concerning social justice

Concentrated smog pelts my white hoodie and forms into gray puddles on the cracked sidewalk scattered with garbage. A dim streetlight reflects off of a hunched figure on the stoop just around the corner from my friends' front door. He is drinking or huffing something out of a large jug. I recognize his face, but don't know his name. We are on the way to the corner bakery to get bread and milk for a simple soup dinner. It's cold and wet, and he will have no where to escape.

On the way back a few minutes later, I pass him some bread and coffee; he asks me for a blanket (which I don't have to give), then a "limosnita" -- spare change to make us all feel better about the unchanging nature of his life situation. ("...a shortsighted and perverse notion of charity leads Christians simply to perform token acts of mercy... This kind of charity has no real effect in helping the poor: all it does is tacitly condone social injustice and to help to keep conditions as they are -- to help to keep people poor." -Merton)
I don't give him anything, with my thoughts vacillating between, "I just GAVE him food!" and "He'll just spend it on drugs."

If I were out in that cold, raining night, I would probably want something to numb my reality, too.
Yes, his addiction either drove him to the streets, or the streets drove him to become substance-dependent, I assume. But what can I do about it? Giving him money won't help. Giving him bread and coffee doesn't reach to the core of the problem and wholistically bring about change and restoration to this man: created with the mark of the Divine, but beaten so far down that the Image is all but destroyed.

He has shown you, oh man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

But what does it mean to "do justice" for the untouchables of a westernized society? What is our part? What can I do to work justice?
And even my mercy in this case was watered-down, perhaps. Yes, I gave a bit of my money to put something in his belly -- I didn't just cross over and look away when I saw him, like the priest and levite in the Good Samaritan parable -- but I didn't take him in, offer him his human dignity again, care for his body and soul. Okay, there are all kinds of reasons to NOT do this -- it's not my house, he would take advantage, he needs rehab, I'm a single woman, etc. But what is he calling us to DO about it?
And walking with God in humility? Well, we're working on it.

Thomas Merton broaches the subject in his book Life and Holiness, which I am (slowly) reading. "There is no charity without justice. ... The sacrifice must be real, not just a gesture of lordly paternalism which inflates his own ego while patronizing 'the poor.' The sharing of material goods must also be a sharing of the heart, a recognition of common misery and poverty and of brotherhood in Christ." And he later declares that, "The task of each Christian today is to help defend and restore the basic human values without which grace and spirituality will have little practical meaning in the life of man."

He cites Jesus' parable of the judgment - those who fed the hungry, visited the sick, etc. did it for Jesus and are given eternal life.
God's divine revelation in the Mosaic law represents how we are to relate to God and to each other. He teaches us many times to care for the widows, orphans, and foreigners, and gives specifics of how to do good to our "brothers."
Who is my brother?
This question that I ask sounds eerily like the, "Who is my neighbor?" which prompted the Good Samaritain parable. My neighbor, my brother, my sister, is everyone; and especially those who most need my help.

I still don't know what to do for the street people. How to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God.

unconventional motherhood

A friend just sent me this link: http://www.kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com/ to a blog about a book by a missionary in Uganda, and this is from the most recent blog entry:

"I want her to be a baby so I can strap her on me and hold her there and she will feel secure and safe and protected. I want to be the person who taught her to write her name and how much fun it is to make mud pies, and I want to be the person who laughed with her when she lost her first tooth. I want to know where the scars came from that she can’t remember the stories about, and I want to be the person who wiped her tears when she fell.

But I know that is not how God intended it.

He did not choose me for those moments, He chose me for these. I entered motherhood through a different door, and I get a different kind of stretch marks."


This resonates with me. I would add, "I want to be the one to contiue to live each step of the journey, each stage of this wonderful, awfully painful, beautiful, forever-surprising journey called life with him/her. I want to be able to say 'you are my son/daughter' without the doubt that one day this will end; that legal situations or living arrangements may change, although my heart won't."
I entered motherhood through a different door, alright. And my stretch marks may seem out of place, but they are beautiful scars that I will cherish as they increase in number and size throughout our lives.

unQUALIFIED

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:25)

When asked what profession I have, I never quite know what to say. I studied English and Spanish, but I’m not a certified teacher. I taught ESL for a while after graduating, and now these degrees are useful on a daily basis, but they are not the foundation of what I do. I’m basically a mom, but sometimes people want to know what qualifications I have for the missions work and children’s work that I do.
None.
According to university standards, government job pre-requisites, legal or technical know-how… I really am unqualified to do this -- And boy do I feel it!!! There are so many situations that I don’t know how to manage!
I feel particularly unqualified when dealing with the kids’ sexuality, and hoping to encourage healthy development in that area. With their backgrounds, which –generally speaking— do not provide good examples and precedents of loving relationships, commitment, and healthy sexuality, I find myself asking God, “WHY ME?!” Why on earth would he have me dealing with these issues and supposedly teaching his children to grow up into healthy women and men who know how to take care of and respect themselves and others, and who can walk in the tension of every human being – physical AND spiritual, neither animal nor angel (as Rob Bell puts it so well in his book Sex God).
Yet, when I recently felt so unprepared and helpless and useless and undesiring-of-this-responsibility, the Holy Spirit brought this scripture to my mind:

“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” (Matthew 11:25-26)

What a thought! What a truth! God delights in using the unwise, unqualified, and uncapable to fulfill his perfect will!
A day or two after that, I received a letter confirming it – Isaiah 55 invites the thirsty to come and buy without money. What we most need, we can’t provide ourselves, but he makes the way. Because his thoughts are not my thoughts and his ways are not my ways. So, even though I would be a lot more comfortable with someone more qualified, trained, or wise to take care of the really complicated issues, that’s not how it is right now. I know that I “can’t” and he seems to think that that’s perfect: that way, anything good, any transformation, will obviously be OF GOD, and not have anything to do with my abilities! Dependency, not self-sufficiency!