Hello! I'm weighing in late on all of this and will undoubtedly miss lots. I tried to post this morning and the site froze up on me, so I'd lost what I'd written. Very annoying!
Lisa Goldstein: Thanks for the suggestion. If I were going to do prison work, that's probably the kind I'd do, except that actually, it would be a bit too much like a busman's holiday. (I'm a college creative-writing teacher.)
Jo Walton: I love your idea about Christians having to visit prisons once a year. (And, on a totally different note, I loved FARTHING.)
I agree with what appears to be the general consensus that intentions may determine status as sheep or goat, but that it matters to hungry people not a whit why the people who are feeding them are doing so. I've met people who actually REFRAIN from helping others because they're afraid that their motivations may not be pure enough: this strikes me as the purest form of self-serving rationalization, and I think these folks need to remove their heads from their lower digestive tracts, get over themselves, and go do some work.
Re missionaries: I wouldn't condemn all of them, since a lot do medical, educational and agricultural work that makes a huge difference. (I don't like the ones who are only there to convert people.) My favorite missionary story comes from a friend (white and from Pennsylvania) who discerned his call to the Episcopal priesthood, fifteen or twenty years ago, by working in Navaholand for a few years. His friends back East, when they learned that he was going to do this, were disgusted and horrified that he was heading off to a reservation to try to convert Native Americans. "They had it backwards," he told me. "I was the new convert, and the Navajos were fifth-generation Episcopalians who were up in arms that we were no longer using the 1928 Prayer Book."
But yes, I know the horror stories about missionaries (especially the 19th-century ones) too.
Susan
Teresa said:
"Notice that when the goats are being goated, they don't get to protest that they donated to missionary funds, sang in the choir, put in fifteen years as the parish secretary/treasurer, or helped organize prayer retreat weekends. Helping others is being identified as a core belief. Failure to do so puts you outside the fold."
Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't follow this. Donating to missionary funds isn't helping? Doing thankless administrative tasks isn't helping? Does that mean that if I donate to relief agencies (which I've done) but don't fly down to New Orleans to help dig out bodies (which I'm not going to do) I'm not helping?
Many relief agencies have asked for money rather than volunteers. Are we being goatified?
I prefer a model in which there are many kinds of help and they all count -- as long as they're consciously intended as help, and not as a strategic retreat from involvement. (But who among us hasn't strategically retreated sometimes? This gets us back into Good Goat territory.)
I wonder if part of the issue here, too, is whether we're helping to acknowledge relationship -- "I could be there too, and I'm treating my neighbor as myself" -- or to emphasize superiority ("I have more than you do because I'm better than you are, so I'm going to give you some to make myself feel better yet").
Susan
Zaynep, as I read the Parable of the Nations (the "least of these" passage, which Teresa has helpfully posted in its entirety on the blog), one of the things it means is that if you feed somebody who's hungry, you're doing God's work whether you believe in God or not. Both groups in the story are really shocked by where they wind up: the people who were serving God didn't realize they were doing so, and the people who weren't thought they were.
My father's a furious atheist, but he's also profoundly generous and helps out his neighbors whenever he can. I tell him he's one of the best Christians I know!
Susan
Lizzy: Hurrah for Catholic Charities! Let me put in a plug for Episcopal Relief and Development, and also for animal-rescue organizations. (My husband and I have donated to the Red Cross, to ERD, and to a group called Noah's Wish that specializes in disaster recovery for animals.)
Sennoma: The Gospel passage is about NOT passing people by. As I read it, the minute you class anybody as someone you'll automatically pass by, you're in with the goats. The passage doesn't say "You fed the Christian hungry, the tactful hungry, the politically correct or socially acceptable hungry, the hungry who vote the same way you do, the hungry of whose fashion sense you approve." It's "the hungry," period. No adjectives, no qualifiers. So if you pass Tim by and don't listen to him, how will you know that he isn't saying, "Hey, I'm hungry, does anyone have a sandwich?"
Marina: I've always heard this translated as "visited me in prison," which is pretty specific. Do we have any NT Greek scholars here? Can it be translated as "helped"?
Susan
This is one of my very favorite Gospel passages. I think a lot of people are acting on it right now (individuals, not agencies; nothing I'm about to say is in any way meant to exonerate FEMA from their scandalous incompetence). I'd also like to issue a caveat, though, by way of some personal examples.
I do a fair amount of feeding the hungry; for instance, I help coordinate a homeless-outreach program at our church. I visit the sick: I serve four hours a week as a volunteer hospital chaplain. I've donated clothing to hurricane survivors, which means I've covered the ragged.
But I don't visit people in prison, because -- although I have lots of friends who've been doing prison ministry for years and love it -- it scares me silly. So am I a sheep, or a goat? Is the glass half empty, or half full?
I saw a book once that suggested that the answer to this question might be that I'm a "good goat," and that in fact most of us (not all) are good goats. We do the best we can. There are places where we fall short. We've both fed some of the hungry we've met and walked past others. If we're Christian, we rely on the fact that we worship a God who'll forgive us for not being perfect.
There's a lot of blame circulating right now, and also a lot of guilt. I've been telling people that any of us who aren't feeling inadequate after Katrina aren't paying attention. I think it's very important to recognize that none of us can do everything: nor do we have to, because so many other people are chipping in a little bit too. We'll all do what we can, but all of us have things we can't do or don't want to do -- and that's FINE. It doesn't mean we're going to burn in eternal hellfire.
I'm not suggesting that people minimize their efforts. We all need to do as much as we can. But we also need to recognize our limits and honor them, because we can't help anybody if we're burned out ourselves.
One of my parish priests once said, "None of us can carry every cross, nor are we called to do that." The Body of Christ has many members with varying gifts: if we all do what we can, and what we're good at and feel comfortable doing, an amazing amount will get done, and it will all be good. But I've been having a tendency to beat myself up this past week for not being Mother Theresa, and maybe some of you are doing that too, and if so, I hope this has helped.
Katrina relief is going to be a marathon. These poor will be with us for a very long time. There won't be any shortage of opportunities to help.
Susan
CrazySoph: You're welcome, and I'm sorry the well got poisoned for you. Institutional religion has, unfortunately, done too much poisoning -- although there are still lots and lots of good, sincere, non-hypocritical people mixed in with the CHINOs. They're often harder to see, because they make less noise. (I know various folks who both complain bitterly about how noisy the Christian Right is and also complain bitterly that the Christian Left seems nonexistent. Well, no, we're here: but we're the ones who don't necessarily thump our Bibles, which means we're harder to identify. Bumper stickers help -- I've got some on my car -- but I think we need our own symbol, something like the Jesus-fish. Sometimes I look at Jesus-fish on other people's cars and wonder if I can read anything into the fact that they're facing right or left . . . .)
Laurie: Hi! Glad you liked FliP! And I'm a judgmental bitch too; anyone who knows me will tell you so. (Just ask Patrick!) But "society" isn't monolithic: lots and lots of people ARE helping, even if some of them are being prevented from doing so in infuriating ways. The rage at the lack of response from certain quarters is an indication that, in fact, large portions of society do care, very deeply.
Nancy: If the unsavory looking people are from the government and want to take you to a shelter, you have to decide if you want to go -- but being from the government doesn't mean that they're automatically evil or aren't genuinely trying to help. Look, "government" means the cops and firefighters too, all those guys who are out there busting their butts and getting traumatized because they aren't getting enough help from other branches of government. One of the horrors of this situation is that entirely too many people are on both sides of the Good Samaritan divide, both urgently offering help and desperately needing it.
And my own Good Samaritan story:
A few years ago, I locked myself out of my car in Eureka, Nevada. This is a tiny town of 400 people in the middle of nowhere. I called AAA, who told me that it would take them three hours to get there from the nearest town and that I should stay with my car. So I sat next to my car and waited.
The police drove by and did nothing, because I'd called AAA.
Small children came by and pointed at me, laughing. "That's the lady who locked herself out of her car!" (I was the most amusing thing to happen in Eureka in weeks, evidently.)
And then a very large, scary-looking man -- crude tattoos, leather vest (in the heat!), bad teeth of the sort that indicate really unhealthy drug use -- emerged from a ramshackle building behind me and said, "Honey, I'm a four-time convicted felon, and I'm sure I can help you break into that car."
He couldn't; it turns out that Ford Escorts are very difficult to break into, and even AAA had trouble when they showed up. But he tried, and when he was unsuccessful he called a locksmith friend (who didn't have the right keys), and when that didn't work, he told me that if I needed water or a phone or a bathroom, I should knock on his door.
I figure this guy was probably running a meth lab out there, but he was certainly also my best neighbor on a difficult day.
Susan
Lizzie,
You're welcome. (Thank you for yours!) Yes, I need to remember that too. And I also need to remember -- and this is very unfashionable right now, because it sounds too much like W talking about silver linings etc. -- to faithfully and stubbornly believe in, and look for signs of, resurrection.
Which, you know, is the kind of thing that makes non-Christians roll their eyes (and I totally get that, having been non-Christian myself for most of my life). But whenever I remember to do it, I find signs of hope, somehow or other. Go figure!
Susan
I took a Gospel course at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley last summer, and the teacher talked about cultural differences in how listeners interpret the parables. The key question is which character in the story stands in for us; with whom do we identify? Americans listening to the story of the Good Samaritan, the teacher said, overwhelming identify with the Samaritan himself, and the lesson becomes the importance of offering help. But in Africa and other developing parts of the world, listeners tend to identify with the person who's been robbed and beaten, who needs the help: and for those listeners, the point of the story is that it's important to accept help even when it comes from seemingly unsavory quarters (Samaritans were virtual untouchables, remember).
Post-Katrina, both sides of that divide are very densely populated. Amid all the outcries about help not offered quickly enough or not offered by the people who should be offering it, I suspect there are plenty of stories of cultural barriers and stigmas dissolving in gratitude at help that IS being offered from unlikely quarters. "YOU're helping? But I always thought People Like You were bad people!"
The parable's as much about overcoming judgments as it is about making them, and I think that's worth remembering right now. I need to remember it, at any rate!
As for "the least of these," that parable (Matthew 25:31-46) is absolutely central to all kinds of Christian social-justice movements, and shows up all over the place. It's the lectionary Gospel reading for Christ the King Sunday of Year A -- the last Sunday before Advent -- which means that lectionary churches hear it in full at least every three years. And it's not just beloved by the Christian Left, either; I've heard conservative Mormons quoting it when explaining why they want their children to help out with homeless-outreach ministries.
On another note: Jim, I absolutely loved the Folksong post. It made me laugh out loud, and I really needed that! (My father lives on the Gulf Coast and is okay, but it's been a tense week.) So thank you!
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