Paul Elie's book on 20th Century American Catholic writers weaves four lives together. One of them is Dorothy Day. One of the more sympathetic and thoughtful interpretations of what Day was about can be found in Volume 1 of James McClendon's Systematic Theology, subtitled Ethics.

Dorothy Day was about peacefully making trouble; and she was about guarding and protecting the vulnerable; and she was about building community using the flawed material of human lives often enough distorted through sin and suffering; and she was about hospitality as a habit of radical welcome in which each stranger is greeted as Christ.

Like many odd and hard to accommodate people, she was a Christian who inconveniently took Jesus seriously, and interpreted the Sermon on the Mount literally. As if Jesus could have actually meant, seriously intended, that his followers should love their enemies. As if turning the other cheek was any strategy for changing the world. As if forgiveness and peacemaking could be practiced with any hope of curbing brutality, converting hatred to love – as well expect people to beat their swords into ploughshares and so cultivate food instead of killing the enemy.

When Dorothy Day boarded the Greyhound bus to travel to Koinonia Farm run by Clarence Jordan, she did so for reasons of peacefully making trouble, and in doing so trying to convert trouble to peaceableness. The farm had been attacked by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members offended by the racial integration practiced on the farm – drive by shooting, arson, assault, vandalism, were commonplace. Dorothy Day took her place in the rota of those who stood guard overnight, in a truck parked under a light, and the truck was shot up by automatic weapon fire. She was unhurt. It seems a futile, reckless and provocative course of action, to put yourself in the line of fire. Flannery O'Connor made the astonishingly dismissive comment, "that's a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc". There are those who would say that of Someone else – "that's a mighty long way to come to be crucified etc".

The picture of Dorothy Day shows the face of a troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble for the power holders, disturbing the peace of the status quo, a sharp fragment of gravel inside the boots of the troopers. The photo is a powerful Advent image. A poster sized copy is up on Stuart's study wall at the College – it is reproduced in Elie's book, and I think it is a stunning image of Christian resistance. Mess with the rest but don't mess with the best, huh?

"When Jesus said love your neighbour, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbour. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something of the order of "A neighbour (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's  own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as the neighbour to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort of kind whatsoever.

Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbour is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you."

(Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), pp. 65-66.

Two pictures face my desk in my study at College. One is the Rublev icon of the Trinity. The other is the above exegesis of the Good Samaritan by Van Gogh. Both were gifts from good friends – and both have nourished my mind, my heart and my imagination for years. And I think Buechner's fun-poking at the reluctant dutifulness or trip-up intentions implied in the lawyer's question capture exactly the subversive and transformative nature of parable – the lawyer who lived by definitions, legal terminology, words of entrapment finely balancing precision and ambiguity, professionally trained in loaded questions, wants his answer. Instead, Jesus told a story, in which, if the lawyer looked closely, he would see himself, and discover not an answer but a judgement, a calling, and a way into the Kingdom.

Michael J Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God. Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), Page 128.
Picture "The Face of the Saviour of the World", Noehani Harsono, Indonesia)

As one who stands in a radical spiritual tradition, when it comes to theology and its impact on our civil and political life, I'm all for asking serious questions about normalcy, status quo, use and abuse of power, patriotism, and the religious validation of national and international exercises of political and military power. Time we started more faithfully attending to "the counter imperial claims of the gospel". Hm?

(Wish Michael Gorman had chosen a better sub-title for his book- good fun memorising the sub-title and going into Wesley Owen to ask if it's in stock though…..  :))

I think it was Edmund Burke who said the body politic should be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination. At a time when a whole world faces some of the biggest moral, political and economic challenges for decades, it does look as if we need enhanced ethical imagination and revitalised imaginative morals. Problem is morality is boring. Morality limits our options, constrains our freedoms, disqualifies our preferred choices. And imagination is too busy creating unsustainable fantasies, celebrating the ephemeral, serving up stories, ideas and images relevant to the desires of a culture. Relevance to the culture is the prime directive where the culture in question, and its desires, happen to be consumer fuelled and credit driven.

"Clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination" – is that how to describe Wednesday's budget? Moral imagination, is that a phrase that is any help to a world economy imploding because there wasn't enough imagination to envisage the consequences of economic fantasy? And not enough morality to see that the prime directive reduces human beings and our projects to instituionalised but uncontrolled appetite?

As a reminder of an alternative worldview, where moral imagination critiques the body politic, and where the desires of the culture were so dominant they crushed the poorest, I've been listening to the prophet Amos, (reading his words out loud):

That's the moral bit.

That, and much else, is the imagination bit.

Moral imagination, the capacity to see wrong and name it, and to see it against the history of a world where the rich waste and spoil by their greed, where the poor are cheated and the body politic have lived as if fantasies are made real by systemic denial of reality. The credit crunch has been described as a problem of biblical proportions. The right diagnosis is certainly of biblical proportions – a lack of moral imagination, economics without enough ethics to control greed, and selfishness devoid of imagination enough to measure consequences. No "wardrobe of the moral imagination". 

I'll continue to read Amos…..and Micah…..and Isaiah. Because moral imagination, like chronic credit, doesn't grow on trees. It is the fruit of a theology that ascribes justice, mercy, compassion and wisdom to the creator God whom we marginalise at our cost. Maybe the failure of banks once imagined globally secure, was due to the creation of banks no longer ethically sound. The spinners of economic fantasies from financial imagination, are now naked of the virtues that both make money and make making money more just. Or to go back to Burke's image, the body politic and the body economic should once again be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination, in garments that should never have gone out of fashion – compassion mercy, justice, wisdom. Attributes of God, each of them, and thus theological concepts which are needed to inform, then form, then transform the moral imagination of our culture.

And I'm left with the disquieting question of where, and when, and how the communities of Jesus Christ we call the Church, bear witness, by the kinds of communities we are, to a different economics, a richer more humane understanding of the body politic, a different dress sense when it comes to the moral values with which, as followers of Jesus, we clothe ourselves. The credit crunch and its consequences for the poor, vulnerable and marginalised people and peoples of the world, isn't just the fault of the bankers and the governments. The Church is at its least attractive, and least "missionally incarnational" (sometimes I like using words I dislike!), when the Church scolds 'them' and we fail to show by our own repentance, that we too took our eye off God. You cannot serve God and money – so either you serve God,  – or you make money God and solve the dilemma.

The Lord's Prayer…."Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven".

What would that look like in economic, political and moral terms?

Use your moral imagination!

William Stringfellow asks at the end of his essay on 'Discernment', "What befits Christian witness?" In a world as dangerously broken as the one we now inhabit, sense-surrounded by the life denying noise of Babel, how is Christian witness to be evidenced? Here's his answer:

The portrait is of the black activist, poet, diplomat, educator and musician, James Weldon Johnson. (d. 1938). Not so well known as MLK and other civil rights campaigners but I came across references to him recently and went chasing. In all the euphoria surrounding Obama, such great men as Johnson are too easily and conveniently forgotten.

Amongst the most interesting things I found out:

Johnson qualified for the bar but found the law boring, not least because it functioned within the way things are…and he wanted to be a catalyst for change.

He composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' a song that eventually became a national anthem for American Blacks, and with his brother composed music and lyrics for many Broadway shows.

He was a leading influence in the Harlem Renaissance, a resurgence of black cultural and artistic activity in the 1920's, and a vocal supporter of black artists struggling against white prejudice in the publishing houses.

He lived to see the first all African American orchestra formed, a symbol of collective creative energy, disciplined harmony and human co-operation that transcended socially contrived discrimination.

And not least, Johnson was a poet, whose poetry was unashamedly political because he knew the power of words to frame a different reality, and shape political vision. MLK used one of his poems in the great landmark speech 'Where do we go from here?' in 1968, 30 years after Johnson's death in a rail accident.

Men like Johnson created the context, set out the paramenters, exposed the issues, modelled the tactics, that would later coalesce and radicalise into a full civil rights movement.

The words MLK quoted are from "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

         

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days

When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place

For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way

That with tears hath been watered.

We have come treading our paths

Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the bright gleam

Of our bright star is cast.