The Eye's Treasure is Master

    Matthew 6.19-24:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where theives break in and steal;

"But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume and where thieves do not break in and steal.

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

"The eye is the lamp of the body.  So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.

"If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

"No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

              Demons & Disease

There is a story I have heard from many people—perhaps it counts as a parable now—of a white, Western missionary to Africa bringing the gospel to Africans.  Yet at the same time he also brought his Western, scientific mindset, and he taught it as reality as much as Christ as reality.

The missionary is talking to an African man, telling him that sickness and disease does not in fact come from demons, as this African’s spiritual paradigm taught him; disease comes from bacteria and viruses.  So one day the missionary brings a microscope and shows the African what these microscopic things look like, as proof of his scientific understanding.

The African looks at the missionary and says, “Aha! So that is what a demon looks like!”

I was reminded of this story one week this summer in talking to “Arche”, a former gangbanger, user, and now second-in-charge of Homeboy Industries under Father Greg.

He had used a number of drugs in his life before coming to Homeboy, including coke and meth.  He was telling me that, as he reads the Bible and engages the talk of the spiritual world, of spirits and angels and demons in spiritual warfare, he suspects that when a human being takes one of those drugs, more than chemicals enter the human person.

He tells me that he sees the human being as having free will from reading the Bible; but at the moment the chemicals are let in and start to work on the body, something else starts to work on the soul—evil spirits that seek to take that free will from the person.

He is not the only one to relay this idea to me.  A hostess at the Cafe, whom I will call "Madre," told me once that "you can't be addicted to drugs and not believe in demons."

At least to Arche, taking drugs meant an escape at the time; but it was an escape into bondage.  He liberated his Self into imprisonment.  He illuminated his pain with darkness; "If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!"

              The Eye's Treasure is Master

If the process of sight sustains "the lamp of the body," perhaps the process of ingestion sustains the soul itself.  "You are what you eat," as they say:  Or, rather, you become what you take in.  In days past, Arche's eye sought what drugs offered.  His eye fixated on darkness, he took that darkness into his body, and darkness covered his heart, mind, and soul.

The darkness takes many forms for us.  Pornography, for example, ensnares a grievously high number of people today.  It appeals to the God-given capacity to look at what is beautiful and call it "good" or a "delight to the eyes" (Gen. 1.4, 3.6), even to the good desires of belonging and intimacy, but it removes the person of everyone it touches.  It removes realities and offers power (cf. Gen. 3.1, 4-5), a fantasy.  It is like the drug:  Find what you have been created to seek—in pornography, belonging; in drugs, transcendence—but give up your person to do so.

Arche became an addict to his darkness.  He would sacrifice, temporarily, his free will for the solace found in the high.  "No one can serve two masters," and Arche could not give himself to the drug and yet remain in control of himself (cf. 1 Cor. 9.27).

Because what fills the eye, the body will treasure; and what the body treasures will rule it.

For Arche, his eye was once filled with drugs, and the evil spirits of addiction ruled him.  Now, he fixates upon devotion to his community, belief in his God, discipline of his body, and these things rule him.  And to anyone that knows him now, these things are easily seen pouring forth from him.

One day, the Lord willing, Arche will run Homeboy, after Father G does no longer.  He is someone from the same world as the demographic of Homeboy’s clients, taught and developed by Father G and the Scriptures the Church holds so highly.  His spirituality, and particularly its interaction with reality, will also guide and teach and develop members of this community for years to come.

I do not know if he is right about this spiritual component of drug use, about spiritual and chemical being parallel, but I do not think that he is wrong either.  I do know that his suspicion gave me more insight into the world living around Homeboy.  Even people who do not grow up in the Church, people who have been in the middle of the world, see something spiritual behind the concrete reality that they can experience by their five senses.

And I think I can learn a bit from this.  Perhaps the food I eat is not merely food.  Perhaps the videos and pictures I see are not merely images.  And what do the food I eat, or the music I choose, or the movies I watch all have to say about what I treasure and, therefore, what rules me?

Death in the Barrio

             Job says, “If I ever summoned him [YHWH] and he answered me, I do not believe that he would listen to my voice.  For he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause” (Job 9.16-7 NRSV).

            As this is my favorite book of the Christian Bible, I am glad that the devotional I am reading by Barbara Brown Taylor spent so much time on the story.  Taylor does well by all of the voices of the story, even the oft-criticized, “existential” friends.  She looks at their arguments, recognizes their (human) common sense, but then adds, “The sad hole in this logic is the illusion that pain can be controlled” (166).

            I am finding this recognition of Taylor’s to be a “common sense”-type understanding in the community about Homeboy.  Father Greg writes in his book that young people from these gang-inundated barrios tend to plan their funeral as opposed to their wedding.  If you know death is going to come, why try to stop it?  “Dee,” a coworker of mine from one of these barrios tells me that he doesn’t even make plans.  He takes it “day by day.”

            Day by day.  No real plans.  Hopes, sure, and goals; Dee hopes to have his own house, to have a full-time job more stable than one at a non-profit, to see his son more often but his ex-girlfriend less.  But he doesn’t really plan for these things.  Today, he has a job.  Today, he has a home to go to, and a girl.  Today, he may or may not see his son.  And that is the extent of his plans.

            Why is this so?  “I’ve been shot at more times than I can count,” Dee tells me.  “It’s not a big deal to me.  And I’ve had homies die—like 6 of my best friends have been shot and died.  But then I know homies who have been shot and lived.  One was shot 19 times; one was shot in the head.”

            Bullets will fly—Dee can’t stop it.  Homies will die—Dee can’t stop it.  Today Dee’s alive—so he will live it, day by day.

            “After a while there is no reason to talk about it.  When pain [or death] is as ubiquitous as air, why comment on it?” (160).  There have been deaths in this community over my summer here.  Almost every week seems to have someone else’s wake or funeral happening.  And the people I see each day, in dealing with these deaths, speak of it with all the melancholy you might expect but tinged with a “business as usual” feel.

            If Job's story tells us anything, it tells us that God pays attention to what we cry out.  Remember, the book says that Job never sinned against God, even though Job called God's own righteousness into question.  Job thought God's tempest would destroy him—God shows up in a tempest and does not.  If you follow the content of Job's laments, you can see that God's interrogating reply targets that exact content.  God's honoring the lament, answering it directly yet transcendently. 

         Contrary to popular belief, God does NOT tell Job to "put your big boy pants on."  To read this as such is to not be able to read.  God commands Job to "gird up your loins"—a command also found in the Passover story, telling people to prepare for imminent deliverance.

            I ask myself, "If I were the pastor of a church for this community, what would I hope to see in them?"

            I would hope that God would not be silent, even though I know that might come in a horrifying way—as a tempest, a whirlwind, like it was for Job.  I wonder if pain is necessary to break Dee out of the “day by day” malaise; I wonder if he even needs to; I wonder if more pain would only fall on deaf ears, as his pain has been great even at a young age.

            I would hope that people in this community would allow themselves to hope enough in their own futures to make plans, even though I know it will be painful.  Even though I know it is entirely possible any given person might not make it through the year, the week, the day.  I would hope that deliverance would be imminent for them.  For decades now, it has not been.

            In a place with this much grief, I would expect people to cry out much more, to “fill the air with [their] furious poetry” like Job (166).  Perhaps I just do not see it.  But I do sense a distance between many people here and God.  Not necessarily a disbelieving one, but a cognitive one.  One that sounds like Job’s quote above.  Some have explicitly stated to me a belief that God does not take part in this world, and leaves us to our own machinations.

            Perhaps this is the only way to reconcile the pain—and death—that they know intimately with the God they do not.