The Solidarity Prayer

Yale law professor and elusive political commentator Stephen Carter has offered a helpful check against a blanket affirmation of empathy, in this case as applied to President Obama's search criteria for Supreme Court Justices, and particularly to Carter's former classmate Sonia Sotamayor:

I respectfully disagree with President Obama that "empathy" is an important characteristic in a judge. Had the President said what I think he probably meant--"patience" or "a willingness to listen and learn"--I would have agreed. Judge Sotomayor has both in spades. But "empathy" is an empty standard. For example, a judge who always rules in favor of investment banks might have empathy for Wall Streeters; and, during the civil rights era, there were plenty of Southern apologists who described the working-class whites of the South as the truly oppressed in America.

I've been enamored of late with the concept of empathy (along with its ethical companion solidarity). On its face empathy sounds so good: a predisposition to understand and appreciate those we come across. But Carter rightfully points out that some things are not meant to be understood or appreciated--only confounded and confronted. That being said, empathy for the person need not be understood as endorsement of the idea or act. Seeking to understand the racist who stands defiant of the arc of justice, or the ethically shallow Wall Street investor who operates under the assumption that "greed is good," or--for that matter--the cloistered suburbanite who sees no neighbor beyond his immediate surroundings--is part of the ministry of reconciliation we're called to by such prophets as Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe we need a solidarity prayer to parallel the serenity prayer:

God grant me the empathy to embrace those I do not understand,
the will to resist that which must not be embraced,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

(WWJWMTTHTL) Where Would Jesus Want Me to Take Him to Lunch?

I have a new phone which is also my new day-planner, because hey, I'm no Luddite. But I am a bit slow on the uptake. In my first week with the new phone I very nearly broke my Bluetooth (the yellow ones are just fine, thanks) and apparently did break the Internet. Sorry about that.

I'm all up and running now, but I'm still getting used to one of the phone's features: when you type something (anything, really), it offers to complete the word for you. Microsoft Word has a similar function, but we who work in the publishing industry usually disable such options because we so regularly spell such arcane and high-falutin' words. I've chosen to keep the feature on my PDA phone. but like I say, I'm still getting used to it.

Anyway, today I made an appointment to have lunch with my friend and coworker Jeff. I started keying my appointment into my PDA phone, somewhat disinterstedly I will freely admit, and then realized that my lunch with Jeff had become "lunch with Jesus." Well that can't be right.

I mean, no disrespect, Jeff, but I think it would be a different lunch entirely. I don't know where I would take him; the default restaurant of choice at my office is a barbecue pork joint (Uncle Bub's--no trip to Westmont, Illinois, is complete without a visit), but Jesus was Jewish, so pork seems inappropriate.

And then I remembered an ad campaign from a few years back when Christian environmentalists asked the question "What would Jesus Drive?" They were cashing in (a little late, I'm afraid) on the cultural renaissance of the nineteenth-century pious question "What would Jesus do?" made famous in the novel In His Steps and soon surely to make an appearance on VH1's undoubtedly planned "I Love the 90s." But it's a legitimate question: what would Jesus drive? And if it's not a Hyundai Elantra GT tracking an admittedly unsatisfactory number of miles per gallon, how could I comfortably buckle Jesus into the passenger seat to get us to lunch?

Of course there are restaurants within walking distance of my office, but most of them are national chains, and I get the impression from some of my friends who are concerned with economic justice that taking Jesus to a chain restaurant would be tantamount to cooking him up a pork sandwich on the grill of a Hummer H3. And then of course we'd have to walk right past the homeless guy with the bicycle camped out in the parking lot of the grocery store, and I can just picture Jesus talking about Samaritans and kids feeding five thousand people with a little bread and a few fish.

So I erased Jesus and keyed in the word "Jeff." And we're going to the pork place. Pray for me.

The Cost of Ownership

As I work on my draft manuscript for Deliver Us from Me-Ville I find myself turning a lot to Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk from the mid-twentieth century. I'm reminded again how volatile the times were before I was born, and how comparatively we've not had to deal with much in our day. Sure, we've seen the evolution of the i-Phone and on-demand television programming, but Merton and his contemporaries sat through a great depression, a world war, a cold war, two American wars in Asia and the civil rights movement. Still, I suspect he wrote the following (in his Secular Journals)not so much for his generation as for ours:

I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing somebody somewhere.

Merton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are proving to be my main teachers as I write this book. Merton is the spiritual director; Bonhoeffer the theologian. His Cost of Discipleship, written in the same era as Merton's Secular Journals, looks at what Christ calls us to lay down in our pursuit of a life with him. Meanwhile, Merton hints at this idea that what a consumerist, materialist culture calls us to take on makes us complicit in what that culture does to the world we inhabit. That's the hidden cost of ownership: we don't only own what we buy, we own the just and unjust business practices that secured the production of what we buy, we own the environmental degradation that such production causes, we own the hoarding of intellectual property that makes luxury items out of life-saving medication. We own all sorts of things alongside the things we invest in or buy.

Read my friend Chris Heuertz's article "Breaking Her Back to Clothe Mine" for a good up-close look at the cost of ownership and some ways of mitigating it.

A Tax on My Plunder

Check out this article by Chris Heuertz, director of the justice mission Word Made Flesh. I can only imagine finding out that the slave labor of a friend is on your back, but Chris is fortunate to have made such a friend, and we're fortunate that Chris has the means to share this story and organize a response.