Lauren took Social Justice at SLU in the fall of 2006; she will be a first year student at SLU’s Medical School beginning August 2007.
1. Seeing the World/2 p. 59-60
“Like Sontag and Beseda, many of us are tempted to be intolerant of the ambiguity and intimidated by the risks of photography and other art forms. Ultimately, I believe we are most daunted by the mystery, the question, the possibility: ‘It could be us.’ Through my own photography I strive to bridge the distant worlds of our small globe. I contemplate the mystery: It is us.â€
Mev really has a way of packing a lot of powerful meaning into a succinct statement. I think that things like photography, and film, and books are really important means of bridging the gaps. I was thinking about how she takes the extra step from saying it could be us to it is us. That is difficult for me to wrap my head around, but when I think about it it really feels true. All of these thoughts flood my head, snippets of things I’ve read or noticed in the past, that would sound incoherent if I put them into words. I don’t know, it almost seems spiritual, but I have shied away from thoughts of spirituality recently. I really love the ideals that Jesus taught, but I don’t know how to use or believe in God and religion to back them up. They seem true, and they are based on faith in God and Jesus, but I feel more inclined to revere Nature than God. I just don’t know about God.
2. Life Without Mozart p. 80-81
“here in bairro liberade / the armpit of brazil / a swamp of discomfort and desolation / i think of the poster on randy’s door: / ‘life without mozart’ / (drawing of a wasteland) // this is the wasteland: / desolate poverty / life without beauty, life without bread // the poor live without mozart / no ability, energy, books to read / thirst chokes the song in their throats // i’ve tasted the absence of bread / and the absence of mozart / not knowing which is more deadly // today life without bread / deafens my ear for mozart / deadens my capacity to care / kills my hunger for bread […]â€
This poem of Mev’s really moved me. While reading, I was always struck by her knack for expression. In her journal and her letters, she really was able to capture moments. It reminded me a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his expressions of the instress of his subjects. I think that is a really unique skill, to make a moment or an object really come alive to the reader with words. This poem really draws my attention to the things that I take for granted, like bread and Mozart. I have so much in my life which my appreciation for can go unremembered at times. I get to spend so much of my time reading books I love, and if I’m hungry, I just hop over to the kitchen or a coffee shop or something and I’m satisfied. I would be dissatisfied if I could not read, but it seems so trivial compared to the immediate concerns for which people suffer. I also think of the search for beauty in such circumstances. I read a really good book, On Beauty by Zadie Smith that dealt with that topic. Also, I am in no way a hip hop, rap fan, I really don’t like it at all, but my brother was obsessed with it for a long time, particularly Tupac Shakur. He obviously grew up in an urban setting in the U. S., facing violence and discrimination and the like. I flipped through a book of his poetry once, and I barely remember anything, but one of the more famous images he talked about was a rose growing out of concrete. It seems to add to these issues.
3. A School/1 (Dissidents/2, Remembering the Dead/2) p. 108
“[…] Ellacuria once offered a spiritual exercise for the present age of atrocity that called people of good will to struggle so that others can experience a more abundant life: ‘I want you to set your eyes and your hearts on these people who are suffering so much – some from poverty and hunger, others from oppression and repression. Then (since I am a Jesuit), standing before this people thus crucified you must repeat St. Ignatius’ examination from the first week of the [Spiritual] Exercises. Ask yourselves: What have I done to crucify them? What do I do to uncrucify them? What must I do for this people to rise again?’â€
When you think about it, it is overwhelming the amount of people, and animals, that suffer to provide us here in the “first world†with a comfortable, affordable, and excessive lifestyle. The structure of it all makes it difficult even to avoid stepping on others. Almost everything to buy, clothes, animal products, is at the expense of someone’s suffering. Our society also makes it very easy to ignore this suffering. It all happens far from most of our visions. We cannot see the deplorable conditions upon which the people who make our clothes live, or the chickens from which we get eggs. I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin for my science fiction class and it reminds of her short story “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.†In this story, the near perfect happiness and peace of a society depends on the extreme suffering of one child that all the people know about. No one ever tries to save the child, most just end up ignoring him, but some cannot stand it and walk away. She writes another story based a bit on these ideas called The Dispossessed, kind of based on a society made up of the ones who walk away from Omelas. They form an anarchist society on the moon based on solidarity and mutual aid, without property or money. It explores the ups and downs of such a society, but it is really interesting. So, I try to think about these questions from the Spiritual Exercises in my own way and try to act more conscientiously.
4. The Gospel according to Maria Goreth (Accompaniment/2, The Human Form Divine/2) p. 129
Maria Goreth: “[…] You see, I don’t do this work for pay. In my work, I never think of the future – what I’ll eat or wear tomorrow. Even today, I don’t have fixed employment, but people always find a way to provide. I work for the love of people who suffer, especially children.
“When you work for money alone, love doesn’t exist…â€
This feels like the almost total opposite of the prevailing attitude in the U.S. It is all about high paying jobs and planning for the future. Dog eat dog, as they say. I think I would like a world based on work for love and solidarity with humans and nature rather than money. That is how I want my life to be. If I must live in a world of capitalism, I do not want to be a slave to money and property. I do not understand how people think that this is the ideal system. I do not want to judge businessmen who work solely to get money, but I do. I mean most people want to live with some comforts, but the extreme is ridiculous. People actually buy thousand dollar dog collars, for God’s sake. This is all too ridiculous and unconscionable. I admire Maria Goreth and I hope I can even be a little bit like her.
5. The Gospel according to Ann (The Human Form Divine/3) p. 184-185
“Ann: One of the things that worries me – not only in this war situation, but a doctor friend of mine who works with AIDS patients in the U.S., or people who work with the homeless – there’s tendency to lose your human vulnerability and responsiveness for those tragedies and become, not just hardened as in bitter or cynical, but aloof, or your compassion becoming an automatic response where you can be kind, but you are on automatic pilot, not from the heart, because if you let all the tragedy touch you, you might just fall apart. I’ve felt this way from time to time. The other thing that happens is situations where I would automatically in the past feel kindness or a capacity to respond, instead I would feel resentful for the intrusion in my life, and it was hard to find the resources from within with which to respond.
“That’s the challenge when we try to deal with human suffering. My hope is to somehow cast my lot with the poor long-term throughout my life, and if you cast your lot with the poor, that means exposing yourself and opening your heart to a lot of tragedy, a lot of human suffering, a lot of painful experiences that most people shield themselves from. How do you do that long-term? How do you keep your heart vulnerable and genuinely responsive and not just going through the motions?â€
There are a lot of things in this particular passage that interest / concern me. I definitely plan on using my medical skills, devoting them, to helping the poor. I have never really experienced the poverty and suffering Ann has, or seen it. Really, my closest experience to feeling the pain has been through books like People’s History and film, and I know this may be a poor substitute for actual experience, but while reading or watching, I really immerse myself into it and empathize. And it does affect me. Learning and thinking about it all has sometimes swept me with overwhelming sadness and despair and dissatisfaction and shame, so I can certainly imagine amplification when I see it all firsthand. I fear my own inadequacies, but right now I feel charged up for it. I’ve spoken about it to people like my pre-med advisor, who agreed with what I wanted to do, but said that the essay I wrote for a program for primary care sounded “radical,†which I really didn’t see. And another advisor told me about a doctor who did what I want to do and got burned out in a few years. I guess right now I will embrace my enthusiasm and conviction, but I recognize the capacity for what Ann talked about and I feel like I can learn from the things she said.
6. A Few Words with the Pope p. 209-213
“All men on stage, in robes and hats and crowns their time had come. We can do the warm up, but the youth, women, blacks, and Hispanics become spectators to the spectacle of the male. To be a part of this multicultural worshipping community is a joy, but who and what are we worshipping? It is so top heavy, so male, such a pyramid. This is our Church. Not amen. […]
“And I was filled with such ambiguity. At times I couldn’t clap, I wanted to go back to my chair. Encouraged to see young people “of faith,†but disturbed that this all goes towards the Pope – knowing what the Vatican has ordered in Brazil, the stands it has taken in Haiti, the exclusiveness and elitism of the structure. And I think, this is too much power. This is too much power for any individual to have. And if an individual has this much power, they should use it to be more prophetic. To denounce and announce.
“[…] This is my church, and I am of this church. I will not relinquish it to “those I disagree with,†nor will I close myself to a respectful dialogue with them. Moreover, I am extremely grateful for all the church has done for me!
“The church is my COMMUNITY – Catholic Worker, SLU, Weston, our prayer communities in Cambridge and Oakland, the Christian Solidarity Project, etc. The hierarchy and Vatican is only one dimension of this church. I am no purist, nor am I pure. The church is not pure, nor am I. Other religions and institutions carry other sins and failings; I do too! I want to work in this church.â€
I feel like I totally agree with the first part. Those are the things that really bother me about the Church. Those are some of the things that eventually really turned me off about religion, not that I can blame these things completely. That would be stupid, but they were and are factors that influenced me. I am so impressed by Mev’s faith and continued membership in the Church while also grappling with these inconsistencies. I respect this. It reminds me of Dorothy Day’s membership in the Church. I love the idea of being part of the community in which we all share so many common values and beliefs, but I just do not feel the faith. I sit through mass and I really try to immerse myself, maybe I’m trying too hard or I’m going in with the wrong attitude or something. Instead, I notice horrible little details about the whole process and that is what I mainly see. I am always disappointed with the homilies I hear. I can only remember one homily that really moved me. It was at the only services that really moved me, which was the summer novella at the Carmelite monastery. It is held outside at dusk. But then it is more the beauty of the setting maybe that really moves me, which could be said to be God’s creation, His presence, but I don’t know.
