What am I to Do about Poverty and Suffering?

By

Charlotte Clutterbuck

Is the Institution the problem?

Men are cruel, Man is kind (Jonathon Swift)

In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins flays religion for the evil done in God’s name:

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no honour killings’… no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers… (1-3)

This is a fairly common stance for unbelievers. My father and brother-in-law led such attacks round many a family dinner table. Of course religion, or at least religious institutions, which is not the same thing, are implicated in these atrocities, but Dawkins’ stance ignores the good also done in the name of religion. Without religion there would have been no ancient (Buddhist) statues for the Taliban to blow up. And no Salisbury Cathedral, no Sistine Chapel, no Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost, no Matthew Passion, and none of the great Requiem Masses. In fact, since the language, ethics, law, literature and philosophy of Rome were kept alive in Christian monasteries throughout the Dark Ages, there would have been very little Western Civilization at all. And no Blue Mosque, no Mahabarata, no Sanjusangendo Temple. But of course that is not all that would have been lost. Such a stance focuses on the sins of intsitutionalized religion, but ignores the kindness inherent in the religious ideal. As William James says in The Varieties of Religious Experience, ‘There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.’ (38). This tenderness towards God and others is central to the Gospel: when a lawyer says that the chief commandment is ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself,’ Jesus endorses this with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This same tenderness is reflected in St James’s epistle:

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. (Jas. 2:15-17)

The Christian ideal is not about dogma, and certainly not about killing those who disagree with you: it is about kindness. Far from supporting institutionalized religion, Jesus challenged it – in his own lifetime he challenged the structures of institutional Judaism, and in our own time, as Orozco and Denys Arcand’s film, Jesus of Montreal suggest, he would almost certainly challenge the power structures of the Christian faith. In doing this he would not be attacking the structures themselves, but the inevitable corruption by power and greed that are so common within structures and institutions, even when the ideal, the mission statement that motivates them is sound: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy but to fulfill.’ (Matt 5:17)

Power or Poverty: is God omnipotent?

Dawkins inveighs against ‘the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis’ (19): that is, he attacks the supposed religious view that God is omnipotent. But that is to oversimplify enormously the religious view of God. As John Macquarrie says, in creating others, God

• Limited his power and committed himself to his creation, leading to the incarnation and passion
• Gave a share of the responsibility to the creatures
• Made himself vulnerable
because there cannot be love, sharing and freedom ‘without the possibility of suffering on the part of him who loves and shares and confers.’ (The Humility of God, 1-4)

In Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’, God withdraws his hand, not seeking to control or possess, but allowing a space into which Adam can reach and grow. God’s left arm is resting on the Son who will endure the suffering that is a necessary consequence of creation.

In fact, it is through this very renunciation of power in creation that God becomes God – without that, he would be just formless energy.

It is in coalescing into matter and form that individuals arise and God enters into relationship with his creatures in time – God is a word that implies relationship. Can Einstein’s famous equation E = MC2 be reconfigured: God (energy) = matter and time/speed/movement?

God is not omnipotent, but rather, as William Langland says in Piers Plowman (c.1386), he became man in order to know our suffering.Elie Wiesel’s Account of Auschwitz, from his novel, Night:

Later, during the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, [Wiesel] hears someone in the crowd ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony, "struggling between life and death." Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes still clear, and weeps. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book)#Auschwitz

Does God demand Jesus's Death?

In the Christian tradition, Jesus has always shown solidarity with the poor. A famous example is the grisly Isenheim Alterpiece, painted for a monastery which had a hospital for patients with skin diseases and epilepsy.

In Michael’s lectures, I particularly liked the idea that God does not demand Jesus’ sacrifice. He demands fidelity to the project of liberating the poor and oppressed, and that is what leads to the Crucifixion. This model emphasizes God’s love for the poor and Jesus’s courage: it is closer to the old heroic model of redemption where God-in-Christ saves Man from the Devil out of love. St Augustine talks about this in his De Trinitate and it is the inspiration for the pictures of Jesus alive on the Cross in the heroic period, ‘the young hero’ as the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’ describes him (and also this crucifixion from the Coronation Sacramentary of Charles the Bald)
But, if God is present in all human suffering, it is even more imperative that humans should try to relieve suffering wherever they find it. Jesus presence on the Cross challenges us to do something about it – as in a poem I wrote about the broken crucifix in the cathedral in Nagasaki

in Urakame Cathedral
the head and arm are torn
from a Crucifix – a gaping hole
a mouth crying out
the remaining arm
an accusing finger

Where do I fit into the story of God’s incarnation of powerlessness?

Plays like Shakespeare’s King Lear and Akira Kurosawa’s film transformation of it, Ran, show that it is human greed, pride and folly that unleashes much suffering in the world. God holds us responsible for the suffering we have created, but he also embraces that suffering. Christ redeems us by giving us a chance to respond to his suffering by comforting or healing the suffering of others. Like the (possibly apocryphal) story of the statue of Jesus that had its arms blown off in World War II and someone put up a sign saying, ‘Christ has no hands but yours.’ http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Feb2005/Family.asp
If abnegation of power makes God more fully himself, loss of power can make us poor, dependent on God, more fully human.
In King Lear, when Lear gives up his kingdom, banishes his good daughter, puts himself at the mercy of his wicked daughters, and becomes powerless, destitute and mad, he begins to discover himself, particularly his responsibility for the poor that he has ignored:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend youFrom seasons such as these?
…. O, I have ta’en too little care of this. (3.4.28)

Liberation theology tells us that God has a radical preference for justice toward the poor – that Jesus appeared first to shepherds, and that he spent his time with fishermen, prostitutes and tax collectors. If I believe in God I must also demonstrate this engagement with the poor and outcast.

When I read 'A New Way of Encountering God', I was struck by
The here-and-nowness that LT deals with
That we are all theologians and that theology is a love letter to God
That God (as I firmly believe) s a mystery that none of us can penetrate, and that intellectual modesty is essential
That theology's love letter changes with time
When I came to the part about Commitment being the first act and theology the second, my heart began to burn within me (sorry to be mushy but that is what it felt like) - I so want to find a way of committing myself in this area - have been feeling this for some years now, but not sure how I can do it. I do encounter poor people to some extent in volunteering a little with refugees in Blacktown, but this is mild compared with the problems of Africa or Latin America.
I was moved by the three main parts of LT - liberation from:
unjust social structures
the power of fate
personal guilt or sin
Reflecting that I do have a growing desire to confront the structural causes of injustice, I realized that in some ways I already do this - that friends and colleagues and family seem to find it helpful to talk to me, especially when they are struggling to release their creativity from the social constraints that inhibit it. I had a very strong sense too, that a particular friend is actually one of the poor in spirit, who asks for my love in a very special way that liberates both of us from some of our past fears and unhealthy patterns. This led me to reflect on the moments of poverty of spirit in my daughter and husband - moments when they need me to listen and be with them. This too is an obligation.

Is a radical preference for the poor a Judeao-Christian idea, or is it at the heart of any ethical system?

But although Christian teaching underlines the importance of this duty, and gives us insight into how and where we might do this, this duty is not just the preserve of Christians: in Piers Plowman, Langland complains that Christians are less charitable than Jews; my Muslim friends talk about the duty to help the poor and are always helping each other; in today’s Sydney Morning Herald (9.6.07) Peter Singer, who is, I believe, an atheist, argues that everyone in the rich world should donate 25% of their income to charities such as Oxfam (a practice he follows himself, and says so, believing that people follow by example); when my brother-in-law was dying a Buddhist group helped my sister to care for him.

And who is my neighbour?

When the lawyer told Jesus that ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself, Jesus told him to put this into practice. The lawyer asked, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ We too must use our minds in order to try to answer this question and work out how to use our finite physical and emotional resources effectively.