the world is given to all

I spent the weekend in Camden, New Jersey with two college students and two nuns. We stayed at the Romero Center, a Catholic retreat and social justice center whose mission is "to build bridges of understanding between people of faith in urban and suburban churches, leading people to a deeper awareness of our prophetic vocation, as we respond to our sisters and brothers in remarkable need."

There's a lot I could say about the weekend. I could tell you that Camden is the poorest city in our rich nation and that only 28% of its residents graduate from high school. 28%! Or that the reported unemployment rate is almost 16% and the actual rate may be as high as 32%. You may be surprised to know that the food stamp allotment per person per meal in the state of New Jersey is 86 cents. That's less than $3 per day! As part of our immersion experience we shopped for a day's worth of food on this amount of money and ate only that food, and it was HARD. I could recount the stories of a woman who directs one of the only HIV/AIDS ministries in Camden, about people with the virus being abandoned and scoffed by their families, about nurses refusing to enter their hospital rooms, as if the very air they breathe is infected with AIDS, as if they hold no dignity, as if their suffering is nothing. I could talk about the rampant drug crime or the lack of affordable housing. There's the homelessness problem and the continuous corruption of city government, the condemned homes and the environmental hazards.

I could talk about all this. But I won't.

Instead I'm going to tell you this. New Jersey is the wealthiest state in the nation.

That's right - the poorest city is in the richest state in the richest country on earth. This serves only to magnify the injustices on perpetual display in Camden. And there are very few people who care. As one of the staff of the Romero Center put it, not many people wake up in the morning and say, "I think I'll go to Camden today." This is not to discount all of the people who do very good work to put an end to poverty, its causes and effects in Camden. On the contrary, their efforts are well noted. It is, however, to highlight what is, in my estimation, our greatest failure as a people. A rich people, that is.

Let me take a step back in order to explain. One of our prayers at the Romero Center included this song:

Bryan Sirchio
"If You Eat Each Day"

Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere
I go there now and then to get my vision clear
Sometimes it gets so hazy in this land of
I consume therefore I am

I was working in this clinic for the dying & diseased
Living skeletons with AIDS and TB
Organized and run by Mother Teresa and her sisters of Charity
I asked the nun in charge, Sister, what should I do?
She smiled and said I've got a job for you
Then she gave me a pair of scissors, and said,
See that man right there
He'd like for you to cut his hair
I said, oh, Sister are you sure?...

I mean its not like I have given
many haircuts in my day
But I was there to help, so I just smiled and said, OK
So there I was, this natural born Vidal Sassoon
just snipping that hair away

We struck up conversation as best we could
His English was broken, my Creole's not too good
But we managed to communicate enough for him to say
Something I never will forget

You see I asked him, do you think I'm rich?
And this was his response to me
He said, well how many times a week do you eat?
Well his question took my voice away
And then he said, you mean you eat every day?
And I said, yeah, and he just said this
Well if you eat each day, you're rich

Somehow that moment felt to me like Holy Ground
I finished his haircut and when I turned around
There was a whole line of customers
who kinda like the way I cut that one man's hair!

So I gave them haircuts but they gave me so much more
They gave me the perspective of the poorest of the poor
And I know I'll spend the rest of my life
trying to somehow respond

'Cause if its true as we often say that wealth is relative
It just might take the dying poor in a place like Port au Prince
To help us see this relativity from God's point of view
To cut through our first world denial with gospel Truth
And as for me, I know I need to receive this paradigm shift
That in a hungry world, if we eat each day...
We're rich

Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere
I go there now and then to get my vision clear
Sometimes it gets so hazy in this land of
I consume therefore I am


Words & Music by Bryan C. Sirchio
© 1999 Crosswind Music Ministries
All Rights Reserved - www.sirchio.com

I know Haiti isn’t Camden and the developing world is not our world. But the unemployment and education rates in Camden certainly are more akin to those in the third world than to our national averages. Camden and other places like it are our third world right here at home. There are differences, to be sure, and I’m not making a comparison of degree, but a point of our failure to care for our own.

Our failure as a rich people is that we don’t care about the powerless. In fact, we go further. We curse them, fear them, blame them. We pretend that our collections of material comfort – our SUVs and McMansions, our designer clothes made in sweatshops and our computers dumped in toxic heaps in China when we no longer want them – we pretend that these things somehow matter more than the dignity and livelihood of another human being.

We don’t choose the situation into which we are born. I know I wasn’t asked if I’d rather be born in a middle-class suburb or a despicable, rat-infested city. And I’ve come to believe that when we make assumptions and stereotypes about our brothers and sisters born into that other world, when we deny our responsibility to share our education, resources, and wealth and open our hearts to them, treat them as equals, acknowledge that we have failed to recognize God’s intention for his people, we are being just as racist and classist as slaveholders of the Old South or the champions of apartheid in South Africa.

The people of Camden reinforced this for me. They blessed me with the gift of discomfort. Not the kind of being away from my daily comfort zone, but the sort in which I’m reminded of a very daunting and vital task. And so I will continue to explore what this means for me, what life is like for them, and what we share as a people on a common journey.

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“You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him [her] what is his [hers]. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have abrogated to yourself. The world is given to all, and not only to the rich.” ~Saint Ambrose

i stand corrected

While writing yesterday's post the husband asked me what I was writing about. I told him that he needed to wait and read it just like everyone else. He thought I should have him proofread it before publishing it. I told him that I am very good at proofreading my own writing, thank you very much. Well, the lack of humility came back to kick me in the butt (doesn't it always...). Turns out our lunch was a pasty shade of white (pale) instead of what you use to carry sand at the beach (pail). I've since edited the word, so you can't go back and see my mistake.

Husband, I stand corrected. But don't take too much pride. It's still a BAG, not a pail anyway.

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"Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all." ~William Temple

"If I only had a little humility, I would be perfect." ~Ted Turner

a step back

I realized after my last post that I may not have sounded like a real person. In case there's any doubt in your mind, here is the conversation my husband and I just had:

me: "Honey, how did dimes and nickels get in the laundry quarter jar?" [we still live in an apartment building and have the college-style coin-operated washer/dryer combo shared by the entire hallway]

husband: "I don't know."

me: "You don't know?" [in one of those "yeah, right" tones]

husband: "Maybe it's kinda like how you left our lunch pail at work and denied it." [we now share his lunch bag because I accidentally left my lunch bag in my trunk with old egg salad in it over the summer; I made him throw the whole thing away at a trash can outside the grocery store. my entire car smelled like rotten egg salad, as if non-rotten egg salad doesn't smell bad enough]

me: "It's a bag, not a pail."

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So a friend told me today that my blog is "intriguing." When I asked for clarification, he gave me a couple of reasons for his comment, one of which was that he doesn't understand why anyone would want to create a public blog. It's a good question. There are so many ideas out there, so many websites. And everyone will continue to have their own opinions anyway, no matter my ramblings.

I gave him some unconvincing and generic answer like "I guess I just see it as a way to share what I feel are worthwhile thoughts and experiences with other people."

Then I came home and checked my friends' blogs for new posts -- all three of them. Three blogs that is, not three friends. A college friend of mine has a parenthood blog in which she shares the joys and trials of being a new mom, in an engaging and endearing, non soccer-mom sort of way, I might add. (I guess five month old babies can't play soccer anyway, but I don't think my friend will ever be this mom even when her daughter is of soccer-playing age.) Anyway, in her blog this friend mentioned that my first post made her think about more than her newly domestic life centered around her child, and that, for a moment, it made her feel small and that she easily forgets the larger world. So then I realized that this is exactly my fear of sharing my thoughts on our first-world responsibilities and obligations. I don't want anyone to feel like what they do is not good enough. I don't want to sound preachy. And I certainly don't want anyone to get the impression that I think I have all the answers. It was then that I realized that this is why I'm blogging. I'm doing this because I, like the rest of us, am searching. I'm looking for answers, or at least for other opinions on my thoughts. It just so happens that I like to take on the world's problems on a daily basis :-) And writing helps me to channel my thoughts and feelings into something more comprehensible. Doing it in blog form allows my friends and family that I may not get to talk to very frequently to be in conversation with me about my thoughts, or to just ignore me on any given day when they can't handle me! It doesn't mean that I think devoting most of one's time, energy, and love to their child is wasteful, or that anyone should think that! No, this is one of the most important, foundational, agapic things we as people do! So my friend may be at a different point than me right now, but her contribution is no less important to making our world a better place.

All of this by way of saying I welcome your thoughts on my daily musings and hope this is a way I can let you in, since many of you are not as geographically close as I would like. I hope you might even, at some point, get something worthwhile from what I have to say...

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"True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared."
~Thomas Merton

taking the long view

So I've been thinking about starting a blog for awhile now, but it took time to convince myself that I have enough to share to make it worthwhile (I'm still not fully convinced, but I guess it's worth a shot). This, as it turns out, is how I do most things; I think about something long enough to get sick of it as a mental topic, and then I just pull the trigger (ew, bad gun reference, but it works) and do it. Or don't do it, as the case may be.

Anyway, my blog's title, perhaps unoriginally, is a reference to one of my favorite passages/prayers/quotes (whatever you want to call it) by Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the liberationist church leader who lived - and died - for his impoverished brothers and sisters in then war-torn El Salvador. Romero's story has gripped me since I first learned of him in an undergraduate Liberation Theology course, but it became real to me when I spent a week with the poor in his native country last March. If you know me, you know that I question the inequities in our world and our first-world response to them pretty regularly. Well, during that week in El Salvador the reality of these inequities, the real human side of our vastly unequal world, slapped me in the face. It's not that I hadn't known of poverty or even been exposed to the American version of it at length before, but for me the unimaginable (and it is that way to most Americans) destitution of the developing world became all of a sudden real. I experienced their one room tin-walled, dirt-floor homes, their polluted and parasitic drinking/bathing/cooking/laundry water, their dusty and trash-strewn roads, their pregnant and barefoot women carrying four concrete blocks on their heads at once to help build a road for their community, their hungry children, their starving dogs, their sickly grandparents, their longing, their despair, their sense of abandonment, for the first time. But I also experienced their smiles, their children's enthusiasm for learning, their deep faith in a personal and real God, their generosity, their gratefulness, their willingness to pitch in for the good of their community, their gentleness of spirit, and, mostly, their love. These conflicting images will stay with me always and no words or photos will ever do them justice. I remind myself, as I do the college students I take on service trips to Latin America, that our short visits there, while well-intentioned, do not really improve life for the people we "serve." Instead, they open our eyes, they expand our horizons, they implant in us a deep and conflicting sense of harsh inequality and agapic love. We are now obliged, responsible, COMPELLED to be their advocates. Anything short of this would become our own contribution to their unrelenting poverty.

And so I question, I teach, I advocate, and now, I blog. I told my husband that I want to move to El Salvador and work for justice. I really do. I haven't, and I may not ever, but I will continue to try to do my part and call others to do theirs. I'm sure, given who I am, I will never feel that I do enough, and maybe this is why Romero's passage speaks to me so clearly.

There will be more to my blog than El Salvador and poverty; there is much more that I am passionate about, and much that I'm sure I'll feel compelled to share on a more mundane level. But this is where I'm at right now, it's a good introduction to me, at least the more serious and productive side of me, and we'll see where it leads. If you're still reading, thanks (!), and I will leave you with the full version of Romero's prophetic words, and perhaps a photo or two from El Salvador.


Prophets of a Future Not Our Own
by Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.


Romero as he is depicted in the Catholic Church in Las Granadillas, El Salvador











This is Vanessa

















Me with baby Joanna



















This little girl is playing in the polluted, trash-strewn drinking and cooking water











This family is lucky; their home is made of concrete blocks