Opening the Edges of our World
Our political imagination has been reduced to a war of opinions, arguing about 'others' not even in the room. How do we reverse this?
In his final years, the radical Catholic priest Ivan Illich recounted the following history to his friend David Cayley:
“In the early years of Christianity, it was customary in a Christian household to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock on the door, in the form of a stranger without a roof—a form of behaviour that was utterly foreign to any of the cultures of the Roman Empire. You took in your own but not someone lost on the street.
“Then the Emperor Constantine recognized the Church, and Christian bishops acquired the same position in the imperial administration as magistrates; so that when Augustine wrote to a Roman judge about a legal issue, he wrote as a social equal. They also gained the power to establish social corporations. And the first corporations they started were Samaritan corporations which designated certain people as preferred neighbours. For example, the bishops created special houses, financed by the community, that were charged with taking care of people without a home. Such care was no longer the free choice of the householder; it was the task of an institution.
“It was against this idea that the great Church Father John Chrysostom railed. He was called golden-tongued because of his beautiful rhetoric, and in one of his sermons, he warned against creating these xenodocheia, literally “houses for foreigners.” By assigning the duty to behave in this way to an institution, he said, Christians would lose the habit of reserving a bed and having a piece of bread ready in every home, and their households would cease to be Christian homes.” [ Rivers North of the Future, p54–55 ]
There is some dissonance for me on hearing this kind of story. For what purpose is it being told? What am I to draw from it? In a time when “care” services are under threat of being defunded, and where culture wars are fought over the political will to welcome the stranger, it feels a dubious tale to tell.
Illich was, I think, asking questions beneath the questions. Today's arguments follow a script: a political Right who prefer not to share a common life with outsiders or waste resources on those deemed undeserving, and the Left who take moral objection to this approach.
The history Illich recounts reveals rather starkly that our political imagination has been reduced to a war of opinions. (What is an election, after all, but a war of opinions?) It is entirely possible to hold strong, deeply held, even morally driven views on the subject, without ever meeting the Stranger whose life is at stake. I suspect this is the more common reality at all ends of the feud.
I don't think this undermines the sincerity of anyone's political convictions. A lack of proximity to the lives in debate is a systemic reality, in which most are passive players. I find myself systemically, culturally and institutionally divided from the life of the Other. Encounters across lines of difference occur, either because of some glitch in the normal running of things, or because my circumstances have changed in a fashion that looks rather like “failure,” or because I have taken intentional steps to queer the lines of my social experience. In the ordinary running of things I am segregated by design. The point, for Illich, was that the institutionalisation of relationships is always in danger of impoverishing joyous and convivial everyday life.
If this is so, I have to ask myself some questions:
Where did I last encounter the Other—the one whose social, economic and cultural reality is different to my own? What would it look like to tarry longer?
Which patterns and structures keep me from encounter? What power do I have to alter or unmake these patterns and structures, and open the edges of my world?
What practices can I keep to open my life to ongoing spaces of encounter?
It was the Passionist Priest Martin Newell who once talked with me about going to the Other, not to convert anyone, but rather to be converted. In Illich’s account above, it is not the host who embodies the Messiah, but rather the stranger.
This week saw the passing of the great theologian Gustavo Guitierrez, who once gave the challenge: “You say you love the poor? Name them.” I don't want to be locked in a war of opinions. I want a life of loving practice. I want to alter the shape of my experience, to create open edges. I want to participate in a kind of art: the practice of messianic encounter. I want to seek out the Messiah in the one whose experience is unlike my own.
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