2014.01.26 Another LIttle Prophetic Photo

The life-size sculpture entitled “Jesus the Homeless”  by Canadian sculptor Tim Schmalz was offered in the fall of 2013 to two well known cathedrals, St. Michael’s in Toronto and St. Patrick’s in New York City. The big cathedrals rejected the work but the Vatican welcomed it. Here we see Pope Francis I blessing the statue, a work of art, yes, and also a profoundly moving reminder about what Jesus taught and lived: do not forget to care for and provide for the poor and those less fortunate, needful in any way.

                                                                       

The statue is meant to sit on a city street, a park bench for its “pedestal.”  The artist is working with the Vatican to find a permanent place in the city of Rome for “Jesus the Homeless.”

Schmalz was inspired to create the 2.5-meter bronze statue, after he saw a street person wrapped in a blanket in Toronto. It took him eight months and cost $25,000, funded by private donors, to complete the statue.  “I just saw Jesus,” Schmalz said. He wanted other people to “just see Jesus” when they saw homeless people on streets or people marginalized for whatever reason, lost or wandering or begging. Jesus is shown in solidarity with the poor and the unhoused, those he told us to help. The statue figure on the bench is asleep and covered with a blanket, an icon of the cruel social disease of poverty. You can’t tell that the figure is Jesus except for the marks of crucifixion on his bare feet sticking out from under the blanket.

 We see all kinds of images like this in the city. It is my policy to give money, say a little prayer in my heart, and then feel ashamed I can’t/don’t/won’t do more. I console myself with the thought that there are many programs and shelters yet I feel like Dickens’s Scrooge who refused to give money to help the poor, saying, “Are there no poor houses left?”  Godde, how terrible I feel, but I move on.

What came to Schmalz’s mind was Jesus. What comes to my mind when I see the image of the Pope blessing the statue is the same: I just see Jesus—not so much in the statue as in Francis’ gesture.

Oh, I know the Pope isn’t Christ but I imagine that Jesus would’ve blessed such a statue, and if it were in the flesh he would have bent to kiss the sleeping figure, careful not to disturb precious sleep. This, in my mind, might have been just before he entered the Temple precincts and overturned the tables of the money-changers—not because the usual commerce at the site of the Temple was bad, but because they were charging usurious interest rates! How fitting a symbolic gesture to confront the terrifying have/have-not split in our own treacherously affluent society today. 

The historical Jesus wasn’t poor or homeless. If he had been he would never have had the stamina to travel about preaching, teaching and healing. Still, he was crucified for his radical political and economic ideas.

Good Godde, imagine us all being absolutely equivalent in the eyes of Godde and each other and therefore commanded to make sure resources were evenly distributed, like the Eucharistic meal. We learned to share as little kids —and we forgot.

Theologian and author, Gustavo Gutierrez, interprets Jesus’ saying in the biblical story of the anointing woman in Mark's gospel, “You will always have the poor with you,” in a particular way. The biblical story tells of a woman who boldly comes into the group of men and anoints Jesus with costly ointment. The disciples raged at the woman’s waste. Self-righteously, and not without a little showing off for Jesus, they declared that the ointment could have been sold, the money given to the poor.  Jesus shuts them up and declares that the poor will always be with us. He does not mean that they don’t count or that their plight isn’t urgent. 

According to Gutierrez, Jesus meant that we should be more aware of the poor, take literally the idea that the poor are WITH us, literally. Yes, they are always with us but do we walk with them, accompany them and let them accompany us in daily life?  Do we listen to their stories? Can we be in solidarity with suffering poverty?

“Even the poor need to do this with other poor—to walk and talk and listen and support. It’s a universal requirement,” Gutierrez said. To meet suffering in our midst is basic Christian practice.

The first thing the Pope did when he saw Schmalz’s statue was to pray, and then he blessed it. The artist called the experience “amazing.”

This pope preaches like Gutierrez, also Oscar Romero who said, “The way to be close to the God of Jesus Christ is to be close to the poor.”

I wonder what the Pope prayed in the moment before he blessed the statue?  Would he have confessed his own inadequacies in living up to the gospel of love?  I don’t know but I thought, Good Godde, I can’t do it. I’m afraid. I’m so sorry.

2013.03.13 My First White-Smoke-Over-the-Vatican Viewing

The sheer volume and power of bold and bald hope that was evidenced today in St. Peter’s Square in Rome is a statement in itself.  Thousands of people gathered to await the announcement of the election of the next leader of the largest religion in the world.

Who knows the future?—but history was made today in this election. The man the cardinals elected as the next Pope is Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina.

He is very conservative about most church practices, theology, and morality.
                                                  AND
He has chosen, for the very first time in papal history, the name of Francis.  He will be Francis the First!  I was hoping for Peter, but so far no one has had the courage to choose that name. St. Francis is one of the most beloved of church saints, known for his humility and his attentiveness to the needs of the poor, not just materially, but those who have been neglected and marginalized in church and society—those in fact who have suffered rejection like Jesus did.  Francis is also  known for his affection for all nature and all critters whom he called Sister and Brother. He’s the saint whose statue you often see in a garden next to the birdbath scattering food for the birds. 
     And there’s another Francis represented as well: Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuit Order: the Society of Jesus.  
                                                   AND
He is a Jesuit, another first.  That will be controversial, and also says much about this man’s intellectual grounding and his love for Jesus Christ. 
                                                   AND
He is a Latino, representing an area of the world in which the Roman Catholic population is strong and growing. Politics is in everything, but American Latinos/Latinas will feel proud and represented.

There were clear signs today of this new Pope’s humility:
He chose to wear his own simple cross, not one of the Vatican  bejeweled papal crosses.
He asked for silence from an enormous crowd—and got it.  In the silence he bowed to receive the prayers and blessings of the people upon him— BEFORE he gave them a papal blessing.  A first!
He spoke in Italian, except when Latin was required, and in a colloquial tone, calling people his brothers and sisters, and telling them he’d “see them soon”  and to “have a good evening.”
When he was a Cardinal in his native land, he walked among the people and took public transportation or a cab.
Francis has a winning smile and a clear-eyed gaze. I do believe that this man, while conservative in many ways will LISTEN and encourage dialogue about women in the ordained ministry, homosexuality, gay marriage and adoption of children, and many other issues people are clamoring about.

I doubt that he would give much priority about my soap box issue: theological language (pronouns again!)  but who knows?  But I bet he would listen to me.

So, as always, we wait and see, pray and hope— and stay open.

2012.06.06 What Does It Matter?

What does it matter when someone at a geographic distance, that you haven’t seen in 30 years and only glimpsed at a reunion, and with whom you have no personal connection but whose work you admire and whose ministry touched you once for a very short time, gets hurt unjustly?

Margaret Farley, RSM (Sister of Mercy, an order in which I am an Associate member) was one of my favorite professors when I was in seminary at Yale Divinity School in the early 80s.  She taught Ethics. The church required aspiring clergy to take Ethics. I thought I was ethical. What did I know? 

I remember Margaret’s generous spirit, her scholarship, considerable and accessible, and her wry grin. She is a faithful woman who has been subjected to three years of intensive interrogation from her church hierarchy and has had to defend her perspectives and scholarship over and over, only to be told her work is condemned because it runs counter to official Roman Catholic moral teaching.

Margaret’s view of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was always broad and deep. Now she is being persecuted, not by her Order but by the Vatican whose Gospel values to me seem shallow and narrow, an institution quite closed in on itself by fear,  and rife with its own corruptions.  Implosive I’d say. 

Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,  a book Margaret has worked on over years and a compendium of much of her thinking on the radical topic of LOVE has made it to the condemned list of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith (CDF) because it contradicts  Catholic moral teachings on matters of, what else, sex—the usual culprits, divorce and remarriage, homosexual sex, and, my favorite, masturbation, an activity the magisterium finds “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” Margaret suggest such an activity may improve marital relations, may enhance and equilibrate differences. 

So how do you screen for masturbatory activity? Who would know but God?  What precisely makes it unethical? (I remember my first time. I experienced bodily power I never knew I had; it helped me love the body someone else had abused and I had shamed and it helped my marriage.)

JUST LOVE is a wily and provocative title.  It can mean just love as if love alone made the world go round and was all you needed; or it can mean that all love must be just.  Knowing Margaret, even without reading this book, I’d vote for the latter interpretation. I’d bet that couples, friends, peers and colleagues, or most people who say they love someone or a group, a pet, nature’s beauties, or a cherished idea, don’t think of justice as an ethical boundary that must surround their affections. 

We think of justice more as a social category than a personal intimate one, but justice is the framework that supports love, both erotic and platonic, and allows it to grow.

The official Notification that Just Love may not be used in any Catholic institutions even for ecumenical discussion is deliciously ironic. Farley is a professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School, not a Catholic institution, and even more the recent censure has sent this book’s sales soaring.

Academic Catholic colleagues are weighing in with vigor in defense of Margaret's scholarly rights and in admiration of her person. I wish some Anglo-Catholic bishops would speak out. I suppose they are worried about damaging ecumenical relations, but this is about solidarity not  politics. 

Mercy’s leadership supports their sister and is helping her through this process while they are simultaneously defending themselves after vatican crackdowns for doctrinal offenses and serious feminist leanings ( more on sex and women) that threaten the same hierarchy, itself profoundly disordered by its own sexual scandals and coverups.  Its a mess. And why is everything conflictual always about money or sex? 

Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister minces no words. “Where has all this energy for empirical destruction come from in a church now projecting its own serious problems with sexual issues onto everything that moves?”

You can read all about it online, with the help of Google/God of course. Start with the Sisters of Mercy website, Margaret Farley, Yale Divinity School, even Huffington Post, and click along the links.

Why does it matter to me?  It matters because I am a woman, an Associate of Mercy, a former student of Margaret Farley, a member of the body of Christ wounded. It matters because anything that hurts one of us hurts all of us, no matter who or where we are.

Most of all it matters because it hurts God, the divine spiritual presence whose graciousness wraps us round with a love at once intimate and impotent, a love that waits upon human cooperation to create “JUST LOVE,” both political and personal.  Freedom, God’s loving gift, is valueless and serves no higher purpose, without justice to give it breath.  


What I remember most of all the wisdom Margaret Farley imparted is something she told us about Peter and Judas, the polarized hero/villain team of the Christian drama. She noted this paradox:  Peter—the favored one, the rock of the Church, the “pope,” leader and most faithful of all—  in the end discovered he had little faith, little enough to betray all of it thrice.

While Judas, the identified betrayer— condemned, cast off, placed outside the inner sacred circle of the faithful forever— discovered in the end that he had true faith, enough to die for its sake.

How timely!