Church, Religiosity, and Injustice

During this morning's homily at mass (at St. Francis Seraph), the priest was talking about religiosity versus true faith. This weekend's gospel reading was the parable of the two sons where one says to his father he will do what he's asked and then doesn't while the other says he won't and then does. The point the priest was trying to make is that our rituals don't mean anything if they're just empty rituals.

This made me think of my home church. I am currently very disenchanted by the parish where I grew up. Before this summer, we went to St. Joseph's Church in the West End twice - once on the Urban Plunge retreat and once on our preparation retreat for this semester. This church is incredibly welcoming and informal enough to make anyone comfortable. It's a primarily African American church, but we were very welcomed. This summer, I went to mass at home, to the 5:30 youth mass that I went to all through high school. The mass I went to was the first mass for the newly instated Knights of the Holy Temple. I was familiar with the Knights from OLMC, another church at home that I participated in events with, but I never expected them to come to Seton. Basically, the Knights wear cassocks (the priest-dresses, as some call them) and use incense and carry candles everywhere. And there are a lot of them - like seven - for a mass that normally only has three servers. That mass was particularly funny because of all of the ridiculous rituals performed during the mass by the Knights. I stopped going to that mass because of the Knights. This morning when the priest was talking about empty rituals, that's what I thought of. My church is great when you're a member, when you're involved, when people know you. But when you're new, I can't see anyone introducing themselves and welcoming you.

I like to attribute a certain comment by my pastor to the religiosity of my parish. I've come to the idea that, to an extent, suburban churches miss a large part of the gospel. Suburban churches see the dignity of life only in the issue of abortion. They don't want to see it in the issues of an unjust criminal "justice" system, from the horrible conditions that public defenders work in - not allowing them to properly defend a client - to the injustice of the ways laws are written - they are incredibly classist, from the difference between cocaine and crack cocaine to the war on drugs in general to white collar versus blue collar crimes - to the injustice of the death penalty system - you can't challenge your sentence based on your innocence after, I think, something like six weeks after the initial trial. They don't want to see it in the injustices that lead to poverty. Yes, I'm being accusatory. But I'm also accusing myself. I was blind to these issues for so long. These issues are easy to overlook when you're surrounded by people who don't face these issues because they have money (or benefit from these injustices). I also recognize that this doesn't include everyone in suburban churches.

Christ calls us to more than ritual. Christ calls us to service. Pope Benedict XVI says, "Love for widows and orphans, prisoners and the sick and needy of every kind, is as essential to [the Church] as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel" (Deus Caritas Est, quoted in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship by the USCCB). This is a huge calling. It's not an easy calling. It's one that gets left behind amid the ritual and spirituality. This calling is one that's central to the Gospel. We CANNOT forget it.

That's the reason I wanted to participate in this semester. I came to Xavier with the intent to become more involved in service. I can't think of a better way for that to happen than for me to be here. I'm blessed because of this opportunity. I'm most blessed in that this opportunity gives me the chance to seek out injustice. Actually, I don't even have to seek out injustice; it comes knocking on my door through the readings for my classes. What a gift to learn about this. At the same time, it's a challenge. It places me in a place where I know there are incredible injustices but have no clue what I can do about them. I'm also in a place where I am frustrated that others refuse to see these injustices (although I understand why). I feel a little like Frederick Douglass in a document we read for history. He essentially said that he's tired of trying to convince people that slavery is wrong. They're not going to see it because they don't want to see it. He wants to be angry. And he has a right to be angry at the injustice. It's like the gospel story in which Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers in the temple. It's a righteous anger.

I know I wasn't intending to make this blog a faith-related one, but today's homily drove me to a reflection. So if you're not a religious/spiritual person, ignore that part of the blog. There's still injustice, and that's wrong. I promise I will eventually get to explaining many of these issues from a non-faith-based stance. But that'll take more work, and for now, I have to get to doing some readings and shopping for brunch today with our leader/teacher.

Newsletter

We put out our first newsletter today. Here is a link to it as published on Xavier's website: http://www.xavier.edu/portal_announcements/pdf/Newsletter.pdf.

I apologize for the typo at the end of Erin's article. It's my fault because I typed it and forgot to spell check the document before I finished.

Weekend Plus

Friday after class I participated (with the rest of the group) in my first non-violent march. We joined with CeaseFire Cincinnati to march around the community chanting "Stop the shooting," "Stop the killing," "They wanna live," etc. It was a really cool experience. The group marching was a pretty decent size, and we got lots of affirmation from passing cars honking at us. I felt like we were heard.

Saturday for our service, we went to an elementary school that was hosting the Guatamalan Consul to help immigrants make sure their papers are all correct. We played with the children. Most of them spoke English really well, but not all of them did. One girl (about seven years old) came over looking scared to death. Erin started talking to her in Spanish, and she immediately warmed up to Erin. She was scared because she didn't speak English. That experience really made me want to learn Spanish. And when I took some of the kids inside to get drinks, I couldn't ask some of the other kids I saw if they wanted to play because I didn't speak Spanish. Imagine how scared these kids must be around strangers who don't speak the same language.

After we finished we went to the bus stop, but were sitting on the wrong side of the street. We sat there for about an hour. Due to some miscommunication among our group, we missed two #32 busses before we realized that was the bus we were supposed to be on. We realized it as one of them was driving away. After that, we decided to walk. We started walking along the bus route and were going to catch the next bus as it drove by, but we ended up walking home all the way from Price Hill to Over-the-Rhine. It was a long walk.

Class-wise, we're still learning a lot, but it's hard to put it all together. I've definitely learned a lot more about the systematic aspects of poverty. There's a lot that goes into it that we don't even realize. The executive director of PIP told me she's been planning to read one of the books we're reading for class, When Work Disappears. She told me that she's going to move it to the top of her reading list and we can discuss how it applies to what we do at PIP/Venice. There are a lot of really interesting readings that Jennifer has compiled for our service learning class. Some of them are more frustrating and challenging to get through, but some of them are really interesting. One article you might be interested in reading is "Body Ritual among the Nacirema." Just google it. Then leave me a comment about what you think of it.

We're preparing to go to New Orleans. Over fall break, we're taking off the beginning of the week and traveling to New Orleans to do some service work and learn some new things. We know Christine will be taking us to a few museums since she's the history person. I'm not exactly sure what work we'll be doing yet, though. I'll let you know.

Service Sites, Classes, etc.

I just want to start by attempting to explain my service sites. I begin my days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by walking over to Venice on Vine (about 2 blocks) to pick up a vehicle. I drive to the West End Emergency Center (which is primarily a food pantry, but also gives out clothes and other various items) to pick up Sharon, who works with AmeriCorps at the Emergency Center. Together we go to the Freestore Foodbank, the distributor of USDA and Ohio food products along with donations from other sources to local pantries, and pick up the daily limit of items. We go back to the Emergency Center to drop off the stuff. On Wednesdays starting tomorrow, I go back to Venice to drop off the vehicle and walk to Emanuel (which is at the other end of my block) where I will be doing primarily administrative work. Mondays and Fridays I can either stay with Sharon to help out around the food pantry or head back to Venice where Rina, the executive director of Power Inspires Progress, will assign me something to do. I've done some data entry for past employees and for donations. Venice on Vine is a restaurant run by Power Inspires Progress that offers paid job training and GED classes. Employees are limited to a year of work at Venice on Vine. Also run by Power Inspires Progress and closely associated with Venice on Vine is Venice Catering. Sometimes I will help doing stuff for them, including a day where I spent some time dicing tomatoes. That's a very brief overview of the work I do.

One thing I was excited about for this semester is the overlap between my classes. It seems that some overlap inevitably happens, or at least it did last year, but this year's courses are designed to be similar. We've come across many readings that say the same things in different classes. We've even had some articles that have contradicted each other. It's much more frustrating than I anticipated. With all of this, we're supposed to be connecting our readings and classes to each other and to our service sites. I was under the impression that was a large part of the Service Learning class, but it's not. We have a huge book of readings that our teacher put together, and so far we've hardly talked about them, let alone readings we've had to do for other classes. A little bit of that is what our journals are for, but that can't be the primary way to work through everything that's going on in our minds. I think discussion and different viewpoints are definitely helpful in working through putting together our new knowledge from different sources. So we're still working on that.

On a very exciting note, our Community Building and Urban Change class last night had a guest lecturer named John McKnight. He's from Northwestern, which is exciting since Rebecca goes there. But even more exciting is the story he told us about his first class of people that he and a friend trained through Northwestern to be community organizers. One of the members of the class was Barack Obama! The man who trained Barack Obama to be a community organizer (aka community empowerer) spoke to my class last night! He actually wrote the recommendation for Obama for Harvard Law. I thought that was pretty cool.

As to Cincinnati's experience with Hurricane Ike, it did hit pretty hard. Cincinnati is in a state of emergency. But we're safe. We never lost power or anything. Many people around the city did lose power, and some are still without power. (Aunt Cathy and Uncle Paul were without power for about a day.) Some of the water treatment plants also lost power and put the city in a water emergency. Basically, we're supposed to reduce our water usage and, if our water pressure is low, boil the water before use. There are many trees down. Washington Park, which is right across the street from our apartment, has many trees that had branches blown off. One church down the street from our apartment had a piece blown off the top. The local schools have been out for the past two days. Many service agencies (although not mine) were closed because they had no power. So, basically, it was a pretty bad storm here, but we're all doing just fine. I don't know how bad it was in Indianapolis, but I know parts of Indiana got hit pretty hard too. I can't imagine what it was like in Texas. So definitely consider sending money or water with aid agencies to those areas. Water, especially, is really important. Thanks.

I received a Facebook message today from a friend from when I was in junior high responding to my recent statuses on Facebook. So I started to look at her blog, and found it incredibly captivating. This friend, I believe, has some awesome perspectives on faith, religiosity, politics, Jesus, and America. While a lot of my stuff has and will continue to come at certain issues from a secular perspective (other than things that relate to my theology class), it is definitely very interesting to see things played out from the perspective of a dedicated Christian living on the near-East side of Indianapolis. Her blogs question the status quo, particularly the status quo of American Christianity. She asks the hard questions and points out the failings of a Christianity founded in theology rather than service and spirituality. The posts on her blog that I read tonight will give me even more to think about, to connect with my class readings and service experiences. These connections are the hardest part of this semester, particularly when it seems I don't have enough time or patience to do that. I just hope that I get enough experience this semester to want to continue to increase my experience and to leave this semester with a sense of how much I need to keep attacking these issues in a way to figure out more about them. The fact that my friend currently lives in the area of Indianapolis that she does really intrigues me. She lives there full-time. She spends her life confronting the issues that I'm confronting this semester, and it's in a city she knows from growing up in a nearby suburb. In my Community Building class, we're reading a book called When Work Disappears. It has definitely given me a new view of the suburbs and how they have harmed the inner-city so much. Suburbs can realistically, at least to a certain extent, be blamed for drug activity and its accompanying violence in inner-city neighborhoods. That's not to say that we can blame the people who live there. But it does no good to cast blame anyway. The question is what we can do. Maybe not even what we can do, though. It's such a complicated issue, this idea of poverty and inner-city communities. I just want to point out that this is how Barack Obama's community organizing experience can really benefit his presidency if he's elected. Sarah Palin may have chosen to dismiss that experience, but I feel it makes Obama more in touch with a group of people he's supposed to be serving. A piece of flair on Facebook that I saw today pointed out that Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor. While this is a tricky comparison that I don't want to promote, it's definitely an interesting perspective. With that, I apologize that politics have found their way into this blog, but poverty is an issue that, as "Poverty in America: A Threat to the Common Good," a publication from Catholic Charities put out, only the government has the resources to handle. It is, obviously, not the only issue, but for me recently, it has become a very important issue.

Neighborhood Kids

There are many kids around here who like to come over to visit us. The most prominent is Keiven. He's really sweet, and we really like him; sometimes, though, he's hard to get to go home when it's time for us to do some work or eat dinner. He's getting better at that, though. Sometimes he brings with him Kumari or Naya, who are both sweet. The neighborhood kid who is trouble is 10-year-old Terrence. To a degree, Terrence is just rude. He has his sweet streaks, but he also has his bad streaks. Saturday night he came over, and we went outside to hang out with him. He likes to climb all over everyone. We repeatedly told him that he has to ask before he can just jump on someone, but he continued to do it. He started yelling across the street at older men trying to pick a fight. At one point he became scared and came to hid just inside our door as some guy whom he had antagonized walked by on the other side of the street. We told him that we needed to go do homework, and so we locked him out. He knocked at the door for about two minutes, and then began knocking at the window. I walked toward the window and heard him ask someone to help him break into his house because he locked himself out, and then I saw him breaking off pieces of our window. It was the plastic outside storm window, and there was already a crack in it, but he was pulling out pieces of the window. Tara and I tried to take him home, but we didn't know where he lived. We got to one door, and he demanded we give him his bike back. So I did, and he took off back for the apartment. By the time Tara and I got back, Graham was out on the stoop with him, and there was another piece missing from the window. Graham had him under control, but as we walked in, Terrence was flaunting the piece of window at me, trying to get me to react. Fortunately, Graham was taking care of him, which was the best thing for the situation. She got him to calm down and eventually took him home with Chris Hale when he showed up to visit. Some of the neighbors were really mad and want us to not allow Terrence to hang around anymore. We disagree, although we're not exactly sure how to handle the situation. It's very obvious that Terrence just wants attention, even if it's just negative attention. We can't have him treating us this way, but we can't just leave him to continue getting in trouble. I feel really bad for him. I'm frustrated with him, but I also feel really bad for him. He clearly doesn't get a lot of attention, and so he misbehaves in an attempt to get attention. We just have to figure out how to curb his behavior so that he can get positive attention from us.

Kroger

Have you ever been to a grocery store that consistently didn't have gallons of skim or 1% milk? Have you ever been to a grocery store that consistently carried things very close to expiration? If you haven't, you're in the majority. The Kroger here in Over-the-Rhine doesn't carry gallons of skim or 1% milk, so if you want those types of milk, you have to buy them in half-gallons, which are more expensive (and worse for the environment). The store is also known for carrying things close to the expiration dates. Kroger treats this community as second-class citizens for no reason except that the people here don't have another convenient grocery store and would have to ride the bus to get to one. It's a classic case of taking advantage of those without the resources to avoid it. Why does it make sense to charge more to someone who makes less? But that's what they do here.