Finding Important Things in Charity

You’re welcome. I’ve added a fourth bullet point, from a previous entry: [avoid delicacy].

First, let me say I’ve appreciated your previous comments. I’m going to disagree fairly adamantly here, and perhaps the treatment of your ideas will seem a little harsh, though it’s not intended to be. It is a thing of gravity, though, because we’re effectively talking about ideas that translate into whether someone lives or dies. The effect of our ideas, and the form of the discussion being introduced, is a jury deciding on who to expend and who to save. It’s the lifeboat, and I deeply disapprove.

I’m about to therefore break the twin social rules of never too directly condemning an idea as illicit, and never exposing the presuppositions behind it, much less logically illicit ones (As a culture, we like to think premises are not contained whole in any given proposition, and certainly are not susceptible to judgment themselves). I’ll try to respond with actual charity, despite what will be an almost utter lack of its cultural counterfeit. Here is where I believe St. Photius would say “truth is the highest form of love”.

As I mentioned, yours is the common response, but:

1. It’s really just a posture to talk of doing one thing “first” and another “after”. Since the need at home is practically endless (and you describe it like that, as well), what you really mean is doing the one thing “only”, even if it’s less desirable to say it that way. The “later” thing, is really just hypothetical and so unreal. Later will never come. It’s like saying “I will love myself first and love God later.”
2. Rhetorically, when you compare “brother in need” to “faceless cause”, you’re making a false analogy, and one I find a bit offensive. Brother vs. faceless. Need vs. cause. I’m not talking of your intent, but there aren’t many nice ways to sentence one people to non-existence in favor of another people. Let’s at least not pretty it up. Also, this was your response to me saying that the inconvenience of one person (e.g. living in a slum) cannot be compared as one and the same thing with the life and death of another person. You’ve reversed the order and, to do it, you had to appeal to a fallacy.
3. And there’s some concealment of nationalism, as well, in my view. What’s the difference between Alaska and Viet Nam when you’re in Oklahoma? Some miles. And a national boundary and fealty.

I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of sympathy with this. There’s not an especially nice way to explain this disagreement. Also, this is a journal, albeit public, rather than a regular debate forum, so I need to be free to analyze ideas here w/o considering the social cost, or thinking of it primarily as a dialogue, but I’m being as gentle as I can. Especially since, like I say, I value your other contributions.

Incidentally, that passage of the Scriptures, analyzed in terms of “first here” and “second there” would be a refutation also of the original missionary work of the Church, in many cases. I question too much attention to a particular hermeutic case, with which you started your post. Logically, if one can separate out a passage and reduce it to a numeral order, then one can likewise do it with the Great Commission which replaced it, “go ye into all the world”, and thereby create a contradiction. This is ultimately a Protestant hermeneutic, in my view, and one that creates immense problems of understanding. To make an obvious point: “Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.” Your logic would support the claim that each of us should learn to love God with all his heart, first, and then learn to love his neighbor. Do you love God with all your heart? If not, why bother with the poor at all? I’m just saying the logic is illicit; once released into the wild, it supports this kind of claim also, to use reductio ad absurdum.

We live in an age of fast global transport, global communication, and global economics. Our economic policies globally (including, for example, the groceries you and I buy and eat, the banking infrastructure that holds our money, the fuel that supplies our transportation) are causing draught, war, famine, exploitation, slavery, kidnapping, extortion, genocide, and all manner of deprivation on the backs of the poor all over the world. How is it that we feel no qualms about first devastating the people everywhere else, then go on about first helping the people here? We are responsible for those we kill. They are our dead. And we are responsible for those we are killing and persecuting; they, more than anyone else, perhaps, are our poor. If I starve someone, he’s my poor, as surely as if he lived next door.

It’s a false dichotomy to suggest it does no good to love those in one place if we can’t love those in another, let alone that somehow we can’t do both equally as well.

As for being faceless, look at the sidebar and the photo of those children. Are they faceless? I know you don’t mean it that way, but I’m going to make a point, so please bear with me taking you literally. Half the time, most of us see the majority of our poor on TV anyway, where the only differences are national affiliation, ethnicity, and culture. It’s really only a question of being like us, or not.

It’s easy to love those who are like us, through nearness, common culture, common language, etc. Even the infidels do it, and it’s hardly any credit. Isn’t that what Christ says? When we’ve taken care of our grandmother, our next door neighbor, or the local hobo, we haven’t loved the poor at all – we’ve done only what is expected and required of us. We’ve loved those who are like ourselves. Those are “our own”. As the Apostle expanded, “he who doesn’t provide for his own is worse than an infidel”. That’s just expected, normally daily behavior. Loving the poor is loving the ‘man of the tombs’ – the one who is not like us. The leper, the widow, the orphan, the outcast, the prisoner, the madman, the mentally ill, the possessed. Remember what Christ said: “for as much as you have done it unto the least of these, you’ve done it to me”. The least of these is the one who is least like ourselves, least in our camp, least knowable, least acceptable. He’s the foreigner (“the stranger”, as Christ put it), the alien, the unknown. To use your word “the faceless”. The “faceless” are your mission, so that, in your heart, they will have a face. And they will then have faces in the judgment of your peers. This is true religion, our true mission, and the true call of all Orthodox Christians.

“I was a stranger, and you took me in.” It means that, to us, in our hearts and in the resultant activity of our minds and wills, we make all strangers neighbors and brothers. We make the most alien the possessor of our bounty. What can “take me in” mean, if not foremost a taking into one’s heart? And what can taking someone into your heart mean for an Orthodox Christian, who repudiates the fragmentation of the person, unless it includes taking in and taking on their bodily needs? We see this treatment of the “heart” and love of another’s body in this: “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and yet closes his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?”

We Orthodox, above all others, have responsibility for all others, especially the poor of the world (I mean “of the world” as in global). It’s hypocrisy to send missionaries to Cameroon to save their souls, while not sending food to save their bodies, medicine to salve their wounds, and all the Orthodox forms of charity which see and save a whole, integral person, and refuse to reduce them to “souls to be saved”. Anything less than our attention to the full needs of the world’s poor is a denial of the Incarnation.

Let me say again, that I’ve taken some license to run with your words, and I’m sure you did not mean them in all the ways they can be exploited. But I want to illustrate how this thinking can be exploited, can be a pathway to shipwreck in regards to charity. The phrases “starts at home” and “in your own backyard” are the common utterance in the US, which brags about its [artificially inflated level of charity] while minimizing its untold devastation. I link this line of rhetoric also to a desire for control, and ultimately to greed. Like almost all the ‘common wisdom’ of the culture, it’s really a concealment of something monstrous. We hear and pick up this rhetoric without giving it full consideration, for its implications. Part of this journal’s job is to help me work out the implications of the culture’s heresies, cast them off, and turn aside from them to understand the words of Christ which have been distorted by the echo, in our minds, of the overall cultural broadcast, howevermuch they are purely transmitted by the Apostles through the pure succession.

Just as a sidenote: if we cared about our backyard, there’d be something like national healthcare. Ours is the only nation remotely approaching this level of wealth per capita (and I do mean remotely) in which a person can go bankrupt from getting medical care and lose his life because he can no longer afford it. To be fair, a lot of the “charity starts at home” crowd do support a national healthcare plan, but a lot don’t. At least a little consistency is nice, even when they’re wrong.

Well, I appreciate the concern; no worries. On your points, I see them as a restatement of your earlier points, so I don’t have much new to say about them.