“And we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride.” –Peter Scholtes, They’ll Know We are Christians By Our Love

As many readers of this blog know, I have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the Autistic Spectrum. The condition affects my communication and social skills, causes me to be very sensitive to sensory stimuli, and makes it difficult for me to adapt to change and the unexpected.

For a Christian, these can be hard challenges to discipleship:  My neurology is ill-suited to welcoming strangers, to caring for the poor, and to be in community with other Jesus-followers. Yet, I am called to do so anyway.  So I try to work with, and sometimes against, my challenges in order to follow this path.

One of the most helpful things for me in coping with my autistic spectrum disorder symptoms is the theological value/doctrine of imago dei: I believe that human beings were created with an inherent dignity that ought not be compromised. Thus, I have decided that my inherent dignity is going to be the guideline for my behavior and social interactions. For example:

• I will not engage in behavior that humiliates or embarasses me. No matter how stressed or overloaded I get, I will not have a meltdown in public. I will guard my tongue.
• I will not tolerate ill-treatment from others.
• I will not compromise the inherent dignity of others by treating them badly, humiliating them, or putting them in a bad position with my own bad behavior.
• I will not compromise the inherent dignity of others even if they are compromising their own dignity or attempting to compromise mine.

My development of what I call the “dignity baseline for personal conduct” as a way of addressing my own problems has also informed other aspects of my thinking, particularly my views on social ethics and politics.

Like healthcare, for instance.

Mental and physical health are important, when either is compromised, we experience that dysfunction keenly:  We hate the way we look and feel when we are sick, we often can’t function effectively in our vocations when we don’t feel well, and we are compromised in our ability to be in authentic community with others.

Healthcare must be a priority for Christians (and historically, it has been, in the development of hospitals and medical missions). We uphold our dignity in caring for our own health, and we extend that dignity when we care for the health of others, particularly the most vulnerable among us.

(In fact, preserving the dignity of the vulnerable (and the sick are particularly vulnerable) is a pointed (and non-negotiable) charge given to the people of God throughout scripture.)

Yet under our current healthcare system, here in the United States, I have witnessed the following dignity-robbing scenarios:

• I’ve seen an elderly woman crying in a drugstore  because she couldn’t afford to pay for her much-needed medication.
• I’ve known seniors who have had to consider divorcing their disabled spouse so that spouse could get the nursing home care that he or she needed.
• I’ve known people with abscessed teeth and festering sores who have spent months in agony, oftentimes battling infections, who could not pay for the simple procedure that might end their pain and prevent further compromising of their health.

I am well-aware of the concerns regarding “socialized healthcare” and the argument that government cannot solve everyone’s problems. However, I would note that the Church has not managed to stop assaults on human dignity such as those that I have described above.

Why is this? And given this situation, why are some Christians convinced that their “right” to avoid taxation in order to provide healthcare to others trumps their obligation  to care for the vulnerable?

Just wondering.

This post is a belated contribution to the August Sychroblog. Other synchroblog posts are listed below:

A few weeks ago I read this post by Kathy Escobar. I found the post disturbing, and needed to take some time and reflect on both my reaction to it and what I truly wanted to say about it.

Kathy is the co-pastor of The Refuge. I don’t know much about this church, but I get the idea that they minister to a lot of “the least of these“: Folks who are  “high need”. From what she has described in her post, it sounds like the “high need” people may outnumber the “normals” at The Refuge.

Because of this skewed demographic, Kathy gets a lot of pats on the back (and probably the head) for her good work, but not so much in the way of practical support (i.e. people who are willing to become part of The Refuge’s community). Mind you, there are plenty of folks who are willing to send folks to The Refuge: They just don’t want to join them there.

When Kathy has asked folks why they don’t join the fellowship of The Refuge, she gets answers like these:

““we just want to be around less broken people”

“i don’t have the issues these people have”

“we just don’t feel comfortable” ”

I have alluded to my discomfort with the poor in previous posts. So when I read this post, I felt rather, um. . .challenged? I don’t live anywhere near The Refuge, so participating isn’t an option for me, but I still felt this need to justify why I wouldn’t participate if I was a local.

To my chagrin, my responses were identical to those listed by Kathy. In fact, I began feeling a bit helpless, thinking that if I were to become involved in a community such as Kathy’s, I’d probably implode with so many demands on my time, so many broken people wanting to be my friend, so many things and people that I’d have to “fix”. It was just too much, and I shrugged and said “Sorry God, I just couldn’t do all that.”

It was then that I heard the still, small voice say:  “Who asked you to?”

Stunned, I had to sit back and think. I realized that what was making me so uncomfortable about participating in a community like Kathy’s had less to do with what would like be expected of me by the church community, and more of what I was expecting of myself.

The arrogance of my thinking and the largeness of my ego actually got me to laugh harder at myself than I have for a very long time: Here I was thinking that if I were to join such a church, I would be expected to meet needs, solve problems, and make friends with needy people. Never mind that:

1. I have a fair number of needs myself right now, and not a lot of resources (personal, emotional, spiritual, or material) to share with others.

2. While I might think of myself as SuperLainie, the fact is that neither I, nor anyone else, can “solve” other people’s problems.

3. These “needy people” just might have their own friends. And maybe they wouldn’t like me all that much anyway.

In other words, I was willing to withhold my presence from a community where I likely would have been welcomed and loved, all because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to live up to my own (not the church’s, not the pastors’, not God’s) expectations about what I “needed to do for them”.

(Kind of silly, eh?)

While I was reading Kathy’s post, I got the sense that the only expectation that she had of others was a willingness to be present: For her, for the church leadership, and for the church community. Yet I had to admit that, if I were local to The Refuge, I would have been reluctant to offer that simple thing because of my “whole-r than thou” attitude.

Of course, I am not everybody, and others may have different reasons for not participating in The Refuge (or churches like it. But I’d encourage those who have the same “uncomfortable” reaction to consider why they feel so squeamish. Is it because they are truly afraid of not getting their own needs met? Or are they laboring under a heavy burden of unreasonable self-expectation?

And if the later is true, are they willing to surrender that burden for a lighter one?

(Am I?)

]]> http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/10/12/who-asked-you-to-the-arrogance-of-self-expectation/feed/ 0 http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/08/13/but-they-dont-deserve-it-august-synchroblog/ http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/08/13/but-they-dont-deserve-it-august-synchroblog/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:33:51 +0000 admin http://www.lainiepetersen.com/?p=189 “The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor” – Dorothy Day.

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)

The theme of this month’s synchroblog is poverty. Poverty isn’t just about being cash-poor, it is about political, economic, and cultural deprivation. It is about being at the bottom of the heap, and not being able to pull yourself up by the bootstraps because you have no boots to begin with.

When people talk about the “deserving poor”, they are typically referring to middle and working class people who have found themselves in difficult circumstances: They may not have any money. . .they may not even have a home, but they do have the cultural values, and the privileges thereof, of the middle and working classes. When Jesus spoke about the poor, he was likely talking about those who were living poverty: Like their modern counterparts, the impoverished of his day were caught in a generational cycle that few, if any, would ever emerge from. What is even worse, the impoverished of his day, again like their modern counterparts, probably contributed to their own situation as a result of the culture of poverty, and as a result, they too were probably defined as “the undeserving poor” by those who were in a position to help them.

The funny thing, though, is that neither Jesus nor the prophets ever made the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. Dorothy Day, who I suspect saw her ministry as being one of hospitality rather than social work or “charity”, didn’t make this distinction either. Instead she obeyed the commands of Christ and his prophets to care for the poor, whether they were deserving or not, grateful or not.

In fact, Jesus doesn’t seem to much care about whether the poor deserve whatever the non-poor can give to them. Instead, he not only tells us that we are supposed to care for the poor, but that, by the way, the kingdom of God belongs to them.

Now ain’t that a kick in the head?

This is a hard thing for me to swallow, incidentally. I work hard, as do a lot of my friends and family members. None of us are rich, none of us have a lot, and some of us are particularly vulnerable: A bad accident or even a minor financial crisis could threaten our housing situation or our ability to even buy food. We are (generally) responsible people who do our best to obey the law and to be productive, and Jesus has the nerve to tell us that the kingdom of God belongs to those “other” people who (really) don’t deserve it in the first place!

Why them? Why the poor? Why not the working classes? Why not those who “deserve” it?

I don’t like to presume to speak for God, but I have a few ideas:

Those who live in poverty, like all of us, have their blind spots: There are options that they do not see, prejudices that they hold, ways in which they misunderstand the world around them. But unlike the working/middle/upper classes, they have no illusions about safety nets: They are aware of their vulnerability to evil and know that the systems in which the non-poor have so much faith simply cannot be relied upon. They live day-to-day, hour-by-hour: Planning ahead is at best a pipe dream, at worst, as set-up for crushing disappointment.

When God incarnated as Christ, he left a “sure thing” for uncertainty: By putting himself at the mercy of fallen and corrupted systems, he found himself being tortured and executed at the age of thirty-three. No system protected him, no system could save him. His resurrection took place outside of established systems (including basic human biology), and his kingdom isn’t of this world anyway. The poor, those high-risk cynics who perpetually “fall through the cracks” of systems that weren’t designed to help them anyway, are closer to Jesus’s incarnated condition than the privileged will ever be.

And that is why they are heirs to his kingdom.

And that is why we are to serve them.

And that is why when we do unto them, we do unto Jesus.

Visit the other synchrobloggers at the links below:

Sonja Andrews: Fully Known and Fully Loved
Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Adam Gonnerman: Echoes of Judas
Cobus van Wyngaard: Luke: The Gospel for the Rich
Lainie Petersen at Headspace
Steve Hayes: Holy Poverty
Jonathan Brink: Spiritual Poverty
Dan Stone at The Tense Before
Jeremiah: Blessed are the poor… churches…
Alan Knox: Boasting in Humiliation
Miss Eagle: Poverty and the Hospitable Heart
Jimmie: Feeding the Poor

(Please note: An addendum/clarification to this post is available here.)

About ten years ago, my mom was a youth group leader at her church. The church was located in a very affluent community, and the kids in the group were very privileged indeed. The youth leaders decided that the kids needed to learn about the “less fortunate” and asked them if they would like to cook and serve a meal at an inner-city soup kitchen.

The kids were less than delighted at the prospect.

Finally, after a fair amount of cajoling, nagging (and probably tears on my mother’s part), the group decided to play along. They were serving a meal at the soup kitchen when a fight broke out between two of the diners. Things escalated when one of the combatants ran into the kitchen to find a knife. (The youth group girls huddled in a corner, crying hysterically, while all this commotion was taking place.)

After the day’s disastrous events, my mom asked my understandably-traumatized sister (who was in the youth group, and is now a very socially-conscious and kind-hearted adult) if she had learned anything that day. My sister nodded and said:

“I learned that I don’t like poor people.”

This story came to mind when I read a recent post by Pastor Pat Spelling over at Shades of Gray. She posted on well-intended “short term missions”, including a provocative article from the Washington Post entitled “Churches Retool Mission Trips“. The points that both Pastor Spelling and the Post article are good ones:

1. Short-term mission trips are often poorly conceived and executed by those organizing the trips. Youth groups are sent to “help” a community with no real understanding of that community’s needs or culture: In some cases the “help” offered is simply redundant (such as multiple groups painting and repainting a church over the course of the summer), but in other cases it is actually harmful to the community (i.e. putting local laborers out of work).

2. These trips are not cost effective: Participants are usually required to “raise funds” from church members, family and to cover their expenses, which can easy run from $1000-$3000. Thus a ten person youth group (plus chaperones) could easily spend $12 ,000-$30,000 to build a house or a hospital that, in the economy of many third-world countries, might only cost $2000-$10,000 if local labor was employed.

3. Most disturbing of all, however, is the attitude among many that even if such trips aren’t particularly cost-effective (or even necessary to those being “served”) they are justified because, after all, middle -class teenagers need to “learn” about their privilege and about the “less fortunate”. (Apparently the “less fortunate” are to endure these assaults upon their communities and local economies so that privileged youths can get an education. In other words, the poor get to be used as object lessons so that the privileged can engage in a course of self-improvement.)

Um, I don’t think so.

When it comes to serious, systemic poverty (and not just in the third world), “short-term” anything is pointless. Poverty, true poverty, is extremely complex, and people don’t “get it” just by going out and building a house or serving a meal at a homeless shelter. At best, kids on these trips are going to come back with “an appreciation of what they have” (but no real understanding of why they have it or how they got it or why other folks don’t have it), at worst, with attitudes like my sister’s after her visit to the soup kitchen.

If young people truly want to address poverty and its ills, they need to understand that going on an expensive working vacation is not the answer. Ironically, they would do best to take advantage of their privilege and the benefits that it affords them: They could use their social networks to raise cash, not for mission trips, but to send directly to long-standing aid agencies in third world countries. They could go to university to become doctors and nurses and engineers and agriculturalists and then visit a third world country to teach, train, solve problems, and generally do the sorts of specialist work that is actually needed. They could also work to transform social and foreign policy in their own countries or house and befriend students from third-world countries who are trying to bring new knowledge and skills back home.

But none of the above strategies sound as good as “My Johnny just went on a mission trip to help those poor people in South America!”. I just wonder what the “less fortunate” being “missioned” have to say to their friends after each group leaves for home.

]]> http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/08/01/mission-mess-ups/feed/ 2 http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/07/04/is-it-a-crime-to-be-poor/ http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/07/04/is-it-a-crime-to-be-poor/#comments Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:17:39 +0000 admin http://www.lainiepetersen.com/?p=79 I read a disturbing story today about a Midlothian (Chicago suburb) man who has been accused of locking his two very young children in a cage, in the back of his truck, while he worked collecting scrap metal. The truck was also supposedly outfitted with tinted windows and cunningly placed plywood which would prevent passers-by from seeing the caged children.

“Shocking allegations” (as the reporters in the accompanying news clip put it) indeed. Journalists and police and probably most of the people reading/watching reports of this incident are “disgusted” and thinking: What kind of parent puts their child in a cage?

At the risk of being called a bleeding heart liberal, I’d like to offer a possible answer to the above question:

“A poor one?”

(To those who are rolling their eyes right now, let me point out that I don’t think that putting children in cages and leaving them unattended (in a vehicle, at that!) is ever acceptable. If you read this blog post thinking otherwise, that is your problem, not mine. I don’t like inept parenting, particularly when children are endangered by it.)

But I’d like to ask another question. What alternatives did these parents have?

• Both parents were employed. The father was salvaging scrap metal and the mother was working as a dental assistant. Neither job is high paid, and this family was probably barely scraping by on both parents’ wages and likely could not afford child care.
  
• The family had got into trouble with the Department of Children and Family services before for leaving one of the girls “home alone”. The family was offered “supportive services”, though this apparently did not include continuing child care.
• The children were not simply left alone in the truck, but were caged and strapped in so they would not “run away”. While this action clearly offends the sensibilities of the local constabulary and the media, it is probably preferable to leaving the girls “loose” so that they could escape the truck and go out exploring.
• The television news report makes much of the fact that the truck had tinted windows and a plywood barrier that prevented outsiders from seeing the children. But if children are going to be left alone, wouldn’t it make sense to conceal them so that potential kidnappers and molesters cannot see them?
• There is no mention in this story of any evidence of physical or sexual abuse. Evidence of such may be forthcoming, but the problem so far seems to be that the kids were left alone because their parents (who already had reason to be fearful of the child welfare authorities) couldn’t afford child care.
• It should be noted that, as poor as this family is, both parents are working. If they weren’t working (and thus looking after the children at home) the same people condemning the father for securing the girls in his truck while he worked would be condemning the parents for being “lazy”.

So now these children are in foster care and away from their parents. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that they are probably more traumatized by being in foster care than they were in a cage, in the back of their father’s truck. While they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, I am wondering what putting the kids in foster care is supposed to solve. Clearly these parents need some, ahem, help in caring for their children appropriately, but given their circumstances, it sounds like they may have been doing the best that they could.

They are poor. They are caring for their children the way the poor have always had to care for their children, which involves few resources and even fewer choices. The police and caseworkers and media are quick to condemn and arrest and confiscate, but one wonders what they were willing to do to help a family, who, despite both parents holding jobs, could not afford a baby sitter.

Is it a crime to be poor?

Is it?