Urban Meditation Excerpt Two, with Dad Story.

Today I was able to spend another hour or so with Urban Meditations while the girls entertained themselves at a playground above Puget Sound. I looked up from my book just in time to see Kay drop her pants. She had left something there which had apparently grown uncomfortable. As I took her inside to change, a gang of fourteen year-olds lounged around out front being as hip as is possible in a place as uncool as the Shoreline public library. Twin A, who is a serious contender for the cutest little girl in Seattle, chose this moment to reach into her pants and hand me the most enormous piece of shit you can imagine. "Daddy, I got it out," she said. "I don't need to change anymore." It sat heavily in my hand, like a miniature billiard ball. "Eeewwwww!," said the cool teenagers. This was too groty for words. Before I tossed it into a nearby trash can, I held the thing out like a handful of Fritos. "Want some," I smiled. Before anyone could react, the poop went in the garbage and we disappeared inside. When we came out five minutes later, the kids were gone. I think I scared them.

But, back to Urban Meditations. I've posted about Kip Tiernan before. When I was in Boston, she and her partner Fran were spiritually engaged activist-intellectuals who's sense of outrage regarding homelessness never seemed to dim. I admired them a great deal, and am grateful for this recent work that puts their forty-odd years of poor people's activism in some sort of perspective.

Things are worse than ever, and she struggles with the meaning of this. That alone, to me, is very helpful, as so few people seem to struggle with the meaning of anything these days. If nothing else, there's validation in being so at odds with reality in such good company.

I've reproduced below another excerpt from the book to go with yesterday's poem. The following is from an address delivered at the Harvard Divinity School in 1999, where Tiernan describes how years of conservative ideology have eroded the idea of human needs amounting to any sort of recognized right to survival, and the moral consequences for us all.

Why Hasn't Anything Changed?

You must ask yourself, qui bono? — Who benefits? And who sets the terms of the debate in which these things are discussed? The rich do. People are being paid by the rich constituencies so that things don't change.

We live in a society of cultural apartheid, two separate worlds of rich and poor, and the distance between the two is becoming greater, because we are not demanding that things change, that priorities be reorganized, to provide justice for all, not just the few that take it and then demand more.

The holocaust essayist George Steiner tells us that tragedy becomes possible when cultures become less rational in behavior and belief. This is America today.

In these times I tend to favor the Old Testament prophets like Amos, "I hate, I despise your sacrifice and burnt offerings" (Amos 5:21). Our shelters and soup kitchens have become for us 20th century "burnt offerings," things we offer God from the midst of the injustices of our time, all so we and everything else won't have to change. I like Jeremiah too. He lived as we do in a time of turmoil, a time of dying. Jeremiah saw coming the death of a society, a culture, a tradition. He watched his world dying and Jeremiah felt its pain. And what pained him more was that his contemporaries failed to notice or care. They could not or would not acknowledge or admit it. Jeremiah could not determine whether they were too stupid to understand, or whether they were so dishonest that they actually understood but were complicit in an enormous cover-up.

We too are in a time of transition, our world also is dying. What we used to call democracy is dying. Our grief is poignant because we are all too busy, too sure, too invested, too committed ideologically to the political forms and economic models of the past which are increasingly ineffective.

The value systems, the shapes of knowledge through which we have controlled life, our own destiny, are all in great jeopardy. The haves against the have-nots is not just a Boston phenomenon, it is world-wide.

The threat is so massive, so comprehensive, and so acute in personal hurt that the result is frenzied activity. We shriek for a death penalty, we pass brutal legislation, we make sure more people are starving and homeless and without any resources. We blame victims and we look for vulnerable scapegoats and they are everywhere. As government's role recedes, Lester Thurow points out, capitalism and democracy clash. Democracy, he points out, is radical equality. Capitalism is radical inequality.

We must look at — and own — the intractable pain induced by a government that no longer cares and is careless, a government endorsed by an arrogant and unfeeling gang of political thugs, and simply endured by a growing number of American citizens.

Urban Meditation

Today I've been reading Kip Tiernan and Fran Froelich's Urban Meditations, a collection of testimonials and other writing by Kip and those who have given inspiration during her more than forty years as a Boston urban minister. I was happily surprised to find this 1998 poem by Norma Laurenzi, a woman I knew in the late-80s and early-90s as a core activist in our Homes Not Bombs homeless direct-action organizing group. Norma was a front-line staff at Pine Street Inn, and was one of those extraordinary people whose passion for the poor derives from equal parts love and anger.

Easter, 1998

In Search of God,
No, no, not high above the alter,
but way below in the subway.
Not in the church
But behind it,
Bent over the heating grate.
No, not Sunday mass
But the mass that rises
In cement fields
With dirty dawn:
Climbing out of dumpsters.
Peeling from the pavement
Worming out of
Torched car windows.

I saw him.
His legs are lost in Korean landmines
And Boston snow banks.
His fingers ground
In factory machinery
Or green and thrown out
In hospital trash.
His lungs are eaten
Away with T.B., holes the size
Of nickels and dimes.
His jaw is sunken —
The teeth dropped out —
He sucks stone crusts till soft
Enough to swallow.

Go ahead,
Keep climbing mountains,
Examining sunsets,
Waiting for wind
To whisper answers.
I tell you he's here where:
One wooden foot keeps stepping
In front of the other, where
Fingerless palms
Balance cups in food lines,
Where tattered veils of lungs
Inhale and exhale,
And tongues keep finding
Nourishment in garbage.
He's most beautiful here
In this shrunken, aching mass of stumps
That keeps rising, rising, rising
Every dirty-rose dawn
To start all over again.

— Norma Laurenzi

Kip Tiernan's River Babies

One of the very first people I ever heard challenge homeless advocates to go beyond services to structural solutions was Kip Tiernan, a Boston activist out of the Catholic Worker mold. Kip is still around and at 77 continues to direct Boston's Poor People's United Fund with her longtime associate Fran Froelich.

She and Fran have recently published Urban Meditations, a work they describe as "outcast political theology" that is a reflection on forty years of urban ministry. I've been thinking of her lately because voices such as hers are so rare yet so badly needed. I first became acquainted with Kip's work in the late-80s, when she was a fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, and was working out a structural analysis of homelessness.

Kip was the first person I ever heard ask the question "Qui Bono," or who benefits? Having seen Good Will Hunting, I can't hear this phrase anymore without thinking of Matt Damon's retort, "Qui gives a shit?" In a time when more people seem to care about the next American Idol than the problem of increasing inequality, that's not a bad question to pose either.

I'll always be grateful to Kip for starting me down this path and for turning me on to radical theologian Walter Bruggeman, who in The Prophetic Imagination said "Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency." There's a lot in there to unpack.

Today someone asked me what I thought about Project Homeless Connect in San Fransisco. Apparently the US Interagency Council on Homelessness has adopted this program as one of their best practice models, which means that it is likely to spread. In fact, their website says it has already been duplicated in 106 cities.

On the surface, it looks like a good thing. Huge amounts of corporate support are linked up with government and non-profit resources to offer volunteer driven assistance fairs that link homeless people up with services. Longtime San Fransisco homeless activist Paul Boden says that while the both the volunteers and the homeless people who line up the night before care about the problem and want to see solutions, it's a bit of a media show that creates the mistaken impression that if only homeless people would just ask, they'd get the help they need. They ARE asking, says Paul, every day. And typically, the help isn't really there.

The question reminded me of Kip's signature story, which I've embellished and taken to telling as well.

Imagine a village where life is good. People have what they need and more. In some cases, much more. This village, where life is good, is filled with good people.

One day, someone notices a basket floating down river. There is a wailing sound. A girl wades out and finds a baby that needs to be rescued. A temporary home is quickly found and arrangements for care are made.

The next day, several more baskets arrive, and the day after that, the flow increases even more. After a few weeks of this, a crisis is declared. Meetings are held, resources are appropriated, and the Coalition for the Survival of Basket Babies is formed.

Over time, the trickle of baskets floating down river turns into a deluge. The village gets really, really good at dealing with the problem. There are rescue teams that can pull baskets out of the river in any weather and hardly ever miss one. This matters, since further down river there is a huge waterfall. There are teams of volunteers who spend all day mashing bananas and apples for the babies to eat. A dairy farm is dedicated to the purpose of providing milk. Churches erect baby dormitories where volunteers tend to their needs and seek to place them with loving families. A basket recycling center is created to mitigate the environmental impact. The pulp is mixed with cotton fiber to create cloth for diapers.

This is adopted as a best practice in hundreds of other villages that are experiencing similar problems.

About ten perent of the village resources are now dedicated to mitigating the baby crisis. People feel really good about it and are imbued with a strong sense of purpose. But despite the enormous infrastructure that now exists, and despite the great skill, caring, and generosity that has gone into its creation, the babies are still coming down river in great numbers. And oddly, no one ever goes up river to see if the flow can be stopped at its source.

When someone finally does, no one listens to what she says. The up river solution might mean that some of the people who have way more than they need might have to do with less. This is a controversial idea, and the villagers don't want to make the wealthy town fathers angry. They're the biggest financial supporters of the rescue operation.