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It seems to me on some level that there has to be a societal - or at least communal - willingness to submit to the idea of Jubilee. As such, I find myself as an individual quite disabled to do anything. If I give all my money to the poor, how do I pay for shelter/food etc? This is a question I wrestle with often, particularly in the light of feeling like there is something better I could be doing with my life than spending most of it with the central purpose of earning money.
Yet recently I have been thinking that the very fact that I think and struggle and wrestle with this is the very reason why I never take any action... It makes it seem OK that "at least I am thinking about it". More and more this isn't feeling OK though.
Still, I don't really know how to move out of this cycle. Any practical ideas?
I still haven't come close to living into this fully, but recently I have been thinking about the role of community. As Mark mentioned in the article, the poor and wealthy lived into this reality by sharing and living in community as family. When God originally gave the jubilee commandment he gave it to people in a community. With the nuclear family as our central social structure we are shockingly individualistic and devoid of truly interdependent community. The first thing we need to do is form that somehow... other issues arise with this, like making sure you aren't forming happy little like-minded downwardly mobile educated communities (which then just ends up practicing charity as a community)... Actually, come to think of it, a way to avoid that could be to stop thinking about forming a community for yourself and looking at the way poor and marginalized peoples have established their own communities for mutual aid and support. Its my impressions that the wealthier and dominant we are the less we are able to fully live into, experience, and form community, but a sense of concern for each other and interdependence exists in the cracks of our affluence, maybe you could start looking, listening, and submitting/sharing there?
I have some practical ideas but I am hesitant to be prescriptive. But I guess what I'm saying is you need to see if you can begin submitting and sharing within a different community that is poor or marginalized. I feel like the key here is submission and solidarity. Eventually your fate has to be identified with their fate and experience (as much as it ever can be I guess), we have to make ourselves less than. This is really uncomfortable, and I feel really lame saying it because 1- I'm not doing this well yet and 2- this could even be objectifying as long as we are talking about this in abstract terms.
so all of this is awkward for me, but I think there are directions we can head, and I hope we can both start wrestling with this by trying some stuff out and listening more carefully.
Intentional community is a remedy for modernism, a reconstituting of extended family of sorts which has been destroyed by industrialism in order to create its "labor pool" for sucking life and profit from the masses. In light of such "extended family", you are courting failure if you attempt to form intentional community with anyone and everyone, especially the hereditary poor, the multi-generational destitute with a myriad of psychological and physical problems.
Are you saying forming community isn't a lot of work? (which it is), or that it doesn't necessitate introspection and growth? (which it does). As such it necessitates putting the other (neighbor) first, and is most definitely essentially Christian. Communal living was a fundamental part of early Christian community.
Forming intentional community is one of the best ways available in these modern times to share with others so everyone limits their consumption. By doing so, becoming less "greedy" for things other than necessities of life, the poor are definitely helped. Then if you want to help those poorer than oneself directly, pray and I'm sure they will be provided to your doorstep. You don't have to become a social worker or missionary to the third world or to a domestic ghetto or barrio. Not everyone is cut out for that. Many (maybe most) of the poor are caught in a cycle of poverty that involves abuse (physical, verbal, sexual), addiction, hopelessness and a host of other psychological and physical problems, which can overwhelm most who desire to help but are inexperienced in dealing with such issues. As someone else has commented here, serving in a homeless shelter on a regular basis may help connect your charity more personally, but you don't have to dedicate your entire life to such.
The early Church Fathers are clear on the role of wealth: to help the poor, not for sensual pleasure (larger yachts, diamonds, more lavish anything). But put this into perspective. In the United States, the top 300,000 earners pocketed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million in 2005. Today those who make $75-$100K annually or less are not the ones who are living on excesses that should go to help the poor; these "middle" and lower classes are those who can help the poor best by not contributing to the consumerist "system", by living frugally and sharing among themselves so that globalism isn't spreading addiction to "affluenza" worldwide.
By living in community, few may need to continue in high powered employment necessary for "nuclear" (nuked) family, reducing stress and allowing more time to devote to spouse, children, and community. Children especially benefit from communal living where they are not institutionally segregated to learn bad habits from being indiscriminately thrown into contact with peer pressure from anyone and everyone's children.
A new generation reared with such a "new American Dream" would do us all a world of good. We needn't confuse or equate modern humanistic egalitarian notions with what it means to be Christian or charitable.
See: Creating a Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian, and http://LifeGivingSpring.info/simple/
I find this statement a bit short-sighted and class-centric (could that be a term? : ). People from any place could be characterized as having "a myriad of psychological and physical problems." I'm not idealizing the character or health of any individual poor or marginalized person. Even my limited experience is enough to be aware of these tensions, but to make a statement like that ignores the way American, capitalist values skills and certain mental states as "healthier" when they may not be. It also ignores the way our system causes a myriad of psychological and physical problems among people in the affluent and dominant culture. Sure, I'm more comfortable dealing with those kind of problems (because I deal with them myself and thus have more empathy in certain areas, and our more able to overlook certain things), but I've found the attempting to understand and submit to the perspectives and limitations from people in different, less dominant spaces, has actually been a factor in my own healing and addressing my own dysfunction (btw, doing that is antithetical to the idea of being a "missionary" or social worker. You must have misunderstood me here). I agree that everyone isn't in a place to do this, and I can see areas where I can't fully live into this ideal, which is why I try to be gracious towards myself and others in conversations like this. Your right, it would be stupid for someone to just pick up and move to the "ghetto" when they aren't prepared, but this isn't something to be rejected out of hand, and it is still important to recognize and lament our limitations.
"We needn't confuse or equate modern humanistic egalitarian notions with what it means to be Christian or charitable."
Your right we shouldn't confuse modern humanistic egalitarian notions. I'm not doing that, and I'm not sure why you would imply that "we" (the elusive "we" : ) are.
anyway everything else you said was really helpful. I think those would all be good steps to take in trying to live into God's kingdom.
See A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Framework_for_...
Even monastic communities do not have such "egalitarian" ideals because they know that members must "fit" the community otherwise it will fall apart. Monasteries (at least E. Orthodox ones) have a 1 year "inquirer" period when the monks are evaluating the inquirer and vice versa. At the end of the year, the inquirer is either invited to stay or told it is better for them to leave.
Thinking that community should be open to anyone and everyone contributes to the top ten reasons that cause new communities to fail, not succeed. Unless we're "gifted" as psychologists, social workers, etc., we'll have to face up to the fact that many of the destitute, multi-generational "poor" have needs we can't meet and are better met by others, especially charitable organizations. We can however, still communally share with others who have less than we do, and together all reduce our overall consumption, thereby not reinforcing the oppressive global socio-economic system which puts a lot of pressure on 3rd world poor who still (unlike us) mostly live off the land, and which ultimately forces them into urban slums, making them even poorer. Communities can also consent to sponsor a poor member(s) among them, but that is voluntary, not mandatory and depends on the community.
See Practical Tools to Grow an Intentional Community: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlMDckgqU30
In fact, I agreed that living with diverse people is very difficult and should not be taken lightly, but I don't think that it isn't possible or that you have to do it from a professional standpoint. Catholic Workers have moved in this direction. Dorothy Day did this. I do have experience in this, though I look forward to growing deeper in this direction (let me repeat, since you didn't catch that in my last post. I do have experience in this, even though I wouldn't pretend to have completed my journey in this area). This has everything to do with my understanding of family in scripture, my experience with charity as dehumanizing, Christ's identification with the poor and my experience that living with people different than me has helped me begin healing and growing in my faith. I said all of this above, and never said that living with diverse (including poor and marginalized) people was "mandatory," just that it is the direction I think we should all hope to move in, and needs to be discussed in the context of forming and living in Christian community.
Also, I never said that living with and among the poor and marginalized was for the purpose of meeting their needs. I do think counseling and treatment centers are useful, though I affirm sharing money and life together which is something that everyone needs. In fact, it sounds to me that your understanding of what it means to live with the poor is akin to a very humanist secular social justice notion of simply "helping" them.
I agree that the only way to truly desire the response to the poor is to identify with them, although as you say this is quite challenging and uncomfortable.
To me it seems fairly clear that knowing how to respond to what Jesus says about this stuff isn't really immediately obvious, and is quite complicated. On the other hand, Kirkegaard says that the matter is quite simple, and the New Testament speaks directly about how we should act, we just make it complicated in order to avoid action that will "ruin our lives".
In my experience, the "yeast" that moves one into action is that of love of neighbor. The ability to recognize not just the need, but also the insecurity of the lives of one who is poor is integral to the equation. Perhaps the one thing that the rich young "lacks" is that sense of insecurity...wondering where the next meal will come from, how the rent will be paid, how to pay for shoes for the kids.
When a chaplain at the soup kitchen in Milwaukee, the faces of the poor became real and close to me. Knowing the names of the needy rather than lumping them into a statistic proved to be the catalyst for me.
My thoughts are that if the "institutional amnesia" of the poor was overcome, than perhaps a more communal understanding and recognition of the Jubilee would be possible.
I'd be happy to share some more specific practical ideas as well (at least the ones I've tried) if any of that interests you.
I do think it is (should be?) as simple as the article suggests, yet the fact that I don't trust or believe that enough to act only seems to indicate the weakness of my faith in God. Do I really believe that this life is one in which what I require will be given to me if I do what I am called to do? It is a question which haunts me, as my inaction every day screams the answer on my behalf.
The concept of no longer having the 'freedom' associated with 'owning' my house certainly puts me off, yet the 'freedom' of not having the responsibility of the debt is the very thing I find attractive. Unfortunately, the more I think about changing my work situation, the less giving I am, as in my mind I now need to hoard and save as much as I can.
And while I know these aren't the type of issues that advice alone will solve, I appreciate the space to speak them and the comments given in love.
In Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster argues that “the majority of Christians have never seriously wrestled with the problem of simplicity, conveniently ignoring Jesus' many words on the subject. The reason is simple: this Discipline directly challenges our vested interests in an affluent lifestyle.”
Once we have begun to cultivate the inner reality of simplicity, what might our outer reality look like? Foster offers 10 principles:
1 Buy things for their usefulness rather than their status.
2 Reject anything that is producing an addiction in you.
3 Develop a habit of giving things away.
4 Refuse to be propagandized by the custodians of modern gadgetry.
5 Learn to enjoy things without owning them.
6 Develop a deeper appreciation for the creation.
7 Look with a healthy skepticism at all "buy now, pay later" schemes.
8 Obey Jesus' instructions about plain, honest speech.
9 Reject anything that breeds the oppression of others.
10 Shun anything that distracts you from seeking first the kingdom of God.
I like it because it gives me 'small step' advice to bring about changes to my mindset about simplicity, rather than trying to force external changes on me and expect my heart and mind to catch up. (Ten Commandments, anyone?)
However, I fully accept that that reason alone suggests that it may just be my subconscious recognising that at the end of the day, "less radical change" often equals "easier to ignore".
But I think there still comes a point where we recognize our piecemeal progress as just unacceptably far from our deepest desires for true freedom and the life Jesus promised. Achievable goals have the advantage of being within our reach, but then also the disadvantage of being within our reach. The life Jesus described (and lived) is, to most of us, obviously unreachable. So the main part of what is desired in the following of Jesus (in my case, at least) is an impossible life, a life lived only by the grace and miraculous power of God.
And that requires a "leap of faith" (as Kierkegaard was so fond of calling it). Always a frighteningly radical move.
You ask, "So given Jubilee and Acts of the Apostles, how should we live? "
I think we should live as cultural creatives, as "salt for society", not as passive "consumers" embedded in a "culture" with obvious anti-Christian roots.
There are modern options which can be used to that end.
See - http://LifeGivingSpring.info/simple/
D. Stall