Christian Life Community

GOD'S PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE POOR by Tony French

 

(The person principally responsible for giving us a contemporary explanation of the Preferential Option is Gustavo Gutierrez the Peruvian priest and theologian. In 2008 I was fortunate to meet Gustavo and hear him lecture.  He spoke of the Church of the Poor. My talk at World CLC Day is a reflection of the great debt I owe him in aiding my own understanding and acting out of the Preferential Option. All the eccentricities in my talk are attributable to me, not Gustavo. Tony French.)

 

God's predilection for the poor and the pastoral consequences of this preference begin with the re-discovery in the 1960's of earlier scriptural insights. John 23rd in Vatican II and successive Latin American bishops conferences spoke of "inhuman misery", "poverty of the church", "anti-evangelical poverty" and, "intolerable extremes of misery".  These descriptions express not just institutional violence but a violation of God's plan for the construction of the kingdom of life.

The divine will to life reveals itself radically in God's choice as objects of special concern those whose lives and very existence stand at greatest risk. We need to be aware of the duality of the universality of God's love with the particularity of God's decision to stand with the poor.  It's not one or the other, but the church of the poor is the church of all. 

 

What do we mean by "poverty", "preference" and "option"?

 

POVERTY

Poverty encompasses economic, social and political dimensions but it is more than these, it means death, unjust death, the premature death of the poor, physical death. People die of sicknesses which in many countries medical science has overcome, for example, cholera and typhoid, yet in many countries these diseases kill people particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, wherever there are poor people.

Poverty leads to physical death, to say nothing of situations where people are repressed. I must mention too cultural death, when a people are despised the persons who belong to that culture are also being killed. If a culture is despised then that life is despised. Think what has happened to our aboriginal people, and is happening to refugees. It happens not just to racial groups but also to women who are denied their full human rights.

The God of life rejects unjust physical and cultural death as well as other manifestations of selfishness and sin. In the Bible poverty is a scandalous situation inimical to human dignity and therefore contrary to the will of God. It is a degrading situation and its cause it at the hands of others, the oppressors:

   "the wicked jostle the poor out of the way, the destitute huddle              together hiding from them." (Job)

Poverty is not caused by fate but by the actions of others whom this and other Old Testament prophets condemn.

It is not simply a matter of denouncing poverty but actual measures are required to prevent poverty. Leviticus and Deuteronomy detail the prevention of accumulated wealth, the providing of food and freeing of slaves. To accept poverty and injustice is to fall back into the conditions of servitude which existed before the liberation from Egypt. The mandate of Genesis is that all men and women are created in the image and likeness of God.

So what do we mean today by the "poor"? The poor are non persons, the insignificant, those who do not count in society and all too often in Christian churches either.  A poor person is someone in Australia who has to wait 3 or more years to see a public health dentist. A poor person is someone without social and economic weight who is robbed by unjust laws, someone who has no way of speaking up or acting to change the situation, someone who belongs to a despised race and feels culturally marginalised. They are the insignificant. The poor are found in statistics but do not appear with their own names. They are insignificant in society but not before God.

If you talk about the poor, people will regard you as sensitive and generous, but if you talk of the causes of poverty they will say, is this a Christian speaking, isn't such language political?

 

PREFERENCE

Preference implies the universality of God's love which excludes no one. Only within this framework can we understand the preference, that is, "what comes first." The Bible speaks of God's preference for the poor. In Genesis God prefers Abel to Cain but nowhere does it say that Abel is better or that Cain has something evil about him. God preferred the sacrifice of Abel to that of Cain, Cain's sin was his refusal to accept God's preference for Abel and so killed him. The rejection of the preference means failing to grasp the universality of God's love with God's preference for the poorest. Holding these 2 aspects together is a great challenge.

But why the preference?  Poverty is not what brings us to prefer the poor. Compassion is important, but is not the ultimate reason. Nor is it sufficient to say the poor are inherently good, or that they have a great human richness. The poor are human too, and we can prefer them if they are good, but rather because God is good and prefers the forgotten, the oppressed, the poor and the abandoned. The ultimate and final reason for the "preference' lies in the God of our faith. God first loved us and our lives should respond to this gratuitous initiative of God. Gratuitous love constitutes the heart of spiritual life and does not oppose social and political commitment. But without contemplation, without prayer we cannot conceive of a Christian life. Without solidarity with the poor there is no Christian life either. We must try to hold these two dimensions together.

 

OPTION

God's option for the poor and thus the church's is not something "optional" which Christians can take or leave. To opt for the poor means to make a decision to side with the oppressed and powerless in their fight for justice and to stand against all persons and structures that oppose their liberation. It is a commitment taken that transforms the world into a place of justice and in the process transforms the lives of the poor and non poor who make this choice.

The option is not something only the non poor have to make. The poor also have to opt in favour of their brothers and sisters by race, social class and culture. The option for the poor is a decision for every Christian.

 

WHAT MUST I DO? (Well, not what I usually do!)

Do I continue to accept that I am not called upon to help in the establishment of the Kingdom. It will come at the end of time, at God's own timing, and anyway since I am already saved then I am conveniently saved from having to participate in the struggle for the emancipation of those oppressed by others. After all that is not an easy thing to do and it may be personally dangerous.

I tend to idealise poverty and not take it on as it is - an evil - and not protest against it and to struggle to abolish it. Since I am not poor, nor am I in contact with anyone who is poor I don't have to struggle against poverty. It largely their fault anyway that they are poor. If they had any initiative they could improve themselves, after all God helps those who help themselves. Accordingly, I don't have to renounce my hard earned and deserved life style. The Lord hears the cry of the poor. Isn't that enough?

I certainly wouldn't adopt voluntary poverty. With my belief in a gospel of prosperity it is not necessary to experience any personal poverty for its own sake or even in an authentic imitation of Christ - "he was rich but for your sake became poor so that through his poverty you might become rich". (2Cor 8;9) Clearly that means something else. Likewise, Luke who presents the community of goods in the early church as an ideal - all whose faith had drawn them together held everything in common. (Acts 2-44). A most  unrealistic ideal, clearly communistic.

I would justify my own outlook on Jesus' statement, that the "poor will be with you always" and by reading it, or misreading it out of context, use it hard-heartedly as confirmation that nothing I can do will make a difference, or better still as an excuse to do nothing. My single command is to worship God and which I do every Sunday at 5pm. Conveniently I emphasise the first part of the greatest commandment which is to love God but consider love of my neighbour as secondary, a social workers gloss. I don't accept a Social Gospel.  

And, I wouldn't join CLC. CLC groups seek and respond to movements of the Spirit in their members lives. Members, says Michael McGirr, tune out of daily tasks and tune in to the Spirit and where God has been in their lives and in their dealings with others.  Unfortunately, that is a spirituality which centres on a conversion to neighbour, the oppressed, the exploited and the despised. Conversion means a radical transformation of myself in thinking, feeling and living as Christ - present in exploited and alienated persons. To be converted means I will have to commit myself to the process of liberation of the poor and oppressed. Well, that's a bit much, too worldly, too political, possibly marxist, but definitely socialist.

It means I do not need an open attitude, one that might otherwise inform me of the totality of my life embedded in a spirituality, which really means no more than how I am to live my Christian life. The truth is going to struggle to set me free and I am unresponsive to the Spirit as it tries to guide me towards the truth. I refuse to acknowledge my genuine freedom to act. Such freedom, a freedom from everything that hinders me from fulfilling myself as a human being and offspring of God is too confronting. I am a regular practising Christian, I regard myself as religious, I do love God, but between you and me, out of fear of losing my salvation and the prospect of eternal damnation. To freely choose to love God and others is too challenging a choice to contemplate.  I am therefore resistant to inspiration from the Spirit to live the gospel message in solidarity with all human beings as an expression of freely choosing my love of God. I am not open to conversion.

My CLC acquaintances tell me that conversion means a break, a break in the way I previously thought and acted, a new way of thinking and acting. To know God is to do social justice they say. It is the one single action with God and humans and necessary if we are to become living witnesses of God's gratuitous love for us. For my CLC acquaintances it becomes the source of their Christian joy, something I don't subscribe too, you can't "enjoy" being a Christian. I know since I am a very serious, pious, God fearing Christian.  And, I don't need conversion, I am already a convert to Christ.

And, I don't want to rupture my relationship with Christ. Certainly not in any extreme fashion proposed by Ignatius. Ignatius invites us to consider three forms of humility, which is his way of describing Jesus's poverty.  In Paul's Phillipians prayer, Jesus "did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped rather he emptied himself, coming in human appearance he humbled himself".  The Son of God became poor by becoming incarnate and embraced poverty in his earthly life. For Ignatius this raised the question, what does it mean for me to be humble?  Were I to be offered great wealth and a longer life, yes I would reject these as corrupting and sinful since they would rupture my relationship with God. But, says Ignatius this is only a very minimal kind of humility necessary for my salvation. There are second and third order levels of humility.

I would not consider it necessary advancing to them.  The second kind is a desire to be with Jesus so closely that I strive to eliminate even minor differences between us. "I come to do your will O God" was the motive for Jesus' life, and could become mine as well, well, if I were to disavow totally all inclinations to wealth and honour.  But recall, I like the idea of a gospel of prosperity and I think I hold my prosperity pretty well in balance with my kind of Christian faith.

The third kind of humility is, well, just way too extreme. It is a desire to be so closely identified with Jesus that I experience the suffering and rejection he experienced. I want the truth of Jesus' life to be the truth of my own, even though it will result in my being regarded as a fool for Christ. Ignatius says we have choice of where we want to be on the humility spectrum and choice is offered to us daily.  Paradoxically for me, he says we are rich when we are poor like Jesus was.

Being poor though is not a state of being ethically neutral, although I act as though it is. Jesus was poor but he championed the causes of the marginalised.  He called it the coming of the Kingdom.  It is 30 years since Oscar Romero was martyred because he dared to "speak truth to power".  Oscar was less revolutionary than Jesus, he was a mild mannered man whose faith in Jesus compelled him to speak out on behalf of the people who couldn't. As a Bishop he stood with the poor and oppressed.  If you read his series of annual Easter messages to the people of El Salvador you cannot fail to note to his increasing stridency and urgency demanding a cessation to the mounting deaths, an end to government sanctioned violence and bloodshed, acts being perpetrated on the poor.  His first Easter message is mild and measured, his fourth and last is political, condemning government violence and calling for a more just El Salvador, a new and not an oppressed society and with a church united in its mission in the service of the gospel. To have visited the poor, to have spoken out on their behalf was dangerous, many in the church had remained silent, and Romero paid the ultimate price. Romero calls on us to be transformed into the good news for the poor and oppressed of the world.        

I know the term "poor" is vague and churchy and sentimental, fuzzy for those in my middle class comfort, but I want you to know I do donate to charity but only if my donation is tax deductible. I am blind to the fact the poor person remains the oppressed person, the marginalised the exploited.  Like me, in principle the church is with the poor, but as Romero said, "things just can't be written on paper."  His prophetic message is that it is our duty as Christians to bring these values to life. We have to act to put our principles into practice.  Are we prepared to put our power at the service of others, and to fight for justice for the world's poor and marginalised, whatever the cost to ourselves?

 

‘This is a time to wait on

God in the silence.

Be still & know that

I am God.’ (Ps 46:10)

GOD’S PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE POOR

Text of Tony French’s introduction to World CLC Day 2010...Read Here.

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