Gainesville Catholic Worker

Here’s a great article that win this week’s copy of The Nation. It’s by Coleman McCarthy:

At Dorothy Day’s death in November 1980, at 83, talk was heard that
the Catholic Worker, the movement she co-founded in 1933, would vanish
without her. She was its Earth Mother–or better, its Reverend Mother,
a convert to Catholicism who took literally the call of the Gospels to
practice personally the works of mercy and rescue. She would do it
with full-risk commitments to pacifism and nonviolent anarchism.

The talk was unfounded. With scant eyeing from the media, and far from
the rites of soft-core religion that sanction coziness with Caesar and
his court clerics, nearly 185 Catholic Worker houses of hospitality
are currently operating in thirty-seven states and ten countries. From
July 9 to 12, several hundred practitioners of Day’s methods are
expected to gather in Worcester, Massachusetts, hosted by two local
Worker houses: Sts. Francis and Therese and The Mustard Seed. The
occasion is a celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the
Catholic Worker, going back to May Day 1933, when Day, then a
35-year-old journalist who had written about class conflict, strikes
and war resistance for The Masses and The Liberator, handed out the
first copies of her monthly newspaper at a Communist rally in
Manhattan’s Union Square.

Through thick and thick–there is no thin in poverty’s
underworld–Worker houses have been models of stamina, going extra
miles beyond counting. The Ammon Hennacy House in Los Angeles offers
shelter and meals for homeless people and publishes The Catholic
Agitator. Viva House in Baltimore runs a food pantry and family soup
kitchen. St. Peter Claver House in Philadelphia gleans for food and
clothing and has it on hand for all comers. Washington’s Dorothy Day
House shelters five families, distributes food and stages weekly
antiwar demonstrations at the White House and the Pentagon. Scott
Schaeffer-Duffy, who with his wife, Claire, started Sts. Francis and
Therese House in 1986, echoes Day’s line–”we confess to being fools
and wish that we were more so”–by saying that Catholic Worker houses
seek “an irrational and personalist way of doing things that trusts in
the miraculous power of God…. Without government aid, salaries,
grants or institutional help from the Church, and often without many
volunteers, we feed and house people, deliver aid in war zones,
confront local and national injustices, and still manage to have happy
personal and family lives. That’s pretty miraculous to me.”

In the years before Day embraced Catholicism, in 1927 at 30, she lived
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She bibbed with Eugene O’Neill and
Malcolm Cowley, interviewed Trotsky, went to jail with Alice Paul, was
on the barricades with the Socialists, read Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy
and Jack Reed, reveled with Greenwich Village bohemians, had an
abortion, gave birth to a daughter and left a common-law marriage. In
The Long Loneliness, Day’s 1952 autobiography, she tells of
transferring all that fury and fire to living out Christ’s message of
siding with the scorned.

Like today’s followers, Day worked her own side of the street with no
official ties to the Church. A pacifist, she had contempt for
churchmen who duped the faithful into accepting the “just war” theory.
She struck matches to burn down the hierarchy’s chumminess with power.
In the late 1960s, when a war-supporting Catholic cardinal was in
Vietnam blessing US warplanes and another cardinal went to the White
House for a prayer service with Richard Nixon, Day unloaded: “What a
confusion we have gotten into when Christian prelates sprinkle holy
water on scrap metal to be used for obliteration bombing and name
bombers for the Holy Innocents, for Our Lady of Mercy; who bless a man
about to press a button which releases death to 50,000 human beings,
including little babies, children, the sick, the aged….”

Day’s fifty-year ministry included war tax resistance, commingling
with society’s broke and broken, imprisonment–she was arrested so
often for civil disobedience that a New York City jail had a “Dorothy
Day suite”–and getting out a newspaper that still sells at the same
penny-a-copy price and holds the same pacifist line as when it
started. Day’s biographers in books and magazines include Robert
Coles, Garry Wills, Daniel Berrigan, Abigail McCarthy, Dwight
Macdonald, Dan Wakefield, Michael Harrington and David O’Brien–the
last writing in Commonweal that Day was “the most significant,
interesting and influential person in the history of American
Catholicism.”

Few writers have been closer to Day than Robert Ellsberg. He took a
five-year student sabbatical from Harvard in the mid-1970s to join Day
at the New York Worker, washing dishes, unclogging the toilets and
editing the newspaper. This summer Ellsberg, now the editor and
publisher of Orbis Books, comes forward with The Duty of Delight: The
Diaries of Dorothy Day. It is 669 pages of sere and flexuous prose,
virtuosic in its candor. A diary entry from June 16, 1951, begins: “I
have a hard enough job to curb the anger in my own heart which I
sometimes even wake up with, go to sleep with–a giant to strive with,
an ugliness, a sorrow to me–a mighty struggle to love. As long as
there is any resentment, bitterness, lack of love in my own heart I am
powerless. God must help me.”

From the evidence in Day’s life and what endures daily in the Worker
houses, help kept–and keeps–coming.as

It has been a few weeks since we finished our scripture study on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, but I find myself running across passages from other things that I am reading and studying that keep sending me back, with new eyes, to some of those passages. My daily prayer includes short reflections from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who was martyred by the Nazis in 1945, just days before the concentration camp was liberated. Anyone who spends any significant time with me knows how much I think Bonhoeffer’s life and witness under Nazi totalitarianism has to say to those of us today in the United States who are trying to practice authentic discipleship to Jesus.

The reading from a few days ago, in part, said this: “A faith that really keeps to what is invisible and lives by it, acting as if it were already here, hopes at the same time for the time of fulfillment, of seeing and possessing. We hope for it as confidently as the hungry child to whom his father has promised bread can wait a while because he believes. Yet eventually the child wants to get the bread… A faith that does not hope is sick (my emphasis). It is like a hungry child who does not want to eat or a tired person who does not want to sleep.”

The section of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount which intersects these words of Bonhoeffer’s is chapter 7, verses 7-11. It is a simple passage that we most often interpret as being about prayer and the persistence of prayer. Indeed the bold heading in my bible just before the passage reads, “The Answer to Prayers,” directing us to read the following lines in that context. But I think that it is only about prayer incidentally, that in fact it goes to something deeper than prayer, but something that authentic prayer is rooted in, namely, hope. The passage is about hope and how hope invites us to take the initiative.

Up to this point in the Sermon, much of what Jesus has asked of those gathered can be understood as an ethic that went beyond the conventional religious, personal and social responsibilities of the time. He has expressed an ethic that is incredibly counter-cultural, and in some ways counter-intuitive, especially for the vast majority of his audience who find themselves struggling to survive in a religious, economic and political reality which is oppressive–sapping their strength, destroying their spirit, robbing them of hope. The reality in which Jesus’s followers live is not a reality which rewards those who ask, seek, or knock. Asking, seeking and knocking are sure ways to get a punch to the gut or a kick in the head. What an oppressed people have learned to do is to keep their heads down, their mouths shut, and to go about their business.

But this new order of reality to which Jesus is calling his followers is not a reality that will simply assert itself without the action or risk or initiative of those listening to his words. It is a reality that is utterly dependent on the dialectic between God and God’s people. Those who have been taught not to ask must learn to ask. Those who have been taught not to seek must learn to seek. Those who have been taught not to knock at that door must summon the courage to knock. A disempowered people will not bother to knock, or seek, or ask. Experience long ago taught them that there is no response to their asking, nothing which their seeking will find, and no friendly welcome at that door. Those who oppress rely on the fact that those they oppress will one day interiorize that oppression and do the work of the oppressor for them. And therein lies the death of hope. The hope that is essential for change has been beaten out of them.

As Bonhoeffer put it so poignantly above, “A faith without hope is sick.” And Jesus must surely understand that this people, to whom he is entrusting the practice of the kingdom of God which at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, needs to have rekindled in them the fire of hope. Verse 7 states: ”Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” This is not a statement of fact. It is, rather, a promise, a promise that goes against every available piece of evidence in the lives of those to whom Jesus speaks. Jesus has been speaking long to this people, and I imagine that he sees in their eyes a spark of hope, yearning to be fanned into full flame, but all too experienced and disappointed by the way things are in the “real world.”

And so as the Sermon winds down, Jesus reaches out to his listeners, inviting them to shake off their paralysis, their despondency, and all that this bitter existence has taught them. This is a new moment. And it is a moment that needs their initiative, their word, their longing–their hope. No longer slaves, no longer sheep, no longer objects, Jesus invites them to see themselves as agents in their own salvation, and the salvation of the world. He invites them to experience that faith which is no longer sick, a faith invigorated by hope, a hope which inspires and motivates and transforms. In the asking and seeking and knocking, they become the very agents of change which the kingdom of God needs. And they are promised that their asking, seeking and knocking will no longer be in vain; that this God is unlike the powers-that-be of this world which have proven to be unresponsive to their cries and their yearnings and their hopes.  And while change may not be immediate, these people can walk away from the Sermon knowing that they are empowered to play a part here, to take the initiative; and that they, like the hungry child, can wait a little while longer because they know their father is bringing the bread and the time of fulfillment is near.

That was the title Diedre Houchen gave the Roundtable discussion she led last Thursday.  After sharing some of her own faith journey, she invited others to share a bit of their own.  Many had similar tales of finding connection with a particular community or way of being “spiritual,” then leaving to move on to something else.  The two ends of the Christian spectrum that folks moved along seemed to be the personal encounter with Jesus and vs. the mandate to follow Jesus’ “Way.”  This is a well-documented divide: Evangelical (conservative) vs. Progressive (liberal). Diedre wondered if there was any commonality, any way for the two to “talk.”  We didn’t come to any conclusions, but hopeful ideas like humility, openness, honest debate, and recognition of a common search for meaning were discussed.  In the end, it seems helpful to recognize that each of us comes to “faith,” or seeking faith, from a place of vulnerability that should be honored - regardless of our own conclusions (or current resting place).

Diedre recommends an episode of Krista Tippet’s “Speaking of Faith”- Evangelicals Out of the Box - as a great follow-up.  It’s a big subject and one that causes a lot of heartache between people who call themselves followers of Christ.

 Joe Brew, Kelli’s son, is about to leave for his third summer in Guatemala where he will teach at the “Institut,” a school which Holy Faith Catholic Church, the GCW’s home parish, helps sponsor.  He led the Roundtable discussion this past Thursday.

Joe talked about the growth of gangs in Ciudad Quetzal, an extremely impoverished area on the outskirts of Guatemala City.  Here, deplorable violence is perpetrated by gangs on the community whereby they exact a “tax” from households, individuals, schools, clinics, churches, etc. in exchange for not killing one of their members.  Joe had personal experience with this when one of his students was shot in the head and killed after witnessing one of these murders,  and again when his next-door neighbors had to flee overnight after receiving a telephone request for $5000 in exchange for not killing their child. It’s a terrible situation that creates a climate of fear and causes daily deaths in the street.

Joe talked about the history of the gangs in Guatemala, how they first came about when desperately poor Guatemalans had entered the U.S. to seek work.  Once in the U.S., because they were poor and separated from their families and communities, and because they had no status as U.S. citizens, they were vulnerable to street crime and violence.  When undocumented workers are threatened in the U.S., they have no recourse to legitimate forms of civil protection that U.S. citizens enjoy. So from within the Guatemalan community in the U.S., groups were formed to offer “protection.” These groups quickly became gangs, adopting aspects of U.S. gang culture and functioning to give their members protection, identity, a sense of belonging, and more. When these gang members were subsequently deported back home, they brought their gang identity with them.  Especially for second-generation deportees, who spoke little Spanish having grown up in the U.S., the gangs offered them community and status in a now-foreign place.

Joe used gang violence to discuss two different tracks of religious thought in Guatemala – the “liberal” liberation theology track and the conservative, evangelical track.  In a nutshell, evangelical Christians stressed personal sin, and the liberal (usually Catholic) Christians stressed structural sin.  The personal sin side is easy to see in the case of gang violence against innocent families and children.  But Joe clarified the structural side by comparing it to the familiar tale of “Les Miserables.”  Many of us are familiar with the story of Jean Valjean who is imprisoned for decades because he stole bread for his starving nephew.  The harshness of prison life and the disdain of the public for ex-convicts once he is released - on top of the injustice of being punished by the system that created the inequities that would have caused most people in his situation to steal bread for a child - creates a bitter, hateful man.  But, in Les Mis, we can read Valjeans story with mercy because we get to watch the “true” Valjean emerge after he is offered understanding, forgiveness and a fresh start.  It’s interesting to try and apply this mercy to gang violence - something current, and as repugnant to us as Jean Valjean’s behavior was to the powers in 18^th century Paris.  Joe made clear the point that gang violence is both a terrible personal failure as well as a structural one.  The situation is complicated, but Joe pointed out that a large part of the solution is, as Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin once envisioned – to “make it easier to be good” by helping Guatemala become a place where people can support and care for their families – and in the meantime to work on creating more just immigration policies here.  

 Joe is heading off in a week to teach basketball, English, and history to displaced Mayan and poor Ladino (mixed European and indigenous ancestory) children.  We’re looking forward to hearing all about it on his return in September.  Meanwhile, check out his Guatemala blog!

Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners — the community and the magazine — and a best-selling author (God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, among others) used to give a stump speech that included a much-told story from his youth that made quite an impression on me. He tells the story of being a seminary student, of taking his bible and systematically cutting out every passage in scripture that had to do with economics, wealth and poverty, money, et al. He then shares that once he had finished, the bible was just tatters, falling completely apart. The lesson he was demonstrating is that the word of God has something to say about the economic relationships between human beings, that it addresses wealth and poverty in depth — as a matter of fact, perhaps more than it addresses any other subject. And most importantly, our own relationship with money and financial security must be held up to the critique and judgement of God’s word. Questions about money and our culture’s virtual worship of it are central to our own understanding of God, discipleship to Jesus, the practice of our faith, etc.

So it should come as no surprise to us that as we get deeper into Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, shortly after Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray (6:9-15), he turns his attention to money, and the supposed security that money offers (chapter 6, verses 19-21, and 24-34). In verses 24-34, Jesus states very plainly and clearly that “mammon” (i.e. money, especially in terms of “wealth” or “property” that assures status, security and power) holds the possibility to master us, and that its mastery of us leads  us to serve it, rather than serve God. The juxtaposition is clear and stark: We do NOT master money; but it can and will master us, so that we end up being its servant. Jesus sets “mammon” up as in competition for us with God, personifying mammon, acknowledging it as a “god-like” entity, a false idol competing with God for mastery of us.  

We live in a time when talk about “idol worship” or “idolatry” might seem a little stilted, or language best left to hard-core fundamentalists maybe. But the truth is that we today worship at the altar of idols as much as or even more than our ancestors from long ago with their stone carvings and pillars and whatnot. Our idolatry has perhaps become more nuanced, or subtle, but it is there nevertheless. And it is most evident in our relationship to money and economics. We talk about “the market” as an entity, how “its invisible hand” guides our economy. We give our trust to it, profess our faith in it, and we acknowledge the power it has over our lives. The irony is that on most of our money it reads “In God we trust,” but trust in God often runs a far off second to our trust in capitalism, our bank accounts, and our 401Ks.

There is implicit and explicit in verses 25-34 a criticism of a culture which manufactures superfluous needs for us which they then, in turn, promise to fill. It addresses the cultivation of anxiety about not having “enough” which is primary to creating a feeling of insecurity, then finding security in our ability to buy enough clothes, or food, and so on. Such anxiety and concern about the various needs of our lives is especially dangerous, not because needing such things as food and clothing is ridiculous, but because our immersion in worry and concern for ourselves steals our attention away from what really matters. And what is it that is most essential, most primary for followers of Jesus? Verse 33 lays it out: “Seek FIRST the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” The business of followers of Jesus is not the business of seeing to all our various needs — real or manufactured; but rather, our business is seeking the kingdom of God. And the verse goes on to say, “and all these things will be given you beside.”

Bob Dylan famously said that everybody serves somebody. At the very least, these passages in the Sermon on the Mount force us to examine our own lives, especially in the light of money’s courtship of us, and ask who is it that we really serve.

Now that a little of the furor over the sound bites from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and his recent interviews has died down, I can’t help wondering what’s wrong with Wright.  Some of his more inflammatory assertions – that the U.S. government could have introduced the HIV/AIDS virus and drugs into the black community, that we are the most violent nation in the world, that our country was built on the genocide of its indigenous people, and that our foreign policy was linked to the 9/11 attacks – are hard to swallow for many of us.  Where is this man coming from?

Listening to his two-part interview with Bill Moyers (part one, part two) in its entirety and watching his interview with the National Press Club are helpful in understanding the context in which these statements were made.   Moyers gives some background on Wright’s most controversial statements and respectfully gives him the opportunity to respond.  Wright’s speech before the National Press Club was equally thoughtful and enlightening, although, in contrast to Moyers, the facilitator at the NPC was not only less respectful, but sometimes downright antagonistic.  This did not bring out the best in Wright, who came off as being combative and arrogant during the question and answer period.  The two of them together sometimes behaved like they were participating in a high school debate, smirking when they thought they made a point smartly.  This part was a little painful to watch.   

But the content of Wright’s remarks shouldn’t be ignored because some of us are put off by his oratorical style.  He uses the cadence and fist-shaking accusations of the prophetic, “woe unto you”-style of preaching reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets. It’s not unlike some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s truth-telling sermons and speeches and brings to mind the style and delivery of a number of African-American preachers on any given Sunday.  

It’s troubling that charges of divisiveness by the mainstream press - and by Obama supporters afraid of the political fallout – are muffling the crux of what he’s saying.  He’s an articulate, intelligent, well-educated person who has lived out many years shepherding a church in an extremely impoverished neighborhood in Chicago. He’s walked the walk – hearing and seeing how racial injustice has affected the people he loves, seeking to inspire them to rise above and claim their own share in the American Dream, expressing his and their disillusionment and – yes – anger over how very much more difficult it is for some than for others.  Yes, he’s offensive to some ears, as surely Jesus was to those whom he called a brood of vipers or whose tables he kicked over in the marketplace.   But if we can get past the discomfort and drop the knee-jerk offense at the impoliteness of it all, it becomes clearer that he’s calling it as he sees it, as a good pastor, activist, and reformer should – and that he may be seeing some things most of us miss.

For instance, as an educated man, aware of the Tuskegee Experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on 399 black men without their knowledge (1932-1972), his mind has been opened to the possibility of purposeful, wrongful death perpetrated by the government on black folks. He’s also aware that the U.S., for all its “war on drugs” hoopla that has sent many an offender to jail (a disproportionate number of them black), has used the drug trade to further our foreign policy goals.  The billions of dollars we spend on war-making and the billions made on selling arms to countries around the world (often to both sides of a conflict) hasn’t profited inner-city Chicago - not to mention what it’s done to the poor globally. And the terrible events of 9/11 are, in fact, seen differently through the eyes of a person who has witnessed the ongoing assault of his country’s own policies on the poor in his neighborhood - and the desperation it breeds. He is too educated and experienced to let patriotism blind him to the truth of America’s contribution to a good deal of ”evil-doing.” 

To say he should be criticized for his lack of patriotism, shunned for being “divisive,” or quieted down for being animated and angry about the underbelly of U.S. policy and its effect on folks with dark skin, is to attempt to shut up an articulate voice in the multiple narratives that tell the complicated story of who we are as a people and that might help us move forward in a new way. 

The story of our country looks different to a Native American and will include a history of genocide and immoral land acquisition and its long-ranging repercussions.  The story of an African-American embodies enslavement and long-term racism and its continued effects on the hopes and dreams of young black children.  The mother of an addict will read differently the historically documented information regarding U.S. foreign policy in Central America and its effects on the drug trade. And the families of the black men who died thinking they were being treated for syphillus while they were actually being treated like lab rats, will feel differently when they read news stories about illnesses affecting a disproportionate number of black folks.  Wright speaks of these narratives and embodies the anger at injustice of a people he loves and for whom he feels a responsibility as pastor and brother. 

The only ones who benefit from everyone playing nice – not mentioning the elephant in the room or the naked emperor on parade – are those in league with the oppressors, standing to gain from the status quo, or not wanting to be ruffled by the messiness of historical reality.  Those of us who hope for change need to sit still and listen to folks like Reverend Wright – even if it makes us uncomfortable. There’s not much wrong with what Reverend Wright has to say. 

- Kelli

Daniel Watkins, a UF grad student in the history department and dedicated volunteer at the GCW, started off this week’s Roundtable by reading us the passage in scripture about the persistent widow and the judge. For those who don’t remember, the story goes like this: There is a widow who must continually harrass the local judge to give her justice. The judge finally relents, not because he finds her case compelling or because justice demands it, but so the widow will stop harrassing him. Daniel stated that from the judge’s perspective, the story might better be called the parable of the annoying widow.

Daniel went on to remind us that a widow, at that time in history and in that area of the world, would have been considered to be among the lowest of the low in terms of security, status, power, etc. To be a widow meant to be completely vulnerable, without value, without the protection of a husband and exposed to the injustice and disregard of others. The judge in the parable had no reason to do anything on behalf of the widow; ignoring her was without consequence for a man of his standing. But the woman uses the only thing left to here: she finds her voice and she uses it — over and over and over again — to push the judge into recognizing her rights and granting what she asks for, which we should emphasize, is justice. She finds her voice and is eventually granted justice.

Daniel’s area of study is French history, and he shared with us how what typically passes for history is actually “royal history,” i.e. history related to the kings and queens and elites of society. What historians typically are interested in and what they end up writing about is the great powers and personalities of their age, giving little to no notice of the contributions of the common people, and even less history remembers the voice of the impoverished and oppressed. This “royal history” typically ends up also being what we come to know as “official history.”

In Daniel’s own studies though, he did find one example in French history of a historian who believed that the voices of the impoverished and oppressed should also be heard, not thru the interpretations of historians and the royal subjects they typically focused on, but rather in their own words. He shared with us how this historian (whose name now escapes me, Le Tois maybe?) appended to his writings pamphlets and cartoons that were the popular literature of the time, depicting the attitudes and the opinions of common people, of peasants and workers. Examples he shared included a dialogue which satirized the king, who, in a conversation with a peasant, inquires why his people are not more supportive and adoring of him. The dialogue is witty and cutting, portraying the social chasm that exists between king and commoner and how the common people understood that their hardships were due in large part to the corruption and extravagance of the king and his minions.

One point Daniel seemed to want to share with us is the importance, especially for those who have been oppressed and neglected, of finding our voice, using that voice and becoming agents of change ourselves. Although the powers-that-be might lead us to believe that we have no voice nor place in “official history,” the truth is that there have always been those who are outside of power who have found their voices and shaped the societies and communities of which they are a part for the better. Like that widow in the biblical story, even when we are told we are powerless and unimportant, we still have our voice. And with that voice, we can be heard, change can happen, and justice accomplished.

PERSONAL NOTE: We are incredibly thankful for all that Daniel has shared with our community during his time at UF. Daniel has been a regular part of the Tuesday Breakfast Brigade crew, brought the youth group from his church to help out at Dorothy’s Cafe on a number of occasions, and now holds the record for most appearances facilitating the Roundtable (3). His love for his work, his belief in trying to make the world a better, more just place, and his gift for storytelling and conversation have enriched our community and blessed all of us. Thanks Daniel for your witness and commitment and good luck with your future studies at Ohio State next fall.

-John

Matthew 6:9-15

For most Christians, it is the most familiar passage of scripture, the one part that nearly all of us have memorized – Matthew 6:9-15, commonly called “The Lord’s Prayer,” the “Our Father,” or “The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us.” Despite our familiarity, despite the fact that this prayer is said in Churches every Sunday, despite the fact that it is prayer in small groups, prayer meetings, in the morning when we rise and at night as we lay down to go to sleep – despite all this, I would hazard to guess that the vast majority don’t realize what we are really saying. Taking this prayer apart line by line, paying close attention to Jesus’ words here, reveals just how deep this revolution is that Jesus is stirring up.

We start at the very beginning, “Our Father.” The first emphasis is on the “our,” the plural possessive. The first word in the prayer reveals first of all the communal nature of the prayer, that we come to God as a people, in a group, with others. This is no individual, between “me” and God prayer. Jesus’ “our” places us alongside everyone else in our relationship to God, making our faith about “us,” not about “me.”

And the title Jesus chooses here for God is literally “Abba,” closer in many ways to “Dad” or “Daddy” then “Father.” What it denotes is a level of intimacy and closeness to God, but it is an intimacy that is still rooted in authority—the relationship is child to parent, not sister to sister or brother or brother. Such a relationship implies God’s claim on us, and our accountability to God, albeit a God who is intimately involved in and aware of his/her responsibility to us as well.

Moreover, perhaps the most important thing about the emphasis on “Our Father” is not the relationship it defines between us and God, but rather the relationship it defines between us and other people, between me and all of these other human beings I come into contact with everyday. Approaching God as “Our Father” implies that all of us, every human being, that we are brothers and sister to one another, family; and therefore, each human being also has a claim on us and we a claim on them. Despite the forces of society and culture and creed that endeavor to separate and divide us, we are, under this Parent God, brothers and sisters to one another, responsible for each other, a reconstituted family. This is especially true for those of us who claim discipleship to Jesus, membership in the Church, but also to all people everywhere, by virtue of God’s “parenting” of them too. The implications that such an insight—that we are truly brothers and sisters, one family—in terms of our lifestyles, our political participation, our economic decision-making, and more are astounding. If we are truly brothers and sisters, then imagine how much we must change in how we see those whom our country is killing in wars or those who are in economic distress because of our nation’s policies? The implications of being “one family under God” are far-reaching and incredibly critical of the status quo.

In verse 10, we read: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In many ways, the notion of “kingdom” is anachronistic in our world. The time of nations ruled by monarchies is pretty much over. So we need to get behind the reality of what the word kingdom is all about. Kingdom refers to a political reality in the world; a kingdom is a people or place over which another has authority or reign. In praying this prayer, after acknowledging God’s intimacy to us as “Father” and our relationship to one another as family, we then acknowledge our hope and longing for God’s authority over this world, this reality here and now, as God rules in that other reality we call “heaven.” But if we are calling for God’s rule here on earth now, then we are also tacitly acknowledging the illegitimacy of any other “kingdom” or rule on earth. At the very least, we are implying that the kingdoms of this world (the authorities, the political system, the governments) are NOT equivalent to God’s kingdom and that we long for them to be replaced by God’s kingdom. Again, the implications for us and for our way of being in the world—not just as individuals or as the church but as states and nations—are revolutionary. Our prayer pledges us to God’s kingdom, not whatever nation we live in or have citizenship in. We are saying, in fact, that we are citizens of the kingdom of God FIRST, not of the United States, or England, or Brazil, or China—that our first loyalty is to God’s kingdom, indeed to God, not to our political leaders or systems or nation. And most poignantly, we are praying that God’s will be done—not the will of our country or elected officials, not our national interest or self-interest be done. Praying that God’s will be done implies that we already are aware how little of God’s will is done, and so we must pray for it, invite it, yearn for it and be about the business of making it happen here, now, for the benefit of our entire, reconstituted family, the human family.

Then we pray that God gives us “our daily bread.” This verse conjures up for us the story of the Exodus, of the Israelites recently freed from Egypt finding the manna in the wilderness. We remember the prescriptions about the manna: Take only what you and your family need for TODAY. And those who took more than they needed for one day found it turned wormy and rotten. This is again a radical understanding of what type of security we ask God for. We do not pray for perceived needs or needs that we may have a week from now or a year from now or for that time after we retire in 20, 30, 40 years. Our security is in our God who takes care of us for today. And if we take only what we need for today, we find, like the early Israelites wandering in the desert, that there is ENOUGH for everybody; No one is hungry, no one dies of starvation, everyone gets what they need when each of us only take what we need for today. This is a radically contrary ethic, one that believes there is enough as long as some of us don’t take too much; and that the reason we find that there isn’t enough is because some in our world are taking more than they could ever need. In essence, when we take more than we need for today, we are stealing from others and contributing to a system where some have way too much and others die because they cannot even get what they need for today. Praying for daily bread is an indictment of an entire system predicated on manufacturing “needs” and encouraging us to get as much as we can as quick as we can before someone else takes it from us. An ethic based on God’s provision of daily bread where there is enough for everyone would be a drastic change in the way our society works now.

This section, which is at the center and the heart of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (both thematically and structurally), ends with two reminders about forgiveness—first in verse 12 and then again in 14 and 15. Jesus seems to be telling us just how central forgiveness should be to humanity. This emphasis on forgiveness should give us pause, especially because Jesus intimates that our own forgiveness is dependent on our willingness to practice forgiveness toward others. This is no simple “please forgive me God” and we find ourselves forgiven. It is, in fact, a quid pro quo: God will forgive us ONLY if we forgive others. And again the reality of what we are praying should strike us to the heart. Whether as individuals or churches or communities or nations, we can only be assured that our own mistakes are forgiven if we forgive the mistakes of another. It is an ethic of reconciliation based on reciprocity, rooted in the basic reality that our relationships to other human beings are reflective of our relationship to God.

So when we pray this prayer, do we really have any understanding of what it is that we are praying? And if we do, do our lives give testimony to what it is that we are really praying here? If the millions of Christians who prayed the “Our Father” every day really did understand and believe this prayer, our world and our relationship would look radically different I think.

-John

Dear friends,

We are happy to announce that we have published our first newsletter since September 2006! To read a PDF of the newsletter, please click here. Many of you may have already received the hard copy newsletter by mail, but if you have not and you would like to receive the newsletter and future newsletters by regular mail, please email us at gvillecw@yahoo.com and let us know your address.

Also, please check out what is happening the rest of this week at the GCW by clicking here. Don Eitzman of the Christian Peacemaker Team has recently returned from Palestine and will share his experiences there at the Roundtable this week. Join us if you can!

Thanks to all of you who have responded to our appeal in the newsletter too! We are really grateful!

In peace,
John