Loving the poor
This is something I have a really hard time putting into words. I want to try, but please bear with me. If it doesn’t make sense to you, I’d love it if you’d ask questions to help me flesh it out.
…
It’s time for the church to get serious about loving the poor!
It’s time for the church to be more inclusive of / welcoming to / connected with GLBT people.
It’s time to give women a voice!
It’s time for me to fess up about why these statements make me cringe.
I love the sentiment. I love the intention to include. I love the idea of people loving each other. Rich people loving poor (and vice versa), “straight” loving queer (and vice versa), men loving women (and vice versa).
But something about these pleas (It’s time for the church to get serious about loving the poor!) just hit my gut, and sits there, like a stone.
I think it’s because my church is a bunch of people under a bridge who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, or whether they’ll have a dry place to lay their heads that night. Getting serious about the poor isn’t the advice I’d give them. (In fact, it’s nearly universal that when one member of this church has a bite to eat, they share it. When one has money, it gets spread around.)
And that’s ok with me. Not all advice needs to apply to all people. But the thing is, the statement about “the church” really assumes that “the church” is made up of a particular kind of person.
If I say “How can we be more welcoming to black people?” you know I am probably not black, right? And the people I’m talking to probably are not black. Probably, they are white people. So I’d really love to hear “How can we, as white people, be more welcoming to black people?” But to ask “the church” to be more welcoming to black people is to talk as though “the church” is the white people. To ask “the church” to be more welcoming of GLBT people is to talk as though “the church” is straight.
When someone says “How can we give women a voice?!” I think I’m not in that “we.” I don’t mind men getting together to talk about such things, but when it’s my group, and I think of myself as involved, to hear that just tells me I was wrong.
Beautifully said! There ARE so many assumptions about “who is the Church” in those kinds of statements.
This addresses something I have been talking a lot about. Again, this comes to the definition of church. An individual gathering can be these things. They can be upper class, middle class, poor, they can be unwelcoming, or welcoming. However, there is a large issue within the church universal, which does have a problem with reaching the poor, being inclusive, and even seeing we are all part of the universal church I even speak of now. Some feel a responsibility to address those issues, the ones that make us cringe. I know this, because I cringe at those who say they are an “LGBT church” or they are so cool that they reach the homosexuals. What I have had to learn these past few months of working through this is one, we must be specific in which church we are speaking of (local, universal) and second, there are those who are called to change the conception of their local gathering or even their larger domination.
Just something to chew on.
I started joining in this kind of conversation due to a wife of a cousin who is very much into “welcoming” the GLBT community into the Church. I am a cradle Catholic who believes in drawing a thin, moveable line between sin and sinner- but one that isn’t so movable that in our acceptance of the sinner we erase the sin.
Whenever she starts talking in those terms, I’m reminded of a similar event I attended at a very conservative Catholic parish in the early 1990s- a candlelight vigil for those afflicted by AIDS. The message there was quite different: “The Body of Christ Has AIDS”. We weren’t judging people by how they got the disease (we all knew homosexual behavior and/or illicit drug use was a cause by then). Instead, we were doing what it took to care for people who already had it, and be welcoming to them anyway- because they were US.
This weekend, I’m doing something daring. This weekend, I’m going to start a Knights of Columbus Roundtable in a parish that is MUCH more liberal than that one I went to in college. The same Knights of Columbus that on a national level, gave a ton of money to defeat same-sex marriage. We have a priest who guest-spots in that parish from time to time, who is on a ministry for AIDS victims. It will be a *very* interesting conversation to have with him if he’s there this weekend. But one thing I will assure him of- that if we do get a council at St. Clare’s (I’m still 25 men short) his ministry will be able to turn to us for support. Because it is all about the sinner- which we all are- not the sin.
Angela, I like what you are trying to say. The only thing I would add is that there are conversations you aren’t part of. That doesn’t make you less of a person. You aren’t a male. That’s a reality. So when men say, “We…” they are speaking for a specific group of men, not just for all people.