1 Kings 17:8-16

Psalm 30

Four dollars a pound.

Four dollars a pound, and you can barely cover your costs.

Four dollars a pound, and still, no one’s buying.

When we are dependent, as a community upon a single industry, four dollars a pound for lobster isn’t just the sign of a difficult season, it is the sign of a famine.

In the days when we gardened, when we raised our own animals, in the days when we produced more then we consumed, having a bad price, not being able to sell off your catch, might make things difficult, but it wouldn’t necessarily make you hungry—it wouldn’t be considered a famine.

Those days are gone.

We are no longer a famine resilient people.

We depend upon a cash economy. We need good prices to produce our heat and our daily bread, and without good prices, the entire island suffers. Fisherman, carpenter, hairdresser, restraunt owner, and priest, all of us are subject to the whims of the market.

And as anyone who has lived through a famine can tell you, the market gives very little consideration to the lives of the people and of communities it governs.

I wish we could chalk this up to some kind of economic screw up, some sort of temporary recession, or market fluke, but the reality is much more stark.

In the long term, four dollars a pound and no one buying, is not just our present, its also our future. The problem with famine in our age is that famines are no longer regional in scale: they are global.

Lobster is a luxury good, a food that rich and middle class people on the mainland buy when they feel like times are good, when they feel secure.

With massive layoffs, with stolen pensions, with diminished job forecasts, with falling housing prices, with the entire economic system of Europe on the verge of collapse, there aren’t a lot of feelings of security going around.

Even at four dollars a pound, who on the mainland would buy a lobster, when they may have to make a choice between paying their rent, or their groceries, between having a place to live, or having something to eat.

Worse yet, is climate change. For every part-per million of carbon we put into the atmosphere by burning oil, we not only increase erosion on the Magdalen Islands, we also raise the acidity of the sea. And, as the sea becomes more acidic, molting shellfish will be unable to harden their shells—killing many of them.

It will no longer matter that no one can afford to buy lobster, there will be no lobster left to buy.

And so, as individuals, and as a community, we have entered a time of famine. And there is no easy way out.

We are no longer a famine resilient people.

At a time like this, it’s easy for us to despair. Like the widow Elijah meets in a land ruined by famine, we look at our children, and we see no future for them here.

And so we go through the motions, picking up our sticks, preparing one more meal while we await the death of our community.

When [Elijah] came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand. “But she said, “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”

These are the words of a woman beyond hope, a women beyond despair. The severity of the famine has brought her to the end of her rope.

She doesn’t rebuke Elijah for asking her to share the little she has left. She doesn’t laugh or even cry at the request. She simply states the facts: there isn’t much left, and what she has now, is the last of it before the end.

Hear how Elijah responds:

“Do not be afraid”

In a famine, the worst thing any of us can do, is to be afraid. When we find ourselves running out of cash, out of food, and out of luck, fear can take the little that we do have, and turn it into waste.

When we are panicked and afraid, we tend not to make good choices.

When we are panicked and afraid, we tend not to think creatively.

When we are panicked and afraid, we tend not to work together, to help each other.

Elijah calls us first of all, to not be afraid.

And then he calls us to turn our fear, into action:

“go” he says “and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son.”

In other words, go, take what you have, and instead of just consuming it yourselves, think creatively, think about how the little you do have could become so much more, if it was shared with others.

Nothing kills more quickly in a famine then individualism, those who survive, survive in and as a community.

And there is more:

For thus says the LORD the God of Israel: when you do this, [when you work together, when you think creatively, and when you share what you have with others] the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.”

Elijah isn’t giving us a suggestion here, but a difficult promise.

Some day, the famine will end. It may not be for months, for years, for decades, but someday it will end.

Working together, as a community, we may not end the famine, but we can survive it.

The good news this morning is that there is a future for our children in this land.

The good news is that we can do more then pick up sticks while we wait for our community to die: we can survive, and we can thrive.

We may not be a famine resilient people now, but if we can pull together as a community like we once did, we can be again.

So go outside, and plant a garden. Raise some chickens, and go hunting in the fall. Can some lobster and some chow. Drop by a neighbour’s, and invite him over for a beer and a BBQ. And when he comes, take out the guitar and the fiddle and play some music. Dance.

Make survival beautiful.

Be the community you want to see.

For by doing so, we will find that the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.

The widow went and did as Elijah said, and she as well as he and her household ate for many days.

Jeffrey Metcalfe is the Incumbent of the Parish of the Magdalen Islands in the Diocese of Quebec. He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

A Sermon on the Feast of Pentecost

Jeffrey Metcalfe

Genesis 11:1-9; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, 25-27

It’s a story of pride. The belief that when humanity comes together, it can achieve anything.

It can build a tower to heaven.

It can make its own way to salvation.

It can become God.

The Tower of Babel is a story of pride, a story of how quickly pride in our abilities, our technology, our wealth, and our power can lead to idolatry. And how idolatry can leave us scattered, confused, and destroyed.

The people who built the tower of Babel were not bad people. But they were a proud people. They knew that no other people before them possessed the resources, the knowledge, nor the desire to do such great things. And they wanted to build a monument to their greatness.

A tower.

A tower so tall it could prick the heavens.

A tower the world would remember forever.

As the theologian Reinhold Neibour taught, a people cannot be both great and good. At some point, they have to choose who they are going to be.

The people of Babel, chose to be great.

And as the scripture tells us, while they worked on this project of pride, God came and gave them different languages, which caused them to become confused.

Without a singe language, the engineers could no longer tell the workers how and where to lay their bricks. Without a single language, the people became divided, and scattered. And the tower fell into ruin.

Pride led to idolatry, and idolatry destroyed not only their tower, but their culture as well.

When I was a kid, I use to laugh at the story of the tower of Babel, and it’s warning against pride. The idea that human thought they could outmatch God seemed rather ridiculous to me. Even with the brightest minds, the wealthiest economies, the most united people, who could build a work so great that it could rival God’s creation?

As the psalmist sings,

O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide,

creeping things innumerable are there,

living things both small and great.

There go the ships,

and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

From lobsters to whales, there’s really nothing that could rival the monument of God’s creation.

When I was a kid, I use to laugh at the story of the Tower of Babel and their obvious pride, but now, I cannot help but wonder, are we really any different?

Speaking the single language of science and engineering, haven’t we thought that humanity can achieve anything?

Haven’t we all placed our trust and our faith in our wealth and in our technology?

Haven’t we all thought with pride that our country was the greatest country?

And haven’t we spent several generations now robbing the land of its resources, overfishing, over-logging, and over-mining, in order to build towers: skyscrapers pricking the heavens in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver?

We’ve all seen the destruction this pride has afforded our land and our culture.

The destruction of our fisheries like herring and cod, and the places and people that depend on them for their livelihood.

The destruction of our environment through oil mining, which contributing to climate change, is causing peoples’ homes in places like the Magdalen Islands to wash away into the sea.

Being great, is destroying us, leaving us confused, and scattered.

Like the people of the Tower of Babel, we cannot be both great and good.

As Christians and as Canadians, we are going to have to choose who we are going to be.

This morning, we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the day when God sends the Holy Spirit among God’s people, to empower them, and to breath into them new life.

Where God had given people a variety of languages that ended up causing them confusion and leaving them scattered, God now provides a single language to bring understanding and unity: the Holy Spirit.

Empowered by the Holy Spirit, we are freed from the pride and idolatry of greatness. We are freed to become Good.

And, as the scripture tells us, no longer bound by the pretension of greatness, our sons and our daughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and our old men shall dream dreams.

To the world, these prophesies, visions, and dreams will look like utopian thinking, to the world, they may seem wishful. Perhaps, like the disciples, they may even accuse us of being drunk.

But we shall know that it is not utopian, wishful thinking, or drunkenness, but the truth of the Spirit, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.

Jesus tells us, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

The peace of Christ, is not like the peace of the world. It is not a peace maintained through fear, violence, or exploitation, it is not a peace founded on towers of pride or idolatry.

It is a peace that calls us not to be great, but to be good.

You cannot be both great and good.

So who are you going to be?

Jeffrey Metcalfe is the Incumbent of the Parish of the Magdalen Islands in the Diocese of Quebec. He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

Jeffrey Metcalfe

Acts 1: 1-11

Luke 24: 44-53

I’ve always found the Feast of the Ascension, the liturgical day we mark Jesus’ rising up to heaven, as a difficult day to get excited about.

Throughout advent, we waited in solidarity with the oppressed people of Israel to witness the birth of the Messiah, the birth of hope at Christmas.

Throughout Lent, we waited in solidarity with the crucified people of our world as Jesus conquers torture and death on the cross, and turns it into new life at Easter.

And now, after all that waiting, after all the drama of the events at Christmas and at Easter, Jesus explains he has to leave, and we have to keep on waiting.

His disciples are rightly disturbed by this news.

They ask him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

They had up to this point assumed that it was. The time when God would make justice flow like a mighty river. The time when God would right all the wrongs of a broken world.

Instead Jesus says, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

And with that, Jesus ascends into heaven. Leaving the disciples alone, again. Leaving us waiting.

I have to admit, when I read these words, I cannot help but feel a little bit disappointed, and maybe even, a little bit betrayed.

Isn’t there enough work for Jesus to do here on earth, enough healing of the sick, enough bringing peace to the nations, to keep him occupied?

We live in a world where 30,000 children die every day from hunger, in a world where we grow more food then we have ever grown before.

Isn’t that the kind of thing Jesus could fix for us—balance out for us—if he were still here?

What would it look like if Jesus were still here, walking around with us today? How would we be different?

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams suggests, perhaps we’d be exactly the same. He writes,

We are always liable to hang on to what we can see and understand so as to make ourselves feel safe; when Jesus is simply ‘there’ like the other things we find in the world, part of the furniture, there’s a big risk that we can make him too familiar.  We domesticate him and we lose the possibility of being shocked and surprised by him.

Were Jesus to still be around us, Williams argues, instead of finding ourselves challenged and transformed through his physical presence, we might find ourselves stifled, and slack.

Instead of liberating us to live freer lives, the security of Jesus’ physical presence could lead to our own domestication, and enslavement.

And so, Jesus ascends into heaven. Only he doesn’t do so empty-handed, and he doesn’t leave us by ourselves.

He ascends with our excuses, and he leaves us with a task, and a promise.

The excuses that we have all at one time or another taken for our reality—that we don’t have enough: enough strength, enough power, enough say in our world to make a difference—these excuses are gone.

Jesus’ ascension teaches us that we are the ones we have been waiting for, that the task of transforming the world is ours, and that God has promised to empower us through the Holy Spirit to complete this task.

You are God’s witnesses.

Jesus has made you his physical presence in this world.

You may never feel strong enough, articulate enough, intelligent enough, powerful enough, spiritual enough, righteous enough, loving enough, forgiving enough, pure enough.

You may never feel good enough.

But you must begin before you are ready.*

For it is only in beginning that we open ourselves to the power and to the promise of the Holy Spirit.

This task and this promise belong to you.

You are God’s witnesses.

“So why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Why do you stand looking up towards heaven?

The one you are waiting for is you.

Jeffrey Metcalfe is the Incumbent of the Parish of the Magdalen Islands in the Diocese of Quebec. He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

*Thanks to Canadian theologian and activist Mary Jo Leddy for this insight.

Last year I posted a piece about the darkness of Christmas season; this year I have come to think of its reverse – Easter. I wrote about having to face the darkness as that is where truth resides. I still agree with that sentiment, however, as I was out walking this week I was struck with how difficult it can be to tunnel out of that darkness into a space of light.

A quick scan of newspaper headlines reveals the brokenness of our world. We are bombarded by the negative rhetoric around immigration, as well as the recent acts of violence in Colorado and Newtown, and subsequent government failure to legislate gun control. Further, the Boston bombings and a factory collapse in Salvo, Bangladesh culminate a seemingly endless season of loss.

These events are tragic and deeply saddening on their own, however they can inflame the underlying realities for those who struggle with mental illness. One would be remiss not to mention that some of these events are caused by those suffering from mental illness; in fact, in Colorado and Newtown, the two are inextricably linked by the insufficient framework to address mental health concerns in our communities. Tragically, the cause and effect can be the same.

Sometimes the darkness can become our comfort and shield from reconciling with our own grief, pain, loss—you name it. The emerging season, with its extended daylight hours, green shoots from the earth, and increasing volume of birds chirping, can seemingly threaten our personal darkness. Spring illuminates, awakens, yes, but while some embrace this change of the season with all the joy they can muster, not all can.  I know too well how difficult it can be. I myself have been in a place where it was difficult to get out of bed and face the day. Depression is a heavy weight that keeps you anchored to yourself.

For those who also share this subdued space, sometimes the light of Spring is a challenge. Spring does witness to hope but it is also requires a determined effort to change out of our tired, winter moods and into a posture of hope and eagerness for more. This season might signal the turning of the days, the opening of new life and the re-awakening of the earth encourage us to re-awaken to ourselves.

May Spring and the Easter story remain a life-giving and life affirming gift. May the story of Resurrection teach us the value and mystery of life, reminding us that the struggle is not everything. In its folds we confront our own darkness to make space for those who suffer and work our way out of it together in beloved community.

In her book A Book of Grace-Filled Days, Margaret Silf writes, “A first-century philosopher observed: ‘When I light a candle at midnight, I say to the darkness: I beg to differ.’” As we light our candles, we too, say to the darkness in our world and in our own hearts: You have no final power over us, for the first and final word is eternal light. Say those words when it’s feels dreary and allow your heart to ache for the light in our midst, even when the darkness is overwhelming.

Remember that the miracle of Colorado, Newtown, Boston and Saver Bangladesh, can be found in the resilience of the people left in the aftermath. We, like they, can choose not to let our light diminish and take the illumination of spring, using it as a reminder of the light that shines in each of us. For when you choose to shine for all to see, the darkness cannot overtake you.

Ashley Cole holds a degree in International Development Studies from Canadian Mennonite University, where she completed an eleven month internship at Romero House. She now lives in Calgary, where she works with street-involved people.

Joshua Paetkau

Under the auspice of identity we write towards an indiscernible future that holds forth hope not only as vision or project but in reality and in truth. What is it to evoke a catholic commons but to signal an intimate entanglement with which we are never truly finished? Never finished because the commons is not something that belongs to us but rather the interconnectedness wherein we constantly find ourselves surprised by beings who fill us with wonder, delight, amazement, disgust, frustration and pain. To speak of the commons is always to speak of what is beyond private control; it is to speak of communion and camaraderie and at the same time the pain, isolation, and violence that come bound up in earthly existence. That the commons is catholic is a sign of its expansiveness, our locality is not protectionist. And what could it be to be seeking the kingdom except that we are on the road open to encounter with that strange stranger who just, just might be the Christ?

The book I am going to review doesn’t talk about the catholic commons. It talks about the mesh, a vast interconnectedness where nothing exists all by itself. It doesn’t talk about Jesus, but it does talk about the strange stranger, that is, those intrinsically strange beings whom we encounter. Beings who become even stranger to us in intimacy. The more we know the more profoundly weird the universe becomes.

The Ecological Thought is a witty, gritty take on ecology. It author Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of California, Davis, and he presents a savvy, literary ecology. An ecology that is unafraid to play in the shadows. Perhaps, one might even venture to say, an ecology noir.  Morton’s response to the “bright green” optimism of some contemporary environmental thinking is “when I hear the word ‘bright’ I reach for my sunglasses.”(16) At the same time his is not a cynicism of detachment. Irony may abound but it is politically and emotionally committed, always displaying a clear sense of passion and compassion for the subject matter.

What exactly is the subject matter? Well, quite literally, it is absolutely everything. The beginning of the ecological thought, says Morton, is the realization that everything is interconnected. As frightening as this thought appears it opens up the world to us more the more we consider it. And it demands not cold calculation but the full engagement of our creative faculties. Quoting the poet Percy Shelley regarding developments in science he writes, “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.” (1) To think the ecological thought, then, is an imaginative task. In Morton’s case this imagination is shaped by, among other things, John Milton, Tibetan peasants, Darwin, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.  An eclectic mix, perhaps, but then as Morton says, “the ecological thought is a virus that infects all other areas of thinking. (2)

Infectious because the ecological thought is ultimately a “process and practice of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral.” (7) The fact that human experience is so inextricably intertwined with the lives of other beings and spaces requires big thinking. While recognizing the importance that words like local, organic, and particular have played in resisting globalization, Morton argues that the risk of being trapped by smallness is one which plagues the environmental movement. An awareness of the interconnectedness of things would allow us to realize that our existence is never as fiercely local and under our own control as we might like it to be.

As part of this awareness Morton challenges the concept of Nature as an entity existing independently of human society. He is critical of a notion of nature that functions in effect as a privileged type of private property, and of the kind of robust, optimistic language it engenders. He writes:

Environmental rhetoric is too often strongly affirmative, extraverted, and masculine; it privileges speech over writing; and it simulates immediacy (feigning one-to-one correspondences between language and reality.) It’s sunny, straightforward, ableist, holistic, hearty, and “healthy.” Where does this leave negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation, and sickness? Are these simply nonecological categories? (16)

Morton’s answer to this last question is a decided no. He argues that the dark experience of being separated from Earth is a place where we can experience ecological awareness. Here he delves into the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics which takes its cue from film noir. Here the point of view of the narrator is revealed to always already be stained with desire. There is no neutral vantage point.  The deployment of his writing makes apparent how difficult this kind of thinking can be, and how readily they can fall back into technological optimism and the reification of forms of thought. At one point Morton suggests that genetic modification is commensurate with selective breeding programs. Both, after all, have elements of human intervention and synthesis. While this would seem to flow directly from his argument against reified Nature I suspect, in fact, that it is shaped more by a view towards genetic determinacy. Morton does recognize that genetic manipulation is controlled by big capital and is entrenched in the contradictions of private property, especially genetic material as private property. He seems to fail to note, however, that the particular manipulation of knowledge is bound intrinsically to our form of industrial capitalism. How we know things is an important part of the knowledge itself.

This particular problem led me to view the overall project with a hint more suspicion. The Ecological Thought promised a lot and made creative use of many different schools of thought. From Darwin to Derrida the entanglement was drawn forth with imaginative elucidation. I found here deep resonances and an appreciation for those things in life that do not always strike us as majestic or beautiful. At the same time I could not shake the feeling that the book was written under the spectre of Obama capitalism. An edgy techno-savvy literary capitalism, certainly one with possibilities, but one still problematically drenched in the culture of military surveillance.

Morton has a lot to say about Google Earth and cyborgs, but rather less to say about the struggles faced by smallholder farms, or the uneven effects of climate change on the world’s poor. He has a lot to say about cooperation and collective action, but it is a collective action mediated by science and sound government policy. Here, at least, there seems to be a window open to a kind of radical emancipatory politics. Collective action cannot be a simple matter of legislation, Morton is well aware of this. Perhaps this is why he stresses imagination, intimacy, and consciousness. These are important questions. The fact that Morton focuses primarily on the domestic and the synthetic elements of life no doubt results from the lack of such a focus in most environmental literature. The question does remain, however, as to how this intimacy looks in wilder less synthetic environments?

The Ecological Thought goes a long way in countering an environmentalism wedded to private property. Morton raises hard questions with imagination, and through his writing we are exposed to some of the severe contradictions such an environmentalism perpetuates. The fact that the book does not chart a clear path out of the perplexity of green capitalism is a testament to the complexity of the problem and not the paucity of the author.

Despite, and sometimes because of, some of the book’s weaknesses I think it offers a platform from which to think the commons, to think our entanglement with other beings, in ways that are creative, catholic and open to the deep pain as well as the deep joy of our human existence. From our identity we strive for something more, some indiscernible that will make room for all our experience, not only the simple sunny holistic optimism, but our doubts, fears, pain, joy, amazement and wonder. It is, in a word, a profoundly human text.

Joshua Paetkau is a father of two and is currently living and working at the A’Rocha Pembina Valley Field Station, Manitoba.  He holds a bachelor of arts in theology and social science.  He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

In order to arrive at the joy and affirmation of Easter Sunday, we encounter the suffering and despair of Good Friday. It’s not a pleasant thing to acknowledge, but grace and violence appear bound together at Easter.

Few writers are as astute at recognizing this relationship as Flannery O’Connor. Rather than a world of neutral surfaces, O’Connor’s fiction presents us with a world that is irreducibly “grotesque.” For her, the history of the South has made for an environment that is “hardly Christ-centered, [but] is most certainly Christ-haunted” (M&M 44). Her characters may not act like Christians, but theirs is a world which is divinely given, a world in which grace regularly emerges and disrupts. For this reason, O’Connor’s fiction adopts what she has called, “prophetic vision,” a way of seeing that paradoxically understands near things at a distance and far things up close. As she puts it, “The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.”  This has everything to do with her view that art is incarnational. It is, in other words, ultimately about embodiment rather than abstraction, and its particular kind of embodiment is a deeply mysterious and troubling one.

Among O’Connor’s best-loved stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” presents a family of six (two parents, three children, their grandmother, and her cat) on its way to Florida. Along the way, the grandmother uses her gullible grandchildren to pressure her son (the driver) into taking a detour and searching for an old plantation from her past. After a minor car accident, the family waves down a passing car, described as “a big black battered hearse-like automobile” (126). After the vehicle stops, the grandmother loudly identifies one of its passengers as a notorious serial killer who goes by the name of The Misfit.

This outspoken recognition is a fatal mistake for the grandmother and for the rest of her family. As the Misfit’s henchmen begin to take her children and grandchildren into the woods to shoot them, the grandmother continues to talk with the Misfit. As his words turn to stories from his violent past, the grandmother begins to lose her scruples. Naturally, she turns to her faith, but it appears void of content. At best, she can only say the words “pray, pray . . pray, pray” and offer empty advice to her adversary (133). “If you would pray,” she says again, “Jesus would help you.” The Misfit agrees with her but admits he has no use for the help. “Jesus thrown everything off balance,” he counters. “I call myself the Misfit . . . because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment. . . . Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” (131). The Misfit understands that human attempts to distribute justice inevitably fall short of the proportionality to which they lay claim. Despite the fact that he is more or less justifying murder, O’Connor’s serial killer has adopted a prophetic register, questioning the very basis of morality and judgment that has empowered the grandmother’s pious faith.

“Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had been there [with Jesus] I would have known and wouldn’t be like I am now.” She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them. (132)

It’s a shockingly violent end to an already disturbing story, but for O’Connor, there is a theological reason for this kind of violence. The grandmother has spent most of the story presenting her ability to remember as the key to her superior moral code, a source of manners and piety that she believes is disappearing along with her generation. The Misfit does just the opposite. He has little trouble admitting to the grandmother that he has no real grounding in the past and that its mystery torments him to no end. While the grandmother has used the past as a way of sentimentalizing the present and achieving some sense of piety, the Misfit recognizes that things are “off balance,” that our moral judgments can no longer have the last word. In an almost Nietzschian moment, the Misfit reveals the grandmother’s nostalgic morality as a fiction. Jesus has tipped the balance and relativized our relationship to the world and to each other. If Jesus didn’t do what he said he did, says the Misfit, there is “no pleasure but meanness” (132).

But in the interaction between the Misfit  and the grandmother grace has also entered the picture, even if he can’t recognize it as such. In the moments before she is murdered, the grandmother realizes that she is responsible for the Misfit, that he is one of her own “children.” As O’Connor has written elsewhere,

Violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world. (M&M 112)

Easter is about the breaking of limits, our collective liberation from the bondage of sin, death, and our own self-seeking imaginations. Easter names the event in which our endeavors and projections, our habits and compulsions, are revealed in their common violence. This is also O’Connor’s point with the Misfit: “the freak in modern fiction is usually disturbing to us because he keeps us from forgetting that we share in his state” (M&M 133). This process of demystification is a common thread in O’Connor’s fiction. And yet, even if this is where we begin to understand our responsibility for each other, it cannot end there.

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the monstrous side of our humanity comes repeatedly to the surface. When we see it as our own, we are ashamed. The good news of Easter is that, along with all our facile moral judgments, this shame need not hold us back from communion with God and with one another.

Jonathan Dyck blogs at Church Going. He is a co-editor of the Catholic Commons

Works Cited

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 117-133.

—. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Jeffrey Metcalfe

John 12:1-8

The words echoed through the ancient hall as the cardinal read out the result of the final vote:

“Habemus Papam.” In English, “we have a Pope.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected as the new bishop of Rome.

We might expect that the other cardinals sitting next to Bergoglio would take this opportunity to congratulate him, to hide their own disappointment behind their smiles, perhaps even to put in a good word in for themselves before the white smoke signaled the bedlam of the crowds waiting below.

However, instead of speaking words of congratulations, the Cardinal beside Bergoglio turned to him and with a seriousness a smile cannot convey, spoke only these five words,  some of the first words the new Pope would hear:  “Do not forget the poor.”

These five words may not have echoed through the halls of the Vatican, but they would touch the new pontiff’s soul, leading him to choose the name of Francis.

St. Francis: the great saint who renewed a decaying church by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, looking after the sick, and visiting the prisoners.

Is choosing the name of Francis a sign that the new Pope will try to renew the Roman Catholic Church as St. Francis did, by finding the heart of the church in the relief of the worlds suffering?

Certainly, our world has no shortage of suffering.

We live in a world of abundance, a world in which we grow enough food for everyone to have enough. And yet, 30,000 children will die today, because they did not get enough food to eat. Even in our own country, Nearly 900,000 Canadians (38% of them children) turned to food banks each month last year.

Meanwhile, over the last four decades, the highest income earners in our country, the 0.1%, have seen their incomes triple, the 0.01% have seen their incomes quintuple, where everyone else’s wages have either stagnated, or, more commonly, have fallen.

In non-statistical terms, this means that we live in a world, and in a country where the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Where the full are getting fatter, while the hungry continue to die.

It seems, both in our world, in our country, and in our church, we are in need of a St. Francis.

And yet in our scriptures this morning, we are presented by what seems like a contrary image. When Mary, takes a pound of costly perfume and anoints Jesus’ feet. Judas, seeing this act, is enraged. ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’

It’s a legitimate question to ask. Who are we to spend our resources on luxuries, when there are children in our country and in our world who do not have enough to eat? It’s a legitimate question to ask, but as the Bible tells us, Juda’s asks it for the wrong reasons. “He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it” (John 12:6).

In response, Jesus says “you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:8).

“you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me”

When I was in my teens, I was taught that this verse meant, that while we ought to be sad, we ought even to feel guilty about poverty, there’s nothing we can really do about it. The poor will always be with us, Jesus teaches us that, and so we need to return our attention to what matters, our worship of Jesus.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem to square with me with who we claim Jesus is, and everything else he taught.

How could the same man who said, we will be judged not on our beliefs, or by the principals we proclaim, but on whether we fed the poor (Matthew 25), be the same man who seems to say not to worry about the poor because they will always be with you. In the words of Sesame Street, “one of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong.”

What if, we as a church, have been reading this passage wrong.

What if Jesus is saying to us, not that the poor will always be with us and so we ought not to focus on the poor, but rather, that the poor ought always to be with us.

What would it mean if we grounded our lives and our worship on that fundamental commitment, that as a church, the poor should always be with us. How might that change our churches, or possibly even renew our lives?

St. Francis had a flair for drama. When he became convinced that God was calling him to care for the poor, he not only sold all his possessions and redistributed the money, he stripped off all his clothes in the middle of church and gave those away too.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not advocating stripping or nudity in church, but I am wondering what it would mean for us as a church if we made a similar kind of commitment, to have the poor always be with us.

So often, it seems to me that as our churches are decaying, our reaction is to turn inward, to think only of our own survival as an organization, to think only of how we can get more: more youth, more funds, more bums in the pews.

But what if our survival as an organization can only brought about by committing ourselves to the survival of others, to those poor who are always suppose to be with us?

What if we asked, not what the world can do for our churches—but asked what our churches can do for the world?

As St. Francis knew, this must be at the heart of our renewal as a church: our ability to heal the suffering of the world, to bring relief to the poor who are always to be with us.

As the theologian Mary Jo Leddy writes, that is how the church will “find itself anew among those who are suffering[.] Because it is they who most need the church to be strong, to be good, to be courageous and compassionate.”

They need us, they are calling us, to be the kind of people, the kind of church that will feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, look after the sick, and visit the prisoners.

And so, as the cardinal said to the Pope, “do not forget the poor.”

For it may be in the poor that the church will find its salvation.

Jeffrey Metcalfe is the Incumbent of the Parish of the Magdalen Islands in the Diocese of Quebec. He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

Stephen Setzer

Urban Housing and Gentrification

Before we begin to examine elements of the church’s liturgy and look for its connections to our urban neighborhoods, some introductory matter is necessary. We must first define the terminology, describe the setting, and understand the demographic which will provide the context for this paper’s thesis.

Defining the Terminology

Gentrification is a relatively recent phenomenon that began in the 1950s and 60s in London, England, and in numerous U.S. cities. It can be defined as “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle-class residential and/or commercial use.”1 However, it should be noted that there are other nuanced definitions of what gentrification is; moreover, gentrification is not necessarily limited to urban centers, but is currently being experienced in rural settings as well.2 Yet for our context the above definition adequately describes the process of transformation that the proposed community is currently experiencing. And although there are differing opinions concerning gentrification’s positive or negative effects upon a community, we will only focus on the most prominent consequence of displacement, which Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge outline as “Displacement through rent/price increases; Secondary psychological costs of displacement; Loss of affordable housing; and Homelessness.”3

Describing the Setting

The setting for this paper will be Dallas, Texas, and particularly a community in the northeast quadrant of the city-center commonly known as “Knox-Henderson.” In recent years this area has undergone significant redevelopment due to its close proximity to Uptown Dallas, a burgeoning community of White, young professionals who may occupy any of the numerous upscale apartment buildings or condominiums that have recently been constructed in the area. Interestingly, Uptown Dallas was historically known as Freedman’s Town or North Dallas. Beginning after the Civil War freed slaves began to buy small tracts of land, which now borders the Central Expressway, and to develop its own burgeoning community. However, this all changed in the 1940s and 50s when the the city of Dallas began to institute particular changes that transformed the community into what it is today.4 The Knox-Henderson area has been slower to change, maintaining an ethnically diverse population, which now incorporates a significant percentage of Hispanics. Yet transformation is occurring in the form of upscale residences and restaurants along N. Henderson and N. Fitzhugh Avenues.5

Understanding the Demographic

The population of the Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh section is predominantly Hispanic and it forms the western boundary of East Dallas that lies between the Central Expressway and I-30 including the area surrounding Fair Park. The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) demographics for this section are overwhelmingly Hispanic with averages from most elementary, middle, and high schools maintaining Hispanic percentages near or above 75%. For example, Robert E. Lee Elementary School is an elementary school within the the Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh section and its demographic is 75% Hispanic, 11% African-American, and 12% White. Nearby Ben Milam Elementary School is 87% Hispanic, 7% African-American, and 4% White. The entire district’s percentages are 67% Hispanic, 25% African-American, and 5% White.6 Another interesting statistic is the percentage of students that are eligible for free/reduced lunches. DISD states the following parameters for qualification:

“Children in households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (SNAP–formerly Food Stamps) or TANF may be eligible to receive free meals regardless of household income. Also, if your household income falls within Federal Income Chart limits, your children may be eligible to receive free or reduced-price meal benefits.”7

According to Robert E. Lee Elementary’s demographics, 78% of their students qualify for free/reduced lunches, while the entire district is at 87%.8

These statistics are important because they indicate the ethnic and socioeconomic disparity between Uptown Dallas and the Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh area. And they are particularly important in considering the gentrification that is already occurring in this section of the city. The demographic of Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh indicates that as gentrification continues it will displace poor, Hispanic families, many of whom have emigrated from Mexico and Central America.9 There’s a particular liminality that accompanies poverty and especially poverty within immigrant families where home and permanence have been left behind in Central America. However, that is exactly what is being threatened by gentrification that is occurring within this area through rent/price increases and the displacement of social capital in the form of family, friends, and neighbors who are forced to move.

Sacred Space, Liturgical Movement, and Urban Housing

Houses and Homemaking

In their book Beyond Homelessness the authors Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh examine the phenomenology of home and determine eight elements that characterize it. Among them appear the words “permanence, stories, and embodied inhabitation.” These words remind us that home is a place of stability. It is a place where stories are told. Those stories may be humorous or sorrowful. They may tell of the premature death of a child, or of children’s snowball fights just after Christmas dinner. But regardless of the content, it is stories, perhaps more than anything else, that form our understanding of what it means to be at home. Moreover, home is also a place of embodied inhabitation, as the authors write, “We live not as strangers to our place, but fully in our place as knowledgeable and caring dwellers. Home, we have said, requires care and cultivation, but that care and cultivation is always located in a particular place.”

Here we are confronted, once again, with that phrase “particularity of place,” and it reminds us that our stability and stories contribute to our embodied inhabitation, but that inhabitation in always connected to a place. So then, we are brought back to the question of specialness. Are our homes, as places, special? I think that sociologically one could make the argument that displacement disrupts our stability, stories, and embodied inhabitation, moreover, it is a disorienting event in the life of a home; however, the purpose of this paper is to understand home in relation to the development and process of Christian liturgy. How is liturgy connected to urban housing and homemaking in the city? Remembering O’Donovan, I am reminded of his words regarding particularity and universality as he writes, “The flesh of Jesus was particular as was no other flesh . . . . A universalism that responds to God’s initiative has taken its beginning from the historical fact of an elect man in an elect place.” And this is the point of the liturgy, the particularity of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Such liturgical movement that proceeds in a particular direction towards the Eucharist is a liturgy that tells a universal story of a particular embodied inhabitation (or Incarnation) that declared universal specialness to homemaking as an extension of the particularity of Christian place.

The Eucharist and Liturgical Homemaking

It’s Sunday morning, you’re seated in silence while waiting for the service to commence. There are others seated in silence around you. The music begins and everyone stands as a crucifer processes along with servers and ministers down the center aisle to the chancel. Inside the chancel there are various things that occupy space. There is the centerpiece, the Eucharistic table. A credence table with bread, wine, and water. The ministers and servers are robed and walk in a particularly reverent form. Things are slow and deliberate. Things are placed in a particular way, and things are done in particular ways that denote specialness – the place becomes sacred through action. These actions tell a story and within the actions the story itself is read and spoken Sunday after Sunday. Perhaps Christian art surrounds you where you sit and you begin to move from image to image, learning the story through color and light all while music envelops you, repeating the story to your ears. And through time and experience the liturgy migrates into your very being until it is inseparable from your own story. The participant now becomes the performer of the liturgy inside and outside the church building. As William McAlpine writes, “Many of the activities that occur in ‘places,’ particularly sacred places, are designed and exercised as a means of acting out a myth, custom, or rite deemed essential to those participating.”

Pope Benedict XVI in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy describes Christian liturgy and worship as “[Giving] us a share in heaven’s mode of existence, in the world of God, and allows light to fall from that divine world into ours . . . . [it] has the character of anticipation.” This anticipatory understanding of liturgy is certainly an aspect of how such Christian rituals should be understood; however, William Cavanaugh writes under the heading “Christian Liturgy Is Not Sacred,” these words: “Christian liturgy knows no distinction between sacred and secular, spiritual and material. To participate in the liturgy is to bless God as God blessed all of material creation, to respond to God’s blessing by blessing God.” These two statements are interesting because they, seemingly, represent two different understandings of Christian liturgy. One maintains liturgy as “other-worldly,” while Cavanaugh’s understanding is very “this-worldly.” Now, Cavanaugh is interacting with the theme of Alexander Schmemann’s The World As Sacrament, in declaring that “the world [is] the material of one all-embracing Eucharist” and he would doubtless adjudicate too narrowly between the Pope’s understanding and his own; however, these two descriptions together form something quite important for our understanding of the role of Christian liturgy in relation to urban housing.

The central act of Christian liturgy and worship is the Eucharist, and when beginning a reflection on ritual space, liturgical movement, and urban housing there is no better point from which to begin. The Eucharist brings together elements of both Pope Benedict’s understanding of liturgy and Cavanaugh’s in relation to Christ’s presence in heaven and our anticipation for his return and restoration of all things on earth, however, the Eucharist is also a rite performed on earth and it is for the people and things of the earth. Moreover, the Eucharist is a rite that comes from particularity, but one which extends universally. It is here that Schmemann offers an apt reflection: “Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite – the last ‘natural sacrament’ of family and friendship, of life that is more than ‘eating’ and ‘drinking.’” So then, from gathering around the table of particularity, we participate in a celebratory meal that is then taken out from the church and performed in our communities and homes, so that through the days and weeks and years of our lives there is a continual movement from the liturgy to the home.

In the Eucharistic liturgy there is also the element of inclusion and embrace, it is a celebration of homecoming where Christ is present with his people and in his people. Here there is diversity and variety in age, ethnic, and socioeconomic identity. It is a celebration where there is a giving and reception of Christ. And Cavanaugh points out that unlike capitalist economies, “In the divine economy . . . the gift is not alienated from the giver, but the giver is in the gift, goes with the gift . . . . this type of giving is perfected as the dualism of giver and recipient are collapsed; Christ is the perfect return of God to God.” So then, there is no Eucharistic transaction which reflects or creates a disparity between the giver and receiver, nor is there a return. Furthermore, the Eucharist is not property that can be bought or sold. Christ is not a bank, nor is he a property developer, but rather he is the gift and in him there is homecoming and an embodied inhabitation of God with creation, for creation, and for God. Here Cavanaugh concludes that “property and dominium are thus radically questioned.”

There is another element of the Eucharistic liturgy that questions the way that we think about our urban dwellings; it is the element in the Eucharistic prayer known as the anamnesis. This word means in essence “to remember.” As the Eucharistic liturgy is spoken there is a remembrance of Christ; however, this memory is not solely located in those moments directly preceding his crucifixion, but rather they are located in the fullness of his person, his life and work including his death and resurrection. Moreover, in the anamnesis we are called to remember the future as well as it becomes what Geoffrey Wainwright refers to as a “‘throwing forward’ of Christ’s final advent into the present.”

Under the poignant heading of “Martyrdom and Eucharist,” Cavanaugh stresses the importance of understanding the anamnesis not only as remembering the past or anticipating the future, but that this element of Eucharistic liturgy is “the making present of a past event.” It calls into present the life of Christ, so that when we partake of him we partake of his life and ministry, death and resurrection, and we partake of his realized rule over the “rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3.10). Bruce Morrill concludes that “as imitation of Christ, faith is itself a praxis, a purposeful way of life shaped by the definite content of narrative memories about Jesus . . . . [and] just as the narrative memory of Jesus is of his kenotic service in solidarity with the suffering even unto death, so the imitatio Christi is about a life lived with interest in the suffering of others.”

A Liberating Liturgy: Urban Housing and Gentrification

I suppose the proper question now is “So what?” What do Abraham and exile or Eucharist and liturgy have to do with urban housing and gentrification? To begin I would point back to the Old Testament and suggest that it is precisely the story of Israel that teaches the church to look beyond its walls and into the neighborhood and see the plurality of places that God’s has called sacred. To see people, their homes and communities as sacred spaces, and to understand that they are sacred because in heaven and in earth “Christ fills all things” (Eph. 4.10; Col. 1.17; Ps. 119.57;64). The church is witness to this through it liturgical activity as it remembers and performs the story of Israel and Christ and the world through the movement of the liturgy each week. It is the church that remembers and enacts the life and work of Christ in their community, even as they have consumed him in the Eucharist, so they become Christ to those outside the church’s walls.

I have several suggestions, specific to East Dallas and particularly the area of Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh, for how the church can begin to “prophetically imagine” new possibilities for enacting community transformation in the form of liturgical centeredness. First, remembering the story of Abraham and Israel, the church must radically rethink the nature of national boundaries. This is particularly important when considering that the neighborhood of Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh is predominantly Hispanic. Christianity is not a national religion. And the church cannot support immigration policies, federal or local, that are unjust to the immigrant and consider itself remaining committed to the witness of Jesus Christ. Christ judges such exclusionary practices most pointedly through Eucharistic practice (1 Cor. 11.17-33).

Secondly, the Eucharist is not a transaction, nor does it reflect or create a disparity between gift and giver. Rather, in the Eucharist the gift and giver are one and we receive them both. Moreover, as Cavanaugh writes, “Christ himself is found not only in the center but at the margins of the Body, radically identified with the ‘least of my brothers and sisters’ (see Mt. 25.31-46) with whom all members suffer and rejoice.” In a gentrifying community such as Knox-Henderson/Fitzhugh, transactions are happening beyond the reach of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, and by their very nature those transactions create a disparity between haves and have-nots. The Hispanic construction worker and his family are not a family of means, nor is their home important. They can relocate. However, through the Eucharist the church is necessarily connected to its neighbors, and it is called to be in solidarity with those whose homes are being threatened and, as Christ, be present with them along the periphery and the margins.

This also means that the church must think creatively about ways in which to obliterate distinctions between giver and receiver. There is great difficulty in understanding how to approach this imperative; however, when we limit ourselves to a particular, local community then opportunities can become more accessible. For example, some churches have cultivated communal gardens in urban spaces to become common meeting and working places for parishioners and their neighbors. Another example is an urban church in Toronto that operates a lunch program for at-risk or homeless persons uses a rotation of kitchen staff including volunteers and the program’s guests, so that there is always a balance of both. They also incorporate guests into their leadership and planning sessions allowing them a voice in leadership, thus averting unnecessary alienation. This is one way that this particular church has discerned opportunities to foster communal development.

Thirdly, in relation to the disparity between giver and receiver, the church must understand the community in which it is situated. What are its streets like? Who are it’s people? Ethnic and socioeconomic identity aside, for Christ knows no such distinction, how can the church use its liturgy to connect with the material experiences of its neighbors? Where do they intersect? When one walks the streets of Knox-Henderson or Fitzhugh, what music does he or she hear? What are people doing on Monday, Friday, or Saturday nights? How can the church incorporate such things into its life in the community? One example may be to take the liturgy from the church building and into the sacred spaces that surround it. Another may be to use Antonia Lynn’s example of using urban streets as a labyrinth for urban prayer.

Fourthly, in the section concerning the anamnesis we reflected on the nature of remembrance and particularly how through the anamnesis we call into present the life of Christ, so that when we partake of him we partake of his life and ministry, death and resurrection, and we partake of his realized supremacy over the “rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3.10). When the church partakes of Christ’s realized rule through the Eucharist, it is empowered to engage with what Walter Wink names “domination systems.” Gentrification can be such a system that consumes property through displacement and disorientation. It can disrupt families and social networks and can ultimately create homelessness. Wink writes that domination systems such as these “always induce a sense of powerlessness.” However, as he notes, “The church has no more important task than to expose these delusionary assumptions as the Dragon’s game.” Having such a prophetic imagination and voice within the community will only come through the power of Christ, remembered and received in the Eucharist, and enacted in the life of the community.

Conclusion

William Cavanaugh writes, “The role of the church is not merely to make policy recommendations to the state, but to embody a different sort of politics, so that the world may be able to see a truthful politics and be transformed. From week to week we hear a story repeated in the liturgy, a story of the sacredness of Israel and the sacredness of the world, a story that remembers and calls to present the life of Christ which we embody, performing his actions in our communities and neighborhoods. And in that performance we declare that all space is sacred and especially the dwelling places of those who are along the periphery and margins of society, for it is in them that Christ is particularly present. We engage in warfare, but not the sort that is common to the nation-state, but “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Eph. 6.12 KJV). It is through the power of Christ in the Eucharist that we are called perform his works, and it is through Christ that we are called to embody his life to the world.

Stephen Setzer is a master of divinity student at Wycliffe College, in the University of Toronto, where he is completing an internship at Church of the Redeemer. He is a postulant for ordination in the Diocese of Dallas, the Episcopal Church. You can find more of his writing on his community blog, Life on Lindsay.

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1 Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (New York: Routledge, 2008), xv.

2 Ibid, 135.

3 Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge, eds., Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 5.

4 Marsha Prior and Robert V. Kemper, “From Freedman’s Town to Uptown: Community Transformation and Gentrification in Dallas, Texas,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 34 no. 2/3 (Summer-Fall 2005): 183.

5 Steve Brown, “Fitzhugh’s Gentrification Moves Into Retail Site Makeovers,” The Dallas Morning News 25 June 2010.

6 “Scorecards,” Dallas Independent School District, http://www.dallasisd.org/scorecards (accessed December 8, 2012).

7 “Free and Reduced Price Meals,” Dallas Independent School District, http://www.dallasisd.org/Page/931 (accessed December 8, 2012).

8 “Scorecards,” Dallas Independent School District.

9 I understand this to be indicated by the percentage of students that are “Limited-English-Proficient” students in the district. For example, 31% of the students at Robert E. Lee Elementary are “Limited-English,” while the district as a whole is at 38%.

Bibliography

Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 56-64.

Oliver O’Donovan, “Loss of a Sense of Place,” 318.

William R. McAlpine, Sacred Space for the Missional Church: Engaging Culture through the Built Environment (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 127.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 21.

William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011), 119.

Alexander Schmemann, The World As Sacrament (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1966), 16.

William T. Cavanaugh, “The City,” Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catharine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (New York: Routledge, 1999), 195.

Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology (London: Epworth Press, 1971), 92.

William T. Cavanaugh, “Dying For The Eucharist Or Being Killed By It? Romero’s Challenge To First-World Christians,” Theology Today, 58, no. 2 (July 2001): 182.

Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis As Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology In Dialogue (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 189.

Antonia Lynn, “Prayer in the Streets: The Labyrinth as Symbol and Tool for an Urban Prayer Life,” Discovering the Spirit in the City, ed. Andrew Walker and Aaron Kennedy (New York: Continuum, 2010), 16-28.

Walter Wink, “Unmasking the Domination System,” Urban Theology: A Reader, ed. Michael Northcott (London: Cassell, 1998), 143.

Stephen Setzer

The words “Eucharist” and “gentrification” may seem to be quite disparate in their context and meaning. One alludes to ceremony, tradition, religion, and sacrament, while the other connotes cities, housing, displacement, and economics. They are seemingly worlds apart. However, it is my contention in this paper that these worlds are not so far apart as they may initially appear. Rather they are connected at a foundational level through their respective understandings of place. What is it? Is it special? To whom does it belong? And do any of these things matter? As Christians we are a part of a story, a story that is centered, interestingly, on a particular understanding of place. Rooted in the Old Testament narrative of Abraham and Sarah and the stories of exile, the Scriptures are intent upon forming our understanding of the inherent specialness of place. Moreover, Christian tradition speaks to that same understanding through the development and process of its liturgy. Particularly, through the Eucharistic liturgy we are told a story week after week of the specialness of sacred space and our place. So then in this paper I will begin to build a bridge from Christian liturgy to our urban neighborhoods and explore how an understanding of the Eucharistic liturgy can provide the urban church with a prophetic voice against redevelopment at the cost of displacement.

The Biblical Story: From Abraham to Exile

The story of Israel begins with migration. Abraham was called to journey from Ur to the somewhat obscure “land of promise” (Gen. 12). This was the land that would be the subject for the whole of the Old Testament and the land from which Jesus would be born and the mission of the church would emanate. It was a particular place and in it would develop a particular religion.  However, it is important to remember that the story begins with displacement and migration. To this Walter Brueggemann writes, “The Bible itself is primarily concerned with the issue of being displaced and yearning for a place.” Moreover he adds, “Land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith. Biblical faith is a pursuit of historical belonging that includes a sense of destiny derived from such belonging.” Displacement and migration, homelessness and belonging – these are themes that begin with Abraham and are present throughout the story of Israel.

And it is important to remember that it was a divine voice that called for Abraham’s initial migration and displacement in order that ultimate belonging could be realized. So this migration was inherently a religious movement, and one might even propose that it was liturgical. Throughout the story of Abraham’s migration there are references to his recognition that this movement and the land were both sacred. This was done primarily through the building of altars and memorials to God (Gen. 12.7,8; 13.18). Moreover, there were sacramental liturgies performed on the land, sacred rites such as the meeting of Abraham and the king/priest, Melchizedek who offers bread and wine to the patriarch. Also, there is the important rite in Genesis 15 where God establishes his covenant with Abraham promising him possession of the land. This promise was established with the rite in Genesis 15 and is reiterated through the rites of Genesis 17 and again in chapter 22. Reflecting on these passages Craig Bartholomew summarizes, “[The land is holy] because it is the place where [God] keeps revealing himself to Abraham and the place which he bequeaths as a gift to Abraham and his descendants. It is the particular presence and word of God in and through Abraham that makes the land holy.”

But what are we to do with the particular holiness of the place when the people are removed from the land? Displacement and migration, homelessness and belonging, themes in Israel’s story are nowhere more poignant than in the exile in Babylon. As the exile approached Jeremiah prophesied, “[Thus says the LORD of hosts] I will take from them the voice of joy and the voice of gladness . . . . This whole land will be a desolation and a horror, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years” (Jer. 25.10-11 NASB). The altars, the liturgies, the temple – gone. However, it was forced migration from their particular place which taught them that their understanding itself would have to migrate from particularity to a plurality of place. God was not to be found exclusively in the land of Israel, but universally with his people in all places. Oliver O’Donovan in his essay, “Loss of a Sense of Place,” comments, “Precisely as [Israel] understood its holy place to have fallen under YHWH’s condemnation, and was forced to consider the question of its future from a distance, it entertained a hope of restoration that would involve it in a new international context.”

In this migration Israel would move from Psalm 137 where the exiles exclaim, “How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” to the words of Psalm 119, “The LORD is my portion . . . . [and] The earth is full of your lovingkindness, O LORD; teach me your statutes” (119.57;64). Sacredness now extends beyond the confines of particularity and it continues throughout the whole space of the world. The world is sacred. Such sacredness is most pointedly observed in the incarnation of Christ in the world. Holy places become unfixed and might be found in the region of Tyre and Sidon, the home of a tax-collector, or upon a wooden cross. Such a reality is prepared for us in the Jewish exile. From particular to universal, their context has now moved beyond what was once exclusively sacred.

Telling the story of how Israel moved from the particular to the universal is essential to establishing how the church must move beyond the particularity of its sacred spaces and into the plurality of sacred spaces that surround it. However, before this move can occur one thing must be addressed. In writing about such movement from particular to universal are we not simply subsuming one space into another so that nothing remains particular or unique? O’Donovan recognizes the potential of this assumption, and he responds by asserting,

“A universalism that responds to God’s initiative has taken its beginning from the historical fact of an elect man in an elect place. If it transcends holy places, then, it does so not by subsuming them into a universal, but by proceeding from their unique, once-for-all role to new general possibilities in the history that follows them. The elect places of history are the matrix in which meetings between God and mankind are shaped.”

This is precisely what this paper is calling for, a “new general possibility” for the church to use the particularity of its understanding of sacred space to influence the spaces that surround it. To become a prophetic voice within a changing neighborhood whose inhabitants are being subjected to displacement through redevelopment and gentrification. It is the particularity of its space and the uniqueness of its liturgy that form and shape how a church can begin to teach its neighbors concerning their own particular and unique spaces and place within the community.

Stephen Setzer is a master of divinity student at Wycliffe College, in the University of Toronto, where he is completing an internship at Church of the Redeemer. He is a postulant for ordination in the Diocese of Dallas, the Episcopal Church. You can find more of his writing on his community blog, Life on Lindsay.

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Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 2-3.

Craig G. Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 51.

Oliver O’Donovan, “Loss of a Sense of Place,” Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 313.

In 1889, William Morris delivered a lecture titled “The Arts and Crafts of Today,” which addressed the degraded state of labour and commerce in industrial England by working through the question of art’s purpose in everyday life. Not simply an indictment of late Victorian society, Morris’s lecture functions as a manifesto, justifying his radical position to an audience of artists while laying out the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. Like the manifestos of later design movements, such as The Bauhaus, Morris’s lecture assumes a close relationship between what he calls the “applied arts” and the complex form of society at large. For both movements, the design manifesto is a polemical call to all creative labourers to recognize their collective capacity to overturn and transform the status quo; it is an attempt to articulate an alternative vision of society in which art does not simply mask reality but actually improves it.

Modernist aesthetics can be seen as a direct engagement with the question of technology and its increasing dominance within industrial capitalism. In this way, the lineage of early twentieth century movements like The Bauhaus can be traced back to Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. If the design manifesto is itself the outgrowth of a modernist attitude toward art and life, it retains the same dialectical impulse that drove Morris to understand the applied arts as a sign of collective solidarity: it is at once critical of its immediate context and pragmatic about how to change it. As Morris’s 1889 lecture demonstrates, the rise of the applied arts as a discipline directly follows from art’s confrontation with capitalist modes of production and social inequality.

In a landscape saturated with advertising and mass production, the applied arts provided Morris with tangible opportunities for intervention. His 1889 lecture recognizes this discipline as a site of labour that must be reconciled with degraded labour of the industrial factory. Art, according to Morris, has two related purposes. The first purpose has to do with use and consumption: art adds beauty to functional objects, it enables the enjoyment of everyday activities. Here, Morris suggests that in some forms of human labour (certain moments in agriculture, fishing, carpentry, etc.) beauty is already inherent in nature, or it would be if we recognized that this sort of work is necessary and dignified. Art’s second purpose is to add pleasure to labour. Nature again figures into this definition because it models this relationship for us by making necessary activities like eating enjoyable.

For Morris, the vast separation between art and life was symptomatic of England’s social and economic inequality. In his lecture, he points out that artists frequently fixate on a particular style or method and consequently lose sight of what that style might achieve. Such artwork finally expresses nothing more than the vanity of the artist: his self-satisfied ability to render a “clever” product, which simply mystifies and alienates his audience rather than working towards its edification. Within the conditions of capitalism, art cannot be commonly experienced: it becomes the lofty domain of aristocratic enjoyment; meanwhile, the factory work that sustains England’s economy is stripped down to bare utility.

Removing art from utility does not make utility somehow more neutral; it rather works against the human spirit and against social progress. If we simply adhere to utility, suggests Morris, we have the choice between two dystopian futures. Either society will be organized in a way that allows for the exploitation of the many by the few (fascism), or, as a strict system of compulsory egalitarianism, not unlike the form of communism that would later envelop Eastern Europe. In either case everyday life is defined by the drudgery of work, which destroys creativity and instrumentalizes human energy.

In contrast, the true work of art for Morris must point to the unified bond of true society, where every individual endeavour is grounded, inspired, and made possible by collective interest. In this way, Morris’s philosophy was grounded in the “constructivism” that would come to define the avant-garde in the early twentieth century: art is distinguished not by the finished product but by the social process that surrounds it and makes possible its creation (McGann 56). For Morris and, later, for The Bauhaus this impulse toward collective interest culminated in the work of architecture. In “The Bauhaus Manifesto” Walter Gropius suggests argues that arts and crafts must work together in unity in order to create complete objects, the most important of which is “the complete building.” Like Gropius, Morris recognized architecture as a way to understand how art and life could influence one another. Even the fine arts, such as painting or sculpture, must be considered within the context of architecture and can aid in the construction of a unified space. The building, argues Morris, is “a unit of art”: it is the pure expression of the lives of its builders and inhabitants. What bound these two groups together in previous societies was a common tradition. By Morris’s time, that tradition had been superseded by the irrational demands of the market, all of which have led increased specialization and alienation for working classes. In this setup, ornamentation (what used to belong to the domain of art) is mass produced as an afterthought to utility, the ultimate purpose of which is to quicken commerce. The end of objects produced in this kind of context is profit, pure and simple. Beautiful work can therefore only be oppositional because it must, by definition, take into account the mutual conditions of production and consumption.

In his lecture Morris sees the buildings of industrial Britain standing in stark contrast to the cathedrals of the middle ages, not only because of their orientation towards commerce, but because such spaces reduce workers to blunt instruments. Because he is driven solely by commercial interest, Morris argues, the capitalist will either have machines do work of production or rely on “human machines”: workers whose desire and creativity must be channeled into spare moments of leisure time. Under such conditions, the working classes are doomed to produce objects of mere utility. In other words, if ornamentation does make an appearance in factory products, it has no purpose beyond the self-interest of those who own the means of production.

Where other social critics of Victorian England, such as John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle, valourized work as an inherently ennobling activity and risked having their arguments used to justify the further exploitation of the working classes, Morris was convinced that simple labour reform would not solve the problems of capitalism (Breton 43). Commerce, according to Morris, can only encourage exploitation and treat beauty as a superfluous ornament. When those engaged in the applied arts take seriously their conditions of production, they cannot but be aligned with rebellion. For Morris the free labours of applied artists are therefore the concrete appearance of utopian possibility; they carve out a space of critique and a space of hope. Such work, in other words, reminds us of what the industrial age has forgotten: that labour can be pleasurable, that social equality is attainable, and that both possibilities depend on one another.

Jonathan Dyck blogs at Church Going. He is a co-editor of the Catholic Commons

Works Cited