AJS--the case for justice (v)

It's an older book. I can't imagine millennials would go for it, but it was a gift, so we started it and now it's become a staple nightly for dinner devotions. The poems are old--John Milton-level old. When they've been put to music, as many have, the hymns they've become are classics to my generation, or else people who grew up in churches too stubborn to change.

A couple nights ago, we hit this darling oldie.

Take time to be holy,
The world rushes on;
Much time spend in secret
With Jesus alone;

The life of William Dunn Longstaff, who wrote those lines, spanned most of the 19th century. His friends included the Reverend revivalist Dwight L. Moody, who preached to overflow crowds in Longstaff's native England. When Longstaff heard Moody repeat a line from the I Peter: "Be holy because I am holy," he penned the poem that was sometime later set it to music. It's an oldie.

"We are called upon to emulate him in partaking of his divine nature and expressing his holiness (2 Peter 1:3-4)," or so the devotional accompanying the poem directs us. "The first stanza tells some of the things we can do to attain this holiness," it says. "We can spend time with the Lord is prayer, abide in his presence, feed on his word, fellowship with other Christians, and do good to others."

Sounds like "old classic" stuff, right? "Holiness," we read, "means to be completely separate from all that is common." I've heard that for years. So have you.

But there in Honduras, the Association for a Just Society takes some liberties with such groundwork biblical principle, and it does so, in part, because thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff make a convincing case that when the Bible uses words like "holiness" and "righteousness," it is just as surely talking about what we think of as justice: "He leadeth me in paths of righteousness," says Psalm 23; but it could just as easily say it this way: "He leadeth me in paths of justice." 

And if it did, we'd probably read that famous line differently.

As we would 2 Peter 1:3-4. Instead of "be holy because I am holy," people like Wolterstorff make the claim that we might say: "Be just because I am just," and harvest therefore a decidedly different takeaway, a meaning and intent different from the classic definition -- "Holiness means to be completely separate from all that is common" doesn't work anymore because justice doesn't walk away from all that is "common," it embraces it.

That kind of reading invites--well, directs--believers into areas some good Christians think off-target. Take a societal problem like street crime. A 12-year old girl is raped. She's poor, and she's not been the only victim. Her life is shattered; she threatens to harm herself. No Christian I know would withhold mercy or aid. Anyone I worshiped with last Sunday would do what he or she could to help that little girl. Money?--no problem. "Does she need to move?"--we can help. 

But if one of the reasons for that child's continuing suffering rises from police inaction and a dysfunctional court system, then ministries like AJS not only find the victim the kind of counseling she's going to need to deal with what happened, they also go after the police and the courts to determine how it is that helpless victims of street crime don't receive the justice a functioning society should be offering. 

Think of it this way: That 12-year old has nothing to eat. We offer her a fishing pole, but the water in the river is rancid. Someone has to investigate why there are no fish. Someone has to do something about it. Someone has to make a claim for justice.
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Next:  Some ways in which AJS is working for justice in Honduras.

AJS--Honduras (iv)

In the recent past at least, Honduras has never risen or fallen into civil war, not like, for instance, Nicaragua, or today Venezuela. There is a long and stout Spanish era in its history, just as there is in all of Latin America. Then, for a century or more, Honduras was the original "banana republic," the government essentially under the thumb of two fruit giants--Chiquita and Dole--both of whom are based in the States. For more than a few decades, those two multi-nationals took turn running things, as if the government was nothing more than an instrument panel.

In some significant societal line items, Honduras was falling behind the rest of Central America. They didn't do well at all at educating their kids, infant mortality was high, as was poverty and death on the streets. Honduras was as dangerous a place as any in the Americas--for a time, 85 deaths per 100,000; the gun crazy U.S.A., registers only five. (For the record, Japan is lowest homicide rate in the world at .5 per hundred thousand people.) As legality and morality sunk, corruption soared, as you might guess. Honduras, a country and culture celebrated for its charming, peaceful nature, was falling into dysfunction.

Drugs are a problem--oddly enough, not drug usage, but drug trafficking. It makes no sense to drug bosses to sell drugs in Honduras; they don't make money off poor people. Instead, they run them through Honduras and market them royally in the U.S. of A., where a couple saddle bags full of whatever is vastly more valuable. Still, moving contraband, the drugs, creates gangs and the filthy lucre that becomes a huge problem.

There are no mythic heroes here. There are martyrs, but if you're thinking you're going to hear that a few high-minded yankee do-gooders came in on white horses and strong-armed the country back up to its knees, Kurt Ver Beek and Jo Ann Van Engen would be first to demur. The first step, as it always is or should be, was for them, Yankees from a place called Calvin College, to learn to see Honduras not as an verdant garden for social research, but as home. 

The two of them, greatly interested in relief work, moved in to Honduras. To stay. 

Let me hit the pause button. Read those words over again. No horizontal commitment could be greater or more profound. They moved in to Honduras to stay. It's somewhat unlikely that anyone reading these words lives each day and night in an abode less North American than they do today in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. When their section of the city has no water, they have no water. They run on dangerous streets, buy their food at street markets, have friends, many of them, who've never been up north. They're not on an errand, a work or a church group. They moved to Honduras to stay.

And one of the first things that struck them was that Honduras had lots and lots of NGOs and relief troops (the airport is full of them), lots of people willing and able to rescue the babies from the river and even help others learn to fish. Honduras had loads of service projects that took up the mightily important task of bringing relief to micro-economic issues, where those issues needed remedying, immediate remedying.

But what they discovered is that there were very few such organizations working on the macro issues, issues like a dysfunctional police force, courts that simply didn't deliver the justice they should have been delivering. There were no distinguishable efforts to take the graft out of delivering medicines to people who needed them. No one was delivering justice--or love, for that matter--to the grieving victims of rampant street crime. 

There were things to do on that macro level, where the action required would be just as crucial--maybe more so--than it is when people are hungry or in need of basic health care. There were few organizations and missions that were looking up river--that's what they found. Why are there babies in the water?

They'd moved to Honduras to stay, and they'd found a place to work--a thousand places to work in fact, no end of places to work. "What happens when someone builds a fence around a pond and says that no one can fish?" Van Engen told a reporter. That's the question they asked themselves and the question that gave them direction in their new home, Honduras. 

Art work from the National Museum of  Honduras

AJS--Rebuilding a failed state (iii)

Street scene, Haiti

A friend, a development worker in Haiti for decades, once told me how he had reacted when a work group, a relief group from a church in the States who'd thoughtfully taken a bag of soccer balls along with them when they came to Haiti. They'd be building a church or some kind of building, but they knew Haitians loved soccer, so they brought along--and used--that bag of soccer balls at night in the compound where they were staying and working.

When they were leaving, the crew boss told him that they had no good reason to take the soccer balls back to the States--"why don't you just keep them here?" he said.

My friend, who'd been in Haiti for a long time, declined. What the people of Haiti didn't need, he told the crew, was more gifts. Haitians, black folks all, don't need white people from the States giving them things. They just don't. The work group took the soccer balls home. 

My friend is no fascist, nor is he racist. I couldn't help thinking that, as unfeeling as he appeared right then, he knew what he was doing. He'd been in Haiti for years.

We'd read some things, lots of things actually, before we left for Haiti. From a distance, the descriptions are can be so critical that they don't easily register to a Yankee imagination. To say the country is combustible might suggest that it hasn't already a disaster. The 2010 hurricane left 300,000 casualties, according to the government; but who really knows? Hundreds of thousands of the Haitians were displaced, their homes--such as they were--destroyed. 

Ten years have passed. I'm guessing if you'd go to Port au Prince today, masses of brokenness would still litter the steep mountainous hillsides. 

Some people call Haiti a "failed state," even though such an expression seems pompous. Things don't work in Haiti. They just don't work. Buildings--even the seat of the government--didn't stand up to the quake, in part because building codes either didn't exist or were rarely used or enforced when major building projects were mounted. Five years after Hurricane Hazel, downtown Port au Prince had no stoplights. Getting across the city required endless jockeying, most vehicles adorned with crash bars mounted out front of their headlights for inevitable bruises. 

Yet today, Haiti slumps at the confluence of major societal problems: political dysfunction, dismal economic outlooks, and a combustible political climate capable at any time of igniting violence. What's there doesn't work, and, worse, most often there's nothing there.

It's impossible to estimate the amount of money and goods other nations have given in an ongoing attempt to bring relief. But nothing seems to matter. That's why some say, simply, Haiti is "a failed state."

Of the books I read before going, one of them stays with me because of the preposturous nature of its point of view, a book with an unwieldy title: The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan M. Katz. I am no expert, but I couldn't help think that Katz's answer to making Haiti into something other than a failed state was the only viable option--and that is, he says, to support the government.

It's a laughable notion really. After all, the government is the very heart of national deceit and chaos. National corruption begins with the Haitian government. Jonathan Katz says when the next horror arrives on shore--hurricane, earthquake--immense relief will be needed, relief that has to be done. Someone must leave soccer balls. If there are babies in the water, the very first action that must be taken should be to lovingly pull them out. 

But Katz says the really difficult job in Haiti is the one that has to be done between disasters: rebuilding, or building anew, a functional, caring government. Katz says if people want to help Haiti, they need a government; and that's a job that's seemingly impossible and even more difficult than putting up a building, leaving fishing poles behind, and even--yes--taking babies out of danger. Building a government that works from the ragged mess of failed state--now that's an impossible problem.

We spent some time in Honduras a few weeks ago, a country that functions many, many times better than Haiti. The two are hardly comparable. And yet, there are parallels--or were. 

Or were. In many ways, in the last decade Honduras was suffering badly. Today, they're not out of the water, but at least, it seems, they've been able to get to their knees and draw some needed breath. The government, which was failing--the highest murder rate in the world--is coming back. No one claims Honduras is out of the water. But it's coming back.

How did that happen? 

 (More to come)

AJS: Miriam and relief (ii)

The Bible doesn't say so exactly, but centuries of readers have liked to believe that Moses's big sister, the gutsy kid who walks right up to her royal highness, the Egyptian princess, bathing in the river, was Miriam. Could have been another sister, but Miriam is no bit player in the great exodus story.

It was, after all, sister Miriam who not only composed and sang a song but in fact led the Israelite chorus in a soaring melody of triumph the moment Pharaoh and hosts were swallowed up by the Red sea. "I will sing unto the Lord. . ." or so it went. Look it up.

But Miriam was no saint. She got a little pushy eventually, when she and brother Aaron grumbled about their brother Moses's superior power. "Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?" they whispered to each other. Besides, little brother Moses had up and married a girl from the way wrong side of the tracks, a Cushite. 

When the two of them groused, the Bible says, "The LORD heard this." Oops.

Still, I've always admired that little girl at the river's edge, not only for walking right up to Pharoah's daughter the way she did and walk away with baby Moses. Whether or not she was a cutie, she was a Levite, a stupid slave. She dared to be a Daniel.

Little gutsy liar is what she was. Next thing you know, she lets out a half-truth: “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” she says, as if she'll check with the employment agency.

Thus, this little sweetheart not only rescues her little brother, she brings him home to her grieving mom, and most importantly saves a baby who will one day lead his people out of slavery. Great story. Unforgettable. 

Last week we visited an agency, a mission enterprise really, in Central America, in Honduras, where I heard the scenario of that ancient biblical tale used to explain the vision of that enterprise, a turn on the tale, and it goes like this:

Say you're down by the river and you see babies floating by in baskets, a la Miriam. Most of us would wade out into the water and grab them, save them, pull them from imminent danger. That's rescue work that has to be done. When people are hungry, really hungry, they need food, the basics. Retrieving babies from the water is relief work in its most pure form. When that work involves danger, it merits the scripture's greatest praise--"Greater love hath no man or woman than that. . ." You know the rest. 

In 2017, the American people gave 410 billion--let me write that out: $410,000,000,000--to charity, the first year on record that the total exceeded the 400 mark. Needless to say, that's some kind of cash. 

Did all those bucks cover needs? Probably not. According to Food Aid Foundation, 795 million people still don't have enough food "to lead a healthy life." It seems, as callous as it is to say it, that there's always babies in the water. There's always more we can do. 

When we use the phrase "relief work," we normally mean giving money or food or shelter to those who don't have it. The Good Samaritan did absolutely blessed relief work by helping the beat-up victim of a highway robbery get on his feet. And it didn't stop there either--he got that poor guy a place to clean up and rest--and he was a lowly Samaritan, too, a lousy, spat-upon Samaritan, the only one with a heart.

In this rich interpretation of the story by a 17th century artist named Jason Jordaens, a Samaritan dressed only a diaper, is helping the naked, bloody victim, while three heavy-set dandies sort of watch, slack-jawed, at the evident moral reckoning of what's happening before their eyes. One--the most pompous, a religious man, too--appears to help. Appears. 

There must be untold relief organizations who use the word Samaritan in their titles, who identify themselves by way of the famous biblical story. You just can't say enough about the good Samaritan. He's a model of selflessness. 

Nor can you say enough for Miriam. She took that baby from the river, walked right up to her royal highness, and saved that child for the mission God almighty had in mind--and what a mission that was. 

But last week I heard a man explain a Honduras ministry in a line that, to me, made all kinds of sense. He said it this way, something close anyway: Praise God for those who pull the babies out of the water, who save lives, who bring relief where it's most required. Praise God.

But there comes a point when those who stand at the river's edge have to start to ask themselves why all those babies are floating down the river--who's dropping them off up there, why they're not with their mothers, what's causing this damned phenomenon, and what on earth can we do about it?

That's relief work too, of a different type. There are babies in the river and no fish in the water. People are suffering; they're hungry and dying. We need an army of Good Samaritans to do something now, quickly, to pull those babies out and give away five loaves and two fishes and more.

But somewhere along the line for rescuers face a difficult question, and that question is "Why are there babies in the river?"

(More to come)

AJS: on fish and fishing (i)

Seems the line is often attributed to Lao Tzu, a philosopher who may well be part legend but is very real to students of ancient Chinese culture. As some kind of meme, it has some significant miles on it. Its implication may be foreign to kids, but most adults have taken the time to shake meaning loose from what is, essentially an extended metaphor that's only tangentially about bait and tackle. 

As old and venerable as Lao Tzu may be, the memorable line with which he is credited may well have other sources, copy-cats maybe; but more likely simply other mortals who thought a lot of about gifting the hungry with their daily bread. Here's one:

Rabbi Moses Maimonides, a medieval Jewish philosopher and biblical scholar, was widely beloved and thoughtfully read by many during a lifetime of truth-seeking in Egypt and Morocco. His wisdom has worn well. Maimonides, who was also, by the way, a physician and an astronomer, died long ago, in 1204. 

Here's yet another. 

Anna Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, all four names of her, had to be a writer--she was, as was her famous father, the novelist William Thackeray. But Anna Isabella was no slouch herself, penning a number of very popular English novels in the late 19th century, as good an era to write novels as any, more so than most. The wording of her version is altered a bit. Plagiarism lurks maybe, I think--don't you?

Today, the old line about fish and fishing is so worn that it's renewed itself in endless goofiness.  

Even some misogyny. 

But then, what's good for the gander. . .

Zenna Schaffer, who would likely be happy to point out that she doesn't rank with medieval rabbis or Chinese wise men and would be nothing without Lao Tzu, was once--at least--quoted in a book titled Funny Women. More than that I do not know about her.

One of the downsides of pithy wisdom is that what gets old soon soon becomes, well, pithy. The minute what's wise becomes cliche, it loses bite but not (necessarily) truth. Tell me I'm wrong, but it seems that most everyone who knows the line about fish and fishing can probably remember where he or she heard it and thought it through for the first time. 

Cliches may be just that, but their overuse doesn't prove they're empty of truth. Chances are, in fact, the opposite phenom operates: cliches are often true because they're almost always true. 

I'd like to say some things about a Honduras enterprise/mission that absolutely captivated me last week because it uses this old line in a way that makes all kinds of sense. It takes the line about fish and fishing, and extends it, pushes out into uncharted waters. Doesn't mock that old line or make it a bad joke--it simply asks this question: What if you give a man (or woman) a fish and a fishing pole, but discover that the river's rancid and the last fish to call it home became fertilizer a decade ago? Wouldn't you want to know why the fish are gone? Wouldn't you want to do something about that? Wouldn't you have to? 

(More soon)