A CHALLENGE TO THE GOSPEL MESSAGE

Mary Scullion, RSM

In 1990, Sister Mary Scullion was invited to give the prestigious Boardman Lecture, an annual event sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Religious Studies. This talk was given on November 1, 1990.

I. Introduction

It is truly an honor and a privilege for me to be invited to share this afternoon with you. I would like to begin by offering an alternative title to this talk, that is: “The Gospel: A Challenge to Homelessness.” It speaks more truthfully to the reality with which I am familiar.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the University of Pennsylvania and especially Dr. Ann Matter and Leonard Primiano for their efforts in arranging today’s activities. The Boardman lecture provides an important forum for discussing critical social issues from a Christian perspective. The ideas put forth here are just a beginning, which I am sure will be deepened and improved upon by this evening’s panelists.

The reflections I offer today come from a graced history filled with struggle, suffering, and hope. To give credit to all who have influenced this reflection would simply be impossible, but I would like to name a few. First to the catalyst community who turned my world, and the world of others like me, totally upside down: Chris Sprowal, Leona Smith, Alicia Christian, and Steve Gold. To those with whom I have worked most closely: Kathleen Schneider, Clare Schrant, Joe Ferry, Eileen Campbell, Chris Simiriglia, Anne McNichol, Marguerite Pessagno, and especially Joan Dawson. To those whose thoughts and writings have deeply affected me: Dorothy Day, Jon Sobrino, Mary Rose D’Angelo, Will O’Brien, Thomas Berry, and particularly Vincent Donovan. And finally to those who have lived life with such tremendous courage and profound truth: Kathleen Sullivan, Ben Verdile, Bob Simpson, Billy Banks, Patty Burns, Susan Dietrich, and Joan Buckley, and each and every person who has lived homelessness and especially all the women who have ever lived at Women of Hope.

II. The Tragedy of Homelessness

What does homelessness mean?

For Georgianna it meant two long years sleeping on the cold concrete, waking to the bitter cold. And one day she awoke to find that her toes were blackened. She described how she went into Thomas Jefferson Hospital’s emergency room where they told her they would have to amputate her foot. She told them: “Let me the hell out of here!” She bought a pint of gin and woke up the next morning to discover that nine of her toes had fallen off. They were frostbitten. Georgianna describes that period of her life living without a home as if she were in a war. Each day was a battle for survival. Just like a soldier she survived by eating out of cans, bathing out of sinks, and being totally exposed to the elements.

For Jacob who lives here in the streets of West Philadelphia, it means living twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with voices that trouble him and alcohol that quells the voices. It means panhandling money for alcohol, buying it and drinking it. It is a vicious, deteriorating cycle.

For Jeffery Two Feathers, a Native American, homelessness cost him his life. While he was living on the streets, he was beaten by skinheads with two by fours until he became unconscious. He was hospitalized for a few days, only to be discharged to the streets. He died there a few weeks later of complications due to his injury.

For Mike homelessness is a vicious trap from which he cannot escape. Mike is an alcoholic without a medical card or health pass. Therefore, detox is virtually impossible to access. To obtain a medical card can be a very tedious process. You need an address and proper identification. You must keep your appointments at the welfare office and then your card will come in time. If Mike would be so lucky to eventually receive treatment, it lasts at the most seven days and upon completion he will be discharged to the streets with little or no resources or support. Yet people wonder why he does not pull himself together and get a job. It makes one wonder: “Why should he even try?”

Homelessness is destructive. It destroys people physically and emotionally. It is part of the institutionalized violence that slowly but surely kills its victims.

The lives and deaths of our homeless sisters and brothers are a powerful prophetic voice in our midst. Their lives and deaths are a statement of anger, of condemnation, and judgement. Their lives and deaths are also a statement of hope: Hope that all who hear may be angered, that all might enter into the experience of suffering and condemn, reflect upon the sources of misery and judge, and then act to crush the structures that are crushing our sisters and brothers, our children, our souls.

Tonight if we walked down the streets in West Philadelphia or if you came to Center City and walked along the beautiful Parkway, people sleeping on the vents or in doorways would be visible to any with eyes to see. You would also see the magnificent Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul with its beautiful doors locked and people forced to sleep on the cold concrete outside. You would find this same scene at most Center City churches and synagogues. And tomorrow you would see thousands of very busy and important looking people hurrying to keep appointments and work schedules stepping over people in the streets. You might wonder where are we really going and what are we doing that is so important that allows us to pass our hurting sisters and brothers? And you might wonder if we realize how we are helping to create that illusion about the city as the place that offers the good life, and opportunities to be participated in by all, and how we contribute to the lie that the city is the place where all class distinctions are erased. And you might wonder if we realize that the failure of the city symbolized by homeless people is our own failure.

Even to classify those suffering people as “the homeless” contributes to the maintaining of class distinction, implying a “we” and a “they” — they who are homeless and we who have homes. We look at such people not as persons, but as people who live in boxes. “Homelessness” then becomes a label we have placed on them, which somehow takes away our responsibility to them as fellow citizens — our sisters and brothers — and leaves us comfortably different than and separated from them.

The cry of these suffering people, is really like the cry we hear in a moment of fear or terror and mistakenly think it is someone else crying — and it is in reality our cry. It is the cry of all those hungering and thirsting for justice. It is the age old cry of a people that murders its prophets and awaits its Messiah.

III. Homelessness and the Gospel: A Crisis of Faith

The murdered prophets are the suffering and marginalized of our world. It is through such suffering that God most often chooses to reveal knowledge and truth. Story after story in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures personifies a God of compassion, a forgiving God, a personal God who is willing to get directly involved with people. The God of Jesus is one that cares very much for the world in which each and all of us live.

The Gospels profoundly challenge our cultural norms and attitudes toward the poor. The Spirit of the Gospel clearly calls us to get involved with the suffering that confronts us everyday. The stories of Jesus, from the Good Samaritan to the many cures of the sick, demonstrate over and over again his compassion and willingness to heal the suffering of his time. William O’Brien points out: “Not only does Jesus offer healing to individual persons suffering from sickness, brokenness, and rejection; he is also constantly challenging the social structures and corrupt cultural-religious values that created an apartheid-like system of clean and unclean, worthy and unworthy, acceptable and unacceptable.” As Richard Rohr described recently in a talk given here in Philadelphia commemorating the tenth anniversary of Bethesda Project, Jesus was overturning the “economy of status” in his society which relegated the power to a few and kept others marginalized.

One of Jesus’ parables, in particular, that of Lazarus and the rich man, offers us a powerful image that cannot let us be complacent with the inequity of the distribution of our resources. The poor man Lazarus, deprived throughout his lifetime of both basic needs and any human attention to his suffering, is gathered into Abraham’s bosom. The rich man, meanwhile, who was oblivious to Lazarus’ suffering, is cast into hell where his torment is unrelieved. The rich man then pleads to God: “‘I beg you to send Lazarus to my father’s house, since I have five brothers, to give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too.’ ‘They have Moses and the prophets,’ said Abraham, ‘let them listen to them.’ ‘Ah no, father Abraham,’ said the rich man, ‘but if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ Then Abraham said to him, ‘If they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead’ ” (Luke 16:27-31). We must hear the terrible relevance of this parable to our world today, forcing us to question how we can give tax abatements to wealthy persons moving into million-dollar housing then turn around and insist that we cannot afford to offer anything more than a cardboard box to house others.

The Gospel message also challenges those good intentions of people in our society who on the one hand express charitable sentiments toward the needy but on the other hand refuse to accept them in their communities. All too often we hear the attitude, “Do not house any of the disabled in my neighborhood”. The Gospel challenge is just the opposite. Jesus did not simply minister to those in need, he built community with them. We are called to do the same. It is essential that we welcome the poor, the marginalized and suffering.

We are constantly shielding ourselves from the suffering in our midst. We want to believe that somehow “these people” are different from us. We convince ourselves that people have chosen poverty and homelessness, chosen to have AIDS, chosen to become mentally ill or addicted to alcohol and drugs. It is their fault and it is their problem. In drawing the lines to separate them from us, we hope that it relieves us of any responsibility. “I am not my brother’s keeper” is a prevailing social attitude.

It seems that we as a society do not want to accept our own brokenness. We want to believe that we are so much better than all of those whose hurts and wounds are so physically obvious. We want to believe that because we work hard and think that we take care of our self and sometimes our families, that it all stops there. No wonder we are bored in America. Numbed at the suffering and pain all around us, secluded in our nice neighborhoods, protecting our standard of living, believing that we have rights not to have to look at homeless people. We want them arrested so we don’t have to walk over them anymore. Or we want the person living with AIDS quarantined, so as to further isolate them. This protects us from both their suffering and pain–and our own. Our cultural idols of patriarchy, individualism, and greed have named the lepers of today. Take the lepers out of our sight and let us go on living our empty, comfortable lives. In fact, I would suggest that the apathy and indifference to the suffering in our world is the primary indicator of the current crisis of faith that exists especially in this country.

IV. Homelessness and Idols

The crisis of faith manifests itself today as it has in other critical periods throughout the history of the world. Vincent Donovan writes: ‘There are spiritual and historic ties between the slaves who built the cities for the Pharaohs and their contemporary counterparts in the urban poor surrounded by marketeers and developers.”

In the Bible the city is presented as a place of pride where people feel secure to affirm that they are all powerful against God in their indifference to human beings. Sodom, Gomorrah and Babylon are symbols of cities under God’s judgement for the idolatry of riches that strangle the poor.

But the city — the city of Philadelphia and every other city in this country — has been abandoned. The wretched and the weak are its occupants. It is beyond the city walls where the conspiracy against God’s poor and homeless is taking place. The city is less and less protective of its inhabitants. It participates less and less in national and social advances. The powerless are trapped in urban convulsions, where the process of extermination of human beings and the crushing of their souls takes place in the midst of concrete, stench, noise, and utter lack of compassion in the face of profit. All this is taking place in the crucible of religious and political indifference, corporate greed, and a culture that is stealing our souls from us.

In our culture, property enjoys an absolute right and defense within our economic system, while no such right or defense is extended to the human person. A person’s worth is totally dependent upon how much he or she produces that is marketable, whether what is marketable enriches or demeans human existence. Efforts that focus on human care and enrichment, such as service to the homeless, are penalized. Such an idolatrous creed rewards belligerence, human indifference, greed, and theft, exemplified in the Iran-Contra scandal or most recently in the Savings-and-Loan scandal. There is no doubt that, in our society, the human person is subordinated to property and is valued by external measurements. And there is no doubt that we have an idolatrous attachment to our present economic system. Thomas Berry in his remarkable book The Dream of the Earth, makes this insightful observation: “The only suitable interpretation of Western history seems to be the ironic interpretation. This irony is best expressed, perhaps, by the observation that our supposed progress toward an ever-improving human situation is bringing us to wasteworld instead of wonderworld, a situation that found its finest expression in Endgame by Samuel Beckett.”

The idol of greed is also connected to the idol of power. The military establishment that defends our industrialized mode of existence is paid homage to by the resources that it exacts from the earth and from the poor. The present idols demand human sacrifices to survive. There is a vital connection between the one million Salvadorans who have been forced to leave their homes because the military government has destroyed their villages, and the three million people homeless in the United States. Each day in the name of the American people, in our name, Congress sends one and a half million dollars to aid the military government of El Salvador.

Our idols of wealth and power have claimed human victims. Remember, Maura Clark, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Oscar Romero, the six Jesuit priests, Elba Ramos and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mitch Synder, Michelle Martin, Pat Reed, Steward McKinney, Chico Byng, and Jeffery Two Feathers. These men and women died for the same reason that Jesus of Narzareth died. They denounced the idols of wealth and power and they spoke the truth. They were part of that prophetic presence that favors the poor and oppressed. Again, it is the age old cry of a people that murders its prophets and awaits its Messiah.

V. The Homeless: A Prophetic Voice

We are confronted by the prophetic voice in our midst: the sick and suffering, people with AIDS, throwaway children, refugees, the unemployed and the homeless, even the earth itself as it suffers the ravages of pollution and industrial devastation. How are we to hear these prophetic voices? What is the Gospel saying to us through them?

The Gospel summons us to become involved with those who are suffering — involved in such a way that we are standing squarely on the side of the poor and oppressed. It is precisely in the realities of darkness and death that the possibility of salvation is present. Anyone who has been privileged to meet Christ in the suffering poor knows the depth of their tremendous courage and unwavering hope. The rich promise of the Beatitudes is made real and concrete. How blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn. How blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right. How blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers, those persecuted in the cause of right. To stand with the suffering and marginalized is a process of letting go of our cultural idols. It is an act of faith. In the tension and chaos that this leap of faith will create (and it will) we will grow in understanding of the unfathomable blessings of God’s Kingdom.

“Perfect love casts out fear,” says the First Letter of John. What we need is an infusion of love to cast out the fears that produce racism, sexism, classism and indifference to the suffering of the poor. We need the ” harsh and dreadful love in action” that Dostoevsky wrote about in the Brothers Karamazov and that Dorothy Day so often cited in her mission with the Catholic Worker. When one of our sisters or brothers has a problem, we have to see that it is a community problem. We have to be there as a community for them. This is a reality that the most technically underdeveloped cultures in the world accept as a truth, as a human imperative. Anyone’s problem in a community is the community’s problem. There is no such thing as homelessness in these communities as long as there are people with homes, no such thing as hunger if there is food in the community.

Opening ourselves to another’s pain is just the beginning. In breaking down the walls that separate us into countries, classes, races and tribes, we find our interconnectedness. The old adage, “There but by the grace of God go I” becomes ever so real. To be able to identify with the mentally ill, people living and dying with AIDS, to feel the anguish of the mothers of the disappeared, to know the longing of the refugees to come home, is a rich source of healing and strength. For the suffering in our midst is a source of ongoing conversion, knowledge and truth. We can resonate with the Aboriginal Australian women who said “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

There are communities of hope rising up to in our society. Communities who speak and act truthfully in the face of the idols they confront. Communities like the Advocate Community Development Corporation, a North Philadelphia neighborhood housing corporation that is dedicated to the revitalization of its neighborhood. Or ACT-UP, a community of HIV-positive persons who have organized to secure the basic rights of people living with AIDS. Most recently, they have had to struggle to allow Betak, a nursing care facility for people with AIDS, to open against much resistance. The Catholic Worker movement has established communities committed to acts of hospitality, mercy, and peace while challenging the injustice of the social structures. There is Project SHARE, a mental health consumer-run organization giving a potent voice to those suffering from mental illness. The Committee for Dignity and Fairness for the Homeless was the catalyst for systemic change through the empowerment of homeless people. This was the lead organization for the political advancement of issues related to homelessness. Out of the Committee for Dignity and Fairness, the Union of the Homeless was born. Chris Sprowal and Leona Smith were responsible for forming grass-roots communities to address four key areas impacting the homeless poor: education, employment, health care and housing. Since March, the Union of the Homeless has taken over 13 HUD houses. These buildings were vacant and owned by the federal government. Now they are housing 13 homeless families. Through the efforts of the Committee of Dignity and Fairness, and the Union, Dignity Housing was created. This is a housing development corporation founded and managed by homeless families. They have currently rehabilitated and occupied over 100 units in Philadelphia.

These communities of hope, all of which take their power from the struggle to establish justice, have begun to break the deafening silence in America. These are communities that refuse to worship the idols of wealth and power. These communities are made up of women and men of vision. They are believers in the dignity of the human person. People who have heard the cries of the poor, who think critically and take seriously the message of the prophet Micah: “This is what Yahweh asks of you, only this: to love tenderly, to act justly, and to walk humbly with your God.”

We must respond to the crisis of homelessness and the many other crises in this society, not only to relieve the immense human suffering in our midst, but because the integrity of who we are as human persons is at stake. Our very witness of the Gospel is at stake. Albert Camus once said, “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way, that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt could arise in the heart of the simplest person . . . what we need are people resolved to speak out clearly and pay up personally.” If we do not speak and act truthfully, we fail not only our sisters, brothers and ourselves, we also fail the Gospel.

Since this lecture takes place in a scholarly setting, we should consider the particular challenges for the university community. In his book Companions of Jesus, Salvadoran theologian Jon Sobrino suggests that the University can be an important partner in the struggle for justice. Knowledge is a powerful instrument for change. Economics, Law, and Health Care can be taught from the perspective of the poor and oppressed in society. It is a key opportunity to effect systemic change. The preferential option for the poor must be part of the “particular nature” of the University and not just an extra-curricular activity. Efforts like the West Philadelphia Partnership and the policy of the Law School to have students work for the poor are to be commended and strengthened. Ignacio Ellacuria, President of the Jose Simeon Canas University of Central America (UCA) who was among the six Jesuits brutally murdered almost a year ago in El Salvador, expressed his hopes for a University in these words: “This does not mean that only the poor study at the university; it does not mean that the university should abdicate its mission of academic excellence — excellence needed in order to solve complex social problems. It does mean that the university should be present intellectually where it is needed: to provide science for those who have no science; to provide skills for the unskilled; to be a voice for those who have no voice; to give intellectual support for those who do not possess the academic qualifications to promote and legitimate their rights.”

Together, if we do act, if we do respond to these challenges before us, we will rediscover our human roots of community and compassion. We will know as never before the promise of the Gospel that God’s reign is at hand and that our God is with us, present in our world. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”