On Pilgrimage in Oklahoma City

Peter, James, and John knew Jesus.  They had walked with him, listened to him, spoke with him, even argued with him on occasion.  They had just climbed a mountain with him.  I imagine them getting to the top, looking around, sitting down to rest, maybe taking a drink of water.

And then. . . something changed.  They looked at Jesus, and they saw Jesus — but now his clothing was a dazzling white, his face shone with the glory of God — and even more remarkably, there were two more men on the mountain top, Elijah and Moses.  Mark’s gospel; says that Peter was so terrified, he hardly knew what to say.  And indeed, what was there to say in the face of such a sight?

But wait, there’s more.  A great cloud filled the sky, and the voice of God was heard — “This is my beloved Son — listen to him.”  And then, as suddenly as the vision was there, it was gone.

I often think of Transfiguration when I see someone particularly down and out on the streets.  I imagine them in robes of shining white, with the lines of pain on their faces replaced with dignity and glory.  Who knows who we are seeing when we see homeless people in the streets.  We are quick to judge them as unworthy.  Are they not poor in a nation which glorifies wealth?

Transfiguration teaches us to not be so quick to judge by first appearances.  All that we see is not all that is. The supernatural reality is as real as the natural reality.  We can see the supernatural reality as easily as we see the natural reality — so long as we have “eyes that can see”. And when God says — “Listen to my Son” — if we have “ears that can hear”, we will hear what Jesus has to say to us. That of course takes courage, because if we listen to what Jesus says, we will inevitably come to want to do what Jesus tells us to do.  And that is a journey both terrifying and glorious, fraught with comfort and challenge, a yoke that is easy, a burden that is light.

Today is the Feast of St. Martha.  Ten years ago, July 29, 1999, I made a small sign that read “Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House” and put it on my door.  The next morning, a homeless person knocked on the door and asked for food.  I remember thinking, “Wow, word gets around fast.”  Even Sean was impressed, and he is never impressed about anything.

So I was thinking, “Well, today I will write a nice reflection on the long strange trip of the last ten years.”  But then this situation with HR 2479 came up, a terrible legal threat to local agriculture.  HR 2479 would allow the FDA to issue regulations governing the production, harvesting, and distribution of vegetables.  It threatens artisan food processors with high fees. We are talking about people who are my friends, practically my family.

So I got busy emailing and phone calling and generally agitating against the bill.  It came up for a vote this afternoon on special House rules that allowed for no debate and no amendments, and thus it had to get a 2/3rds majority.  It fell six votes short.  But then the House Rules Committee grabbed it, tinkered with it a bit, and is sending it back to the House soon.  I read the entire bill this evening, all 159 pages of it.  Someone remind me to drink bourbon the next time I have to do something like that.  As it was, I had to put on relaxing music to get through it.

And what did I find?  That the Rules Committee blatantly lied in its executive summary of its actions with the legislation. It’s clear the purpose of the summary is to lessen public opposition and mislead people into thinking that they had removed the worst aspects of the bill.  They’re betting most people won’t read the actual text, and they are right. I had to force myself to do it.  These imperialists are so devious.

So now its late, I’m tired, and the nice reflection about our ten years of ministry will have to wait.  But in a way, this is kind of how its been for ten years.  Just when I think we’ve got things all planned and scheduled, oops, life intervenes and totally distracts us from the originally planned program/project/whatever.  That’s why I sometimes describe us as “opportunists” on behalf of the cause of peace, justice, and the Care of Creation.

Thanks to St. Martha and St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist and St. Dorothy Day and St. Peter Maurin and St. Oscar Romero and St. Stanley Rother and St. Michael and St. Maximilian Kolbe and Saints Isidore and Maria and God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for watching out for us all these years and taking care of us even when we hardly knew how to take care of ourselves.   Thanks to everyone who has been part of this journey.  Ad majorem Dei gloriam!

Matthew Talbot didn’t have much, but he lost everything he had — twice.  Once in the depths of alcoholism, and then again, in his sobriety and conversion.  Two very different “losses”, shall we say, but both very real.

When I went to the streets of Denver, I lost everything in my life for a time, all the things that were important but I didn’t really understand that then.  All I knew was that I was hungry, alone, and scared.  So my life goes on, and acquire all kinds of stuff and etc and now it seems I am trying to learn how to “lose” everything again.

Jesus said that if we would save our lives, we must lose them.  He said unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, there will be no harvest the next year.

There are lots of hard sayings like that in the Gospels, but at the same time, we read that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

Some people, attacking the sanctity of Matthew Talbot, have said that he was a “laughingstock” in his day because of his poverty and his piety.  Well, I don’t doubt that at all.  People laughed at Jesus too.  The crowd wants conformity, because that enables the crowd in its own disorders.  Imagine the crowd shouting for the crucixion of Jesus and the release of Barabbas. What would they have done to anyone shouting for the opposite?

Today the world shouts for other crucifixions, and tells us that if we want to save our lives, we must get as much stuff as we can.  We can never have too much stuff, we must always have more, newer, and better. That’s why the example of saints such as Matthew Talbot are so important.

There are a lot worse things that can happen to a person besides losing oneself in Christ.   Indeed, this kenosis (emptying out) is the source of true self-knowledge.

What is the price of counsel?  At some law firms, it can be quite expensive. One can hope that it is good counsel, but as the “torture memos” suggest, sometimes high-priced counsel isn’t so benign.

What is Mary’s counsel to us?  “Do whatever he tells you”, is what she told the servants at the wedding at Cana, which is one of the seven great signs that the Gospel of John gives regarding Jesus’ lordship, and one of the traditional epiphanies of the Lord. Which is another way of saying — “pay attention to this, it is important”.

What else does she have to say?  “Be it done unto me according to your word” — fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.

And then. . . “My soul proclaims the glory of the Lord” followed by some really revolutionary words about scattering the proud and pulling down the mighty from their thrones and exalting the lowly and sending away the rich and giving good things to the poor.

That’s good counsel.

But we think that all this happened long ago and doesn’t always apply to us’ns who are the rich and powerful in this world. And even if it does somehow remain relevant to us, surely it isn’t so in a literal way,  Thus we comfort  and protect ourselves from the troubling truths of the Counsel of Mary, Mother of God.

When Mary spoke to the servants at Cana, she spoke with a loving authority. The servants did as she asked, even though what Jesus said to them was obviously foolish.

Across all these years, Mary’s voice of loving authority continues to call to us — “Do whatever he tells you to do”.  She doesn’t say — “Pick and choose among what Jesus tells you to do and only do those things you feel comfortable with and that agree with your nationalist political aspirations.”  No, her’s is a simple counsel — “Do whatever he tells you.”

A lifetime of study could not completely break open the meaning of that simple phrase, so we’d all better get busy.

During this novena, we are reflecting on (among other things) those who are pushed to the edge of our societies.

Forty years ago this summer, I became one of those on the edge.  I was 16 years old, and I ran away from home.  There was no particular reason.  I was I suppose full of teen-age 1960s angst and tired of red dirt southwest Oklahoma.  Nothing was cool there. Everything was boring. I had seen a movie about runaways and it seemed exciting, maybe even glamorous.  Better than Frederick, that was for sure.  I wanted to go to California, but I only had enough money for a bus ticket to Denver.  So over a few hours, I went from middle class respectability in small town Oklahoma, surrounded by a dense network of family and friends, to being a lonely and friendless runaway on the streets of a city much larger than Frederick.

As it turned out, being homeless in Denver wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t exciting, it was terrifying and dangerous.  Things happened to me that 40 years later, despite my well known ability to carry on and on and on about a multitude of subjects, I can’t write about and indeed have only spoken about with a small handful of people over the years.  I was hungry,and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t find a job.  I didn’t know where the soup kitchens were.  After a couple of days, I’m started to look a bit scruffy, and people were averting their eyes or telling me to get lost.

Someone said “go over there”, so I knocked on the door of the Catholic Cathedral on Colfax and the office lady gave me $2, which in 1969 was more than it is now. Big Macs were 35 cents.  Bus fare was a quarter.  I was really really grateful for that two dollars.  I was also glad that she spoke kindly to me and didn’t just tell me to go away.  After I left the office, I hid behind some bushes and cried.

The loneliness of homelessness can get really intense.  I had no street skills, and no one to talk to.  I had never been in a situation where I went all day and no one said anything to me and I said nothing to anyone else. After the events of the first couple of days, I was afraid to talk to people, to be seen.  Then, as now, for the homeless, all too often “to be seen” is to be hurt, attacked, run off, jailed.  So you practice invisibility until you get good at it.

When I lived in Kansas City, Missouri, I was a volunteer with the Uplift organization, which helped homeless people that didn’t live in shelters.  They had two old bread trucks and one suburban and three routes. The trucks were loaded with everything a homeless person needs (except a home).  It was really amazing to see where homeless people lived in KCMO.  Right close to a big elegant mall was a homeless camp hidden under an overpass, complete with camouflaged panels that looked like the side of the embankment.  There was another camp which was really out of the way.  It was close to a river, on an abandoned railroad, we had to drive over a tiny one-way bridge to get to it.  There were a bunch of abandoned railroad cars that homeless people lived in.  It lacked most amenities, but it had the most spectacular view of downtown KCMO at night.  I was amazed that no one had put expensive condos on the site, the views were so incredible.  Most of the railroad cars were covered with graffiti, and it was art.  We were always there at night, and there was a very surrealistic feel to the experience.

Homeless people in Oklahoma City are no different, they too are clever in their ways of hiding.  I am not going to talk about places they may be hiding, since I don’t want to cause anyone any trouble.  But there’s a dumpster where a homeless person was crushed. A parking garage where a homeless teenager jumped and killed himself years ago.  A place where a man named Steve died. I remember a freezing cold night when Marcus and Philip Evans went down and tried to get him to go to a motel, but he wouldn’t go, he just burrowed more into the cardboard and newspapers and sleeping bags that were his home.  From his viewpoint, it was better to be free on the street than to be locked into whatever terror an enclosed space would bring him.

Jesus often told people to “open your eyes so you can see, get some ears so you can hear”.  Then as now, it is easier to not see distressing sights than to open our eyes and really see what is before us.  All of it — everything that is there, not just the view that the Chamber of Commerce or the Republicrats want us to see.

Mother Teresa’s comment about the distressing disguises that Jesus wears has been repeated so often it has almost become a cliche, but even so it is a very true and prescient observation from someone who had practiced very hard the art of open eyes.  What we try to do in a novena like this, which just goes on and on and on and on and repeats so many things over and over and over and over, is to break through the scales which cover our eyes so that we can see the reality in which we live — not forgetting that the vision we seek includes a supernatural reality as well as the temporal reality.

“What do you want? Lord, I want to see.”  So Jesus spits in the mud and rubs it on his eyes and tells the beggar to go wash in the pool of Siloam.  The first extraordinary thing, from the cultural viewpoint of the time, is that Jesus was willing to not only see the blind beggar, but also to speak with him.  The beggar was obviously a grave sinner, why else would he be so afflicted?  Note the similiarity of views today with then.  People don’t want to see or acknowledge the homeless because there is obviously something wrong with them.  If they weren’t (fill in the blank) lazy, degenerate, alcoholic, drug addicted, whatever, they wouldn’t be homeless, right?  At least, that is what we tell ourselves over and over and over so we don’t have to deal with the consequences of our sight.

When I went to Rome in 2004, someone told me, “Bob, you have to decide what you are going to do about the beggars, because they are everywhere.”  I quickly found out the truth of that advice.  They were everywhere.  I knew all the socially responsible lies to tell myself starting with   “These people are professional beggars, ignore them” and ending with “if you get too close to them they will attack you”.  I ended up deciding to just give a small coin to everybody.  The old ladies sitting in front of churches would clutch my hand and softly murmur Italian words I didn’t understand.  For all I know they were saying “You hard hearted American, why don’t you give me a Euro?”  But I couldn’t afford to give everyone a Euro so I gave them what I had and when I saw them again, I would give to them again.  It’s a much better practice than running through some kind of decision-making process to determine who was worthy to receive a gift and thus dismissing some as unworthy.  Who am I to decide anyone’s worthiness?  “Lord, I am not worthy, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”

So my advice is to take the risk of opening your eyes and seeing the homeless among us and to just forget everything the Chamber of Commerce wants you to believe about the homeless and go ahead and give them something.  It doesn’t have to be money. You could make little paper lunch bags of goodies for the homeless — pack it with a candy bar, some hard candy, a peanut butter cracker package, some aspirin or ibuprofen, a clean pair of socks, and a small bottle of lotion and maybe a prayer card or a personal note — “I am praying for you”.  Don’t forget the hand or skin lotion — it is really important for people who aren’t able to shower regularly.   In the winter, carry extra hats and gloves with you and give them away.

Be not afraid, as Jesus would say, to open your eyes and see what is to be seen in your own town.  I am sure that when we think of “having a vision of Jesus” we aren’t thinking of looking for homeless people, we’d like something more sanitized and holy, like a beautiful figure in an immaculate robe, radiating comfort while floating in front of us as rose petals shower down all around us.  But most of us will just have to be satisfied with the more prosaic vision of “Jesus in the breadline”.

Lord, I want to see. Heal my blindness so that I can see.

One of our bishops, it might have been Rigali, said that George Bush was the “most pro-life president ever”.  When I read that, I wondered, “where has he been these past few years.”  Certainly there was no sign that George Bush — or Barak Obama — cares much for the right to life of the ordinary people of Afghanistan.

According to the Congressional Research Service, since 2001 we have spent $38 billion on aid to Afghanistan, 54% of it went for security “projects”, 32% went for humanitarian/infrastructure projects to help the civilians.  In other words, big woop. we’ve spent about $46 per civilian Afghan per year for humanitarian relief and infrastructure.

A trillion for our wars over the last decade, a paltry $46/civilian/year for humanitarian assistance.

These are not the works of a “pro-life” government.  These are the works of the demons who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls, and it is those demons that have been in charge in Washington D C since these wars began, even though certain delusional Catholic bishops would have us believe otherwise.

But we’re not supposed to talk about this, because the Afghan people are not really people in the same way that Americans are people. So what happens to them doesn’t matter — even if it is at the hands of our own government, with our tax money.

That’s what marginalization and depersonalization is all about.  The Catholic bishops of these United States, the politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties, indeed, all of our aristocracies, are masters at eliminating the human personhood of entire groups of people for no better reason other than the ones to be depersonalized are inconvenient and in the way of our higher purposes.  We have to kill lots of Afghans so that (a) we can be safe here at home, and (b) the Republicans can get re-elected so that (c) we can get pro-life laws passed by Congress.

So for eight years we have been blasting and shooting our way from one end of Afghanistan to the other, targeting and killing civilians with impunity, and now we wonder why the Afghan people hate us with such grave intensity.

We’ll know that the Catholic Church in these United States is serious about defending life when we actually do defend all life, from the moment of conception to the time of natural death, INCLUDING people who live in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Pigs will fly in great flocks across the sky, however, before this present college of US Bishops does anything so radical as actually preach and teach and live the Gospel of Life.  They are much too busy debating the minutiae of liturgical translations — to gibbet or not to gibbet, to deign is the question, or is it the dew? — to defend the right to life of poor Muslims in a foreign country who don’t even speak English, especially when a loud defense of said rights would terribly embarrass the political aristocrats in the Republican and Democratic parties.  To the US Bishops, the people of Afghanistan (and Iraq) are not even human persons — they are existential nothings, devalued of any personhood by the bishop’s carefully nuanced material cooperation with the objective evil of unjust war.

This is why the fourth work of justice and peace — defending life — is so critical.  We should not follow our bishops into the valley of the culture of death. As St. John Chrysostom said, “The road to hell is lined with the skulls of bishops.”  For those with ears to hear, the call to faithfullness is clear and without ambiguity, even if the bishops continue on their dead-end path of moral relativism. May the seeds we plant today in faith and hope grow into forests of peace for our children and our children’s children.

I went to bed early last night so I could get up early this morning and make peach jam.  I had picked about 4 gallons of peaches from one of our trees, and time and fresh peaches wait for no one.  Every one wants to eat those peaches — not just the humans who live here, but also every kind of bug and micro flora and fauna. It took me about 3 hours to find all the canning stuff, peel and pit the peaches, and prepare the jam.  I did the prep work inside, but went outside to the front porch to make the jam and to process the jars in boiling water.  It was supposed to get up to 105 degrees here today, and I didn’t want to heat the house up any more than necessary.

About mid-way through this process, a little thought creeped into my head. . . “Wouldn’t it be easier to just go the store and buy jam?”  Well, the answer to that of course is “yes it would be easier”.  I thought about that thought for a while as I did the simple repetitive work of peeling and pitting peaches.  And of course, eating a slice or two every other peach.  Well, maybe not that much, but still, regular snacking on the fresh sliced peaches is one of the benefits of making peach jam.  I had peach juice on my hands, it was running around on the large cutting board, there was some in my beard, on my shirt, you know, typical jam making craziness.

I decided that while it might be easier to go to the store and buy a jar of commercial peach jam, it wouldn’t be as much fun, the jam wouldn’t taste as good, and there was some indefinable connection between what I was doing at that moment and everything else in my life.  I thought about all the times I saw my grandmothers make jam, and all the different kinds of jam they made.  My grandmother Dovie Bagwell Waldrop made Creek jelly, from sandplums we picked from thickets that grew along Deep Red Creek.  My grandmother Opal Newsome Cassidy made, among many others that could be mentioned, the best watermelon rind jam that I have ever tasted.  It is also the only watermelon rind jam that I have ever tasted, but that’s beside the point.  It would have been much more convenient for those two, very busy women, to have gone to the store and bought jam, but for them, this practical domestic art was love in action.

The Empire doesn’t want us to do stuff like this.  It doesn’t mind if we like peach jam, but it wants us to go to the store and buy it.  The Empire doesn’t want us wasting 3 whole hours to make jam.  We all have Much More Important Things to Do, things that may very well feed the war machine. Jam making is an independent activity, it goes against the current of the times, and thus is itself a dangerous and even radical thing for people to take up.  It is a step away from Empire, and a step towards community.

I know this may seem like a lot to read into a few pints of peach jam, however tasty they may be.  I hope I remember these thoughts with every taste of the peach jam, especially as the summer ebbs into fall and thence into winter. Knowing what is to come, I took action this morning to save something of summer for eating in the winter.

It seems to me that our whole society is approaching a cyclical winter.  Right now we are in an “Autumn”, with the heat and fire of a Summer cycle giving way to the chaos of Fall — warm one day, cold the next, leaves turning golden and falling,  So I hope we are all making jam, taing action now to preserve the bounty of the Summer cycle for later in the Winter cycle when we will really need it.  Autumn can be a bountiful time, my fall gardens often produce more than the Summer.  As the old hymn goes, “Work for the night is coming, work through the noon-time day.”

The moment Franz Jagerstatter refused induction into the German military, he was subject to summary execution. “Take ‘em out and shoot him.”  But that’s not what happened.  It took six months for the model of efficiency Germany military to chop off his head.  In the interim, they seemed very interested in getting this young Austrian peasant to recant his principled stand against  unjust war.

Why did they care?  What was so extraordinary about the opposition of one man — a peasant farmer from a backwoods town.  In the US, we would have said that he lived in a “hick town”.

I think the answer lies in the fear inherent in all imperial ventures.  Their emperor is naked, and if even one person dares to comment on the nakedness — as opposed to praising the non-existent new clothes — then the whole scam is in danger.  In the face of tyranny, truth is a dangerous disease.

So we should never lose heart when truth compels us to stand for what is right against the errors of our age. Time and time again throughout history, tyrants have said “OK, that’s that” when they remove a particularly insistent and inconvenient truth.  But truth somehow always comes back.  No matter who dark it becomes, God sends us candle-lighters to show us the path.

His name does not roll easy off our English tongues, but his witness is powerful in any language.  Franz faced one of the ultimate evils of the 20th Century — Nazi Germany.  Nobody would have blamed him for going along to get along.  Plenty of other people did.  They made no protest when their Jewish neighbors disappeared. They turned the other way as political dissenters were punished. They obeyed orders to enlist and go to war.  They paid their taxes. They followed the demands of their Imperial State.

But then comes Franz Jagerstatter, no one special, a villager in a rural area.  But he had as much moral courage as was to found in the Third Reich of his day.  Everyone tried to talk him out of his stand of Gospel principle against the forces of darkness.  His priest, his bishop, his friends, all begged him to go along to get along.

So it came to pass that in the midst of a grave and almost overwhelming darkness, he lit a small candle of truth.  The day came when the State attempted to snuff out that candle, they took him to a windowless basement room and chopped off his head.

In the end, Franz knew that all that matters is our faithfulness to the Gospel.

The 20th century has many martyrs of Justice and Peace, and St. Franz Jagerstatter is one.  He reminds us that there is never so much darkness that it is meaningless to light a candle of truth.  May his witness guide us today, and by his prayers of intercession, may all of us find the strength to keep lighting candles of truth and peace in the midst of the overwhelming darkness of our own time.

Lots of stuff arrives in my in-box everyday or is linked with an RSS feed on my computer’s home page.  If I spent all day doing nothing but reading, I could only cover a fraction of it.  But I do read some of it, and today I was deeply touched by someone I had not heard of before today.

Dr. Gideon Polya has had a 40 year career as a research biological scientist and published extensively.  For some time he has been keeping track of human mortality due to wars and their associated catastrophes, both currently raging and historical.  He has published an Open Letter with his estimates of the “excess mortality” in Afghanistan due to the 8 year long war on the people of that country — 3 to 7 million dead civilians.

Not thousands, not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but MILLIONS.  What does the Bible say about reaping what you sow?  What is the harvest of millions of civilians dead in an unjust war?  We are the occupying power.  What does it say about our country that we let millions of people die “on our watch”, from preventable reasons like disease and malnutrition and dirty water?

His estimates are considerably in excess of the official US government estimates, but then, when has any empire publicly admitted the extent of its crimes? More info at Body Count , Afghan Holocaust, Thou shalt not kill children .  And that last blog link — “Thou shalt not kill children”.  What a concept!  Do you suppose the Catholic bishops of the United States will ever get around to preaching and teaching that commandment?  Or will they continue their material cooperation with the evil of unjust wars where children are slaughtered?

• The blood of these innocent children drips from the hands of every US Catholic bishop who did not issue a canonical declaration against participation in the unjust wars on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The blood of these innocent children drips from the hands of every member of Congress who has voted to support these wars.
• The blood of these innocent children drips from the hands of every military general and every person in the Executive branch of government who have plotted, planned, and implemented these unjust wars.

Dr. Polya has some notes about the legalities of genocide and its applicability to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Of course, pigs will fly before international law is impartially applied to the leaders of the US Empire, but he lays the facts out for all to see and judge for themselves.

And he has interesting tidbits of data.  We’ve occupied Afghanistan for nearly 8 years.  What is the per capita health care expenditure of that territory?  $29.

That says something about our self-image as “benevolent occupiers seeking only the good of the civilian population.”:

Sow not in furrows of injustice, the Bible says, lest you reap a seven-fold harvest.