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Child Poverty, Sant'egidio and the Spirit of Friendship - Bishop Richard Clarke's speech to the Symposium on Child Poverty, Armagh, Saturday 20th May 2006
CHILD POVERTY, SANT?EGIDIO AND THE SPIRIT OF FRIENDSHIP
Symposium on Child Poverty
Armagh Synod Hall Saturday 20 May 2006
Bishop Richard Clarke - Bishop of Meath and Kildare
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You are in a church, as a big service is about to begin. The church is fairly full but you have a space or two in your pew. A child wanders down the aisle looking for somewhere to perch. He?s not too young to be out on his own, but he looks distinctly dirty, and neither looks nor smells as if he has washed for a month. His clothes have all the look of hand-me-downs, several times over, and they?re as grimy and whiffy as he is. Do you, as a questionnaire might put it -
(a) point out to him that there?s space in your pew and then share your hymn-book and prayer-book with him throughout the service?
(b) hope that he?ll find somewhere else to sit, and preferably not too close?
(c) hope that he will get tired of being in church and just wander out again because he probably doesn?t know how to behave properly in a church building?
(d) think that really the churchwardens should gently ease him out of the church and suggest he finds somewhere else to play?
I suppose we have to say that if the answer is not (a), it?s very hard to know what exactly we?re all doing here. I might even have added the word ?unselfconsciously? a couple of times to the first option, option (a), in order to make it even harder ? ?point out unselfconsciously to him that there?s space in your pew and share your hymn-book and prayer-book with him unselfconsciously throughout the service?.
I?m not pretending for one moment that I would be any better at it than most of you, but what I am saying is that we are rather missing the point of everything we as Christians stand for, if we only want to sponsor other people in their caring of children who are poor and not just unloved, but who ? precisely because they are uncared for or because there is grinding poverty in their home ? will not be as fresh and fragrant and as neatly turned out as we might wish; nor will they necessarily behave in the way that nicely brought-up middle-class Church of Ireland children are taught to behave..
The simple solution to all of this - if we just want to try and feel good about ourselves - is that we would hold fund-raising activities on a large scale in our dioceses or parishes, and hand over the money we?d raised to Barnardos or to some other group of people who know what they?re doing, who need financial support, and who aren?t afraid of the unpleasant sights and smells that are the realities of child poverty in Ireland. We might even let the diocesan magazine or the Church of Ireland Gazette know how much we had raised for these fine people.. But that is not, I hope, the prospect that has brought us here today.
We have a fair idea of the statistics on child poverty. We cannot pretend otherwise. (And if we really do not know them, they are readily available from such web-sites as the Combat Poverty Agency, the Conference of Religious of Ireland, or Barnados themselves.)
? We know that one in seven children in the Republic of Ireland now live in what is called ?consistent poverty?, the indicators for which include having a decent cooked meal less often even than every other day, of having no more than one pair of shoes, of never having new clothes, or of having to do without heating in the house at some point because there is not enough money to pay for it..
? We know also that the number of families in the trap of ?consistent poverty? is now 1 in 5 for lone parent families in the Republic whereas, when our much loved Celtic Tiger first started making a noise, it was actually 1 in 20 (bad as that might have been)..
? And we learnt in December at Dromantine that the figures for Northern Ireland are no more impressive..
But do we wish merely to alleviate the statistics from a comfortable and safe distance, at one remove, or do we have a rather better grip on what might be meant by the doctrine of the Incarnation?
The whole point of the Incarnation is that God did not do things at one remove from the world. The entire point of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ did not do things at one remove from people or their pain.
I have been asked to relate what we?re here for today to some of the things that I?ve learnt - through my involvement over the past few years with the Sant?Egidio Community - about the possibilities of the direct integration of gospel, prayer and social involvement for all Christians.
I won?t say much about the origins of Sant?Egidio, about which I have spoken many times, other than to give a bare outline for those who do not know what I am talking about. The Community of Sant?Egidio began in 1968 in Rome, when a group of young Roman Catholic students ? young lay teenagers - met together to pray and to study the Scriptures. They discovered immediately that they could not pray and study the bible without doing what the bible and prayer was driving them towards ? care, hands-on care, of the many poor people around them. So Sant?Egidio, while retaining its firm rootedness in prayer and the scriptures, began organising soup kitchens, medical care for those on the streets, care of abandoned children.. Nearly forty years on, it is still continuing its work, with worship, the bible, prayer and the care of the poor, the disabled and the old, seen not as separate things but as a single seamless unity within a life of Christian discipleship. Sant?Egidio is still a lay community although they keep a very definite and full relationship with the institutional Church. There are now more than 50,000 members world-wide in more than 70 countries, and Sant?Egidio is today also involved in inter-faith dialogue, in peace making both in and between divided countries, in vigorous opposition to the death penalty, in work with AIDS orphans, and in a very strong ecumenical element, particularly with the Orthodox, Lutherans and Anglicans, as you will realise from my involvement.
But at the heart of it all, as I have tried to explain, is this determination to integrate the Word of God with Christian care of the dispossessed of God?s world, as a single indivisible unity, and emphatically not at one remove.. At their nightly worship in the stunningly beautiful basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, you will meet every kind of person imaginable ? not only university lecturers, doctors and teachers, but people who are old and clearly poor, people who are mentally and physically disabled, alongside ordinary families (with husband, wife and a couple of children), but there is no sense of anything other than a single community, at ease and in friendship with one another. A phrase you will often hear in the Community of Sant?Egidio is the call to ?Friendship with the Poor?.
Now think about that phrase - Friendship with the Poor - for one moment. To our ears, it probably sounds as politically incorrect as it is possible to be. ?Friendship?, we would say, sounds so patronising. We would much rather have a nice middle-of-the-road, neutral, non-involved word like ?Engagement with the Poor? or ?Commitment to the Poor?, which would of course make far fewer direct demands upon us. ?The poor?, we might also say, is a condescending sort of phrase. Actually no, it isn?t - there are people who are poor, some very poor, and all around us. What would we like to call them, ?monetarily challenged??
No, the word ?friendship? is crucial because it is what we have to be talking about, if we are not detaching ourselves from the reality of poverty, and if we are not merely producing impressive sound-bites for the media, or churning out gushing rhetoric in order to give ourselves and the faithful members of the Church the impression that we and they do actually care.
So what would ?friendship with the poor? actually mean?
The first thing we would have to say is that it is not friendship to, it is friendship with the poor - a total change in mind-set for all of us. We?re not hiring do-gooders to do good on our behalf. The challenging aspect of Sant?Egidio for us is that their members will give of their own time (even holiday time), at their own expense, in order to give direct hands-on help to those in need, whether the AIDS orphan in the Malawi clinic or the Afghan immigrant in the soup kitchen on a back-street in Rome..
Real friendship is costly, not merely in money but in time. In our everyday life, we do not pay people to do our friendship for us, we do it ourselves. We do not eke out time reluctantly to continue real friendships. Yet we are so full of excuses when it comes to so much else ? How about, ?I really do not have the time, and I certainly do not have the necessary expertise..?? We would have the time if we decided what should be important in our lives, and - let?s face it - just how much expertise is actually required to be kind to someone who is destitute? Yes, we would from time to time be taken advantage of, and no, we wouldn?t like what we would see at close quarters. There mightn?t even be any kudos or public recognition attaching to it. And does that have to matter to us?
Friendship also presupposes an access that goes both ways. As I have suggested already, people of every age, every social class, every economic level and every level of disability and ability, are all equally at home and equally at ease in the Basilica in Trastevere. Returning to the question I asked at the beginning, just how welcome is the outsider - and particularly the less than neat, less than tidy, less than fragrant and less than well-behaved outsider - in our pew, or in our local church community? That beautiful image of the Good Shepherd in Saint John?s Gospel includes the lovely picture of the sheep-fold as the place where people can come and go with ease and without self-consciousness to find pasture. Friendship is not a matter of going out and being friendly to people where and when we choose, on their patch but never on ours. We all love being able to control our space and our privacy (in our generation more than ever before), but you cannot make and keep real friends if your only concern is self-preservation.
No, if we are talking seriously about working directly, as a Church, with the pressing issue of child poverty in this island, north and south, we must make certain difficult costly decisions.
? Are we only going to talk the talk, indulge in the same weary if impressive sounding blather, ask the same tired rhetorical questions, and then possibly hire others - albeit with maximum publicity - to do good on our behalf, because we don?t have the time, the stomach, or the real interest?
? Or are we concerned with changing ? and what a change it would be ? the Church of Ireland into an instrument of the Kingdom of God which is recognisable by its unselfconscious friendship with the poor?
It has to start somewhere.. and if this group of people - who clearly do care - unite in ensuring that change begins with us, something may yet be done. It would require co-ordination, the sacrifice of time and energy (as well as money), and it would certainly mean the relinquishing of much-loved fiefdoms (where I and my cronies can go on doing things our way!), but if we decide not to leave this synod hall before we have sought for ways of even trying to move from well-meaning concern at one remove for the impoverished, hungry and abused child towards the construction of something which integrates the Gospel and the prayer of God?s people in our communities with an unselfconscious and uncondescending friendship with the poor and especially with the child who is poor, we will not have wasted our day entirely.