Place

I note this week two news stories from my hometown: one where a crackhead father killed his daughter; the other where a brother raped and killed his sister.

The similarity lies in the places they lived. The first victim was a 13-year old girl from a trailer park who reeked of cat urine, wrote she'd die by age 15, and slept on a mattress in a room littered with ice cream cartons and cigarettes. The second lived in a hovel with doors falling off the hinges, broken windows and trash piled high in the yard.

They lived and died in the same rural county in the same Virginia rolling hills and woods where I live and find a beauty that nourishes and sustains me.

I also note this week the comments of Bishop Orama of Nigeria who said gay people are insane, satanic and not fit to live.

Last week I wondered what Christopher Hitchens thought of revelations found in the letters of Mother Teresa; that for most of her life, she'd doubted, if not, lost her faith. I'd wondered whether the information she didn't consistently believe in the religion upon which her service was grounded would get her off the hook with the atheist Hitchens or multiply his criticisms all the worse.

I serendepitously happened upon a three-hour live interview on C-span's Book TV the following Sunday to hear his reaction. The publication of the letters didn't negate his condemnation on practical considerations, for example, rather than using donations for poor relief, she used them for convent construction. He said on spiritual grounds that "her attempted cure, more and more professions of faith, could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself," presumably by believing the lie of religion in the first place.

Hitchens didn't address, or he discounted, the realization of Teresa at the end of the story, prompted by a spiritual advisor, that her doubts coincided with the doubt of Jesus on the Cross when in Mark 15:34 He cries out My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" That revelation alleviated her doubt.

The Church, as Hitchens would be right in his criticisms, can be an agent of the very culture of death it decries out against. The daughter, the sister, and the people Bishop Orama labels as not fit to live, are abandoned - where is their Church?

Hitchens sees the Church as a participant in their abandonment or destruction. Yet the core experience of Scripture is that grief and destruction always precede something better, and that these are the actions of a free and capricious God not owned by any earthly power which has Him under control. That would also be true of any meaning to be derived from tragedy if there was no God.

There are those of us in the Church that do not consciously allow ourselves to become participants in the destruction of other lives while the world plays itself out. We work as if we're past a current point of destruction and are part of the reconstruction process. If that is self-delusionment, fine, since we don't know of any other way to carry on.

The NY Times carried a story last Saturday on 'committed window-gazers,' those at "the exact juncture of the public and private realms." Like "Ms. Figueroa, 71, who treats her ground-floor roost at the corner of East 117th Street and Park Avenue like a combination take-out counter and dispensary. Anyone who looks hungry or thirsty gets a glass of ice water, a coffee, a sandwich, a plate of her pernil and rice and beans. To the wounded, she hands out Band-Aids, Tylenol, peroxide."

Ms. Figueroa straddles a private and public divide to dispense hope. We believe in a public God that dispenses personal hope through people like Ms. Figueroa. Whether all the stories in the Bible are true or not is not the point I'd address to either Hitchens, in his intellectual disbelief, or Orama, wallowing in his dangerous hate. We, like Teresa discovered at the end of her life, look to a powerless and abandoned Jesus suffering on the Cross in solidarity with the tragic and the hopeless as our example - not as the powerful Kingly judge of death as envisioned and carried out in this world by descipable self-annoited saviors like Orama.

What matters is the application of belief or disbelief; the example of the Cross-in relation to self and others-in the Spirit of sacrifice - Trinity as an alternative beginning. If your working assumption is that everybody else is saved, or righteous, in the context of whatever they believe, or don't believe, except for you, and that you are the one with the catching up to do, then by undertaking an attempt, it is possible to be an agent of hope for teenagers who write death poetry; their crack-addicted fathers; for slain sisters; the demented brothers who slay them; to stand in solidarity with all persecuted persons by the way you live.

I can't offer more than that to Hitchens other than that his criticism becomes irrlevant at the point where faith and religion do no harm and may even do some good - that must be the goal if the critics of Christianity are to be honestly addressed.

This is the place where I live; the place that nourishes my soul and sustains my life.