Tell me what they sing and I will tell you their theology...

In a recent Christian Century, I read about a wise Pastor who gave some advice to a young seminarian looking for clues which might reveal the inner theological identity of a religious community.

Today as we served lunch to about 200 souls in the government plaza, I wondered if I was just becoming more childish. As the acolytes of local government passed by, scowling, I "turned up the volume."

For fifteen years we Catholic Workers have been "singing the alphabet" while we arrange and then distribute the US mail along with our soup. Knowing how utterly dependent homeless people are for the mail to contain the documents, or even the funds they need for "redemption," I years ago became inured to their repeated requests that I "check again" or "keep a lookout" for their salvific correspondence.

To allay their fears that we might miss something, we began pulling an entire sheaf of incoming envelopes, gathered by the first letter of the last name, and crying out, "Doing the "M's," or "Doing the R's!" Then we would proceed to sing out the surnames so everyone in our soup-line could hear their "call."

Over the years I became culturally more sensitive. I pride myself on begin able to pronounce Spanish and Vietnamese surnames. In a lower voice I can almost guess how the mortified parents from Detroit and Mississippi would have their kid's names properly pronounced all these years later in this God-forsaken place so far from home.

By saying aloud every surname beginning with a given letter of the alphabet for every single communicant, we have arrived at a process that largely allays the fears of those for whom no check ever comes.

This process, a hymn of sorts, is the way we sing the names of the children whose ship won't be coming in; for those whose only ship is deportation; and for those whose forebears "already got their trip" on a slave ship many years ago. We sing the names of those who will not be rescued this time around.

We sing out these names, a tiny balm over anxious and troubled waters, and we sit with the empty-handed until, on rare occasions and after many, many years, they raise their own voices in song.

It is then, thanks to your Pastors' message to a young seminarian, that I now recognize the hymnal of our theology: I now hear the loud, clear voice of those who have turned, undistracted by wealth or power or even sustenance, utterly toward the Cross.

It is the song of those reconciled to the singular sufficiency of the Redemption Himself; of those for whom no lesser counterfeit will suffice.

Thank you for your much needed and salvific interpretation.

Tomorrow I pray that I might listen anew to the sound of my friends, silently singing of the Love that will at last their terrible suffering relieve.

Thank you for showing me how to follow this sweet, sweet sound.

Quintessential Dilemma of Aggrieved Anarchists

Dear 99%,

Upon the occasion of reading emails (lots) about how the City of Santa Ana doesn't respect the Constitution and how [we're] going to bankrupt the City treasury, I dragged the following good advice from my thin store of anecdotage...

As an anarchist who has successfully sued the City, please let me offer the following two-part dose of experience, strength and hope:

The first part is an outgrowth of the difference in our structures - CW membership is communitarian, our leadership nominative by unanimous selection. This allowed us to select one person to be the plaintiff, and then later offer a defined group of plaintiffs. Courts and lawyers won't deal with an undefined plaintiff. Without a plaintiff(s), there's not going to be a suit! (This also implies being able to say additionally and definitively, who is not a plaintiff, even if they disagree!)

The second part was the hardest for me: Learning to pick a lawyer and then foregoing the right to talk, completely, except to answer questions. If any of you have experience with criminal law where the DA really wants to get you, you know even criminal law is arcane, intelligent, demanding; so much so that we have the saying about having a fool for a defendant. Civil law is harder still, and I believe the intersection between the Constitution and City Councils represents some of the most difficult legal practice out there. Witness how many truly great lawyers have toiled in that garden. Those are the decisions that occupy Supreme Courts.

While I am thrilled at the exuberance of the local Occupy Movement, I can tell you why it "Has no legal department."

If you don't undertake the difficult changes I've alluded to, you will persist in confusing email with briefs and hyperbole with useful theories. The only thing those will do is give the City something interesting to cite when it's time to negotiate a settlement offer!

When we finished our lawsuit in 2003, we were owed an estimated $650,000, and we declined to take it: The City, not the Council, is the 99% - how could we steal from our neighbors and their old-age pensions? BTW, that award was for legal fees, not damages. Our cause managed to attract and we managed to obey 20 law firms at once, or we would have been "stalled out." The City can easily defeat one honest, intelligent lawyer - the jails are filled with their clients.

It's time to decide whether OccupyOC is willing to make the kinds of necessary, inevitable compromises that come with civilization: representation, agency and stare decesis.

At this point I don't know how, meaning by what process, you're all going to decide.

I only know what will happen if you don't.

Shelter vs. Hospitality

Last weekend Leia and I attended the Catholic Worker Gathering in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In preparation for working with Robert Schuller III to start a seminary built along the lines of the Rule of St. Benedict, I opted for the Benedictine Spirituality workshop. I got my head handed to me, so I’m reaching out to you for consolation.

After joining into “silent prayer” with the others I asked about a Benedictine Monastery that “never turned anyone away” I desperately needed to know how this miracle was being worked. Were it true, I would count it among Medjugore and Fatima as a miracle for our millennia.

“Are they above the Arctic Circle?” I asked. Not quite, but it did develop that they were in an outpost so remote that no one had ever heard of the nearby town.

“How do they exit guests?” I asked, and my heart sank in my chest as it was apparent that the bearer of these glad tidings was unclear about that reality as well.

I said that, rather than boasting of some distant mirage, it would be a lot more instructive to examine how the Rule of St. Benedict might help us to discern who to exit when our shelter was full: Did we honor the ongoing claim of the longest-staying guest, or exit them in favor of a newcomer. Or did we do what most government shelters do, and simply post a sign saying “Full” and turn away everyone, regardless of their circumstances?

I proposed that the “Preferential Option for the Poor” and the Parable of the 99th Sheep argued for at least something more interactive than a “Full” sign. I’m afraid I went on a tad too long about our travails here in Orange County, so much so that I exasperated my counterpart from the Midwest, who cried out, “I think some of us don’t know the difference between shelter and hospitality.”

I stand convicted, and I find myself in complete agreement. After 20 years of helping my wife run the largest CW in the country, I must admit that I know very little about "doing" hospitality. I am haunted by the idea that the definition of “neighbor” in our exegesis for the Greatest Commandment might include people who don’t actually sleep under the same roof, and that the poor wretch standing on the porch dismayed at our “Full” sign might actually be much poorer than someone who is too proud to accept their parents’ (or children’s) insistent and repeated offer of lodging.

As the lawyer in the Parable of the Good Samaritan “plea bargains” for our souls, the economist in me recalls that reality dictates that we can do less (per person) the wider our definition of neighbor becomes. But less is not worse, because no part of reality is bad.

Bad is when we decide that holiness happens more readily when we close the door to our houses, and then our hearts, so that we can appreciate and control what happens, as if we were doing hospitality, instead of God.

We offer shelter, and, like our guests, we pray God will reward us with hospitality – in this world and the next. What startles me is how easy it is to see how my "spirituality" could result in an increase in the suffering of some wretch I would turn away. The man questioning my holiness had dropped his census from 40 each night down to 5, and recommended we do the same.

This isn't the first time truly holy and soulful people have told us that merely sheltering so many folks was a recipe for disaster - so I must concede the possibility that our adoption of the Kirwan legacy is mere ego, and that God might be better served if we were to examine the possibility of shrinking our numbers.

I'm throwing open the door of our hearts, and I'm fully prepared to accept a lack of comments on your part as a roaring commendation: No news is good news, indeed!

The more of you who don't write comments asking us to throw folks out, the better. So please, instead pray for us, and for all Catholic Workers, and encourage us to stay alive to the cries we cannot hear: for the people on our porch who have never seen a "full" sign, and for the donors and volunteers who sustain us by remaining a silent majority.

Those are the people from whom we shall learn the difference between shelter and hospitality.

Haynes Fund Speech

My name is Dwight Smith, and I’m with Isaiah House Catholic Worker. We’ve been a project of the Haynes Fund for about ten years, and we’re very grateful. Leia couldn’t be here tonight because she’s helping her sister begin another round of chemotherapy in Chico. My partners, Melissa and Nancy, and Leia and I, run one of the two emergency homeless shelters in Orange County, not counting the Cold-Weather Armory. The smaller of those two shelters is the Salvation Army. Two shelters for 21,000 homeless people.

I’m old enough to remember when there were no homeless people. Hoboes, maybe, but no homeless people. My parents, of course, had a different experience. So what happened? I think in my time, it’s not so much that there was a homeless problem as there was a “We should pay less for mental hospitals” program. And yet I also remember talk at that time about reserving welfare checks for those “who truly needed it.”

Because a few poorly paid and overworked Psychiatrists and a lot of highly-skilled nurses were getting the all the money the State was paying too much of, it was easy to get the American Psychiatric Association to agree to a regimen of discharging the patients to the community, where all of California’s psychiatrists could bill for treating them, but without all the expensive nurses. Thus began the emptying of the State Mental Hospitals in the 70’s.

When, within a few short weeks, these patients proved to be more problematic than anticipated, especially without the nurses, they were simply abandoned. Without attentive doctors and committed nurses, the patients first missed appointments, and then quit taking their medicine, and finally exited the group homes where they’d been placed, to become homeless. Since no one had tried the group home program before implementing it statewide, there was nothing to fall back on. We just watched as these truly deserving welfare recipients did without. Without mental health care, without medical care, without shelter, without food.

After about twenty years of hand wringing, the Federal government came up with the “Continuum of Care” where three levels of shelter would replace the State Mental Hospital. The first seven days was, obviously, the emergency shelter level. During that first week the guest sought work, while the shelter provided "two hot meals (hots) and a cot" and very little else. Guests were allowed to re-enter the emergency level every thirty days if they couldn't graduate to the transitional level by finding a job. The big difference between the shelters and the State Mental Hospitals was now, everyone was told to look for work, so over the next 20 years, what few shelter beds there were used mostly for the merely unemployed, and, as a result, the mentally-ill people ended up in our prisons and jails. The difference was in the definition of “grave disability.” When I worked at County Mental Health in San Diego in 1977, grave disability meant that people were unable to rent an apartment and prepare their own meals, because of mental illness. Now it means they’re incapable of foraging from a dumpster, or accepting an offered sandwich.

Now, there’s another group of people that really didn’t figure into the decision to eliminate mental hospitals, even though they’re incapable, then and now, of even foraging in a dumpster for their dinner, although not on account of mental illness. It’s on account of their age. I’m talking here about homeless children, and I’d like to expose the two faces of Orange County’s supposed attempts to assist them. From December first through April Fool’s, the OC does a pretty OK job. Now that the Illumination Foundation is providing emergency shelter to the families that present at the Cold Weather Armory, the medical model they use insures that all relevant variables in a child’s life are addressed, and for as long as needed. Through no fault of the Foundation, their saving oversight is permitted on an emergency basis only when the existence of the Cold Weather Armory program results in a fair probability of the press getting involved. Since about 200 families are assisted during the four months the Armory program is running, it stands to reason that about 400 are being mistreated the other eight months of the year.

When the press isn’t watching, from April Fool’s through December First, the County lies to the public, and worse, to the parents, and, only if pressed, do their Social Workers offer them a 14-day “once-in-a-lifetime” voucher for a cheap motel like the Buena Park Rodeway Inn. The last family we assisted was unaware that the County voucher plan they were on didn’t include the Continental Breakfast everyone else was enjoying. The dad was actually sobbing as he described how the manager, Mr. Patel, actually scooped up his kids half-eaten cereal bowls as he hounded them out of the dining area, screaming in Hindi. Later that day, an agent for Mercy House brought the family two cans of chili. Two cans of chili for five people for two weeks. Now you might not think that’s a lot, but it’s more actual food than the County gave to anyone else last year. You see, most families get EBT cards.

There may be no better way of destroying families with wasted tax dollars than the EBT program. Unlike food, there is no surplus of tax dollars for the input, and there’s no such thing as “having enough” on the output. While those of us in the real food business concern ourselves with the needs of the homeless and are constantly conscious of “serving concrete” by offering too much of the wrong thing, the EBT program might as well have been set up to insure that every spare dollar, and even some needed ones, go right for the “wrong thing,” and here I’m not just talking about dietary preferences.

In 2008 I told the County Director of Homelessness that I would not be able to continue sheltering children if they could not halt the exchange of EBT funds for between two and three ounces of methedrine, which was being imported into our ministry every month, to be sold on credit. Between the madness of parents stealing away on week-long speed runs and the use of physical violence to collect on drug debts, the collective proximity of so many children and so much insanity led me to conclude that nothing the County did could be worse. So we gave them back. We allowed the children we had temporarily placed in the Armory while we repaired the restrooms to again become the County’s problem. It’s a decision I’ll regret for the rest of my life.

I was wrong: the County was much worse. By fraudulently declaring one child from each family so “seriously mentally-ill” that the entire family qualified for room and board, the County was able to place all these people into a housing project and provide family therapy, while simultaneously overlooking the fact that what they were that they were dealing with the perfectly normal children of drug addicts. How reminiscent of the 70’s.

You see, like it or not, we had established a program that minimized the number of hours these children interacted with their toxic parents. By encouraging them instead to spend their time at school, at the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Ana, and with volunteers, we limited their interactions to just a few hours on Sunday afternoon. Children were encouraged monetarily to do enough homework so that, at the time they were declared disabled, not one child was working below their grade level in school. Now they all are.

Under our care for six years the total cost to the taxpayers was nothing. After four years under the care of the County, courtesy of the Renew Program of Providence Healthcare, we have already spent over four million dollars for the nearly complete destruction of the majority of the children that were housed here. This is the moral quality of the decisions made by managers currently in charge of executing the O. C. Board of Director’s summer program for homeless children. I would encourage each of you to examine the truth of my allegations through your contacts in the press, in County government, and in JustFaith groups at your parish. You can obtain a copy of these remarks on the blog attached to our website at occatholicworker.org.

Whenever things this evil happen there is always a remnant, a group of people who holds for the old ways;

people who invoke Christ;

people who try to do the right thing even though it costs.

People who know that the Golden rule is about using gold to save our neighbors instead of using up our neighbors to save on gold.

People like the Haynes Fund, and the programs they support, like Illumination Foundation,

and like our own Isaiah House.

I’m here tonight to thank you. Because of your support Isaiah House has managed to expand it’s operation to the extent that we no longer experience census problems – we can always accommodate a homeless woman, or a woman and her small children.

In part because of your support Illumination has secured a permanent location for a third emergency shelter for families and singles in the City of Stanton.

So I suppose it’s at this point that we should congratulate your Board and thank each of you for being that remnant, that group of people who do the right thing, even though it costs.

But before we lose ourselves in a symphony of well-deserved self congratulation, the food before us tonight reminds us of another unmet need, a need even Paul Leon, the much lauded director of the Illumination Foundation has suggested I remind you of tonight: dinner

Obviously even with three emergency shelters in the County of Orange, we’re still not going to be able to help all 21,000 homeless people. There will still be thousands sleeping rough.

Believe it or not, the County has decided to do almost nothing for them. No portable restrooms or showers, and most important, no food. That job falls to us and the other soup kitchens in Orange County.

In keeping with the incredible job your Board has done, I wish to suggest their selection of Isaiah House as uniquely worthy of your consideration. As the only all-volunteer soup kitchen and food pantry, not only does 100% of your donation go to providing food to the homeless, we’re also able to enlist the support of the governments’ FEMA and EFAP programs, bringing at least another $1000 dollars worth of food to Orange County’s poor each week at no cost to our donors.

Isaiah House provides about 2100 hot meals to the poor of Santa Ana each week, and about half that many again through food pantries that benefit the Lighthouse in Costa Mesa, FoodForLife in Santa Ana, and through Christian Volunteers at various motels throughout the County, including the Rodeway Inn of Buena Park.

We’re proud to have been chosen for consideration by the Haynes Fund, and we’re overjoyed to join the list of charities they support – charities we believe are truly making a difference for the poor in Orange County.

Thank you very much.

Monkey with the Truth

      A long time ago in a University far away a Doctor tried to quantify the nature of Love. He submitted a design for an experiment and defended it against many challengers. Finally victorious, he began his life’s work. He extracted two groups of baby monkeys from their mothers’ cages, and placed them into new cages with two statues the size of dolls. In the first group, a terrycloth doll provided no food, while a plain wire doll had a nipple fixed to a baby bottle containing milk. In the control group, the terrycloth doll gave milk, and the wire doll did not.

It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth monkey dolls whether or not they provided them with food, and that the young monkeys approached the wire doll only when necessary to obtain milk. With this result the Doctor concluded that monkeys could be fooled about Love, but not about milk.

We are reminded of a similarly heartless process wherein the County Homeless Agency informed all the police and emergency room workers that the actual count of emergency shelter beds, one measure of our collective love for the poor and previously given as 1512, was actually 889, and now about 500.

As result of these clarifications, the police continued their cities’ policies of arresting the homeless for “camping.” The staff at the county’s emergency rooms kept placing the homeless in taxis and shipping them to the corner of Third and Garfield near the Salvation Army in Santa Ana.

Even the voters seemed satisfied with the County’s fuzzy math: It made it a good deal easier to retain heartless Supervisors who “preserved” the tax dollars previous administrations had wasted on people who just “didn’t want to work.” That satisfaction peaked last year, even though by then it had become Official that half of the homeless couldn’t work, not because they lacked documents, but because they weren’t old enough.

After some measurements of our own we became concerned that the truth counted for so little a part of that particular love the County shows to the poor. We became so concerned that we refused to help the County help the poor unless they told us the truth. We insisted that the poor be given a letter stating why the County government would not assist them, and then we further insisted on meeting the poor children and parents the County would not help in the Board’s waiting area.

One week after we began to refuse, the County agreed to tell the Police and the ER staff the truth: The only beds available right away, which is what most of us think of as an emergency bed, are those few the Salvation Army offers at 2:30PM each day, perhaps eight total. Eight beds for 30,000 homeless people.

There are no such beds at all for families with more than two children, or with boys over the age of ten, or for the families of single fathers, ever. A while back, two of the people the County refused to help were a pregnant woman sent here from the jail. Her baby was too far along to enroll her in any of the pregnancy programs, and her pregnancy was too risky to keep her in jail, so they sent her to us. We got her into a hospital where an ultrasound suggested that the time was right for a Caesarian, even though the mother insisted her time had not yet come. When the baby was taken from her prematurely, it was rushed to a nearby hospital where they had a neonatal care unit. The mother was given a breast-pump and instructions not to walk or take the bus because of her stitches. She was also told that the milk for the baby was her problem.

As a Catholic convert who grew up during the superheated 70’s, I was glad I embraced the Church’s teaching about chastity after I was safely and happily married. But in a pamphlet from 1942 called “Chastity and Youth” I read a statement which could provide a role for all of us in this dilemma. A Jesuit priest talked bravely about how, were one spiritually healthy enough, one might obtain strengths and graces from marrying a sick person – provided one’s love was strong enough. You cannot now how that affirmation reached across those years to comfort me. My Church was the one where the sick were, if not healed, at least loved. We are the people who have been charged with the care of the 99^th sheep, the poor, the lame and the hungry.

As fellow possessors of the fullness of faith, we Catholics know that the milk is our problem. Not the governments, not the non-profits, not even the Police or the emergency room’s problem. We are the ones who know what Love is, and no lying monkey from the County can make us believe otherwise.

Forgiving the Jews - Part Two: Words of Jesus sorted by recipient.

As a chaplain in Orange County’s jails for ten years, I become very familiar with the concept of “unchurched.” As a catholic, it’s a common experience to talk about Jesus with faithful adults who nevertheless have never read the bible. Instead, they’ve heard it. They’ve heard the entire New Testament every three years, and almost all of the Torah, and a lot of the Old Testament likewise, but they almost never sit down and read, chapter and verse, page after page.

In jail, however, I had to do “bible study” with people who had never heard or talked about Jesus, much less the Patriarchs, in their lives. Asking them to begin according to the Roman Catholic lectionary, with some random gospel passage often did more harm than good.

One good answer to this dilemma is Protestant: Generally speaking, Protestants gather bible passages for study by theme, like forgiveness, or marriage or some notable part of Christ’s journey. In this way, the text is sort of self-organizing, and because the chosen passages, in spite of the gaps between them, make more sense than simply starting somewhere in the middle without any context save Rome.

Besides the gaps, however, there is another problem with this method. To be fair, it is likewise a problem with the Catholic system: If the Protestant system is like a chart of accounts, where all the “bills” for a given part of the bible are read together, like rent or utilities, the Catholic system is like the journal used to insure against gaps, just like the journal in double-entry accounting: Here, the passages are read in canonical order; which is slightly different than either the order they were written or the order in which the events transcribed are thought to have taken place. For example, even though carbon dating of fragment from Qumran Cave Number Seven indicate that Mark was the first gospel to have been written, the Roman church has always given first place to the Gospel of Matthew. Even though Mark himself cautions the reader that his account is out of order, canonical order indicates the system of priority assigned by the Church. As a way of settling disputes, it is without parallel, because unlike voting or arguing, at least it works. in that it allows us to solve the problem not addressed by priority: the problem of meaning determined not by “when” something was said, but by “to whom’ it was said.

Clearly, sorting out those things Jesus said to “the Jews” as opposed to the things he said to the apostles, who were also Jews, or the things he said to the poor, many of whom were Jews as well, has a great deal of impact upon any putative condemnation we might wish to read into our interpretation of any given New Testament passage. Given that Jesus was almost always talking to Jews, except on the rare occasion he was talking to Romans, it’s hard to insist his remarks are intended to endure as they have.

As a chaplain, I found it very useful to have my students sort the words of Christ (hopefully printed in red, so you don’t miss any) into three columns: One for the scribes, Pharisees – the powerful; one for the apostles and one for the poor. We discovered that a genuine fourth column was needed: one shared by Mary and the supernatural beings, like God, angels and demons, and a possible fifth: One actually reserved for the official “Jews,” the members of the Sanhedrin, and, to be fair, a corresponding column for “official” Romans, like Pontius Pilate or the centurions.

When you sort the words of Jesus in this way, a definitive picture emerges: Nowhere is Jesus angry with Jews because they’re Jewish. Nor does he appear to be angry with the Romans because they’re not. This was truly remarkable; Jesus may have been the only rabbi of his time demonstrating such equanimity toward, not just Romans, but gentiles of all stripes, like the Samaritan, and even women!

After you sort the words of Christ according to this hierarchy, it is much clearer that Jesus divided the world into classes by function, as was necessary: disciples vs. non-students, angels vs. demons, and by approbation: good or bad.

This is where we’d expect any anti-Semitism to show up. Like modern anti-Semites, or even Zionists for that matter, we’d expect Christ to display a preference or an antipathy for Jews regardless of their station. Like the Nazis, he’d distrust poor Jews as well as the rich powerful ones. Or like Israel, he’d welcome all Jews, rich and poor alike.

Jesus does no such thing. He inveighs against the rich, although not nearly so much as against those who have power over others. He forgives the poor, or more properly the powerless, even though they make no offering to atone for their sin as was proper for a Jew at that time.

Given that until recently, books, and certainly printing presses were the exclusive property of the rich, it’s a wonder his message wasn’t further distorted. I’m surprised that this little method of discovering the unaltered method of finding meaning within scripture hasn’t been more widely disseminated; perhaps it’s rarity has preserved some of it’s value. In any case, when one sorts the words of Christ according to the recipient, a pattern emerges which is far less sensible as anti-Semitic, and far more sensible as anarchistic.

Given the fact that the Jews were, at least at that time, sharing power with their Roman overlords, and given moreover that it was those Romans who determined both the canonical order of the modern gospel, and even their content, it is clear how a anti-power viewpoint could be subject to later misinterpretation as an anti-Semitic viewpoint.

The key to resolving this issue: power vs. Semitism, would depend upon what Jesus really said and felt toward non-Jews in power. If we assume that the Romans who later printed, translated and published the gospel attenuated Christ’s disapproval of their forebears, then Christ’s anarchist viewpoint could be reduced to anti-Semitism, since all the anti-Roman remarks were neutralized. Indeed, the very quixotic nature of Jesus’ remarks to and about all thing Roman stand out after this homespun reclassification as the most difficult to place into this new context.

This alone make this exercise a valuable addition to the argument against anti-Semitism in the New Testament: no new facts are needed, just a more accurate analysis of existing passages, yielding a highly probable suspicion about a corresponding lack of “rebuke” for Romans who were far worse, while yet far more removed from the favored poor, than the Jews in power.

Sorting Christ’s word by recipient subsumes any biblical argument ostensibly leveled against Jews beneath one against those leveled against those in power, regardless of origin. Any supposedly biblical argument, indeed, any Christian argument against the Jews suffers from this fatal weakness: in reality, any argument against the Jew is really an argument against the State, unfairly pruned of it's fuller meaning by later Roman redaction.

How like we Romans to stand idly by, fiddling while Jews burn, and in so doing deny Christ our faithful testimony to the sufficiency of his holocaust. Since our idleness is our blasphemy, we are called to come out of this posture, to actively atone once we believe. If you have any prayers or suggestions, please leave a comment.

Forgiving the Jews, Part One - Jesus' Baptism

We might assume since John baptized Jesus in the Jordan that John somehow initiated Jesus into something. This is normal, since that’s exactly what an ordinary, Christian baptism does. There is generally a gulf between the initiate and the one doing the initiating.

But if you ask a Priest about his first baptism ever, assuming he doesn’t remember his own, a different thread appears. The first time one initiates another is also an initiation, an initiation onto the fraternity of those who initiate. And into solidarity, perhaps, with those who also initiate others.

Likewise, a person who has an over-arching agenda could well decide to demonstrate solidarity with the others so initiated, even though they themselves were already initiates.

And think for a moment about the first time a thing is ever done, like being the first one to eat at a lunch counter or attend a university or become President. Here the sense of initiation is overshadowed by the feeling that a new era is beginning, that the prospect for new beginnings somehow includes all of us; that we are all initiates now because of our new prospects.

I think that each of these things were occurring at Christ’s baptism, and I think that each could properly overshadow our mistaken conception that the event in which John and ‘Jesus participated was in any way similar to our sacrament.

When Jesus chose to be baptized by John in the Jordan, a number of things were happening that are quite unlike what will or did happen when we Christians get baptized. Like almost everything else in the Gospels, it is a pre-Christ event, and not a Christian event. The baptism of John was a Jewish baptism, offered as a radical and perhaps schismatic alternative to the blood sacrifice of animals performed in the temple by the Priests of the Sanhedrin.

This was more a rejection of the monopoly held by the temple over reconciliation than initiation into a new faith tradition. Indeed, John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. Circumcision was the initiatory sacrament of the Jews, and not Baptism; Since Jesus was already circumcised, he could hardly have been initiated into Judaism by his baptism.

Indeed, when we take into account that Jesus was also free of sin, it then becomes apparent that the only conceivable reason for Jesus to be baptized by John in the Jordan would have been to express solidarity, perhaps primarily with John and his radical new egalitarianism, and secondarily with the poor, who had long labored under the accreted heretical excesses of the temple priests, especially inasmuch their accommodations to Rome were unanticipated by Torah.

Later, when Jesus cleanses the temple, His real reason becomes apparent: Lest His actions at the temple deny the poor the reconciliation they seek, He, in concert with John, initiated an alternative liturgy of reconciliation independent of the temple.

In a sense, it was not Jesus being baptized that day, but all of humanity, as He and John began the long and still incomplete process of ending external sacrifice and scapegoating for all time, and establishing reconciliation as a internal process central to the integration of the soul’s yearnings and the body’s actions.

In a very real sense Christ that day unbound the human soul, freeing it from the blood of beasts and setting in motion the events that would spill His blood to forever bind us to the will of God. It was in the Jordan with John that Jesus began the process of baptizing all of us with the Holy Spirit.