Transformation: Whose Space Is It Anyway?
A Politics of Communion
I hope you can join me to “widen the circle of compassion and kinship” in your church or organization to use a term borrowed from Fr. Greg Boyle, founder and leader of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention program in the world. Fr. Boyle writes:
"I had mistakenly tried to “save” young men and women trapped in gang life. But then, in an instant, I learned that saving lives is for the Coast Guard. Me wanting a gang member to have a different life would never be the same as that gang member wanting to have one. I discovered that you do not go to the margins to rescue anyone. But if we go there, everyone finds rescue."
Dorothy Day once said “there are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell and are ungrateful”. I started working on affordable housing issues in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan in 1989 when I was just 20-years old and have never looked back at my commitment. The housing landscape is vast and not easily understood.
“Widening the circle of compassion and kinship” means more than giving out charity. It requires transformation in all our lives. While volunteering at church food pantries and soup kitchens, I have been amazed at the resistance voiced by parishioners to locating any housing resembling “affordable” near their homes. These are well meaning folks doing charitable work. Some of them are directly involved with relocation efforts of migrants to the U.S. fleeing war zones around the world. But try to relocate our own neighbors to our own neighborhoods!
We forget that the essence of the Gospel is radical hospitality. I once listened to a pastor lament about his generally progressive congregation, “We can put up our BLM signs in our front yards, but we resist with full force that proposed apartment complex in a rezoning hearing down the street”.
To address the housing needs of citizens returning home from jails and prisons, and for that matter, all our fellow human beings struggling with housing needs, we need more than charity. Widening the circle of compassion means creating space, physical space, so that others can simply live.
"It's one thing to give out charity, but another thing to give out justice. We have a challenge to give back and be accountable for what God has given us" - Rev Francis Xavier Knott
Kevin Clarke writes in his reflection titled What early Christian communities teach us about care for the poor, “It is a reminder to contemporary Christians of the importance of this primary role of our Christian duty that it surfaces even in this Scripture that deals with the most fundamental questions of Christian identity. Let us confirm it today, even as we explore new ways to be ‘mindful of the poor’, determining what that means in our times: expression of individual charity or demand of social justice, or both?
"It is only for your love that the poor will forgive you the bread that you give them" is a prayer of St. Vincent de Paul invoked by the Catholic Workers in a Los Angeles soup kitchen.
Our faith relationship to the land typically invites a more romanticized agrarian narrative or environmental narrative to hold land in the commons. It is fashionable in eco-theology circles. However, our faith should also invite an urban narrative. That becomes more difficult.
Decades of housing policy have put homeownership front and center. Our interest in wealth accumulation in our homes creates a conflict when trying to live out the Gospel to welcome the stranger to the manger. “Not-in-my-backyard” has turned into “Not-in-my-neighborhood” when trying to locate affordable housing even among faith communities. So, when we do our charity work, we need to reflect on the societal structures — zoning, tax breaks, government subsidies — that have benefited our own lives, walled us off while pushing away those persons and families who have every right to claim the spaces where we reside except for lack of resources. Borders are our lines, not God's
