation, Abraham and Isaac, the year 1986, the state of South Dakota, Ken Lovett, the year 1993, Native Americans, and hiding cigarettes – not necessarily in that order. And I have been warned by the Rector’s Warden herself about going over twelve minutes, so let us begin. Those of you who began attending St. Martin’s within the past ten or fifteen years may be wondering who exactly I am, and whether perhaps I got lost and ended up in the wrong church. In fact, I was born and raised in Chestnut Hill, and spent the first eighteen years of my life here at St. Martin’s. The reason I rarely darken the door of this church is that I have lived out of state since going off to college fifteen years ago.

            St. Martin’s was, however, entirely central to my young life. I spent my childhood dashing around the columbarium, coloring with crayons on the leaflets during sermons such as this one, and studying the faces in the stained-glass windows, with my favorite being the one towards the back, of the prodigal son and the fatted calf (although I always thought that the calf was a lamb). In one of my parents’ favorite stories of my childhood, I came home from preschool one day with a colorful, abstract-looking drawing that I had asked the teacher to label “supernal”, a word that I had undoubtedly learned from the hymn “Ye Watchers And Ye Holy Ones”, one of my favorites.

After nearly 10 years of growing up in this parish family, a momentous occasion happened in 1986.  I refer, of course, to Ken Lovett’s joining the St. Martin’s staff as the music director. In what would be a transformative experience for us both, Ken’s first day as choir director was my first day as a young chorister. The next ten years would be transformative for me, in that I would learn a deep love and appreciation of choral music. Transformative for Ken…in that he was transformed from a young and idealistic, fresh-from-college musician into a stressed-out, gray-haired individual, very likely on the verge of a nervous breakdown. While I can’t take all of the credit for this change, I am proud of the role that I played (I think his son Sam may have taken my place in the succeeding years). In fact, had I stayed in the choir much longer, Ken would have doubtless ended up like poor old Christopher Smart, writing poetry about his cat. (That was a reference for the choir.)

            I am only kidding, of course. But growing up in the choir, first as a children’s choir member, and then as one of the first high schoolers to be allowed to join the adult choir, was a tremendous opportunity for my personal growth. Ken was constantly challenging us. Despite the fact that I was petrified at the prospect of singing solos, Ken assigned me to do so at least a couple of times a year. Even though I was not one of the most golden-voiced young choristers by any means, I muddled through as best I could, and it undoubtedly improved my self-confidence. When I was in high school, Ken asked me one day if I could play the accompaniment for the children’s choir anthem on the following Sunday, even though it had been many years since I had taken piano lessons or had performed in front of others. But I felt that he knew I could do a good job, and I practiced the piece day in and day out until I knew the accompaniment by heart.

            Over the years, I gradually came to realize that the high standards that Ken set were motivating me to strive to reach a higher standard for myself. When I joined the adult choir, with a voice that was exceedingly late to change, Ken assigned me to sing first tenor, for lack of a better option. I used to take every piece of music home with me and practice the tenor line; by itself, against the soprano line, and against the bass line to be sure that I knew it perfectly. I also signed up for weekly voice lessons with Alyson so that I could make a good contribution to my section. In a way, Ken’s perfectionism shaped my own.

            But I think that most of all, what I learned from Ken – and from my experience with the choir overall – was appreciation.  Ken has an unparalleled ear for beauty, and I was exposed to a wonderful cross-section of choral music, from the Renaissance era to the present day. I learned to appreciate polyphony, the proper blend of voices, carefully-chosen dissonances, dynamic changes, the importance of the proper tempo. I learned to appreciate the craft of the musician, the delicate balance between soloist and choir, and the skill required to direct a piece while playing an instrument that requires all four limbs at once.

            And on top of these lessons, there was another layer of personal gratitude in the fact that I had learned to appreciate these things in the first place. I appreciated that Ken had been so central to my newly-developed awareness. I appreciated that despite all of the gray hairs that I and my little accomplices had given him; despite the months spent hiding his cigarettes in an ill-begotten plan to get him to quit smoking back in the ‘80s, despite making fun of his real first name when he was naïve enough to answer us truthfully when we asked, despite making up parody versions of hymns and anthems with cleverly-changed lyrics and singing them ad nauseam during breaks in rehearsal, Ken continued to put up with us, challenge us, and expose us to beautiful music. And like many of my choral contemporaries, music has continued to be a major driving force in my life. I sang in choirs all through college, and I still listen to tapes of our old evensongs and concerts on a regular basis.

            I will return to the subject of Ken before I finish, but I should say that the notion of appreciation was an easy unifying theme as I was thinking about what to say today. The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis 22 is a familiar one, and one that I remember well from childhood Sunday school classes in the undercroft. As I grew older and more critical-minded, I sometimes found the story rather unsettling, an example in which – not unlike the story of Job – the God of the Old Testament seemingly toys with a mere mortal to see how much he can make him squirm.

            But oh, the appreciation that Abraham must have felt from that day forward, to have his son – the son who had almost died at his hand – alive. In fact, we are told that not only did Isaac outlive his ancient father, but died at the ripe old age of 180. Even the Psalm for today echoes the notion of appreciation and its sister emotion, gratitude. “Your love, O Lord, forever will I sing; from age to age, my mouth will proclaim your faithfulness.”…“Happy are the people who know the festal shout! They walk, O Lord, in the light of your presence.”

            But I never really appreciated my upbringing until a series of trips that began in 1993. In that year, as those of you old-timers may remember, the youth group began a series of annual service trips – led by the phenomenal Jack and Barbara Dundon – to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. To say that none of us kids had spent time on a rural Indian reservation, which also happened to be the poorest county in the United States, would be an understatement. The first trip was a huge eye-opener, and the first time most of us were exposed so directly to people who had such a different lot in life. I can say without any hesitation that those trips affected every single one of us who went, perhaps me more than most.

            You see, after graduating from college eleven years ago, I moved to the reservation to live. Armed with a high school teaching certification and a good dose of youthful idealism, I began work in the reservation school system, first at a tribal contract school funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and then at a Jesuit-administered school where I just completed my tenth year of teaching. Over the years I met a wonderful woman who hailed from a different part of South Dakota, and we were married three years ago, with a beautiful baby girl joining us a couple of years later. Other than that, just the thought of trying to condense ten years of living on the reservation into a few minutes or a couple of anecdotes is so daunting, that perhaps I shouldn’t attempt it. But I will say that in an odd twist of fate, I have become fluent in the Lakota language, and have spent the past few years teaching it at the school, to students for whom it is very much a second language. Hardly anyone below the age of 40 speaks the language fluently, a dire situation that I am deeply devoted to remedying.

            Meanwhile on the reservation, the Episcopal Church is struggling to survive. Formerly the predominant Christian denomination among the Lakota people, the church is now shuttering many of its community parishes, probably for good. At the church that my wife and I are members of, twenty people is a good Sunday turnout, and the annual budget for the parish is around $800 a year, most of which goes to propane costs for winter heating. When there is not enough propane to heat the church, it will be closed for weeks on end. Sometimes we reminisce about our respective parishes of old, with their strong core memberships, vibrant ministries, and exceptional choirs. But we have learned to appreciate what we have out there, and what we lack, just as we have expanded our spiritual horizons to include the sweatlodge, the Sundance, and other traditional Lakota ceremonies that we attend on a regular basis.

            In her wonderful book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris relates a parallel account of how life on the Great Plains made her more appreciative of a rich and stimulating life that she might otherwise have taken for granted. She writes:

For me, moving to Dakota meant entering a kind of literary desert. I left behind a job in arts administration in New York City that had allowed me to attend several poetry readings a week, and most of my friends were also writers…[But] when the deprivations of Dakota become oppressive, I try simply to accept what is the natural result of my choosing to live in isolated circumstances. All in all, I suspect that the lack of a literary scene on the Plains has been good for me…Now a poetry reading is an event in my life, a pleasure rather than something I take for granted. When I attend a good reading, experiencing what a friend once called “the relief of hearing language,” I find it as refreshing as a rain that drenches parched soil.

Perhaps I might describe my experience this morning as “the relief of hearing music.” Without a doubt our Ken has pulled out all of the stops today (an expression which, of course, refers to the act of an organist). As he plays his last notes, and conducts his last anthems, and gives one last, secret thumbs-up to his singers, I invite everyone who has been a part of this parish family for any length of time to reflect back on how one man’s gifts have enriched this community and touched so many people. There are many like me, scattered to the wind, who have been members of this church during the last quarter-century, and who, while they may not have made it back today, nevertheless have fond memories of a phenomenal music program. I speak on behalf of all of those, past and present, when I say “Thank you, Ken.”

I close with the words of Frederick Pratt Green, and the text of an anthem that we used to sing back when I was in the parish choir:

How often, making music, we have found

A new dimension in the world of sound,

As worship moves us to a more profound: Alleluia.

Let every instrument be tuned for praise!

Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise!

And may God give us faith to sing always: Alleluia!  Amen.

Christianity and Co-Dependence

My mother stood up in church.  Or more accurately she remained standing.

On a Sunday during the late 1970s, my mother remained standing during the Eucharistic Prayer after the singing of the Sanctus.  The common practice was to kneel at that point and, of course, everyone did including yours truly.  When we went up to the communion rail, mom stood to receive communion while everyone else knelt.  I did not realize it at the time - as I squirmed in my self-conscious childhood embarrassment - that my mother was leading a revolution in our church.

The revolution came from a deeply entwined story that is both personal and theological.   Mom stood up as a statement of human dignity.  The Eucharist is a proclamation of how God has restored humanity to harmony with God and has restored our innate, created dignity.  So, it would seem, it is fitting to stand up in full celebration of our healed humanity, demonstrating with out bodies what God has done for us.  The custom of kneeling sends a different message, a message of the unworthy begging for God's attention and approval, which was the theology of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  "We are not worthy to come to this table, trusting in our own righteousness."  I am all for humility, but humility means different things depending on your race, gender or class.

For mom, this act of human dignity also represented a victory over all the voices that had taught her she was unworthy or defective because she was a woman.  As a woman who was raised in Texas in the 1940s and 1950s the messages were clear about what women were expected to be and where they fit in relation to men and to God.  This deep misogyny was not from God - although plenty of men and women used the word of God to endorse it - and rejecting it by standing in God's presence at the Eucharist was a triumphant and faithful act.

There was another wonderfully healing victory in this act as well.  My mother and father were both raised in alcoholic households and have done a wonderful job healing from the scars of their early lives.  In an alcoholic household, the addict uses shame, rage, blame and withdrawal of affection to undermine the self-esteem of other family members, thus insulating themselves from accountability by dis-empowering children and spouse. For mom, to stand up at Eucharist was also a victory over the voice of the addict who undermined her dignity, unlike God, who affirms and heals it.

Christianity is often accused of training believers to be subservient, submissive and overly detached from our basic self-interests.  (I am thinking here about  Friedrich Nietzsche who is worth a read!)  Indeed, the characteristics of the traditional Christian character match up fairly well with the characteristics of a co-dependent personality; the need to be needed, the self-abasement, the putting others before self to the point of self-harm, the doing for others what they could do for themselves, the overweening kindness, passive aggression and the lack of accountability.  I believe that God has restored, and is restoring, our basic human dignity and calling us to be co-creators in that process of redemption in ways that are both empowering and generative.  Part of that healing is learning how to enter into mutual relationships that are not based on neediness or manipulation, but rather on primary respect for the other as a human brother or sister - the belief that our neighbor has everything they need already and merely need to share what we have.

In our Baptism, we vow to "respect the dignity of every human being."  In an interesting way, we disrespect human beings when we relate to them on the level of neediness only, or incapacity.  To say that another human being is 'incapable,'  is first an incredible assumption and second an insult to their basic dignity.  We guard against making this assumption too easy in our laws which reflect our high regard for human autonomy.

Some might be afraid that a focus on mutuality and dignity will lead us to warring and rivalrous self-interests competing for scarce resources.  On this point I highly recommend the book Talking to Strangers by Danielle Allen, where she asks, "Why is self-interest necessarily competitive?"  Self-interest can and does overlap among large segments of the population.  I am not alone in finding affordable, high quality education in my self-interest.  What this fear points to, however, is that mutuality is harder work and requires a different set of skills for negotiating relationship than does relationship based on neediness and the need to be needed.

Professor John Bowlin at Princeton Theological Seminary recently challenged me to wonder about Jesus' self-interest.  More on this next time....

Salvation for All

A piece of wisdom from the Buddhist tradition has captured my imagination.  The saying goes, "No one will enter Nirvana until everyone can enter Nirvana."  What impresses me about this statement is that an enlightened and compassionate soul would choose to forgo bliss and re-enter the karmic cycle of suffering and rebirth for the sake of others.  Can you hear how that resonates with the story of  Jesus, who chose to enter the cycle of birth, suffering and death to free creation from alienation from God so we could all be restored to God's presence?

American Christian's have a history of presenting salvation as an individualistic concern.  I stand in tension with this tradition, because I am convinced that salvation is a collective and cosmic concern.  In other words, no one is saved until everyone is saved.  Or, I don't want to be saved if others are left behind. 

The "left behind" language is intentional.  In May, the media were sucked into the false drama of the alleged rapture.  The sick theology of the cult which pandered this prediction seemed entirely comfortable with the mass of humanity consigned to genocidal suffering and extermination.  To my horror, it seems that folks who were expecting to be raptured could live comfortably with the suffering of those left behind.  Salvation did not seem to include a heart expanded to the breadth of God's compassion but rather it did include a heart that seemed to relish God's punishment of others.

What I find painfully ironic is that while we were preoccupied  by this silliness a more healthy theology would have us asking, "What about the folks who are being left behind every day?"  By that I mean all who are left behind economically and educationally, all who are left behind in the prison system, all who are left behind nutritionally and with sub-standard housing and health care. The moment in the story of the Ascension of Jesus when the angels ask "Why are you standing around staring into the heavens?"  seems to be a healthy rejoinder to the rapture rubbernecking that distracts from the real draw of the Gospel toward the whole of society and creation.

It is interesting to me that many of the folks who hoped for the rapture seemed to be anticipating relief from being left behind economically.  In interviews, I heard many of the hopeful talk about debt of all kinds and what a relief it would be to be free of that debt.  Indeed it would be a relief.   We need to be responsive to this pain and suffering while we tell an alternative story of what salvation means.

Salvation for all would entail a wholly other set of motivations and concerns.  While 'individualistic salvation' accords easily with social fragmentation and the total war of self-interested rivalry between citizens seeking scarce resources (the "winner take all" mentality that fuels much behavior), a 'collective salvation' perspective would be concerned, indeed highly motivated, for the health and well-being of all. Collective Salvation seems to model a better representation of God's compassion as we know it in Jesus.

I don't think it is a coincidence that Evangelical "personal relationship,"  "personal salvation"  and "prosperity Gospel" language have dominated American Christianity over the last 30 years as both Republican and Democratic administrations have withdrawn support from the social safety net and assailed the common good for the sake of a massive transfer of wealth to the top .1% of the population.  Our challenge is to assert a countervailing vision of mutual concern and the common good and to intentionally invest in trust building relationships which build community from the grass-roots up.

A Prayer and Reflection for Good Friday

Words Fail Me…..

The intensity of emotion overwhelms my ability to frame thoughts and find words. 

To speak feels indecent, like chattering about theology beside the bed of a dying person.

The only thing that works for me is the language of prayer.

As I sat in the chapel this morning the following prayer came to me,

“Lord God, grant me the courage to be present, simply present to the suffering of your son today.

As I meditate on his passion, I am afraid and I am overwhelmed, Lord God. Please hold on to me so that I will not turn away and run. Give me the grace to be present to the suffering of your son today.

Lord God, give me the grace to open my heart and mind to Jesus as he absorbs the hate of the world, the rage and fury of the world on the cross. Help me to see how he carries the scorn, betrayal, judgment, anguish, suffering, rejection, prejudice, shame and  violence of the world in his body today.”

As I prayed, a new sensation came to me….

It was like the feeling of a receding tide, sweeping the beach and pulling the sand and stone and driftwood out to sea.  It was as if God was tugging at me, inviting me to be present to my own shadow, the wrong in me, and to let it flow into Jesus as well. 

I recoiled at first. I backed away. I could barely face Jesus on the Cross, how could I see my suffering, my anguish, my hurt and my wrong put on him.  But this was the invitation.  Jesus was carrying away the sin of the world – like a receding tide – and my sin too could be washed away. 

Letting go feels like grief, feels like mourning, feels like dying.

And that is our gift this morning.  To be present to our beloved, tortured, dying  savior who offers himself – as a great receding oceanic tide - that sweeps up and receives the worst of the world, the worst in us, and sets us free. 

What if Death is Not the Enemy?

As we approach Easter more than one preacher is preparing a sermon about God vanquishing the power of sin and death in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The Good News according to this highly Pauline trope is that we no longer need to live in fear of death, "death has lost its sting."  Theologically we are to understand that death is a product of sin and not an intended part of God's design for humanity.  Death is a punishment for human disobedience and another indicator of our alienation from harmony with God.  Sermons may go in many directions at this point assuring folks that death is a doorway to an individual after-life with God in heaven, or that freed from a fear of death we may take the risky path of faithfulness and discipleship here in this life.  I believe these are completely legitimate interpretations.

What if death is not the enemy, however?  The theologian David Ford recently introduced me to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who is a diligent smasher of all idols that we humans routinely mistake for God.  According to Levinas, death itself can become another idol to which we assign an ultimate power and a totalizing explanatory power, such as "most human behavior can be explained by fear of death."  Idols, and totalizing (or reductive) thinking is dangerous for at least two reasons: 1.  Our relation with a living God is obscured and 'managed' when we rely on such limiting constructs, and 2. People are dehumanized, defaced and generalized into a mechanistic series of traits and attributes making us 'manageable' objects more than infinitely unique and valuable subjects. 

What if death is just what happens at the end of life and the resurrection is about something else? This is not only a speculative question.  With a rapidly aging population and massive inflation of health care expenditure especially in the last year of life when massive life-saving and sustaining measures are applied for very little result in increased life-span, this is also a very concrete question.  Ironically enough two-thousand years of preaching the Resurrection has done little to effect our willingness to invest heavily in the extension of our mortal life.  Perhaps this is the case because the trope that says, "Death is the Enemy that Resurrection Defeats" has an odd way of re-empowering death as a totalizing concept, an essential 'bad guy' in the narrative that gains power in the constant retelling.  The glory of the victory depends on the estimation of the enemy.

A few weeks ago we read the story of the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead and I wondered why did Jesus need to die if we already had this proof that God was stronger than death.  Why not celebrate Easter two weeks earlier!  My conclusion is simply that the resurrection is about something more than the generic defeat of death by life - everlasting, seasonal or otherwise.  Resurrection - to borrow heavily from Rowan Williams - is really more about the vindication of one particular life lived in radical faithfulness- indeed union- with God, that of Jesus the Christ.  That Risen Life is then incorporated in a community with a distinct mission of reconciliation, healing and compassion in the world.

One final implication of a re-appraisal of the theological position of death is to wonder how God the Creator's relationship with death changes as a result of the crucifixion of God the Son.  Much theology attempts to distance the 1st person of the Trinity from the suffering and death of the 2nd person.  Classically some atonement theories imply that God the Father requires the blood of the son to satiate God's thirst for recompense.  My notion is that God the Creator fully participated in the suffering and death of Jesus and that in some way the Godhead now includes the reality of death, not as eternal enemy but as a transformed part of ultimate reality. 

Where the Grapes of Wrath Are Stored: A sermon for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

150 years ago this week the American Civil War began and our Nation entered the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  By the end of the war over 6200,000 had died – a staggering 2% of the U.S. population. – and another 400,000 had been wounded.  At the start of the war 4 million Africans were enslaved in our country – 8% of the total population – and by the end of the war they still had more than a  hundred year struggle for freedom ahead of them.  

The prophet Ezekial took me to a valley of dry bones this week and we walked around.

I could hear the snap, crack and knock of brittle bones under my feet.   I could feel the tension in my body as I took immense care with each step.  I could feel the horror rise in my heart – the desolation and emptiness, the overwhelming loss of precious, distinct human lives.  This valley of bones had many names – Chancellorsville, Antietam, Wilderness, Bull Run, Gettysburg, Vicksburg …

As I walked and walked with the Prophet Ezekiel there was no end to the bones, the bones remained underfoot, a part of our landscape, even up to today.

William Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead, it is not even past.”  I believe that as a nation we are still tripping over the bones of the fratricidal blood-bath that formed us as a people.  The bones that are still underfoot  are called white supremacy and racism, faction and rivalrous self interest, unequal distribution of sacrifice, suffering and opportunity, the equation of human value with class status,  a reflexive violence in act and in rhetoric.  We have still not decided what it means to be a diverse people and it seems to me that we are rapidly losing any sense of obligation to one-another at all, that the spirit of the age is “Every Man for Himself,”  and “Get mine while I can.”

In a season devoted to reflection on forgiveness we need to look hard at the bones that litter our past and our present.  We cannot really enter the process of reconciliation without a reckoning, a sober appraisal.  We avoid it, deny it, skim over it, put a happy face on it all the time.  We can tell it is highly charged and contested territory because blame, guilt, self-pity and fierce defensive anger erupt when we go there.  We like to prematurely and unilaterally declare past wounds healed without any significant effort or sacrifice on our part.  I agree with Dr. James Cone when he says that progress will be made toward racial reconciliation when white Americans take racism and white supremacy seriously as a subject for self-examination.    

I believe we need to put this work at the center of our reflection on reconciliation and forgiveness not to wallow in guilt but because that is where the path of new life in Christ leads.

We need a new spirit in our dry bones.  We need God’s spirit to return us to life.  I hear that spirit speaking in one of our greatest national prophets who literally spoke a word over the dry bones.  I would like to read from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, where I hear the spirit of God speaking….

"Neither party – North or South- expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes God’s aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through God’s appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that God gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

What does it take to move on?  It requires a clear reckoning, a spirit of sacrifice and a spirit of compassion – hearts expanded to meet and include our suffering neighbor as an indispensable part of ourselves.   It takes a spirit I have only ever experienced fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.  Collectively and individually we put on the person-hood of Christ in our  Baptism.  This is good news for us and for the world that need us so badly.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

Charity: Turning Scandal into Virtue

After reading Jesus Freak by Sarah Miles I am even more convinced that charity takes a public scandal and converts it to private virtue.  The public scandal is our refusal as a nation to justly provide for folks who draw the short stick in an economy premised on a perpetual supply of short sticks.  No reputable economist believes in full employment and most peg the lowest possible unemployment rate in an advanced capitalist economy at 4%.  Of course, that number does not include the unemployable and the underemployed.  The reigning pseudo-scientific 'economic model' of morality frets constantly about the 'moral hazard' of providing a humane level of benefit for the unemployed, underemployed and unemployable even while admitting that our economy has no other means of meeting their needs.  Fear, it seems, is an essential motivator.  "We must be afraid of unemployment or we won't want to work," is the argument in a nutshell.   Conveniently the 'moral hazard' of excessive wealth is hardly mentioned.

And that is where charity comes in.  Charity - the voluntary redistribution of excess food, clothing, human capital and money  by a small minority of citizens - provides for those without the means of self-sufficiency while providing an opportunity for the charitable to grow virtuous.   Charitable organizations are often blatantly instrumental in their notion that charitable work is an opportunity for the giver to grow spiritually or ethically by attending to the poor.  Over time,  this reasoning serves to form a justification for the suffering of the poor who exist as a means for the generous to grow in compassion.  (See your average Community Service program) Suffering is a crucial unacknowledged article of faith in our secular creed which holds that suffering is essential for learning the virtues of hard work etc.  Ironically, the poor get no credit for the essential sacrifice and suffering they take on for the sake of an economy that will always leave some behind.  It is important to note the subtle ways that Christian theology has buttressed this meme.

My beef with Sara Miles is her rush to glorify her charitable work -and by extension herself as the hero of the story - without risking any larger analysis of the place of charity in society.  Is this a willful naivete?  As someone who has been intimately involved in the charitable sector for thirty years I have to wonder if in part it is just the well-worn charitable habit of marketing the work through constant cries of crisis and perpetual personalization of need.  The person - like myself - who asks uncomfortable questions about the effect of the "Free Food Industry" (See Sweet Charity) on local economies are dismissed as heartless scolds.  But what is the effect of free food dumping in poor communities?  How does it discourage the creation of a sustainable local food economy?  Who is doing this research?

Honestly, during my time as Executive Director of the largest food pantry in Trenton, I had to think that the last thing that small city needs is more charity.  If we could convert in-kind food donation to food stamp dollars for low-income clients we would achieve two goals: 1. Increased autonomy and dignity for our clients who could then chose food in the socially normal way,  2.  Increased cash in the local economy where our clients would shop for their food.  One irony of the free food industry is that the economic beneficiaries are the vendors and producers who are usually not located in poor communities.  If I donate a bag of food to a charity I usually purchase it in my middle class neighborhood.  USDA foods benefit agro-business. Mass food donations by Food Industry Giants like Kraft etc. benefit those companies by dumping surplus.  (Check the board list for Feeding America!)

What is wrong with this picture?  Charitable donation cannot aggregate enough funding to provide adequate food stamp style support.  Only as a nation -through the means of government- can we bring together enough money to have the desired effect.  And this is exactly what we refuse to do.  This is the scandal.  Charity - funded by a small minority of the populace - covers the scandal in a warm, if skimpy and fragile blanket.

At the end of the day, charity is a pea shooter in a tank battle,  a piggy bank in a scorched desert of massive disinvestment.   And it gets worse.  Clothing donated  in the USA to charities like Vietnam Vets are shipped in bulk to Guatemala where they undermine the manufacture and retail of locally produced clothing.  Charitable mission groups in Haiti constantly take work away from local workers during their one week mission 'experiences.'  We cannot afford pious naivete about charity.