I've been reading excerpts from "The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered" by Kenneth Baxter Wolf. What struck me was the way in which Wolf remains fairly unimpressed by Francis' deliberateness in agressively pursuing holy poverty.
At the same time, my own thinking was taking me back over and over again to the social organising in two "poor" parts of the world in which I ended up living, without even intending it.
The first community was Penalolen, near Santiago de Chile. After I had ominously declared to my parents that I planned to visit Chile on my own at 19, my mum phoned up all her friends to find out if anyone knew anyone in Santiago. The sister of the friend of a friend offered to accomodate me while I looked for another place. So I ended up in Penalolen, surrounded by a very lively pentecostal community, which at the time freaked me out a bit.
The second community was Anenii Noi, Moldova. I had just graduated and was temping while looking for a "serious" job, when one of my best friends invited me up to Moldova, his home country. Needless to say, I was up for that!
The level of sharing and tangible interdependency I noticed in these two places was mind-blowing, not to mention the people's huge omnipresent faith. In Moldova especially, I did not have to do anything, but I felt that I was getting healed on a very deep level, just by standing by. I spent a month with my eyes wide open: now what the heck is this? Why does it feel like Christ's resurrection happened next door, here in Anenii Noi, just about two weeks ago. This was mega weird.
And the thing is... none of these communities was deliberate. They were not trying to be "faithful", they were not trying to achieve "holy poverty". They were not trying much at all.
So now I'm reading half a gazillion western Christian blogs, in which we all seem to struggle with our "responsibilities". So we're "emergent", "neomonastic" and what else... But reflecting back on Wolf's book, maybe the notion of incremental downward mobility is a lot of BS. Keep the upward mobility, but start from the bottom, within an (expanding) community of sharing.
2 comments:
Of course, the glaring flaw in this proposal is the assumption that one can simply "start from the bottom." Apart from that, there are some good thoughts here.
Depends where you are... It's related to the comment I left on your own blog, about informal slum communities -one person gets a job and it's great news for everybody.
A good example exemple of this is depicted in City of Joy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103976/). In it the main character does start at the bottom.
You leave one way of life as you enter a community. The problem we've got in the West is that we don't have the community in which to enter. We might be focused on surrendering our stuff but we can't find the community we would be part of.
Even the rich young ruler was offered fellowship of a very tangible community!
Thanks for linking to this blog btw. I hope I'm not embarrassing by posting a lot of stupid things now :-), and I hope that your readership forgets about me real soon.
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