liftthescreen

Danny Glover speaks this line in the 1991 movie, “Grand Canyon.” Glover is a tow truck driver, who has driven into the heart of a Los Angeles black ghetto, where Kevin Kline’s car has broken down. A group of gang bangers arrives at the same time and threatens Kline. Glover challenges the gang leader, insisting that the gang back off and allow him to tow Kline to the garage. The gang leader protests and in the course of the exchange, Glover looks squarely at the gang leader and says, “It isn’t supposed to be this way. We’re supposed to be able to go about our business.”

Why have these words have remained with me all these years? Because they carry a powerful message of confidence and hopefulness. Confidence, because Glover was saying, “this city we live in, at this very moment, is grounded in possibilities of peace—rapacious violence is not our destiny.” As a longtime Chicagoan, and a Southsider at that, with the issues of violence, poverty, and injustice that face all cities, Glover challenged me to see the city as God’s creation and, as such, founded in an intention of goodness. “God looked upon creation and said ‘it is good’.”

There is also a message of hopefulness—that the gang and the whites who have oppressed them can actually fulfill their created goodness.  As I look out over the south side of Chicago from my ninth floor apartment, I am challenged to say for myself, this city, created in the image of God, can fulfill its creator’s intention.

Danny Glover is making a statement of faith—in the face of empirical evidence contrary to his belief. So am I. 

Our world is indeed full of evil—unspeakably so. But it is not destined to Hell and damnation. Its destiny is goodness. There is no situation anywhere that is beyond the reach of love, including God’s love.

“It isn’t supposed to be this way”—a belief that is deeply rooted in human life and human history. Traditions of apocalyptic cry out, “It isn’t supposed to be this way.” When the cosmic monster of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation is slain, the message of hope is at work. 

Traditions of eternal life focus on God’s will to  transform the world. We also read in the New Testament “In accordance with the promise, we wait for new heavens and new earth or righteousness is at home.” (2 Peter 3:13).

Both of these traditions—the apocalyptic and the yearning for eternity—consider the miseries of living in this world to be temporary, provisional. They do not represent the “really real.” Things are not supposed to be like this.

How are we to live our lives in this “between the times,” when things are not the way they are supposed to be? In the movie, Danny Glover negotiated with the gang leader for safe passage for Kevin Kline. Judaism teaches “tikkun olam”—work however we can to repair the broken world in which we find ourselves.

Franklin Clark Fry, who was presiding bishop of our church during the 1960s, my theologically formative years, said:

“All that we Christians are called upon to do, all we can do, is to be an open watercourse for the divine love. We do not create any part of it; it would be an arrogant illusion to think that we did. We must not blockade it; if we did, we would be the adversaries, not the children, of God. We are simply to reflect it, back to God and out to God’s world. Our calling is to give it free flow.“

(c) Phil Hefner,  28 July 2019

My blog posting on poverty engendered two responses that reframed the issue, particularly redefining the term “poverty.” I conclude the discussion with excerpts from these responses. Each response was much longer than what appears here—I have edited their material substantially, I hope, without distorting their intention.

From Stewart Herman—theological ethicist, college professor, retired. herman@cord.edu

I’ve never been smitten by the idea of a ‘preferential option for the poor’, no doubt mostly out of moral insensitivity, but partly out of confusion.  How to define poverty? I think of poverty dynamically in terms of inaccessibility—the inaccessibility of resources.   That is, I am poor when I am unable to acquire and use what makes for a healthy, materially comfortable life.   This line of thinking gets me to two terms that struck me from Kurt Hendel’s prophetic reflection: oppression and hoarding.  These are actions that make resources inaccessible.   So poverty is not only relative but relational.  It is relative in that what counts as being poor in one setting may not in another.  I have seen many contexts where people without much in the way of material possessions still seemed to have fulfilling lives.  But poverty is also relational in that it exists where people are prevented from, or simply not enabled, to secure the resources needed for a decent human life.   Call this a dynamic definition of poverty—pointing to the dynamics involved.

From Mark Hoelter—retired Unitarian-Universalist minister and therapist. mhoelter528@gmail.com

We do better to speak of “people who are experiencing poverty” or “people who are poor” rather than categorically of “the poor.” In the USA the largest number of people who are experiencing poverty are people of color. So I submit that we do well to use “Black Lives Matter” as a current translation to “preferential option for the poor.” It is what that movement has been about.

Engaging people around the issues of fairness using John Rawls’s thought experiment is another avenue, noting that Rawls at one time contemplated becoming an Episcopal priest, so there is some Christian moral thinking in the background. To simplify his exercise: Imagine you are not yet born; you are about to be born into a world with societies and disparities much like our own. You do not know into which country you will be born, with what color of skin, with what degree of family wealth or poverty and social support, as what gender or sexual orientation. Assume that you will not be born as you find yourself now; you could be born into wealth and privilege, but by statistical reckoning you well might be born into poverty; you could be born to white parents and a white family, but you might well be born as a child of color. You do not know into what religious milieu you will be born either; maybe it will be Christian or Jewish, but maybe it will be Muslim or “None” or Buddhist or Hindu. Given all this, what laws and structures would you want to be guiding the society (and world), to give yourself and everyone fair opportunities and protections?

We know all too, that awareness and enlightenment do not lead automatically or easily to actual change. There is in fact the phenomenon the social scientists, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, call “immunity to change.” It happens at the family level, as family therapists well know (see the works of Murray Bowen and Edward Friedman); it happens at the corporate and society level (see the works, of Peter Senge and his group). Both the divine and the demonic, god and the devil, are in the details. To go back to Christian texts, Jesus’s use of what was probably a popular aphorism in his day still fits: “Be innocent as doves and wise as serpents,” where “wise as serpents” means equipping ourselves with as much social-scientific knowledge and community organizing savvy as we can for effective social transformation.