An Urban Meditation

Spring 2003

A Publication of The Poor People's United Fund
Writer: Kip Tiernan
Editor: Celia Wolf

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

For many years Fran and I have been thinking about and writing Urban Meditations. They are reflections of our times in the city; what we see, what we hear, how we try to change some of the terrible things that are happening to our citizens, usually in the name of responsible government. But, if it is truly in the name of responsible government, why are things so much worse for people who don't have homes, jobs, food, day care, medicine, and access to healthcare and housing?

For the past twelve or more years, taxes have been lowered, and always at the expense of the most impoverished of the city and state. And yet, according to data released by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, corporations are now paying less and less and less. According to a recent bulletin, Massachusetts corporate income tax has fallen from over 16% of total tax revenue in the late 1960s to just 4% in 2002. If corporate income tax had remained constant as a share of total tax revenue between 1982 and 2002, Massachusetts would have collected an additional $1.1 billion in FY 2002 - enough to stop the sinful cuts to human services.

One wonders, who benefits? We are reminded of the words of the Old Testament prophet, Micah, who wrote:

Woe to those who devise wickedness
and work evil upon their beds!
When the morning comes, they perform it
because it is in the power of their hand.
They covet fields and seize them;
houses, and take them away;
they oppress a man and his house,
a man and his inheritance. (Micah 2:2-1)

……is it not for you to know justice?
you who hate the good and love the evil,
who tear the skin from off my people,
and their flesh from their bones. (Micah 3:1-2)

Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob
and rulers of the house of Israel,
who abhor justice and pervert equity (Micah 3: 8-9)

It is the time of year when a crucifixion took place, and a resurrection began, all of it based on the system of social control that called us to Christianity. So, the invitation to do justice is in a context of the systemic power of evil. How far have we come, and how far must we travel to achieve justice in our lifetime? Micah challenges us again, during this Easter and Passover.

In struggle and faith,

Kip, Fran, Georgia, Liz and Celia

Litany For Women

(Originally delivered by Kip Tiernan on Good Friday, 1975 at Rosie's Place in Boston, Massachusetts, and updated here.)

Much of the history of women has been lost to us, as the history of Blacks and other minority groups has been lost to them, through benign or malignant neglect. But, some of the voices have been heard, and a few have been selected for this service. Rosie's Place was one of the stops along the way, during a Good Friday walk through the city.

For women like Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, Rosa Luxembourg, Julia Ward Howe, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Ada Bethune and countless others who are nameless to us, who provided us with direction toward finding ourselves, we pray to the Lord.

For Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and Dorothy Dandridge, our beautiful songbirds, we pray to the Lord.

For the environmentalist, Rachel Carson, whom everyone laughed at and whom we have now lived to weep over, we pray to the Lord.

For Maggie Kuhn, foundress of the senior militant group, the Gray Panthers, we pray to the Lord.

For Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness, we pray to the Lord.

For the ordained ministers and Episcopal priests, and their courage, we pray to the Lord.

For the unordained priests and ministers, and all women who chose to be ministers, we pray to the Lord.

For Lucy Benson, Margaret Merry, Betty Ford, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisolm, Florence Kennedy, Barbara Lee, Nancy Pelosi, and other less outspoken women, we pray to the Lord.

For courageous women like Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Golda Meir of Israel, Sr. Marge Tuite of Chicago and Nicaragua and Dorothy Day of New York, we pray to the Lord.

For the man-made products, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, who were used, abused and misused, we pray to the Lord.

For our own courageous community woman, Doris Bland, who began Mothers for Adequate Welfare, we pray to the Lord.

For Ellen Jackson, Ruth Batson and Jean McGuire, our educators, who truly saw the way and the light to education for minority students, we pray to the Lord.

For battered mothers, and mothers of battered children, we pray to the Lord.

For victims of madness or bad politicians, for women in jails, women with AIDS, for women in stables of pimps, for victims of rape, domestic abuse, victims of landlords, victims of unfulfilled men, for old, unattractive women, for women heads of households, for women who somehow go on caring when they are no longer cared for, we pray to the Lord.

For middle class, urban and suburban women who feel unfulfilled without knowing why, because everyone is always telling them how lucky they are and that they have everything a woman could want, we pray to the Lord.

For low income and no income women, for women in religious communities who have become lackeys of the church, instead of the ministers they might be and could have been, we pray to the Lord.

For all the women in all the back wards of the world, be they hospitals, prisons or their own homes, we pray to the Lord.

For all the unborn women, that their world might be a better place, we pray to the Lord.

For all the women who have made and are making women question their own womanhood, we pray to the Lord.

For all the women of all wars - Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Latin America, El Salvador, Africa, Ireland, North America, Asia, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Baghdad, who have given up their sons and husbands to the war machinery of man, we pray to the Lord.

For the men who have played a role in the lives of the women we have named, we pray to the Lord.

For the women in places like Rosie's Place, we pray to the Lord.

For the men who care, we pray to the Lord.

And, finally, for the billions of nameless women through the ages, who have borne, nurtured, raised, fed, healed and buried their children, in thanksgiving and love, we pray to the Lord.

Lord, Lord, hear our prayer.

"The best laws and the best conceived democratic mechanisms will not in themselves guarantee legality or freedom or human rights if they are not underpinned by certain human and social values." - Vaclav Havel

Who Are The Moral Majority?

The spiritually depraved will always call upon their Lord to bless their actions. But those angry curmudgeons of the Old Testament would tell you different - like Amos, who referred to charity as the burnt offering he would refuse if presented saying, "Still your noisy harps……no, justice flows like a river that never runs dry." Or Jeremiah, who believed, as we do, that we are in a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition. As his world was dying, he felt the pain, but what pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to notice, to care, to acknowledge or admit it. He couldn't determine if they were too stupid to understand or they were so dishonest, so corrupt, that they did understand, but were engaged in an enormous cover-up.

We, too, are in a time of dying, a time of transition. And, there can be no resurrection without a death. But, we have yet to learn about grief as a practice, or about loss as a societal issue.

It is, theologically, a time of grief. Our grief is poignant because we are all too busy, too self assured, too invested, too ideologically committed. The political forms and economic models of the past are increasingly ineffective and our destiny is in jeopardy. Walter Brueggeman, the Protestant theologian and biblical scholar, tells us that when such a great and massive threat is underway - so comprehensive and so acute in personal hurt - frenzied activity takes place and we pass brutal legislation. We allow - no! we consign thousands to hunger and homelessness. We blame victims! We look for vulnerable scapegoats. Lester Thurow, MIT professor of management and economics, tells us that as government's role recedes, capitalism and democracy clash. Our system is unraveling fast. Democracy, Thurow tells us, is radical equality, and capitalism is radical inequality. Can it be any plainer than this as we look around at the slaughter of the innocents in Massachusetts today?

Our romance with fundamentalism, both religious and ideological, goes back a long way, to about the time the Heritage Foundation first appeared in the Reagan administration and the conservative think tanks began emerging across the country. Paul Weyrich, a devout Catholic and a founder of the so-called "new right" who was influential in advancing Jerry Falwell's career and who is credited with coining the phrase, "moral majority," helped to found the Heritage Foundation, supported by financial aid from Joseph Coors, the ultra conservative Vice Chair of the Coors brewery and an advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

Let us remember that justice is the moral test of spirituality, and if there is no justice, there is no spirituality.

The Passover Story

This is the bread of the affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. All who are the hungry - let them come and eat. All who are needy - let them come and celebrate the Passover with us. Now, we are here; next year we may be in the land of Israel. Now we are slaves; next year we may be free.

- The Haggadah Ceremony

Lord, Lord, where is it written that the quality of life and the quality of mercy must travel divergent paths. And, the great lawyers’ question – Cui bono? Who benefits? And, the accompanying question – Who sets the terms of this debate? Or, for that matter – Is there a debate?

Since the mid-eighties, conservatives have been successfully framing most all the debates around public policy in this country. In fact, William Bennett, former education czar and former drug czar (not all that successful at either) and now a writer of “moral” books for children, and for people who apparently think like children, said at a meeting of the Heritage Foundation, “And now American conservatism sets the terms of the debate.” If justice is the moral test of spirituality, one cannot help but question the new notion of moral clarity, when growing numbers of homeless and disabled and disaffected citizens are cut off from any visible means of public support in the name of responsible government.

The alarming increase of layoffs, the skyrocketing rise in rents and the cost of living, and the reckless profligate spending of the new elite, brings to mind a line from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities – “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

In 1990 and again in 1997, I conducted a three day fast at the Arlington Street Church and at Old West Church. At the time, when asked why I was doing it, I suggested it was –

(1) for atonement for what is happening to the people of Massachusetts in our name,

(2) for redemption, because we need to bring hurt into public expression because it is the most visceral announcement that things are wrong,

(3) for resistance in the name of all those who feel abandoned by our state government and who need to rise up in the name of God and be heard, and

(4) for hope, because it is the wellspring of all human energy and it must come from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness.

If we come together we have the opportunity to come into the light of understanding again. And, compassion, my friends, is a discipline – not a lachrymose litany of proper language. It is the will to fight for what is right and just.

Lord, Lord, hear our prayer.

The Case for Compassion:
Embracing America's Poor

(Excerpts from a speech given by Kip Tiernan at the fortieth anniversary of WGBH.)

There’s an old African proverb: “Until the lions have historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” Let us rewrite history.

Those of us on the urban scene have the opportunity to be evangelized by the poor, the disaffected, the disillusioned, and sadly, the disappeared. As we have said before, we in the city see the forces of evil and power, colliding in the rawest of forms, and we have a chance to challenge this force, this evil. We have the rare and sacred privilege to see the faces of the disinherited, in the sad, frightened, bewildered faces of the young, the old, the lame, the halt, the blind, and, God knows, the crazy.

The true cross of the prophet, Jesus, is the most radical condemnation of an unjust world. It is here, in the city, that one discovers that history is created, if not spiritually mature, then by the spiritually depraved and degenerate. It is here, at the core, where prayerful hands become clenched fists and the presence of God is most discernable, in rage.

I have this rage, this hope. I have this stubborn hope that somehow we are allgoing to make it through this long dark night together. Someone out there, some kind of redeeming prophet, is listening, waiting, watching, and is waiting for us to stand up and be counted.

In his time, the greatest hindrance to accepting the message of Jesus was respect for society’s leaders and institutions, and he believed in none of that. In his time, a radical theology came about from his listening to the most deprived, least listened to community of misfits from all of Judea. Today’s theology must come about by listening to today’s Galileans. The goal he was hoping to achieve, with his raggedy little band of outcasts, was not merely to obtain eternal life, but rather to transform society, and he did. We have that same opportunity. We, the new Diaspora. We need a spiritual revolution. Let it begin here. If not you, who? If not now, when?