tempus fugitive

Originally I was going to write to a couple of people with this but my desire for readership as well as a present lack of time and feeling of intellectual grace has swayed me to post it here instead. I might still send it to a couple of people but for now it will get posted here.

The Cross in the Garden
By Chris Rooney

I feel moved to write about a concept that’s been bouncing around in my head for a few days now, the concept of Divine Futility; let me try and explain what I mean.

Last week I was talking with a girl here who was frustrated with her work in the soup kitchen. She was upset because the work seemed to accomplish nothing. She questioned the purpose of feeding people who were not contributing anything to society—who had no inherent worth.

She complained that the work we do by feeding them does nothing to help them better themselves financially or increase their quality of life. These same people would just come back tomorrow, just as poor, just as hungry, just as dirty, and just as high; and the prospect is very real that some would return every day of the rest of their lives. As she was telling me of her experience when the idea of a Divine Futility came into my head It sounded nice, to me the words ring poetically, they evoke images of people practicing the works of mercy, and of living out the sermon on the mount.

These things are as romantic and noble to me now as were the revolutionary efforts of Leon Trotsky or Che Guevara in my youth, as a member of a revolutionary socialist organization. It occurs to me now that these two romances are not too far removed one from the other. The guerrilla fights against armies controlled by the wealthy and the oppressors who benefit from political and economic injustice.

The guerrilla is a member of a small band of comrades, friends, they are three, five, maybe seven if they are new or lucky. They have little support in the field, no plains, no missiles, 20-year old Kalashnikovs and machetes; they are alone in the jungle.

The Armies have legions of well-trained and disciplined men and women, the latest weapons and technology; they have plains, bombs, missiles and endless ammunition. The guerrilla has only one thing up on most soldiers they have their convictions, they have the outrage that drove them into the wilderness.

The life of the Catholic Worker shares a common romance for me. The Catholic Worker fights against the systems, the paradigms, the powers and the principalities, which drive the same oppressors. The Catholic Worker tries to embody the best qualities of humanity through the call of the Gospels, non violence, service of the poor and voluntary poverty in order to share in the burden of those most in need, those people on societies margins. To the guerrilla the battle ends when he’s dead, to the Catholic Worker the battle ends when we are raised up on the last day.

For the guerrilla the armies of wealth keep coming without end. For the Catholic Worker the armies of poverty keep coming forever. And this in both cases could be a romantic futility, but what makes our work Divinely Futile? I kept asking myself about this while not giving any real thought, and then on Tuesday in back of the Hippie Kitchen I looked up at the Cross in the garden, mutilated, run through with rusted spikes, nails and coils of razor wire; a Cross of beautiful rest, a rest as sweet as jasmine and as soft and as comfortable as goose down and Egyptian cotton. I looked at this Cross and asked in a moment of prayer to understand this Divine Futility and it was in the sign of the Cross that I found it.

Christ knew, maybe his entire life, what he was born to do; it was revealed to him all that was to happen, from his betrayal by Judas Iscariot to his betrayal by all those who have come after.

I have no doubt that Christ saw the purges in the Church, the Inquisitions, The Crusades, the Ku Klux Klan, Santeria, the Conquistadores, residential schools, paedophile priests, and every war for the last two thousand years. I believe he saw these things, and that as he prayed for the cup to pass him by he also saw Saint Francis and Saint Claire, He saw Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, he saw Dorothy Day praying at the Lincoln Memorial, he saw Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, and Tom Fox and he saw all of us and all of you doing whatever we can, ignorant of the effects save for the knowledge that a few hundred people had lunch or morning coffee and some oatmeal. And it is my belief that these visions gave him the courage and the perseverance to take the cup of his death. A death that by the logic of this world was an abject failure, but was transformed into the final victory, in this death and resurrection God has been glorified, and Christ in him and maybe even he in us.

If you knew that no matter what you chose to do to help your fellows in humanity that you would never live to see the fruits of your labour, that your children and grand children might never live to see the fruits of that labour either. If you could know that your grand children would be doing the very same work or damage control. Would you give up, stop serving and go do something else? Or would you find joy and a strange comfort in the thought that the view is better from the Cross? <