Shut your pie hole and help Haiti!
As I listen to people calling in to radio shows, I think, you know, the level of duplicity among right-wing (fascist), Republican (corporate), evangelical (made-up religion), “christians” whenever there’s brutality or disaster elsewhere in the world, is obscene. If it was England, there wouldn’t be a debate. When it’s black people with dreadlocks, we ask all these questions about “whether it’s our responsibility”. One gets a little tired of inbred, toothless, backwoods-drawl “believers” and their nouveau riche suburban counterparts expressing their pride and anger about doing the very thing Christ asked of us – help those who are poor or in distress: “If you see your brother in need and withhold the world’s goods from him, how does the love of God abide in you?”
- Image by Nite_Owl via Flickr
These folks aren’t Christians – the Christian is the pagan, atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, or whatever that pulls someone from the rubble, bandages his wounds, carries him to the hospital, and puts down his own money to feed and care for him (by their prayers save me). The Christian is the Samaritan, the heretic, the alien, the foreigner, the false religious person, not the Judeo-Christian who sits at home bitching about the cost. I wouldn’t want to be standing in the congregation of those whose verbal ejaculations are a mockery of the gospels, because one day the floor is going to fall in, the grave open up, and the Devil take them all.
If you were singing songs of triumph when we bombed villages in Serbia and shot children in Fallujah, but saying “Yeah, it’s not our job to save the Tutsis from massacre by the Hutu in Rwanda – that’s another part of the world, not our business” – then besides being a hypocrite to reason, and an obvious liar therefore, you’ve hardly got a claim to being Christian. You may be Republican. You may be “conservative”. You may “believe in the Bible”. You may “have a personal savior”. But whoever it is, it’s not the historic Christ of the gospels. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a figment of your imagination. A fictious person to whom you’ve merely attributed your own attributes, carving out an idol of God in your own image, rather than leaving behind the world you love, as did the Holy Apostles, and following Christ. Christ is helping those in Haiti. You’re just bitching that other people are casting out demons and healing the sick in his name. You fundamentally don’t get it, and your fundamentalism has clouded your judgment.
Almost every religious person I know has let his politics pollute his faith. Among some of my people, it has been the obscenity of rhetorically beating up Muslims (funny, they weren’t bold enough to talk smack before 9/11 – what, did their faith change with the times? – is it “post-9/11 religion”?). They’ve become tools of Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s bandwagon. They’re not autonomous, which is the kingdom of which Christ spoke, “my power is not of this world”, but appendages of the political and social machine. It’s not everyone, of course. But religion sets up camp in faith all the time, busily appointing itself like storefront preachers, to the “ministry” of translating the premises of the world into the lingo of religious belief. You want to know if I’m guilty of it too? I don’t know, but my faith teaches me to say that I am, whenever anyone accuses me of a failing, and to accuse myself so that the enemy can own nothing in me. So whether I can think of a specific instance or not, I’m guilty. I’ve been religious. And damn every stitch of it, when I have been. Let’s repent together!
In Haiti, thousands are dead, families left fatherless, widows wailing in the streets, orphans looking for their parents, people have lost their homes and have nothing. Remember, you are charged with the words of our father St. James, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Brother of God, “Pure and undefiled religion is this, helping orphans and widows in their affliction, and keeping oneself unstained by the world.” Don’t mouth off about “yeah, but is it really our responsibility?” like you’ve been smoking too much conservative crack and it’s made you too high to hear the gospel – you’re putting shame and judgment on your head, and it’s just adding to the agony of the world. It’s not about you, and it’s not your job to turn everything into an ideology like you long ago did to your faith. It’s not all a belief system. The Samaritan has more faith than you or I, he will judge us in the last day, not vice versa. And if you think otherwise, you’ve been spoon fed too much triumphalist baby food that was just what your pride wanted to hear. Tell your pastor to go to hell and do something to help Haiti. Protest by withholding what you normally put in the offering plate, if he stands up there and tells you it’s not your concern. The Red Cross is the ‘church’ in that moment more than whatever cheesy architecture is wrapping those pews.
There’s plenty of stuff on the web about how to help, and what’s needed, so before anyone says I should light a candle not curse the dark (there’s a nice double entendre there), we just don’t need that extra voice on that side of the delivery truck. But I don’t see a lot of hands helping shove people off the rice sacks that have planted flags in them and are giving the finger to the desperate because they can’t find a “bible verse” to tell them they “have to” show compassion and mercy. So that’s my job. Get off the sacks you freaking false prophets, you cheats and stealers from the poor, you horders of the provisions God gave you to precisely to give away. I’m not “saying it with love” (timidly and in a pretty, Downy-soft, impressionistic manner). I’m just saying it.
Remember, these words, “You didn’t visit me in my distress. You didn’t give me food when I was hungry. You didn’t give me drink when I was dying of thirst. Depart from me, I never knew you.” What do you think is the penalty for stealing from the poor in the sight of God? “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours but theirs.” – St. John Chrysostom
For those interested in helping, I recommend Global Giving (they’re solid – we use them all the time – and you can give any amount using paypal, credit card, or online check) or text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 via your cell phone bill. 100% of your $10 donation passes thru to RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell carrier keeps nothing.
She’d come upon an orphanage there that needed volunteers to teach some English to the children. Teachers would come through, and some would stay a while and do this, and she was captivated and decided to stay for much longer. I was captivated too, and I looked, and they needed $900 in small gifts – that’s all they were asking for last year, and it was being given in small gifts ($25, $35, $45 at a time) through [ 
This is an entry in the comments of another article. It seems like it might also make a good article.
There’s a sin the fathers warn us of: “Gluttony of delicacy.” It is the sin of choosing not to pray or approach the holy things because of the dept of my sin, when in fact praying and returning to God is what would save me. It’s a form of despair. Overmuch (gluttony) of delicacy (the need to have it all just right – perfect – before I will act or do anything). It is a grievous sin.
I am guilty of that sin. I spent years not giving, because I couldn’t find the ‘right’ charity, and I was afraid of throwing my money down the toilet. …
I once had a spiritual advisor, Edie, and among the things that she helped me with was this: I was starting to lose heart, because I was poor. The people around me had been saying that it’s a sign of God’s judgment on me, and that I should be ashamed because I couldn’t pay my bills, and was in debt, and had to pay late fees all the time. It’s so easy for the poor to become demoralized about being poor, but especially when the people of God are against you. But Edie gave the scriptures back to me. She read the Gospel to me and asked me, “Who are the poor?” Then she answered, “They are those who cannot pay their bills, who are in debt, and who have to pay interest and penalties all the time. It was this way even when Christ walked among the poor.” She added, “you cannot despise yourself for being poor, because then you would be despising the very thing that Christ does not despise. And as for judgment, it is those who despise the poor that Christ said he would judge. So love the poor, and be poor, and don’t despise anyone, and be saved.”
Over the years, I began to hear another luminary, Tony Campolo. He showed me how I live in the wealthiest nation in the world, or at least the most gluttonous, even if it is really on borrowed loot. “You know and I know that most of what we spend in any given year is spent on stuff that we don’t need.” Campolo showed me my poverty as riches compared to the truly poor of the world. I have always been able to eat, but there are mothers watching their children wither in their arms and their whole families die, because they cannot even find water. Here, it would be hard to find a poor dwelling without cable TV. Others in the world can’t even imagine owning something so valuable as a TV; an inexpensive one here would feed a family there for a year.
Then eventually, I began again to listen to the Gospel itself, with ears unstuck, and I could hear Christ. I don’t mean any kind of ecstatic vision. I mean I could hear the simple words and see them in the present. And that’s when I realized that the poor are not only the hungry. They are those deprived of friendship or status (the stranger), of peace and comfort (the afflicted), of refuge (the naked and homeless). They are all those everywhere who want of grace, of the grace it has been given us to give them. The poor are covered with sores. They are the man of the tombs. They are the born blind and held in institutions. They are the abandoned spouse – the widow. The unwanted child – the orphan. The immigrant. They are those with a demon, the mentally ill, antisocial, illegal, hunted, turned against themselves and all men. And it is ever to the poor that Christ goes, ever with them that he concerns himself. I can hear Campolo say, “And you can’t be a Christian, unless you do likewise.” I can hear Edie say, “woe to those who despise the poor.” I can hear Christ, “inasmuch as ye have done it to the very least of all these – these my brethren…”
I once told a friend that I was setting out on a journey to learn to love my wife. I believed that if I learned to love my wife, I would learn to love others. And if I can’t learn to love my wife, I told him, then I fear I will never learn to love anyone. My friend periodically, after long periods of time, writes to ask me if I’ve learned to love my wife. And I have always written back, “Not yet. I think it will take a long time.” Recently, I wrote to him to say: