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Miracle Worker (Mark 6: 1-6)

After the remarkable healing of a woman who had suffered for 12 years from hemorrhages and after the raising of the dead child of Jairus, Jesus goes home to Nazareth accompanied by his disciples. He teaches in the synagogue on the sabbath, and the people are amazed both at his teaching and at the murmured accounts of the healings. For a moment or two it would appear that a warm celebration of "hometown boy makes good" is about to erupt. But not so. What is about to happen is rejection, the same kind of rejection that would dog his trail all the way to Good Friday. "He could do no mighty work there . . . because of their unbelief."

Strange how "mighty work" and "belief" are so solidly linked. Strange how hardened hearts can cut even God off at the pass.

"Where did he get all of this?" "Whence all this ‘wisdom’?" The Nazarenes respond with good old horsesense: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon (and aren’t his sisters in the band at Hebrew High)?" So it went, and they took offense at him.

It’s easy enough to deal with this under the heading of "familiarity breeds contempt." Jesus even invites that spin with his "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country." Yet there is an issue here that runs much deeper and with greater, even devastating import. The issue is the scandal of the incarnation. It hounded Galilean hearts and minds then, as it hounds us now. "The word made flesh" is both our only salvation and the greatest bugaboo of modern piety.

Yes, by God! He was the carpenter. He was the brother of James and Simon. The grand wonder of the incarnation is that that is precisely how he gets to be your brother and mine. But downtown Nazareth was having none of that. And downtown Carrollton and downtown Chicago aren’t all that comfortable with it either. The mystery of the incarnation holds our greatest solace and comfort, namely that wherever we go in suffering, in hurt and sorrow and despair, God has gone there first, goes with us, shows up (!), and is glad to be there with us and for us.

It is amazing that the first great heresy in the church was not the denial of Christ’s divinity, but the denial of his full humanity. The Nicene Creed addresses that heresy (docetism). Yet we still struggle with it, maybe with less justification than did Nazareth. We want a two-fisted God who comes up like thunder, and we are offended by one who puts himself/herself at our mercy and who now and then looks a lot like our Uncle Fred.

Yes, his mama was Mary, and he had sisters and brothers with names and faces and backaches. The Gospels proclaim that God was his father, and he proclaimed that God is your father and mother too, and mine everyone’s. When we begin to really believe that, when we seek God in the ordinary, daily wash of things and find God in nothing more complicated than each other and in God’s beautiful, dangerous, gorgeous creation, "mighty works" begin to happen. Works of mercy and compassion. Works of healing and commiseration. Works of forgiveness and understanding and of great laughter. Frederick Buechner was right, I believe, in asserting that miracles do not evoke faith so much as faith evokes miracles.

What that poor crowd of Nazarenes was cutting off at the pass had to do not only with God, but with their neighbors and spouses and children, and whatever they knew of community. It was probably a world where anyone who cooked was just a cook, any tradesman just a competitor, any lawyer just a crook. Anyone’s wife was just a woman, anyone’s daughter was a nuisance. It was a bleak world, with no wonder, no enticing mystery, no great expectations and precious little hope. They seem to have suffered not only a loss of nerve (which may be another word for faith) but also a loss of awareness -- of consciousness.

When Emily Webb, in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, comes back from the dead to the town of her childhood and finds her mother and father and all her long-dead acquaintances still "alive" and the town and its environs the same as when she was a child, she begs to go back to the grave. The sheer beauty and wonder of it all -- every sight and sound, every tender grace of things, every gesture of love and devotion -- is overwhelming. It is too much for her to bear, for she had never realized the miracle of her life when she was living it.

Maybe that was the case in Nazareth. Maybe most of the time that’s the case with us too, Maybe we need to go back to our lessons from safety patrol; Stop, look and listen! Know a prophet when you see one; learn the wondrous truth when you hear it. Maybe that’s the way we get to let God cut us off at the pass and then lead us into the eternal life which begins in the here and now of realizing the wonder we see in each other’s faces.

A Matter of Taste?

The cover of the August 1996 Atlantic Monthly announced a Christian cultural revolution: "Giant full-service churches are winning millions of customers with [their] pop-culture packaging.

They may also be building an important new form of community." Author Charles Trueheart described what he calls the "Next Church": No spires. No crosses. No robes. No clerical collars. No hard pews. No kneelers. No biblical gobbledygook. No prayer rote. No fire, no brimstone. No pipe organs. No dreary 18th-century hymns. No forced solemnity. No Sunday finery. No collection plates.

The list has asterisks and exceptions, but its meaning is clear. Centuries of European tradition and Christian habit are deliberately being abandoned to clear the way for new, contemporary forms of worship and belonging. The Next Church and its many smaller, typically suburban relatives are held up as models of the options available to Christians who want to "catch the next wave."

Music provides the clearest indication of the revolutionary change. The musical idioms of the Next Church are contemporary (nothing dating from before 1990 in many cases). One 24-year-old pastor characterized the predominantly rock music of his university-related church as "a cross between Pearl Jam and Hootie and the Blowfish" -- in other words, somewhere between angst-ridden "grunge" and upbeat pop.

Yet in many of these churches, the spectrum of styles offered is actually quite narrow -- as it has been in most churches throughout history. Country music is usually out of the question, as is religious jazz in the style of either Duke Ellington (in his "Sacred Concerts") or Wynton Marsalis (In This House on This Morning). Nor is there music like that of Sister Marie Keyrouz, a Lebanese nun who has begun singing the chants of her tradition in an appealing, "secular" style that utilizes colorful instrumental accompaniments. The typical Next Music sound is club-style soft rock.

It would be unusual to hear anything in these churches so morally daring as certain songs of the Grammy-Award winning Indigo Girls, or anything so ironically and astutely probing as a song on ecological spirituality by James Taylor ("Gaia," from Hourglass), or music as alert to alternative spiritualities -- African and South-American -- as Paul Simon’s Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints or as achingly yearning in overall effect as k. d. lang’s "Constant Craving" (Ingénue) or U2’s "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For" (Joshua Tree). These are only a smattering of widely accessible, white and mostly middle-class alternatives.

The more ritualized yet contemporary music from Taizé (composed by Jacques Berthier) and the newly composed yet folk-based songs of the Iona Community in Scotland apparently smack too much of traditional religion to find wide acceptance in the Next Church.

And little of what is currently heard in the megachurch or suburban church with contemporary worship resembles contemporary classical "spiritual minimalism. Nothing in those settings sounds much like Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, John Tavener, John Adams, Giya Kancheli or (more Romantic in idiom) Einojuhani Rautavaara. Nor would such churches, which often make use of recordings, be tempted to venture into the recorded repertoire of more avant-garde classical composers such as Igor Stravinsky (by now virtually a classical icon), Olivier Messiaen, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sofia Gubaidulina or James MacMillan -- all certifiably contemporary and almost shockingly spiritual, and frequently explicitly theological.

The current selectivity in church music, because it is more the rule than the exception, would be unremarkable except for the claim made by the Next Church and its contemporary Christian relatives: that theirs is the truly contemporary alternative for Christian music today.

In his book Dancing with Dinosaurs: Ministry in a Hostile and Hurting World, William Easum makes this very claim about worship and music. A former United Methodist pastor, Easum works as a consultant with congregations and religious organizations. He describes major changes in worship as the "second stage" of the Reformation. "The shift in the style of worship is the most obvious and divisive [of the changes]. This divisiveness is over the style of worship rather than doctrine or theology."

Easum insists that the generations that are most vital to church growth, the midlife baby boomers and the baby busters (born after 1964), do not want to be reverent or quiet during worship. He singles out music as the "major vehicle for celebration and communication." Few movies, he observes, make a profit without a solid sound track. So what sort of sound track should a church choose, given the variety of options? Easum claims that the right method for arriving at a suitable style is to determine which radio stations most of the "worship guests" listen to. "Soft rock," he declares, is usually the answer.

For Easum, classical music -- and traditional church music in general -- is a relic of a dying past. "Classical music was rooted in the native folk music of the time," he says. "That world is gone." He quotes John Bisagno, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Houston:

Long-haired music, funeral-dirge anthems and stiff-collared song leaders will kill the church faster than anything in the world. . . . There are no great, vibrant, soul-winning churches reaching great numbers of people, baptizing hundreds of converts, reaching masses, that have stiff music, seven-fold amens and a steady diet of classical anthems. None. That’s not a few. That’s none, none, none.

If you want life and growth, Easum suggests, make use of music, art and media that are "culturally relevant." He repeatedly emphasizes the importance of "quality music" -- music produced not by choirs and organs, but by praise teams, soloists and a variety of instrumentalists and small ensembles that use synthesizers, drums and electric guitars. Quality music, especially in the context of youth evangelism, needs to be entertaining. What about cultivating some sort of developed and mature taste for quality in worship music? Easum says, "Worship is not the place to teach music appreciation." The only question that worship communities need to ask about music is: "Does it bring people closer to God?" Music is never the message. "No form is inherently better than another. Music is good if it conveys the gospel; it is bad if it does not."

Easum is willing to cite historical precedents if he thinks they serve his purpose:

Spiritual giants such as Martin Luther and Charles Wesley showed us the importance of culturally relevant music [by] taking the tunes out of bars, putting words to them and singing the songs in worship. They accommodated the people in order to reach them with the message that would change their lives. They did not conform the message, just the package.

Christians should be able to sympathize with most of Easum’s pastoral and musical concerns. Importing Vivaldi or Brahms or William Mathias into a church community whose native musical languages are closer to those of Madonna, Jimmy Buffett or John Tesh is like missionaries imposing European or North American religious styles on drastically different cultures. (Not that converts do not sometimes need and welcome a sharp alternative to their native cultural vocabulary. Chinese Christians have treasured the gospel hymns brought to them by 19th-century missionaries, choosing them over songs using Chinese folk tunes or composed later by Chinese Christians and in a Chinese idiom.)

Easum makes a valid point, moreover, in claiming that music that was originally secular has repeatedly found its way into church. The boundary between sacred and secular has repeatedly been blurred or transgressed. No one style is unalterably sacred or unalterably secular. And Easum is probably correct that much of the soft rock or pop music that he advocates for worship has become a kind of generic musical product, with no set of specifically worldly associations that would prevent its use in worship. One could make a similar observation regarding the baroque and early classical musical styles of the 17th and early 18th centuries (roughly from Handel to Haydn), which crossed rather freely from the operatic stage and concert hall to the church and back again.

Again, matching religious words with neutral or nonspecific popular music can bring out a suitable range of meanings that the music might not have on its own. Amy Grant, Petra and countless others adopt and adapt rock as a Christian musical style that their listeners find entirely consonant with their sense of Christian life and proclamation.

Finally, we can agree with Easum’s implicit claim that church music has sometimes been unduly limited by traditional suspicions of pulsing or lively rhythms, "irreverent" instruments and entertainment. (Religious music would be in trouble in much of the world if it could never be rhythmic or animated.)

Despite the merits of some of Easum’s claims, he makes several highly questionable assumptions:

• that religious quality and musical quality are both reliably indicated by numerical success

• that liking a certain kind of music for light entertainment is the same as liking that music for all the purposes of worship

• that the key to musical quality, religiously and aesthetically, is immediate accessibility

• that religious music is never, therefore, a medium one might expect to grow into and grow through as a part of Christian formation and development

We also question other Easum claims: that worship music must always be upbeat and animated if it is to be "culturally relevant"; that classical music in general is stodgy and fossilized; that religious words guarantee genuinely religious music as long as the music is likable; and that music can be treated simply as a "package" that contains the gospel message instead of as an art that embodies and interprets the gospel message by its structure and by the very way it sounds. Finally, Easum assumes that he is competent to make judgments about the viability of particular kinds of music without engaging in genuine dialogue with musicians trained in those traditions. Thus, far from exhibiting ecumenical taste, he takes a selective and dogmatic position disguised as an obedience to a gospel imperative to spread the good news.

In fairness, it must be said that the musicians Easum has dealt with might not have been open to much dialogue. Traditional and classical musicians in the employment of churches have all too often dismissed pastoral and worship concerns as irrelevant to their music-making. Faced with the narrowly musical mind-set and unchristian arrogance of certain professional "classical" church musicians, Easum has taken matters into his own hands. He has discerned and reacted to congregational restlessness and dissatisfaction, something that more traditional musicians have been slow to notice and reluctant to treat as relevant to their work. That does not mean, however, that Easum and others taking his approach exhibit the sort of taste and informed judgment that would make them reliable guides to Christian growth (or even church growth) in the sphere of music and the arts.

Easum predicts, for example, the quick death of all symphony orchestras that do not soon begin to feature a significant amount of pop and rock music. A number of observations counter his suppositions and provide the sort of evidence regarding "cultural relevance" that Easum would have every reason to regard as pertinent.

First, opera has experienced a tremendous revival of late, and not only among the senior generations. Opera houses in many parts of the world (including the United States) are filled to capacity and are adding series. The number of people in North America who say they very much like classical music stands at a substantial 14 to 20 percent across the generations, a more consistently favorable cross-generational response than for most other styles. Although the sale of classical recordings is a relatively small percentage of total audio sales, that can partly be explained by the fact that classical music is much less oriented toward the currently fashionable and the new, which quickly becomes unfashionable and is therefore replaced. As Mark C. Taylor remarks, fashion -- being "forever committed to the new" -- speaks only in the "present tense." That hardly argues against incorporating classical styles in many church settings, but instead cautions us that riding each successive wave of fashion may be neither desirable nor even possible.

Other music, known as "early music" (roughly European "classical" music before the 18th-century classical period), has attracted a significant and ardent audience that augments the already considerable following of baroque music such as Pachelbel’s "Canon in D," Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti and Handel’s Messiah. A concert by the women’s medieval quartet Anonymous 4, the Monteverdi Consort or the Tallis Scholars is normally packed, whether they sing in Rome, London or Indianapolis.

And recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of chant. The widespread introduction of religious services using music from the religious community at Taizé, France, fits with this trend, since much of it tends to be rather contemplative and in harmony with the moods if not modes of chant. The attraction of such "boring" ritual music challenges Easum’s notion that "culturally relevant" music must be lively and entertaining.

Still another trend -- and this one should have caught Easum’s attention, given his interest in "sound tracks" -- is the use of music that draws on classical idioms in the composition of musical scores for films of high drama, serious feeling or intense introspection. An array of recent movies use music indebted to classical traditions. The music that John Williams has composed for the Star Wars series often sounds like something one might expect from Sergei Prokofiev or Gustav Holst. The film Shine features the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto. One can also cite John Corigliano’s largely classical score for The Red Violin, the contemporary classical music for Terrence Malick’s war movie The Thin Red Line, the fascinating and contemporary sound tracks for the morally complex films of

Krzysztof Kieslowski, Ennio Morricone’s score for The Mission and music for "period" films such as Shakespeare in Love.

These examples suggest that "classical" music is not only very much alive, though evolving, but also enormously varied -- more varied than one would guess on the basis of the "classical music" one typically hears in churches.

Before judging which kinds of music are culturally relevant and relevant to the transformation of values appropriate to Christian culture and growth, it is important to attain a theologically adequate and aesthetically informed picture of the musical options. I would argue that out of many legitimate options, the Euro-American classical tradition remains one of the most varied, profound and adaptable traditions -- in ways churches have yet to imagine.

Similar misunderstandings can be found in common assumptions about the viability of simply "packaging" a sacred message in an appealing secular style. Protestants and other Christians have made wide use of secular sources for their hymn tunes and religious music. J. S. Bach borrowed from his secular cantatas and harpsichord concerti when composing his sacred works, including his B Minor Mass. Martin Luther has been credited with saying he did not want the devil to have all the good tunes. Yet secular and popular music was not the only sort that Luther wanted to raid. He was openly jealous of "the fine music and songs" and "precious melodies" that the Catholics got to use at masses for the dead, and thought it would "be a pity to let them perish." He said that the pope’s followers in general possess "a lot of splendid, beautiful songs and music, especially in cathedral and parish churches," which ought to be divested of "idolatrous, lifeless and foolish texts" and reused for the sake of their beauty. He was hardly the advocate of strictly casual and vernacular styles.

John Calvin was extremely cautious about the music he sanctioned for use in worship, which he thought should exhibit moderation, gravity and majesty. Luther and John Wesley could both be very particular about the tunes they wanted to use with hymn texts. Wesley designated the ones he judged to be suitable; Luther would not sanction the free use of music from bars and brothels.

Why would any Christian theologian, pastor or musician want to make such discriminations? It is doubtful that they would if they thought that music provides nothing more than a "package" for the gospel message, and one that is adequate as long as it is appealing. That is not what any of the major Reformers thought, even though they were sure that some secular music could legitimately be borrowed and adapted for religious purposes.

Christians today need to be thinking more carefully and deeply about sacred and secular in the realm of music. Art, and certainly musical art, may have a special religious calling, because it tends to come from the heart and go to the heart -- to paraphrase what Beethoven said of his Missa Solemnis. But perhaps not all art is meant to touch the heart, let alone the soul; and perhaps even the music that touches the heart does so in quite different ways. A clever piano sonata that Mozart composed in his head is not likely to be perceived as religious or "spiritual." However justified Karl Barth’s conviction may have been that Mozart’s ostensibly secular music is possibly even more significant, religiously, than his masses, a lover of Mozart’s music may "adore" Cherubino’s adolescent and flirtatious songs in the Marriage of Figaro without needing to regard them as even remotely religious, let alone as generally well suited for worship. As for the masses, clergy and musicians from Mozart’s time to the present have expressed reservations about their more operatic traits -- the religious admiration of Barth and Hans Küng notwithstanding.

One does not have to believe that certain styles of music are inherently religious in order to be convinced that some kinds of music are generally more suitable for worship than are other kinds. Pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen has articulated a number of cogent reasons for regarding the classical style of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as peculiarly handicapped in the realm of sacred music. In Rosen’s view, those composers wisely departed from the more strictly "classical" conventions to become more "archaic" in style (modal, contrapuntal) when writing their most serious church music -- Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, for instance, or Mozart’s Requiem and Mass in C Minor, or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

And some musical styles are more flexible than others. Both baroque music and African-American gospel music have roots within the churches as well as within secular settings, permitting composers and performers in these idioms to make relatively minor stylistic adjustments that will readily put into play the appropriate range of associations, thoughts and feelings.

Other music is designed and adapted primarily to do such things as create cerebral conundrums (some avant-garde classical works) or energize sporting events, entertain at parties, reduce stress or enhance bedroom desires. As Martha Bayles argues in Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in Anwri can Popular Music, early rock ‘n’ roll, for all its undeniable sexual energy, originated out of a milieu deeply influenced by a white Pentecostalism that borrowed African-American rhythm-and-blues styles while remaining defensively segregated. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard all grew up in Pentecostal churches and sometimes made highly conflicted, guilt-ridden alterations of their churches’ music. But, Bayles goes on, a multitude of influences -- including the impulses of artistic modernism -- conspired to push moral and religious associations and tensions out of much subsequent popular music. Her claim may be overstated, but it finds a certain amount of agreement among popular musicians themselves.

Some musical styles, instead of being flexible or neutral, seem quite specialized in character -- something made exceptionally clear by novelist Robertson Davies in The Cunning Man, in which the narrator describes his first encounter with plainsong:

At first I did not know what it was. At intervals the eight men in the chancel choir, or sometimes Dwyer alone, would utter what sounded like speech of a special eloquence, every word clearly to be heard, but observing a discipline that was musical, in that there was no hint of anything that was colloquial, but not like any music I had met with in my, by this time, fairly good acquaintance with music. My idea of church music at its highest was Bach, but Bach at his most reverent is still intended for performance. This was music addressed to God, not as performance, but as the most intimate and devout communication. It was a form of speech fit for the ear of the Highest.

Gregorian chant would serve poorly for purposes of inebriated celebration; by the same token, the latest Ricky Martin hit would serve poorly for purposes of meditative prayer.

Thus, in response to any uncritical willingness to adopt for worship whatever music people favor in their radio listening, one might ask: Is it possible that musicians in our notably secular era have become especially adept at shaping music to specifically erotic, recreational and commercial purposes? If so, might not bending those sorts of music to the ends of worship be like choosing to praise or thank God in the tone of voice one would use to order a pizza or to cheer a touchdown -- or perhaps even to make the most casual sort of love?

No doubt part of the meaning we hear in a given kind of music is "socially constructed," which raises the possibility that an alteration in the construct will alter completely how the music sounds. Simon Frith makes such an argument when he proposes that it is "cultural ideology," rather than anything within the music or its beat, that produces most of the sexual and bodily associations of rock ‘n’ roll. But his elaborate and brilliant defense of that claim is too clever. Nothing one can do will convert Gregorian chant into a style as bodily and erotic in its center as various kinds of rock; nor can rock be made to sound as contemplative or as ethereal as chant, though it can indeed take on an aura of ecstasy.

The whole question of meaning in music is elusive, and in many ways a matter of intuitions that we cannot fully explain. Nonetheless, music, as literary and cultural critic George Steiner insists, "is brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression. . . Music is at once cerebral in the highest degree -- I repeat that the energies and form-relations in the playing of a quartet, in the interactions of voice and instrument are among the most complex events known to man -- and it is at the same time somatic, carnal and a searching out of resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness." Because of the virtually sacramental "real presence" of its meaning, music has "celebrated the mystery of intuitions of transcendence."

Particular sorts of music have a range of possible nonverbal meanings that verbal language and cultural context can then shape and construe in more specific ways. One can distinguish between religious music most appropriate for the inner sanctuary (both literally and figuratively), and that which is best for the nave of the church, or for the courtyard, recreational hall or concert stage. One can fittingly choose to use religious music in any of these settings, but its character and purpose will shift accordingly, with convention playing a role in shaping those choices.

But because religious meanings cannot simply be imposed on every sort of musical medium, regardless of its style, considerable musical and liturgical experimentation could be required to find out which forms of rock and pop permit or invite stretching for religious purposes. Christians probably need musical "laboratories," involving both clergy and musicians.

No doubt some of the worship services that now use popular and casual idioms were not awe-filled to begin with but awful: bland, stiff and stifled. Nevertheless, if the medium of religious practice and expression is not only predominantly casual in style but also artistically "flimsy" (a complaint lodged by Kathleen Norris), or perhaps even kitsch, then one must ask: What sort of God are worshipers envisioning as they sing or look or move? To what sort of life and growth do they suppose they are being called? The possibility that a relatively casual and unchallenging style might be all there is to a community’s worship life is bound to be deflating to those whose call to discipleship causes them to yearn for something more in aesthetic formation and development.

As for the uncritical adoption of "secular" styles, there is no denying that the act of giving ordinary, secular-sounding expression to extraordinary reality can transform the ordinary and secular into something sacred. But marrying gospel insights and liturgical actions to a musical medium that was originally secular in sound and purpose is an art. Carelessly done, it can inadvertently convert the sacred into something quite ordinary.

Reading Acts (Acts 2:42-47)

I have absolutely nothing new to say about the 23rd Psalm or the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, and most readers have little need to rehash what they’ve already learned. What I don’t know much about, and what many of us fear to fully and faithfully confront, is the reading from Acts. In an election year, in a national recession, and in a global economy whose rules seem to shift like tectonic plates, maybe we need to know more.

The setting in Acts is tricky because it is immediately post-Pentecost while Christians are about halfway into Eastertide. The lectionary loves to do that. But the setting is interestingly suggestive. Just before Acts 2:42 we read, "So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added" (2:41). Hmm. Three thousand new members. That is an interesting challenge. I know the sociocultural situation is a tad removed from our own, but what would you do with such an influx of new believers? What would your confirmation class look like? Ted Gulick, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, reminds us, "The principle problem in the [insert your denomination] Church today is inadequate catechesis."

We may not be working with 3,000 converts, but between Easter vigil, Easter sunrise services and Pentecost to come, there is going to be some new blood. What should we do with it? All the glorious sermons on the Good Shepherd and reflections on Psalm 23 are not really going to help, because we are not just talking about flocks to care for, but new disciples to send into the world. Acts helps.

The formula is fairly set: teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayers. Got it. We need to teach the basics of the faith, nurture fellowship, emphasize the Eucharist and be devoted to prayer. Who could object to that? What we get all worked up about is: "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need." The Berlin Wall fell two decades ago, so no one is going to criticize Acts as "communist" or "pinko." So what’s the problem? The problem is not the fading potential for name-calling, but the stark reality of the early Christian Jerusalem community. Its members shared. Radically. And the community grew as a result. Not forever--the realities of empire and temple saw to that. But it grew in a way we can’t ignore.

The trouble is we ignore the wrong thing; we ignore the sharing. After all, before you can say "Trinity Sunday," this egalitarian community will be in such dire straits that Paul will have to pass the hat in Thessalonika. So what kind of sustainable model of community is this? Point taken. But is it the right point? I don’t think so. The "all things in common" and "sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all" is not the beginning point of community, but rather the logical outcome of "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayers." You do not start with radical egalitarianism: it is what happens when you start practicing the faith. What happens then? "Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles." What stands between us and 3,000 believers "having all things in common"? Not much, just "many wonders and signs."

Where exactly are we supposed to find wonders and signs? There are two possibilities. One is to wait and hope, trusting in God to bless you and whatever you are up to. The other is, with no less trust in the blessing of God, to "devote [our]selves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayers." It is a simple suggestion: if the faithful devote themselves to the same things the first generation of believers did, good and wonderful things will result. When a true community of faith arises (fill in the blank with the name of a community that you know), startling things happen. Faith happens.

The wonders and signs surprise us. I visited Monseigneur Arturo Bañuelas in El Paso, Texas, last year and preached at St. Pius X, which is known as one of the best Roman Catholic parishes in the country. At the 9 a.m. mass more than 20 award winners in a regional Special Olympics were recognized, then honored at a breakfast following mass. Arturo needed to meet with another group, so I, "Father Bill," was invited to the photo op. To my joyful surprise my Episcopal ordination did not matter. Because I was present to them, and because Father Arturo had honored me as priest, they knew all they needed to know and wanted to have their picture taken with me, have me bless their medals, have me be the recipient of their hugs and kisses. You well know who was most blessed, because we "had all things in common." And what was it we had in common? The teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers. Because my friend had well and truly formed the people in his parish, my preaching, my presence, even my priestly blessing were received by those who were in communion, and they welcomed me into that communion.

"Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy." This prayer becomes more common as our capacity to recognize God’s work among us increases, but the recognition scares the faith out of us. As long as it scares the faith out of us and into the world, we’re good.

 

What Has the Gospel of John Given Us (John 14:1-14)

What has the gospel of John given us, and what are we to do with it? Working from end to beginning we must, at a minimum, account for such contested verses as these:

• "If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it" (14:14).

• "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these" (14:12).

• "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (14:9).

• "Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied’" (14:8).

• "Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’" (14:6).

• "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.… I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also" (14:1-3).

Listening to these claims reminds me of Annie Dillard saying that we should wear crash helmets when sitting in the pew (Teaching a Stone to Talk).

In many ways it is a matter of emphasis. Do we emphasize "ask me for anything and I will do it" or "the one who believes in me will do greater works than these"? Do we emphasize "show us the Father" or "whoever has seen me has seen the Father"? Do we emphasize "in my Father’s house there are many dwelling places" or "where I am, there you may be also"? Last but not least, do we emphasize "I am the way, the truth, and the life" or "no one comes to the Father except through me"?

Most of the time, God help us, we emphasize the wrong thing:

• what’s in it for me, not what I can do

• the search for incontrovertible confirmation, not trust in what we have already seen

• wondering what our room in heaven will look like, not enjoying Christ’s presence with us each day

• trying to decide who is in and who is out, rather than following the path of the One who is the Way

Other than that, we’re doing pretty well!

"Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’" Why do we hear that as a perilous affirmation fraught with exclusion rather than a suggestion of the right path for Thomas and the disciples, with us as present company included? Could it have anything to do with the fact that calling the roll is easier than following the leader?

Jesus said, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.… And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also." The Greek is plural, so who is "you"? Are there only some folk whose hearts Jesus wished to calm, only a niche group invited to faith in God? And if the answer to that is a resounding No! then why do we persist in thinking that the divine accommodations will be limited and segregated?

"Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’" How does the old joke go? The philandering husband denies that anything is happening by asking, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Do we believe what we see, or do we join Philip in wanting just a little more? OK, not a little more: we want the whole thing. We want to see God too. Is that so bad? Maybe, maybe not. But to recall the wonderful Joan Osborne song, "What if God was one of us?" What if the evidence is less spectacular than Philip and we might prefer? If God is present in creation, in the daily miracles of human love and compassion, in the hopes and aspirations of all who seek after God, can we see God? "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?" Hey, Philip, this is as good as it gets! Maybe we had all better look again, and this time as if we mean it.

We make progress, backing off a little on the whole exclusivity issue, and deciding to attend not only to the spectacular but to all the evidence around us. But then we slam into "If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." Here we really get off track. We wonder what we should ask for since Jesus says he will do anything, skipping over the fact that Jesus talks about what we can do ourselves--greater works than his own.

Greater works than his own. OK, we start with a slight handicap, but we have been given the Spirit, so… I get it. Jesus is kidding. Except Jesus never kids in the fourth Gospel. Irony, sarcasm and metaphor abound, but not humor. Greater works than these? Maybe we need to read ahead a bit. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (John 15:13-14). Jesus laid down his life for us, his friends. So what is our "greater" work? To do what he commanded. How does that commandment go? "Love one another as I have loved you." Is that so hard to remember?

Savior Like a Shepherd (Ps. 23; 1 Jn. 3:16-24; Jn. 10:1-18)

How is a church like a sheepfold? Both are filled with funny-smelling creatures that will follow just about anyone just about anywhere . . . Why does a pastor tend a flock? To fleece ‘em. . .

Is it just me, or is there more than a little bit of tension in the way we deal with biblical and ecclesial images of sheep and shepherds, pastors and flocks? Good Shepherd Sunday notwithstanding, how complimentary is it to refer to the members of a church as a flock of sheep, and how appropriate is it to speak of clergy as pastors? More to the point, is that Jesus’ point in John 10?

The tenth chapter of John is a rhetorical and metaphorical mess. Yes, I too grew up with the picture of Jesus with the lamb on his shoulders, but the image probably comes from Matthew 18:12f., not John 10. Here Jesus begins by contrasting himself as a sheep owner to a thief who scales the wall. The owner knows and calls the sheep by name: when he leads them out, they willingly follow. But when the thief calls, the sheep scatter. This metaphorical mix -- proper entry, known names, familiar voice, leading and following contrasted with surreptitious entry and strange voices -- then yields to altogether different imagery. Jesus becomes the gate by which all must enter and exit, while everyone else is a thief or bandit out to steal and destroy. It is at this point that we read the famous line, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." But what exactly does an abundant life look like to a sheep?

Finally, in John 10:11 we read, "I am the good shepherd." Now the contrast is not between owner and thief, right or wrong entry and the true gate, but between owner and hired servant, between the one who runs from the wolf and the One who lays down his life for the sheep. Jesus is not done, however. The imagery shifts from good shepherd to the shepherd of multiple flocks ("I have sheep who do not belong to this fold") and a new central metaphor: "There will be one flock, one shepherd."

There’s plenty of tension here, and more if we consider Peter’s speech in Acts 4, where he seems interested in keeping strays out of the fold ("There is salvation in no one else") and 1 John 3:16-24, which picks up on the theme of the One who lays down his life of his own accord and then sees an outrageous connection between Jesus’ action and our own: "We ought to lay down our lives for one another." How can God’s love abide in anyone, the writer continues, who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? "Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action."

Father James Callan, a colleague, mentor and friend, shares a lesson that he learned early in his ministry, a valuable lesson that many of us are still struggling to accept. When Jesus said there will be one flock, one shepherd, he was not asking for applications. The position is filled. With that realization comes an extraordinary freedom to be about the work of ministry without needing to be in control.

There is a great deal of difference between thinking that one is laying down one’s life for the "sheep" and that we are called to lay down our Jives for each other. John 10 is about Jesus; 1 John 3 is about us. In his book Can’t Hold Back the Spring, Callan quotes Ezekiel 34: "I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak. . ."

The trouble is that when you give the task of shepherd and gatekeeper to God, you lose control over who enters the fold. When you take seriously the admonition in 1 John 3:17 to help a brother or sister in need and forget to ask whether or not the author of 1 John intended the words to apply only to the Johannine community, you might start helping the "wrong" people. And they might like it. And they might come back.

Then you have a real mess on your hands. Kind of like a crowded sheepfold.

Unless Someone Guides Me (Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 4:7-21)

The First Church of St John, or "the community of the beloved disciple," as the late Raymond Brown called it, seems a lot like the church around the corner when you read between the lines. Some of the faithful sound a little too sure of themselves. Others confuse the talk with the walk. Some members get mad and leave the church.

Above all they seemed to have a hard time getting along with each other. Again and again the author included a variation on "Those who say, ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars." Love must have been hard to come by in this beloved community; 29 times in the space of 15 verses the author uses one form or another of agape: Beloved, let us love one another, for crying out loud! If they had this much trouble mustering love within the church, how did they deal with outsiders?

Dealing with outsiders was not a problem for Philip. He was an outsider. Not to be confused with Philip of Bethsaida (one of the Twelve), this Philip was a Greek in Jerusalem, one of the Seven appointed to run the food pantry, clinic and hospice program there, so the Twelve did not need to tend to such petty concerns as food and drink. After Stephen was martyred, the Jerusalem community scattered.

Luke pursues only one story: Philip’s. Philip moved from waiting on tables in Jerusalem to serving in Samaria as evangelistic front man for Peter and John, proclaiming the Messiah, performing signs, amazing the people and cutting into Simon the Magician’s business. When the two apostles arrived, Philip’s work was done. So the angel of the Lord sent him on the road to Gaza, as rough a road then as now, for an adventure in evangelism that is without precedent in the New Testament.

If Philip was an outsider, the one he was sent to meet was the quintessential outsider: a person of color, of, uh, complicated gender, official to the ruler of a foreign power. He had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and was reading the prophet Isaiah while riding home in his chariot. As the chariot passed him, Philip called to the Ethiopian. (Did the Ethiopian have the slowest chariot in antiquity or was Philip training for a marathon?)

"Do you understand what you are reading?" asked Philip. No more than Cleopas and companion knew what they were talking about on the Emmaus road. No more than Saul understood what happened on the road to Damascus. No more than we understand the twists and turns on the roads -- well or less traveled -- on which we find ourselves. We all need an interpreter, a guide, a mentor. The Ethiopian had the wisdom to ask for help. "How can I, unless someone guides me?" he asked. How indeed.

Somewhere along the way, at least in my Baptist tradition with its emphasis on "soul competency" and "soul freedom" ("I’ll figure it out for myself" and "I certainly don’t need the likes of you to explain it to me"), we became convinced that the Bible should be as easy to understand as it is to buy. It has been translated, paraphrased, life-amplified, annotated and illustrated. That does not make it easily accessible. An ongoing challenge for church and clergy is to sufficiently establish the significance of scripture in the hearts and minds of believers so that they will attempt the hard work, the life’s work, of seeking to understand the Word made Book. The Ethiopian knew this, for he was motivated to acquire an Isaiah scroll. He was seeking faith and understanding, and Philip was privileged to be his guide -- literally to show him the way.

There is something here for church and clergy -- the use of the word "guide" in translation. The Ethiopian did not ask for a teacher, he asked for a guide. There is a big difference. Teachers point and say, "Go there, do that." Guides reach out and say, "This is the road I traveled. You might want to try it, but whatever road you choose, I’d like to walk it with you." Philip got in the chariot with the Ethiopian. Luke went out of his way to say that both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water for the baptism. Teachers say, "I told you so." Guides come after you if you lose your way. The church, I am convinced, needs fewer teachers and more guides.

The elder (assuming continuity of authorship in the Johannine Epistles) writes to his cantankerous community as a guide, not a teacher. He reminds, cajoles, warns, exhorts and invites, and consistently uses the first person plural in verbal and pronominal constructions: "Let us love one another," not "You should love each other." "We deceive ourselves," not "You’re fooling yourselves." More than that, the tone of the letter is of one whose heart aches for the apparent lack of love and for the struggles roiling his community, and who writes tenderly to his beloved ones, his little children.

The trouble with being a guide or mentor, of course, is the likelihood that the one being guided will look upon the mentor as an example and model. Forever. Who needs that kind of pressure? Chariot rides are notoriously bumpy as it is, and baptismal waters are wet and cold. After that the baptized ones are on their own. Let them look to God for their example. You know, WWJD and all that. Not so for the elder, or for Philip.

"Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us." That will take a while.

Staying Power (Luke 24:36-49; Acts 3:12-19)

Cleopas and his unnamed (female?) companion get all the credit. Everyone preaches about an "Emmaus road experience." Nobody preaches about a "stayed-in-Jerusalem-and-waited-to-see-what-happened experience." Everybody preaches about how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread, but nobody preaches about what happened after Jesus asked, "Have you anything here to eat?" Which goes to show that staying put rarely gets much credit.

I am doing a lot of staying put lately. Cancer does that to a family. My 76-year-old father is dying of cancer. Hospice is involved, as well as my sister, who lives around the corner from Dad, and who has taken leave from her hospital chaplaincy and postponed her seminary studies to take 98 percent of the responsibility. I blow in when I can from my home 400 miles away, thankful for every chance to share the wonder and mystery and blessing of these last days.

Staying put. We don’t know how many years the lame man was carried to the Beautiful Gate by his friends. Was it 38 years, like the lame man in John 5, or 12 years, like the woman in Mark 5? Staying put. A lot can happen if we are willing to stay put.

I came to my current parish, my fourth, 15 years into ordination. Since the typical call or appointment now lasts 4.5 years, I am an average minister. My father was ordained in 1948 and served four churches before his first "retirement" (he served two more parishes and one retirement community after that, resigning the last position only a few weeks ago). Staying power. Lyle Schaller and other church consultant gurus have long preached the importance of long pastorates, of staying put to see what happens. What is my hurry? And what do I have to show for it?

In Under the Unpredictable Plant, his wonderful 1992 "exploration in vocational holiness," Eugene Peterson searched the Jonah narrative for keys and clues to pastoral presence and practice. Recalling St. Benedict’s addition of a vow of stability to traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Peterson determined to stay at his first parish for his entire ministry. He was bucking a trend: "Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement." Not that Peterson was never tempted to move on, with or without the shake-the-dust-off-my-feetism that too easily moves many of us out of parishes, businesses, schools and homes. But he stayed put and found that "something interesting happened each time. After swallowing my pride and accommodating myself to my frustrations, I found depths in my own life emerging into awareness and, along with them, depths in the congregation that I had no idea existed."

Of course, the man lame from birth had no say in the matter. He had to stay where someone placed him. But when he was healed what did he do? He began walking and leaping and praising God as he went into the temple. The language emphasizes that he walked and leaped and danced where he was. He stayed put. When the disciples were arrested for their provocative acts and sermons and given a night in jail to cool their ardor they insisted on staying put: we cannot keep from speaking, they said, about what we have seen and heard.

In the Jerusalem appearance scene Jesus emphasizes staying put, contrasting the corporeality of his presence with that of a ghost (which might have been news to Cleopas and companion, from whose sight Jesus had recently "vanished"). To deepen the demonstration Jesus enjoys a little broiled mahi-mahi "in their presence." In the postscript to the scene he again opens their minds to understand the scriptures and concludes with one commandment: Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.

Stay here. Everything about our culture seems to say "get moving." Jesus says stay put. This is not for everyone, every time. There are jobs, schools and relationships in which staying put is an invitation to disaster and destruction. Sometimes leaving certain callings and vocations is the only blessed possibility. But these times are fewer and farther between than we are conditioned to suppose. Our reasons for leaving are usually less holy, more of a grass-is-greener restlessness than a vision of someone in a Macedonia calling "come over and help us." Accepting the prevailing pace and priorities means packing up more often than is probably healthy. We miss what we might discover if we stayed put, especially if we decide to move in the mistaken hope that we will find things much different in a new place.

A few years ago I went to the bookstore for a book. Being a guy I searched high and low before asking anyone for assistance. Finally I approached a clerk and asked, "Do you have If You’re Not Where You Are, You’re Nowhere?" He did not. So I checked the reference. The book I wanted was titled Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Jesus said, "I am with you always." Imagine what we might experience if we learned to truly be where we are, and stayed put long enough to explore and discover all the wonderful ways Jesus is truly with us.

Abiding Love (John 15:1-17; 1 John 5:1-6)

I am not an avid gardener. I like the outdoors but would rather hike or bicycle in it than work in it. So when I read, "Every branch that bears fruit [God] prunes to make it bear more fruit," I think of my wife, whose approach to pruning is to "whack it down to the ground and see what happens." Sometimes it works out, sometimes not.

Focusing on the gardening, however, does not do justice to the central metaphor of this passage. Jesus’ image of vine, branch and fruit is not about viticulture. It is about abiding, and while the language of vine and pruning may be unique to the 15th chapter of John, the language of abiding is at the Gospel’s core. From the two disciples’ embarrassed question in chapter one, "Rabbi, where do you abide?" to Jesus’ declaration about the Beloved Disciple in chapter 21, "If I wish him to abide until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!" (my translations), the Gospel of John is very much about abiding -- where Jesus abides and how we who believe in Jesus shall abide. Our translations add variety to the text by substituting "dwell" or "stay" or "remain," but the Greek root is the same: meno, "to abide."

The trouble is that few of us are clear about what it means to "abide in Christ." Move to Capernaum? Not likely, though it has been tried, and visits to Israel are surely inspiring. Go to the desert, the monastery, the hermitage? If that is your calling. But for most of us it is not. What about the foreign mission field or a local Christian community, living in solidarity with the poor and dispossessed? Certainly -- if that is your calling. But such suggestions are grounded in an understanding of abiding that seems more about place than presence, while I take Jesus to be talking about being present to the presence of God in our midst wherever and everywhere we are.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has helped me as much as anyone (except perhaps Brother Lawrence) to understand what it means to practice the presence of God, to abide with Christ. It is hard to imagine being present to Christ when one struggles even to be present to the moment and to oneself. Learning to be who you are where you are seems a prerequisite to being present to anyone else, including Christ. When I returned from a three-month sabbatical last year, I was asked what I had learned that would help the church. "The most important thing I learned," I said in all seriousness, "is how to breathe in and breathe out." I have not yet learned how to meditate, but I now know how to sit quietly for a few moments and breathe in and breathe out, and I am learning how, in those moments, to be aware of how Jesus sits with me and loves me. I imagine myself "reclining" like the beloved disciple, sitting with Jesus and leaning on his shoulder, abiding in his love.

Such moments of abiding are wonderful gifts, but they are not the only way to abide with Jesus: "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. . . . This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." Jesus says that we abide in his love when we keep his commandments. Not trusting our memories, he emphasizes the commandment he has in mind: Love one another. The elder John had his own version of the same thought: "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome."

Love is not burdensome? What does John know that we don’t? Maybe this: we tend to treat love as a kind of goal-oriented affection. We love so that something will happen to somebody. I am not sure where that understanding comes from, but I am quite convinced that it’s true. And it is wrong. We do not love as a means to bring about some holy end. We love because God first loved us. Loving is the highest form of abiding, of being present for another. In Peace Is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh says, "If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs of the person we love. This is the ground of real love." Understanding happens when we are present to the other, when we abide with her or him as Christ abides with us. Not a burden, but a presence. "If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish and it will be done for you." What more can we ask for than an abiding awareness of the presence of Christ in our lives, and a growing capacity to abide with others?

Pastoral Learning at Bellevue Hospital

Being an assistant chaplain in a teeming New York hospital for mental and physical illnesses was the most emotionally challenging experience of that year. God’s justice never seemed more confusing or the church more marginal.

Described by one of my professors as a "kind of spiritual EMT," a chaplain works differently than a parish priest. Historically, chaplains are appointed by states or private bodies as religious functionaries working at secular institutions such as schools, prisons, hospitals, or in the military Chaplains rarely develop the long-term relationships that connect a priest to her parishioners. They are more like an emergency room staff -- ready to sew up spiritual wounds and pass the patient along to primary-care providers. Clinical pastoral education for Episcopal seminarians resembled a medical internship. If we could cope with daily crises in hospitals, we might be able to handle the less frequent crises in a parish.

Clinical pastoral education, or CPE, is open to anyone wishing to learn about spiritual care, and it’s required for everyone entering the Episcopal priesthood. In 1925 the first CPE program enrolled four seminary students for summer study at Westboro State Hospital in Massachusetts. CPE was the inspiration of Anton Boisen, a minister who had been hospitalized five years earlier for "catatonic schizophrenia" at Westboro. After he recovered, Boisen founded CPE to teach clergy to care for the sick and dying through firsthand experience.

Over 70 years later, Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Buddhist students seeking ordination in their own traditions enroll in the program nationwide. My classmates and I work in hospitals and hospices ranging from Christ Hospital in New Jersey, where Brad does 32-hour shifts once every eight days and performs many sacramental functions, to Columbia Presbyterian, where Mauricio takes part in a very structured program with preaching opportunities and strictly delineated pastoral responsibilities. I want to do my CPE at Bellevue Hospital because work in a large, ailing New York public hospital is guaranteed to be a "boot camp" experience. Also, our supervisor, Ernst Joseph, has been running CPE for 33 years; this would be his last program cycle before retirement. Joseph has chosen four of us from General, a Yale Divinity School student from the United Church of Christ, and a Benedictine monk who lives in Oregon.

Bellevue Hospital, located at First Avenue and 27th Street, lies within easy biking distance from General. Founded to serve "lunatics and paupers" in 1736, Bellevue is the oldest public hospital in the country. In films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Snake Pit, Bellevue is the archetypal insane asylum. But although New Yorkers tell tales about great aunts and dipsomaniacal uncles carried off to Bellevue, and the guides on Circle Line tour boats describe it as a mental institution, Bellevue is a general hospital.

For a seminarian, it’s hard to imagine a building that contains much more of "the world outside." The locked psychiatric wards occupy only one small part of this 1,232-bed facility. In addition to the birthing center, medical and neurological ICUs, and dialysis clinic, Bellevue houses two libraries, a high-security prison, a fully accredited public school, a print shop, a Medicaid registration office, two chapels, a synagogue and one of the city’s best emergency rooms. The hospital also has a community board, a palliative care unit and a world-renowned psychiatric program for survivors of torture and hostage taking. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous groups meet there, and relatives of schizophrenic and depressed patients find support groups. Art therapy programs serve children and adults who suffer emotional disorders.

My notions of right and wrong were challenged too. Level one trauma centers like Bellevue depend on a steady stream of violent-crime victims to maintain the reputation of their ER residency programs. In psychological intake exams, desperate people give answers that will guarantee admission because they’d prefer an indefinite period in the psychiatric wards to the New York streets. I learn that prisoners sometimes commit crimes that will return them to jail because they cannot handle the uneasy burden of freedom.

I also saw selfless professionalism. Here were medical and social work professionals, often leaders in their fields, who had forgone more lucrative and prestigious places at well-endowed medical centers to help care for the poorest people in our society.

I often walked past rows of people waiting to register for Medicaid. Going into a patient’s room, I was as likely to be asked for spare change as for a prayer. Sure, it would be great to speak with a chaplain, a patient says. But first, would I mind calling his daughter to come over from Brooklyn, and could I pay the $20 fee to turn on his TV, or better yet, call the public notary from medical records so he could send a letter to his bank and bail his son out of jail? I would turn away, guessing that our heart-to-heart on spiritual matters might have to wait. "By the way," the patient adds, as I try for a discreet exit line, "Could you get one of the nurses to pick up my bedpan? It’s been sitting here since breakfast."

Over the intercom, I heard requests for interpreters of Spanish, French, Filipino and Cantonese. In addition to meeting the African-American homeless woman who just learned she is HIV positive, I might encounter a highly paid model recovering from a heroin overdose or a Wall Street lawyer hit by a bicycle courier. People from every class, race, ethnicity and nationality pass through Bellevue’s halls. Upward and downward mobility, not to mention immobility, are all on display.

Our instructor tells us a little about himself. After growing up in a strict Mennonite family, Chaplain Joseph went through an extended period of religious doubt and struggle. At college he studied history and theology, then spent several years teaching in the Middle East. Once home, he began working with the mentally ill. In the early 1960s he came to Bellevue as a CPE supervisor, and liked it so much that he decided to stay.

Chaplain Joseph is an unassuming, quiet figure who seems on good terms with much of the permanent staff -- particularly the social work department. At the same time he’s a little removed from the hospital mainstream. One psychiatric resident describes him as "that very nice-looking elderly gentleman." Chaplain Joseph’s affable air and the way he walks -- one hand tucked in the pocket of his short lab coat, name tag slightly askew -- reminds me of the gardener in the Peter Sellers film Being There.

He appears unassuming, but we discover that very little slips by him. During our hour-and-a-half morning debriefings, we each recount our interactions with patients in reports called "verbatims." Chaplain Joseph’s way of intensive listening, eyes closed, is sagelike.

Usually he waits for the rest of the group to respond, then offers acute observations about our motives or behavior that we would never have admitted to ourselves. Mary, my classmate from General, says he reminded her of the father in the prodigal son story. Like the parable figure, our chaplain has a magnanimity that extends undeserved forgiveness.

CPE is a group process, so other summer assistants are critical to the experience. From General, besides me and Mary, there is Bob, the only native American in my class of 18.

In his late 30s, Bob is a tall man with a ponytail of long dark hair; he moves slowly, reads voraciously and speaks laconically. His father was an Episcopal pastor on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where Bob hopes to return with his wife and two small children. Our resident expert on the productivity of silence, he says little. But when he does speak, everyone listens. I’d been rather intimidated by Bob during the school year, but I appreciate his wry sense of humor and look forward to getting to know him.

Mary, a classmate from Louisiana, was once nominated salesperson of the year when she worked for Toyota in Detroit. Her "burning bush" moment at the altar rail in a church basement was a call to turn her life over to God, but the idea of priesthood evolved later, after she’d worked as a verger in a large Beverly Hills Episcopal church. Short, with black hair and dark eyes, Mary has enormous energy, doesn’t waste time and doesn’t suffer fools. She has a quick wit, and can drop everything for cheap opera tickets or a good bottle of champagne. I struggled all year to keep up with her in our Greek class.

The other two non-General members of the CPE group are Thomas, a divinity school student at Yale, and John, a Benedictine monk from an abbey in Oregon.

Thomas is very bright, earnest -- and from the most scrupulously traditional Protestant background of anyone in the program. He often single-handedly defends his ministry at CPE by reference to the Bible. For all of General’s liturgical fundamentalism, few of us begin sentences with "The Bible says . . ." It is eye-opening to watch Thomas unapologetically defend his pastoral decisions on scriptural grounds, while the rest of us trip over each other to see situations in murkier shades of gray.

John, the 40-year-old Benedictine monk, plans to be ordained a priest. He has traveled around the world recruiting for his abbey’s Catholic seminary. Before joining the monastery, he studied music in Germany and released a CD of a choral work he had composed. Possibly because of his age, experience and decision to wear a collar, John assumes a unique air of authority in the hospital and among our group. He soon becomes the confidant of several policemen at Bellevue, is called into rooms and sought out for advice. John’s congenial, slightly reserved manner makes him more enigmatic than others in the group. Impressed by his religious vocation and captivating life story, I strive to put my best self forward whenever we talk.

My own experience told me that trying to play the guardian angel who dispels a patient’s demons was not a productive use of a chaplain’s energy. I was very proud of my progress with Colin, a Rastafarian from Brooklyn who wound up in the neurology ICU after being mugged. Colin had solicited my help in his struggle between his religious principles, which required peace and forgiveness, and his instinct for revenge. I’d thrown myself into the part he cast for me -- supplying him with several biblical role models who were rewarded for prevailing over temptation. All went well until one afternoon. We were role-playing how Colin might react if someone called him with a tip on his mugger’s identity. The phone rang. "Where the hell is my money? I told you that’s my money! Where the hell is it?" Colin yelled into the receiver without stopping for breath.

Later he explained he was talking to his baby’s mother, as if that justified the outburst. Colin added that he was relieved -- he didn’t have to worry anymore about violating his nonviolent principles because his brother had taken it upon himself to beat up the people whom he suspected of mugging Colin. Still, he hoped that I would return soon and read to him more about King David.

Despite evidence that placing myself in the position of a finger-wagging instiller of high principles didn’t work, it was impossibly hard to avoid. I fell into this trap more than once, though it was painfully clear that imposing my own ideas of morally admirable behavior on a patient was fruitless unless the patient was searching for guidance.

Take Adam, a patient I met in the neurology ICU. The harder I tried not to impress my own values upon him, the more transparent my earnestness became. Adam, his medical chart said, had "jumped/been pushed?" from the window of a large Manhattan apartment during a party. A livid surgical scar bisected his shaved head; one eye was swollen shut, and a yellow-green rainbow of bruises arched across his face, one arm and side. He could barely speak because of the tracheal tube in his neck. He breathed laboriously, and flailed around so much that he had to be forcibly restrained. Seeing Adam as a deranged patient who’d be sent up to 18E when his physical ailments healed, I approached gingerly and took his gesticulations and raspy calls for water as hallucinations.

I realized there might be more to Adam when I arrived at his bedside one day and found an elderly gentleman, Adam’s uncle, leaning over the bed. He called out gently, "Adam, Adam, it’s me. Your aunt and I have sorted out your apartment, we’ve turned off the gas and will come by to check your mail. Everything is taken care of, so don’t you worry. It’s all going to be fine." I was shocked at how my perceptions changed with this new framing. To see someone who knew Adam speak to him about homely matters, as though he could grasp the conversation, brought me up short. After that I sat longer, deciphering his scrawled notes about being afraid and wanting to see his uncle or wondering where he was. A conscious, rational person lay behind Adam’s appearance and wildness. Usually, I’d carry on a short one-sided conversation about how everything was going to be OK. "Please, Adam, try to relax and don’t try to get out of bed; I can’t give you water right now because of your tracheal tube, but the nurse can bring some relief."

The real miracle came when Adam was transferred to rehabilitation. It took a few days to find him, and a weekend elapsed between visits. When I entered his room, Adam was sitting in a wheelchair by the sink, swabbing his face with wet paper towels. The swelling had abated and his bruises were fading. He looked up inquiringly.

"Hello," I said, "I’m an associate chaplain here. I’ve been visiting you upstairs. You look much, much better!"

"Ah yes," replied Adam in a slightly nasal tone, "my uncle told me about you. I understand you’ve been quite a faithful visitor," he continued, smiling wryly. "Thank you very much."

Adam is a financial analyst who lives on his own in Manhattan. He grew up in a large Roman Catholic family in small-town Louisiana and attended Princeton. He thought about being a doctor, but decided on business school. Adam is well read, well traveled and enjoys what he calls the good things of life -- music, literature, food, drink and the company of good friends. The Roman Catholic faith of his childhood disappeared during his first year of college, when he began to "understand the world as it really is." Now, Adam says, the only time he believes in God is when he listens to Mozart. He respects people who are religious, but, honestly, the whole thing doesn’t much interest him.

But Adam’s continually irreverent, occasionally condescending ribbing about religion touches a sensitive spot in me, and I wonder if socializing with Adam is inappropriate. I am supposed to be his chaplain, not his dinner guest. Shouldn’t I try to probe deeper matters, even if they are harder to discuss?

After all, despite Adam’s degrees and accomplishments, he is at Bellevue recovering from what I assume (with no proof) has been a suicide attempt. At the very least, Adam has behaved in a reckless fashion that, I believe, points to serious emotional problems. Although he has told me and everyone else in the hospital that he won’t discuss what happened the night he fell, it seems my duty to make sure that he acknowledges that something is missing from his life. I feel responsible for urging Adam to attend to his psychic wounds as well as the physical injury.

This will be my agenda with Adam, although I resolve to disguise it well as I know the dangers of imposing my views on patients. But there has to be something to show for our relationship. I will consider myself successful at chaplaincy if I succeed in leading Adam to admit his confusion.

One afternoon, Adam is explaining how amusing he finds the young residents who try to locate his pulse without success. "They can’t find anything because they hold both fingers on my plastic wristband" he chortles. Adam deplores how seriously the psychiatrists underestimate his knowledge of their field and satirizes the transparency of their questions.

"When you have had the background and education that you and I have had, Chloe," Adam confides, "you know a lot about how these things work."

I smile and stay quiet, trying to turn our conversation to the issues on my agenda.

Adam continues talking, almost in a reverie, about his recommendations for improving Bellevue -- basic things, like less noise and more courtesy. He understands that a public hospital probably can’t offer the amenities of a well-endowed private one. "But I’m really not used to this sort of atmosphere," he explains, adding that when he has to stay home with a cold, an army of retainers is mobilized.

"Usually, I have everything, meals and all, delivered in. My assistant makes sure I have the work I need. This is really a new experience. My friends are amused."

I see an opportunity. "So who are these ‘friends’ you keep talking about? Are they close friends?"

Adam replies vaguely that they are people who understand him -- some from Princeton he kept up with over the years, more recent acquaintances from around the city.

Suddenly he is defensive. "If I really wanted to leave here, you know, I could. I would just call up my friends and they would come and get me right away. I know how to get things done. If I really wanted to get out of here, I could fly right out that window."

I nod, and we sit in silence. Later that afternoon I realize the significance of his threat, and I am seriously alarmed.

"I’ve learned," says Adam, switching subjects, "that I’m being prayed for from all over the map. People in all 50 states are praying for me, according to my aunt. A group of 40 women I don’t even know is praying for me. It’s very sweet, I think, don’t you? Endearing."

I remember how worried his aunt was when she and her husband visited Adam in the ICU. She had asked me to anoint him with holy water, even though I wasn’t Roman Catholic. Suddenly Adam’s condescension angers me.

"Why are you glad they’re praying for you if don’t even believe in God?"

"Oh, I think it’s great that some people believe in religion," Adam says airily. "I respect it very much. It’s just that I don’t think God exists for me. I don’t know very much about it. If push came to shove I think there’s about a 50-50 chance that God exists -- so probably I do believe.

But, I’ve told you already, religion doesn’t interest me that much. I enjoy talking about other things."

I ignore the hint and keep probing. "So you don’t care if I pray for you or not?"

Slightly exasperated, Adam says, "You should pray for people without money, without any kind of education. Pray for those who get trampled by the world and don’t know to push back. They need your prayers. Me, I know how to push back a little bit. I know how to get things done. I’ve learned how to say ‘no’ or ‘not right now,’ or ‘no thank you very much’ or just ‘NO.’ It works."

I back off. Has Adam imagined the first thing he’ll do when he leaves the hospital?

"I’m going to have a huge party and invite all my friends and everyone who helped me to recover," Adam replies dryly, looking past me out the window.

On the way to the elevator, I feel ambivalent. It does not occur to me that Adam was egging me on. I cannot let his comment go by. Just as the elevator door opens, I resolve to confront Adam right away. I turn back and knock on his door.

"Adam, I just thought I should let you know that I’ve thought about what you said about throwing a party, and it upsets me a little bit. I mean, isn’t that how you ended up coming here?"

The minute the words come out, I want to swallow them whole.

His back to me, Adam bursts out angrily, "I told you in the most diplomatic way I could that I did not want to talk about the accident. I don’t know what happened to me that night, and I’m not going to discuss it till I get better physically and am at home and will seek expert advice. I can take care of myself, thank you very much, and technically this is none of your business. You are out of your league. Good-bye."

It turned out I did not destroy the fragile trust between Adam and me. I summoned the courage to return, he accepted my apology, and our usual conversation began. He complained that the nurses were unsympathetic when he insisted that visiting family was more important than "spending another half hour jumping around on a pogo stick in rehab." I manage a smile when he jokes about his "infamous welcome-home party" and invites me to attend with an oxygen mask and a stretcher, since I worry so much about his health. We remain on good terms until I leave Bellevue.

I am disappointed and alarmed that I did not resist the impulse to preach at him. By the time I bring it up with my CPE group, I anticipate Chaplain Joseph’s suggestion to hesitate before "rushing in where angels fear to tread." I know the answer to his question about whether my wish to hear Adam confess dark doubts had more to do with Adam’s need or mine. But how could I -- so proud of my open-mindedness and ability to embrace diversity -- be perceived as "pushing the religion stuff a little too strongly," as Adam scoffed. I had indeed "rushed in" to the life of someone who was perhaps spiritually wounded, but also perhaps mentally ill beyond my powers to assist. I thought I understood the concept of pastoral engagement in moral questions, but clearly not well enough to put it into effect.

Mary had taken time off from the neonatal ward to visit the obstetrics unit. A nurse on the ward pointed out a young woman who had just had an abortion; her mother sat beside the bed. Mary went over to introduce herself and began talking with the patient, an African-American in her early 20s.

The woman, called Tashi, wondered if she would be "forgiven" for what she’d done. Noticing the "confession" and "forgiveness" language, Mary inquired further.

The young woman and her mother had arrived at Bellevue a few days before, seeking an abortion for Tashi after the baby’s father disappeared. She and her mother feared the young woman wouldn’t be able to bring up her child alone. The mother was adamant on this point. At Bellevue, all had gone according to plan until they discovered, after the operation, that Tashi had been carrying twins.

"I don’t know," Tashi told Mary tearfully. "Somehow when I heard that, it seemed like this was a gift. Something really special."

Mary caught the inconsistency. Twins would have been twice the work and demanded twice the resources of a single baby -- all the more reason for their choice, if Tashi and her mother really meant what they said about being too poor to raise a child. Now Tashi cried that, had she known she was carrying twins, she might have kept them.

Then Mary did something pastoral. She pursued her curiosity and asked the young woman if she could talk more about her feelings.

Again, Tashi said it was because twins felt like a gift, a special thing.

Mary suspected there was more to the story. From the overbearing attitude of the mother, she gathered there was heavy maternal pressure on Tashi to keep up appearances even within her own family, most of whom had no idea what had taken place. This must have weighed heavily in the hasty decision to seek an abortion -- getting rid of the child was the tragic means of saving face and avoiding shame.

Not once, however, did the church’s or Mary’s personal opinion on the morality of abortion enter their conversation. "Right" or "wrong" was never mentioned. By inquiring with sensitivity, compassion and natural curiosity into Tashi’s situation, Mary engaged the young woman and her mother in an honest conversation about the abortion, a conversation they probably would not dream of having with someone in the church. Mary heard Tashi express her sorrow in the language of Christian faith, and opened the way for the young woman to continue talking with a priest or pastor who might help her to move beyond regret. Listening to Mary, I thought that the tragedy was not so much the abortion itself, but that such a large decision had been made so hastily and with no outside guidance. The church was the last place Tashi and her mother felt they could turn.

Now the difference between a pastoral approach and other approaches to moral issues grew clearer. Mary had not been discussing an important "issue" in the abstract, she’d had a poignant conversation with Tashi. In a pastoral setting, Mary’s own views or the church’s views on the morality of abortion in principle were far less important for the young woman’s life than uncovering Tashi’s own feelings of remorse. Tashi was the one who would ultimately have to be reconciled to herself in order to move ahead. She alone would know how God’s forgiveness would allow her to embrace her own life again. And Mary, the good chaplain, had shown Tashi that this question was worth pursuing.

The Water of Life

On weekends the kids from Lafanmi Selavi, our center for street children, come to our house to spend time, to share food, talk, play and swim in the swimming pool. It is a small pool, too small for 400 kids, but for them it is a piece of paradise. Sometimes we invite children from other parishes in Port-au-Prince. Sometimes a Lafanmi Selavi bus goes to Cité Soleil, to La Saline, to Carrefour to pick up children who want to swim.

This experience, which may appear at first as merely symbolic, has tremendous ramifications. In a country where only 20 percent of the population have access to clean drinking water, swimming pools are exclusively for the rich. There is not a single public swimming pool in Haiti. The pool itself is a symbol of the elite.

We know the kids need food, we know they need school, but we cannot give all of them these things in a day. So while we are working to change the society, we can give them a day in a swimming pool. We say no child is so poor she does not deserve to swim in a pool. And if you imagine this has no impact on the society, think again.

The kids swim with us, with their teachers, with a group of agronomists who work with them on Saturdays, and with American friends and volunteers working at Lafanmi Selavi. A mix of races and social classes in the same water. Sometimes these images have appeared on television. Shortly after we began this experience we started hearing reports from friends among the upper classes of rumors that I was preparing these vagabon, these street children, to invade their swimming pools. Were it not tragic it would be comic. Perhaps the real root of the fear is this: If a maid in a wealthy home sees children from Cité Soleil swimming in a swimming pool on television, she may begin to ask why her child cannot swim in the pool of her boss.

So it is a system of social apartheid that we are questioning. We saw the same phenomena during the civil rights movement in the United States where attempts to integrate beaches and swimming pools met with some of the worst violence of the period. The same was true in South Africa. What we are facing in Haiti is a form of apartheid. There are no laws on the books enforcing segregation, but the social and economic forces at play are so powerful they create a de facto apartheid.

The polarizations are many: literate/illiterate, rich/poor, black/white, male/female, those who have clean water to drink/those who don’t. In Haiti, where these polarities remain so strong, swimming in the same water has both psychological and social repercussions. You swim with people you are close to. If you are a family, if you are a community, swimming together may improve the quality of the relationship. Our experience has shown that the water can help to melt the barriers between us, and wash away the dirt of prejudice.

Officially, slavery no longer exists in Haiti. But through the lives of children in Haiti who live as restaveks we see the remnants of slavery. Restaveks are children, usually girls, sometimes as young as three and four years old, who live in the majority of Haitian families as unpaid domestic workers. They are the first to get up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night.

They carry water, clean house, do errands and receive no salary. Often they are from the countryside; their parents send them to the city in the hope that the family they live with will give them food and send them to school. The family that takes in the restavek is more often than not just one rung up on the economic ladder. Most families struggle to send their own children to school -- let alone the restavek. So most often restavek children are not in school; they eat what is left when the others are finished, and they are extremely vulnerable to verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

Officially, Haiti is a free country. But through the economic life of the country we see the remnants of colonialism. Ours is an economy of dependence, a restavek economy. Because of foreign food imports our agricultural production has fallen to historic lows. Because we export little our currency is weak. Haitian workers earn the lowest wages in the hemisphere. We are encouraged to exploit and maintain this so-called advantage to attract foreign companies to come. Because our economy is weak we depend on loans and aid from foreign countries to support our national budget. This makes us extremely vulnerable to pressure from international institutions that control the money.

Bertony was a restavek when we met him. He came to the house with a group of children from our neighborhood to spend the day. He was five years old. That day Bertony played, swam and ate all he wanted. When he went home he bragged to the children of the family with whom he lived about this rare day. When the parents heard, they were angry. They would not stand to have this little restavek teasing their own children who had not enjoyed such privilege. They threw Bertony out, saying that if he was such a big man he should go back to Aristide’s house. Bertony had broken the first rule of the restavek. The restavek has no right to speak. Fortunately, Bertony, being a very clever boy, found his way to Lafanmi Selavi, where he quickly became integrated into the life of the house, going to school and working at the kids’ radio station. Today seven-year-old Bertony is a journalist at Radyo Timoun. He not only speaks; the whole country hears him.

Another story came to us after the visit of the famous Haitian-American rap group the Fugees. They played a concert for the rich at Haiti’s Club Med. The lead singer was once himself a very poor child growing up in Port-au-Prince. And he continually reminded the crowd of this. One of the concert-goers was heard to say that the singer did not need to keep talking as this would just make the kids in the street plis sou moun. The closest translation is, "they will think they are somebody." Another person, talking about the kids swimming in the pool I will clean it. But if one of Aristide’s dogs falls in my pool they will be swimming in their own blood."

In 1991, on the first day of my presidency, I invited the poor to breakfast. The palace doors, forever closed to them, were opened. To this day many among the elite feel that the palace has been dirtied by the presence of the of the poor. At the time the response was the coup d’état which did indeed bathe the country in blood.

How do we wash away the dirt of prejudice? Little by little? With a cleansing flood?

When my daughter was born in 1996, we asked, Where should we baptize her? In this country of rigid social delineation, the place that we chose Lafanmi Selavi. There at the house, among the children of the streets, and in the presence of many friends of all social classes, Christine was baptized by her godfather, Bishop Willy Romélus. The water of life can baptize us all new. One people, God’s children, swimming together in the water of life.

In Haiti’s countryside the people are crying out or the water of life, too. The 70 percent of Haiti’s population that lives in the countryside needs water to grow the food that can feed the country. If Haiti is to be economically independent, we must be able to feed ourselves. To do that we must heal the land. We can trace the roots of our current ecological crisis to Haiti’s heavy debt to France in the 19th century, which encouraged the logging of Haiti’s tropical forests for export to Europe. Today only 3 percent of our forests remain. Without the trees to hold the soil, 1 percent of Haiti’s topsoil washes to sea each year, driving Haiti’s peasant farmers further into poverty as the land produces less and less each year.

Since our independence in 1804, every Haitian government has governed on the backs of the peasants, taxing their produce and giving nothing back in return. A deep chasm between people in the countryside and people in the capital has always existed. This chasm is inscribed in the language. Anyone who lives outside of Port-au-Prince is called moun andeyò -- literally, "outside people," outsiders. And the language was inscribed in the law. Historically, paysanne ("peasant," in French) was listed on the birth certificates of anyone born outside Port-au-Prince. When I became president in 1991, by presidential decree we changed the law, so that now all birth certificates are the same. Now we must keep working to change the language -- and the realities of life in the countryside.

On our continent, the banking industry has grown from 40 percent of the economy to 57 percent over the past ten years, while agriculture has shrunk from 30 percent to 15 percent over the same period. In Haiti, agriculture was 50 percent of our gross national product ten years ago -- now it is only 28 percent. The banks in Haiti extend only 2 percent of their lending to the agricultural sector. How can we ask the poor, who are mostly peasants, to put their money in these banks?

Article 247 of the Haitian constitution says, "Agriculture is the principal wealth of the nation and the guarantee of the well-being of the population." Yes, but where will we find water to irrigate the land? If only 2 percent of bank lending goes to agriculture, how will the peasants have money to irrigate, to buy water pumps, to buy seeds, to invest in the land?

In the world at large we see this same picture: 3.1 billion people make their living in agriculture. Their lives are on a collision course with globalization. They cannot compete with industrialized Western agriculture with its heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. And yet the world economy is not creating new jobs for them. What will they do?

Peasants are forced off their land and move to overcrowded cities where they find neither jobs nor health care, nor schools for their children, nor even clean water to drink. The people follow the land. After the trees are cut from the mountains, the soil washes to the plains and the people follow. When the soil washes away from the plains, the people once again follow, moving to the slums of cities by the sea.

The economically powerful are not protecting the land, the trees, the soil or the people who have existed on this land for generations. Can we expect that aid programs will help our environment or our people who depend on the land? If 84 cents of every dollar is going back to the donor country, how much is left for water for the peasants? Or for trees to hold the water and the soil? The question is dramatic. What will we do to have water?

We are at the millennium and there is still no water for the people to drink -- let alone water for the land. Sometimes foreigners think we are lazy, asking for food, asking for handouts. But in fact we are asking for water. In our rich country, where the sun shines every day, I assure you that if we have water, we will grow the food we need to eat.

Some may ask how a strategy of national development based on agriculture can possibly succeed in this day and age, in the face of the macroeconomic realities we are facing. In fact, we cannot know for sure. But what we can be sure of is that as long as Haitian governments continue to receive instructions from international institutions we will move from the same to the same, the same program to the same program, from bad to worse.

On the other side, if we see organizations in Haiti among civil society looking for strategies that come from the people, this represents a candle in the night. Hope in a night of despair. We can offer an alternative -- an alternative that will not make us rich, but may at least save us from starvation and lead us to poverty with dignity. If what we propose is not perfect, what they proposed has already demonstrated how disastrous it is.

This is a strategy for subsistence, for survival. And that is just what the poor have always done in the face of macroeconomic realities that have never been favorable.

The neoliberal strategy is to weaken the state in order to have the private sector replace the state. Through cooperatives we can perhaps preserve some margin of public services. Without a national mobilization of human resources, we will never be able to create a balance between that economic power and that human power. The human power in my country is the huge majority of the poor. The economic power is that tiny 1 percent that controls 45 percent of the wealth.

The coup d’état of 1991 showed how terribly afraid the 1 percent is of the mobilization of the poor. They are afraid of those under the table -- afraid they will see what is on the table. Afraid of those in Cité Soleil, that they will become impatient with their own misery. Afraid of the peasants, that they will not be moun andeyò anymore. They are afraid that those who cannot read will learn how to read. They are afraid that those who speak Creole will learn French, and no longer feel inferior. They are afraid of the poor entering the palace, of the street children swimming in the pool. They are not afraid of me. They are afraid that what I say may help the poor to see.

But in the end, on this small planet, we are all swimming in the same water.