Vocation and Hindsight I: Beauty

Recently, on the Lamb's War, Micah wrote (at http://www.lambswar.com/hindsight-is-20-20/) about how difficult it can be discern what is truly important in any moment or season of life: it is often only in looking back that what really mattered--or what God's plan was--becomes apparent to us.
    I sometimes look back and try to make sense of my life, and one of my puzzles is trying to understand the tangled knot of my working career(s) or why it has taken me so long to find my vocation, and I believe I have one answer. I also can hardly complain about my strange career paths: I have had a rich and varied life.
     When Roger and I took a trip to Italy in the mid-2000s, and I saw Florence again for the first time in 25 years,  it hit me very powerfully  that when I was 20, I fully believed I would bump into Florences around every corner, that the world was awash in such wonders. I took Florence for granted, and used it carelessly, though innocently. Returning in my 40s, I realized, in contrast, what a comparatively rare gift Florence is, how extraordinary it is, and how important it is to fully appreciate power of extraordinary places and people.

Florence

     This reminded me of a very powerful memory I have of being on the Johns Hopkins campus for a graduate school interview. In the end, they offered only tuition and no stipend and no teaching assistantship as a first year student, and I accepted instead a full scholarship with stipend to attend George Washington University to study international relations (a mistake) and eventually ended up doing graduate work in literature at University of Maryland, which offered, financially, a full ride. I want to note for the record, too, that these opportunities were much more abundant and far easier to access 30 years ago than now. In any case, what I remember was an extraordinarily powerful desire, while walking across the Hopkins campus the day of the interview, amid all the brick buildings, to be on such a campus as Hopkins, to stay in such a setting. I was emotionally atremble with it, which is why I remember it so distinctly. I should have listened to what the Quakers call that Inner Guide, but at that time I knew nothing of Quakers. So I repressed the feeling as ridiculous, overwrought and sentimental. But I now realize, that just as I thought that Florences were everywhere, I thought that other careers, other jobs, other paths, could bring me the same glorious and intense joy as academic pursuits. I did find joy as a journalist. But other career choices made me miserable, as the world is in general a mix of darkness and light, and we are all formed differently.  I only found that out through experience, just as I discovered there is not a Florence around every corner.

Light within or Inner Guide: to me the Holy Spirit

   We live in a society that does promise us that everything beautiful or desirable can be reproduced over and over, ad infinitum. Do you like the Mona Lisa? You can have 1,000 copies. Or a million! Or why stop there? Two million! Do you like Beethoven's Ode to Joy? You can listen to it, performed by the best orchestras in the world, over and over and over, every waking moment of every day of you life. Enjoy Picasso? You can buy wallpaper, curtains, shower curtains, note cards, napkins printed with Picassos. Tired of your friend or spouse: You can find a new one from the many endless models out there. No wonder I thought I would encounter Florences everywhere.

    Isn't it more about class and privilege that I am able to wax eloquent over

the beauties of Florence? Didn't I simply go, like any tourist, and consume the Florence "experience?" Is this not effete, the stuff of parody? Don't I understand the oppression and injustice it took to build such a city?

    Yes; yes and no; possibly; and yes.

    As for my yes and no on tourism, when I visited the city at 17 and 20, it was about consuming an experience. I can remember wanting to race from the Botticellis to Michaelangelo's David to buying jewelry. Undoubtedly, I did some of that on my return trip in my 40s. But on the return trip, it was less about seeing and doing and more about simply being in the city. I can remember feeling content. Unlike your average consumer experience, it didn't leave me wanting more. Although we did do some touristy things, I was satisfied simply to sit on a stoop with Roger or walk around the streets, not needing to take from the city as much as appreciate it. Although no doubt built on human suffering, as all cities are,  I understood it as a place than cannot simply be reproduced like the waterfront tourist mall, with its obligatory tourist shop, Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory.

     What I underestimated when I was younger was that when you find joy and love and affinity, these are rare, not endlessly replicable, and you must cling to them with all your heart and soul and mind. You can't simply interchange them with something else, which is a truth about vocation it has taken me a long time to recognize. Not surprisingly, my happiest, ie most content, memories are of the simplest, most mundane things.

On Community: Do we get to choose?

In the film Arranged, a friendship develops between an Orthodox Jew and a devout Muslim, both teachers at the same school. One day, the two put their young charges in a circle. Each child has to write or perhaps draw a single-word attribute about themselves. The teachers then have each student state their attribute. Initially, the children choose predictable and positive words, such as beautiful, kind or funny. But when a young black boy's turn comes, he holds up the word Nasty. 

The faces of the young teachers themselves grow grim and nasty. Are you sure that's what you mean they ask him coldly. He nods yes. As a result, the teachers  force him to leave the circle, stigmatized and isolated, then deliver a moral message to the other students: we can choose our friends.

I wondered that these teachers did not ask the boy what he meant by nasty. As we know, language is slippery and  a word that has a negative connotation to one person or cultural group might have a positive connotation to another. I immediately thought of the classic use of "bad" meaning "good" in some subcultures. Maybe to this boy, nasty meant brave or bold or adventurous.  But how could we know? Like many people with power, the teachers simply imposed their own assumed interpretation on his text.

But what if they had spoken to him, and he had affirmed their understanding of nasty as disgusting or undesirable? What if that was his self image? Wouldn't excluding him from the group merely reinforce his perception that he was a bad person?  Wouldn't it force him into an outer conformity to gain a minimal level of acceptance, while doing nothing to address his inner anguish?

I also wondered how these two women could be oblivious to the idea that this youngster had possibly internalized  racist stereotypes about blacks that permeate our culture. Should he be punished for this? 

One  of the biggest challenges facing community involves how to treat those who are different.

The movie's solution, that we can choose our associates, feeds into an individualist notion of community as a consumer choice. It's also factually untrue in most cases. We largely can't choose our family, our schoolmates, our workmates, our neighbors or the people we share civic space or the planet or history with. Personally, I don't choose to be in the same species as Adolph Hitler, but I am. I don't choose to live in a society where many would cut off people's food stamps or refuse to accept global warming, but I do.  We can try to control community, but in the end we will inevitably have to contend with difficult or disagreeable people. The dream of insulating ourselves from the feared or despised other becomes the nightmare of genocide. And even with genocide, the hated others have a way of multiplying, like the sorcerer's apprentice's broom, the more you try to eradicate them.

Community, especially spiritual community, is not based on exclusion and control. It recognizes instead that we are mutually interdependent, that attempts to control others are soul killing for all involved and that people who confront us in uncomfortable ways have lessons to teach us.  In contrast, cliques allow us to believe we are different from or better than others and reinforce this by walling out those deemed lesser. They are not real communities because they can exclude a member the minute he or she becomes unacceptable, which often coincides with the moment of greatest need. True community, on the other hand, ideally serves those at their weakest points, and fosters humility, openness and growth as we learn to embrace those who are different and perhaps disagreeable.

Of course, no human can fully embrace everyone else. How do we decide when the permeable, inclusive boundaries that characterize a healthy community should become more rigid? And who decides?

Sent from my iPad

"Do we really want community:" A woman's view

I very much appreciate, resonate and am in harmony with the work of Micah Bales, so much so that I subscribe to his blog, a rare occurrence for me. Lately, he wrote a post called "Do we really want community?" at http://www.redletterchristians.org/really-want-community/and I want to respond from a woman's point of view. 

Like Micah, I believe community "requires that we consider the needs of others on an ongoing basis, even when it frustrates our own desires," but also find this highly problematic for anyone who has been part of a group that has routinely been indoctrinated to "frustrate" its "own desires." Forgive me as a woman for being leery of  such a call. As theologians such as Dorothy Solle and Andrew Sung Park have written, issues like sin, sacrifice and subordination look different depending on one's social location: male or female, black or white, First World or Two-thirds world. Do what extent do I have to be submissive for the good of the group? Who benefits? Who, in reality, will sacrifice the most?

Dorothy Solle

Much of the social fragmentation we see in our current culture arose from the identity politics that emerged from the 1960s as women, blacks, native Americans, gays and other groups demanded a new community more inclusive of them as fully human (ie, as being like white males) and more responsive to their needs. Many stood up to a social cohesion--a "community--" based on exploitation and caste. Much of our recent apocalyptic literature speaks, I believe, to the fragmented and desolate social landscape we have all been living in for the past 40 years. 

But are women and minorities to blame for destroying community in pursuit of our own needs? Have we sinned? Park would say no. As the oppressed, we have  challenged  forms of community that harmed us, and thus have produced what Park calls han, the damage caused by the protest of those who suffer against injustice. I realize that my sufferings as a white woman in a privileged country have been very small; all the same I immensely grateful to these minor indignities for the sensitivity and insight they have given me to the more intense sufferings of others in greater oppression. When I recognize how angry I can get when I am, say, dismissed  or condescended to or accused of being a whiner for even mentioning gender, I am humbled by what much worse oppressions people bear with grace.

What first jumped out at me from Micah's post was his mention of the Howard Thurman quote that I use it as a tag line for Emerging ... Micah writes: "The famous Howard Thurman quote –Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. - is twisted into justifying boundless individualism. If it meets your needs, do it."

I am glad Micah noted that turning this quote into an individualist manifesto involves "twisting" it. It never once occurred to me that this statement could remotely support selfish individualism. I have seen it affirming a community that values everyone's gifts, a vision countering a totalitarian view of community that I witness so often as a college instructor, in which my students deny their own deep gifts to pursue a vocational major seen as valuable to society (ie, subordinating their own needs to the good of the group) because it offers a job at the other end. These choices are couched as individualism, but are, I believe a form of market totalitarianism in which human value is reduced to a paycheck.  Thurman is quite clear that we should pursue our own gifts not for reasons of self-fulfillment or individual ego gratification, but because the world--and I love the use of the term world for allowing inclusion of an eco-spirituality that transcends mere human needs--cries out for our gifts: our specific, God-given gifts. 

I realize that gender plays a huge role in why Thurman's quote resonates with me. As a child growing up in  the 1960s, I imbibed completely traditional gender expectations. When the woman's movement erupted as "bra burning" in the late 1960s,  it was treated by adults in my community as utterly bizarre. I grew up, albeit only half consciously, having internalized a strong message that my needs were  naturally subordinate to male needs. The Thurman quote has helped liberate me to be a person who dares to use my gifts with a confidence that doing so serves the world. I can't express how much I have leaned into that wisdom.

How seriously can we take women when our society reduces them to beer cans? Can we blame them/us for being leery of "community?"

I know Micah hardly envisions a community that replicates the gender and ethnic oppressions of the past. But we can hardly build a new community without being conscious--acutely so--of what has gone before. Even in Quaker circles, which tend to be less sexist than the wider society, the unconscious sexism--not to mention racism and classism and other isms-- we have all internalized ought to be addressed. 

We need community.  As long as we are, to use Biblical metaphors, clusters of scattered sheep or lone sheep, we are easy pickings for the wolves of the world. Yet this new community needs to be a truly new community, based on the kingdom of God. Jesus showed us how to do this. Through the foot washing, he demonstrated that the privileged must serve the less privileged. This doesn't mean that the priest washes a few parishioners feet once a year. It means-- a repeated message through both testaments-- that the stronger care for the weaker. Jesus said, three times to Peter, feed my sheep. He didn't say feed my sheep only if they work or only if they subordinate their very selfhood to your needs. His kingdom means the stronger--and this includes the many privileged parts of me--take on greater frustration for the good of the group. Can we do this?

It can be hard to find images of community that don't foreground men and whites, but this one was OK. 

Part me of me, falling back on Thurman, wants to say we must each put on our own oxyen mask  before we can participate in community, but clearly, we need others even to wear an oxygen mask. Often, I simply want to reject community. After all, the subtle oppressions of community are both easy to perpetrate and easy to dismiss.  However, I will, as I have done, continue to struggle with this issue through a lens that highlights the knowledge that some have been treated as more equal than others.    

Grand Hotel and Breaking Bad

The movie set lobby of 1932's Grand Hotel

On a whim, my husband and I bought and watched the 1932 Grand Hotel. It's both charming and dark simultaneously, perhaps reflecting the zeitgeist of the era--and very Art Deco in look. What surprised me no end was the way it reminded me of Breaking Bad. The two invite a question: What's the better way to live out your last days?

In Breaking Bad, high school chemistry teacher Walter White learns he has terminal lung cancer, and decides to cook and sell crystal meth, both to regain self determination and (ostensibly) to provide for his family. 

In Breaking Bad, high school teacher Walter White finds selfhood through murder and machismo. 

In Grand Hotel,  an accountant named Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), who, like Walter White, has been crushed by long years working, is now dying. Like Walt, he decides to take control of his life in his last days, to be his own person, to stop being afraid. Unlike Walt, he is apparently unencumbered by family  and so takes all his savings out of the bank in order to spend his last weeks (we are led to believe he has only weeks to live; it's never made clear how long) at the Grand Hotel. He insists on--and gets--a premier room with a private bath (!) (fascinating bit of social history that even at a fine hotel in a major city (Berlin) a private bath was not a given in 1932) and entertains kindhearted, new-found friends on caviar and good champagne.

The dying Kringelein (left) enjoys life in the Grand Hotel with good champagne and kind friends.

I was fascinated by this character because, after watching Breaking Bad, I have been trying to imagine ways a terminally ill person could reclaim his or her dignity without having to resort to murder, mayhem and cooking crystal meth. The circumstances are different, as Walt does have a young family (a teenaged son and a baby on the way) and longer to live.  I applauded Walt for his desire to reclaim his selfhood and dignity, but abhorred that the method was through ultra machismo, ultra violence, manipulation and greed. A subtext for Grand Hotel is indeed the violence underlying Berlin life, with booted (the camera at one point lingers on a long, shining boot) underworld figures clearly symbolizing the  already rising Nazi brownshirts. Yet Kringelein doesn't go the violent route at all.

He reclaims his dignity without murder or machismo by politely insisting his needs be met, by sharing generously with others, by openheartedly delighting in life at the hotel, and--most significantly--by confronting his old boss, General Director Preysing. For yes, indeed, the owner of the business where the dying man worked for low wages for many years (ala Walt) also is staying at the hotel. Preysing (played by Wallace Beery) is a brutal man, who ends up beating to death with a phone receiver the kindly but impoverished Baron Felix von Geigorn (John Barrymore), who tries to rob him. When Kringelein meets the old boss at the hotel bar, he confronts him about why he pays such miserable wages to his employees while living in high style. The boss first defends himself-- "I pay the prevailing wage"--then becomes furious and chokes his former employee--presumably willing to choke him to death--until other people pull him away. No such scene occurs in Breaking Bad--never does anyone question why the system throws away people who have worked all their lives--ala Walter--to die.

Kringelein and Flaemmchen, both employees, know Preysing is not a nice guy. 

By the end Grand Hotel, our dying man has supplemented his 10,000 marks life savings with almost 4,000 more through a card game--40% more in a day!--and goes off with the young secretary Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) to Paris, in a deal in which he will pay her way if she has (innocent) fun with him and takes care of him. She goes off with him cheerily, not a controlling woman, not a "bitch," not something to be feared and loathed and hence destroyed, ala most, if not all, women in Breaking Bad, but as an equal companion. She even insists "they can cure anything these days" (words we still hear!), leaving open-ended how long Kringelein will live. We must assume that, then as now, he won't be "cured," but that, then as now, extra money and a loving companion may buy him some extra time.

Kringelein, oppressed worker, and Flaemmchen, the secretary Preysing wants to "buy" for her body, make common cause. 

I found Grand Hotel a deeply sane movie, in the same sense Little Shop around the Corner is a sane movie, and its remake, You've Got Mail (1998), with all its ritual humiliation of women, is not. But then I think, why such hostility now (Breaking Bad is no anomaly) to women, such a desire to punish, humiliate and best them/us? And why is reclaiming selfhood from "the man," from the degrading and underpaid conditions in which so many, then and now, toiled and toil, a matter these days of embracing ultra violence and ultra machismo? Why does it mean "going rogue" without questioning the system? Why does it mean attacking women? Why is Walt implicitly degraded by having a warm, nurturing female principal as his boss? Even a film like The Grand Budapest Hotel (which bears little resemblance at all to Grand Hotel, except being set (in part) in the 1930s) has to have its share of violence and murder, and (admittedly light) humiliation of women for the lead characters to assert themselves. (Grand Hotel's sole murder is committed by a bad guy--"the man" at that, whereas in Grand Budapest, graphic, violent, cold-blooded (but "light-hearted") murders are part of a prison break by the good guys.)

Finally, if art shows us truths we don't--or can't--see any other way, are we worse off as a society than we know? How do we respond? 

Columbia Mall: Rest in Peace and Going Forward

I was saddened and shocked to learn that two people were killed today at the Columbia Mall by a shooter who then killed himself.

Back in the day, we thought Woodies would be here forever. The mall was glamorous when it opened but part of its glam was in reflecting a vision of a society of people all working together.

     I have been going to Columbia Mall since my family moved to Howard County, between Baltimore and Washington, when I was 14.  In those heady days, the clothes store Paraphernalia with its space capsule dressing rooms and deep purple clothes stood catty corner from Bun Penny, a gourmet coffee shop. Upstairs boasted a sit-down Polynesian restaurant and the locally owned Smuggler's Attic (or was it Nook?) where you could buy round candles in layers of purple and orange or fish nets to hang from your ceiling. You could lunch at Hochschild Kohn's Lemon Tree, done in a decor of bright limes and yellows or shop at Woodward and Lothrop's, which we believed would be there forever since the store actually owned, rather than rented, their space.

    Columbia was and is a planned city, the brainchild of the visionary James Rouse, who wished to design a livable community of the future where all classes and races could live together in harmony. Though Rouse has often been portrayed as an unrealistic dreamer, locals who knew him remembered him as a hardheaded businessman--when, for example, the popular restaurant, Mrs. Z's, burned down, he didn't just write a check to reopen it. Mrs. Z had to come up with her own funding and a viable business plan--and when she decided not to, life went on. Rouse didn't bail her out.

The People Tree was the logo of Columbia until 2012, when it was dropped, but with the promise the new logo would reflect its promise and identity. I love the idea of a group of people joined  together but reaching out into the world as individuals

  Rouse brought blacks and whites side-by-side in middle class suburban neighborhoods even before the Fair Housing Act was passed. Stories abound of him refusing to sell lots to say, three black families in a row--he would insist a white family live in between. He was legendary for opening his Wilde Lake home to the community for block parties to which everyone was invited. His was an "executive" house for the time--but that meant four bedrooms instead of three, a few glamor architectural features, and a lake view on an otherwise ordinary quarter acre lot. In Columbia, you can trace the descent from the 1960s, when "executives" were ordinary people with a little more money--living in the same neighborhoods!--to the grossly oversized gated MacMansions of today.

In the old days, the central part of the mall was not crowded with kiosks but planted with trees meant to make it feel like a "downtown." Light came in then, as now, from pyramidal skylights.

    I've spent parts of my life going to Columbia Mall, and sometimes, depressingly, felt I measured out my life in shopping malls. I even worked at the Mall for a stint, at Bun Penny. I shopped at the Mall, met friends there, ate there, laughed there, ran into people there, was lonely and excited there at different times, in the 1980s brought my then-fiance Roger there to see the Christmas poinsetta tree--and naturally, brought my kids there. When my children learned in school that Martin Luther King gave his "I have a Dream" speech at the Mall, they naturally thought it was our mall.

    The mall changed over the years, expanding and becoming more upscale. I remember in the 1990s, when, after James Rouse died and Columbia was sold to a corporate interest that the new mall management raised rents. They said they wanted to oust the long time local owners, the people who lived and invested in the community, whose customers were their neighbors. It was not malice, but business. Dealing with individual business owners was inefficient, the new mall management said. The parent company owned a string of malls, and it was easier to have the same chain stores in all of them.  The locally owned camera shop went out (perhaps fated to go anyway), the locally owned toy store shut its doors, Bun Penny, the beloved gourmet coffee store, closed over the high rents. McCrory's not a local business, but a nod to a time when the mall could accommodate a discount place alongside upscale department stores, disappeared.

     

   In all the days I tramped from one end of the mall to other, I never once dreamed of a shooting. But why should this mall be immune? I can't help but reflect, however, that this shooting at THIS mall, in a place so wedded to a vision of what life could be, shows so starkly that what we are experiencing now, in Columbia or elsewhere (I moved to Ohio in 2008) isn't the future Rouse dreamed of or what Columbia (or imo, the U.S.) was meant to represent.

    The mall instead reveals what we have become. It is bigger and posher than ever now.  It's more crowded than ever, too, in part due to the kiosks that occupied the center area in the 80s, when the profit mania took off. And now it has become a place where people are murdered.

     

    "Without a vision the people perish." The second half of that, from Proverbs 29:18, is that those who keep the law will be happy. Isn't "the law"--a set of rules set in stone--antithetical to the idea of a creative vision? Not really--what that passage says--at least one meaning--is that a creative vision must first of all be rooted in the idea of a shalom community the law is meant to embody. Without  such a vision binding people together as one people, all in it together, greed and anarchy tear us apart. James Rouse's concept of social harmony and equal opportunity becomes a shoot-out at a skate shop.

   How do we find a better vision? Quakers have so much to offer in this situation. We know how to build community,  and we've already crossed the Rubicon on peace. Of course, it's not just Quakers who have a vision of a peaceful society rooted in shared community--so how do we think about this and live this and write about this imaginatively in ways that are not sentimental or nostalgic but truth-telling and future oriented? How do we move forward to a time when being randomly gunned down in your mall is as inconceivable as a public hanging there?

 

  

Christmas contretemps...Terry's Tavern

Two days before Christmas, I went with Nick to Zanesville. After some last-minute morning Christmas shopping, before the stampede arrived at the Zanesville mall, we headed for the long drive home. Only a few minutes out on the highway, the car lost power. I drifted onto the shoulder and  entered into a flurry of phone calls--to Roger, to AAA and to the local AAA person.

Finally, the man with the tow truck arrived, and towed us to the nearest shop. The people at the shop advised us to have lunch--by this time it was 1:00--at Terry's Tavern just a block or two away by the railroad tracks. Was it OK for us to enter such a place as strangers? I asked. Yes, I was told, they are very nice and have great food.

We headed out in the cold and wind and walked along a desolate strip of warehouse type buildings until we reached Terry's Tavern, literally right next to the railroad tracks. The advice we were given was good--Terry's was welcoming to us.

The food was also good--home made, "real" food--and the prices were inexpensive.

The Terry's Tavrn menu. The egg sandwich, which I ate as a vegetarian, was $1.50.  The double sausage sandwich was $3.50. You can see too its the Midwest, with soda called "Pop." The candy bar was $.75.

In entering Terry's Tavern, I couldn't help but believe we had stumbled on a secret. I never would have found Terry's on my own. Even if I had noticed it driving past, its isolated location by railroad tracks and "down home" look would have said "don't enter." Probably, unostentatious as it is, I never would have noticed it. Even more likely, I never would have been on this warehouse row but on the main drag, with its string of fast food places and national chain restaurants.

So a sense of grace surrounded entering this haven. I wouldn't have been there without a personal contact, fleeting as it was. Ironically, I wouldn't have been there without the unforeseen and intensely irritating situation of my car breaking down. I kept thinking about Harry Potter, a series I  I interact with skeptically and warily, but I do accept how powerfully the books plug into archetypes. In Terry's Tavern, I saw Diagonal Alley, hidden in plain sight, or platform 9 3/4, accessible to those in the know. How much "magic" of the ordinary variety do we miss that is right in front of us?

Being in Terry's was a Christmas gift I couldn't have predicted or controlled.

Nick had the double sausage sandwich. It came with a big plastic container of  horseradish with a plastic spoon sticking out and a catsup bottle repurposed as a mayo bottle with a homemade sign.

Finding these places feels spiritual to me, a metaphor for the half-seen world I imagine dancing all around us, just behind the thinnest of veils blowing in the breeze. I remember once taking a walk around a local lake in Maryland that I had circled dozens and dozens of times, often while pushing a baby stroller. This time, as I was wending my way around it, I felt moved to cut across a grassy lawn and enter a wooded area. I found a narrow trail there and followed it. It led to a neighborhood strictly cut off from ours due to the vagaries of local politics--the only way I had previously known to enter this neighborhood was to drive. And yet here was this trail! How could I not have known about it? Again, I had a strange feeling. I had almost been blown somewhere on a wind. The imaginative and literal met.

Dubbed the "real Diagon Alley," York England

I have difficulty putting into words this sense of finding evidence of the unseen in the concrete. Have others had these experiences? I believe they must be common--and uncommon. Since I am writing this on New Year's day, I am making a note to myself to keep attuned this year to the numinous. Or try to. :)

Christmas wish: If only we could rely on private charity

In Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Match Girl," an impoverished child freezes to death sleeping on a door step in Christian Copenhaen.

The Little Match Girl, hungry and freezing.

 In Dicken's A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim would have perished for want of good food and medical attention in Christian London if not for the miraculous transformation of Scrooge (in a story that never advocates changing systemic social injustice). In 19th century and early 20th century Christian countries, children went hungry and dressed in rags, and many people died young of preventable diseases--despite all the growth in wealth brought by industrialism and despite the many efforts of well-meaning Christians and others. The needs were simply overwhelming. Even today, in Third World countries without a social safety net, poor people live harsh lives that Christian charity has been unable to come close to ameliorating--in Kenya, a country the British colonists once divided amongst religious groups, including the Quakers, a friend tells me that a Kenyan without money will be left to bleed to death on an emergency room floor, dying while nurses step over him.

Tiny Tim would have died but for Scrooge's personal transformation.

In Middleton in Transition, anthropologists writing in the 1930s outline the almost impossible struggles of private charity to plug the hole the Depression blew in the local economy. A social consensus arose in which landlords did not evict unemployed tenants--and were tacitly relieved of contributing to the many charitable drives designed to stave off starvation. But not until the New Deal sent government money and centralized programming to the town--in reality, Muncie, Indiana--could the aid begin to meet the needs of the local population.

Yet friends or acquaintances of mine often mention their desire that private charity replace government social programs. The government, they say, is not supposed to be in the aid business. Government charity usurps the role of the churches and other religious institutions. If the government did not steal people's money and spend it against their wishes, they would have more to give to deserving causes. If the government would get out of the way and stop dispensing food stamps and Medicaid, the churches could step in and take over, distributing aid with love and individualized care, not bureaucratic coldness.

This is a compelling counter-narrative to the welfare state, and oh, how I wish it were true. If only churches and other religious groups could handle a society's charity: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked. Yet history, as outlined above--and present day experience--tell me this is a fantasy.

We are a much richer country now than in the 1930s, some will argue, and have learned the lessons of the debilitating dependence wrought by the welfare state. We would step up to the plate. But would we? If we would, why haven't we? If we could, why is anyone applying for government aid? I would be more comfortable with withdrawing the aid if it happened in such a way that need for it withered on the vine. Rather than doing  away with SNAP (food stamps) I'd rather see a situation in which private charity was so generous that nobody would think to turn to the government. However, I don't think that world--that shalom kingdom-- is on the verge of emerging.

I fear that for all the talk, if the government were to withdraw what is left of the social safety net, that first, many people would not "snap to it" and hustle into work, because work would not be available to them for any number of reasons. I fear many would become ever more  hungry, ragged and homeless, and that we more comfortable souls would become inured to a situation in which great groups of the poor lived miserable lives. I fear that rather than give sacrificially to meet need,s churches would withdraw, as churches do, and insist their mission was to save souls, not bodies. Even the Quakers, feeling the financial pinch in America during the Depression, balked at giving German Quakers the aid they needed to help people, including Jews, during the crisis of National Socialism. American Quakers, as outlined in the book Quakers and Nazis, remembered the "rice Quakers" in Germany after WWI--those who converted just long enough to get fed--and fell back on the idea of providing spiritual nurture, asking the German Quakers to become materially self-sufficient and help themselves.

How would this not happen across the board if the government safety net were removed? If churches and mosques and other groups could deal with the needs without the government, wouldn't they have done so already? Wouldn't there have been no need for a welfare state? My concern is that when people are asked to dispense aid on a personal level--and when it is voluntary--judgmental attitudes quickly kick in. People in need suddenly "don't deserve" help. Jane Austen nails this mentality--all too human--in Sense and Sensibility--when, urged on by his wife, the half brother of the Dashwood sisters quickly reinterprets his father's dying wish that the son help his wife and daughters in order to be able to do as little as possible.

John Dashwood's wife talks him out of setting up an independent income for his step-mother and half-sisters for after all, they  themselves might someday need the money.

I also worry that the growing trend towards private charity leads to distinctions in which those who are personable and attractive and popular get help, while those who aren't get left at the wayside. As a religion reporter, I covered a number of silent auctions sponsored by churches to help a family with large cancer treatment bills. Inevitably, it was an attractive family being helped, a family that people identified with --usually young, with young children, and active and popular in the church. I often wondered if the same effort would be made for the nasty older woman that people avoided or the elderly man who pissed himself or the pain-in-the-ass woman who was always complaining about her dietary needs--or the family that didn't do much for the church, with the kids that were a little heavy and clumsy. I imagine people would want--or think they wanted--to help--but would they always be too busy to organize, too overbooked to attend the auction? I remember a vulnerable young woman dating a young man I used to work with. She was heavily involved in saving abused horses. She told some people I worked with about a fund raiser--they eagerly promised to attend. Not one showed up, remembering at the last minute other commitments, or that they were too tired. I don't know if she was hurt, as she never came to our office again--but I imagine she was, and I imagine the well meaning people simply didn't like or identify with her enough (she had acne! she was a little needy!) to make the effort. These are realities.

But, people will tell me, more people would convert to Christianity if they had to turn to the Church for their physical needs. I don't believe this. I call this sick Christianity. I believe that having to mouth Christian pieties to get a meal alienates people from Christianity almost more quickly than anything else, a sentiment documented by writers such as George Orwell who lived among the way the "down and out" in London in the 1930s.

So, while Christmas conjures up an image of generosity, love, goodwill and private charity, I for one will continue with all my heart and mind and body to support the welfare state--for it is, I believe, a gift from God that allows us to make life better for all people, a way to bring goodwill to all men and all women.

What do you think? What would it take for faith groups to provide for people's needs? Is it possible?