As I head in to Bell’s final chapter in Liberation Theology After the End of History, which is entitled “The Refusal to Cease Suffering”, I read this:

Forgiveness entails not just a renunciation (of the “right” to insist, often by violence, on what is one’s “due”) ; there is a substitution or replacement as well. Specifically, the agonistic logic of rights is replaced with the peaceable logic of reconciliation. The end of forgiveness is the return to God, reconciliation. God in Christ extends the gift of forgiveness to humanity for the sake of reconciling humanity to God, and Christians are empowered to receive and return the gift through its interhuman extension for the sake of reconciliation with God and one another.

Bell, p. 150

Immediately my mind goes back to the major thesis of Charles Marsh’s book, The Beloved Community, which he introduces with an observation about MLK:

Although a boycott was neccessary in Montgomery to bring an end to discriminatory laws, King urged the church people in the movement to keep in mind that a boycott and its achievments do not in themselves represent the goal. “The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, ” he said, “the end is the creation of the beloved community”.

Marsh, p. 1

Bell goes on to describe the REAL SIN of capitalism:

The sin of which capitalism is guilty in the final analysis, is not that of the gross violation of basic rights, especially the rights of the poor to life. Rather capitalism is sin becuase it fractures the friendship of humanity in God. It disrupts the original, peaceable flow of desire that is charity; it ruptures the sociality of desire, which by nature seeks out new relations in the joyous conviviality that is love. Capitalism is sin becuase it harnesses the productive power of desire in its original mode, which is donation or giving, to the market. IN so doing it corrupts it, rendering it propritary, with the result that desire no longer flows in the harmonic symphony of joy that is the fruit of the creation and extension of the non-proprietary (that is, participatory) relations of desire, but is submerged in the agonistic struggle that is contemporary life under savage capitalism, where even the excluded poor, who can hardly be characterized as driven by a passion to acquire and consume, are nevertheless forced to compete with their brothers and sisters for life.

Bell, p. 151

I would elaborate and suggest that this corruption of desire also pollutes the community of the church such that the beloved community is obstructed; the drive of corrupted desire steers us away from the reconciliing community and shapes us, conditions us, compels us, to tend to our own desires first; and thus “discourage” us from pursuing the desires which compel us toward community. Even the most “justice-emphasizing” and “justice-activist” churches do this. The neccessary structures upon which this “work” depends are set aside , since the implication seems to be that to tend to the inward journey and the disciplines of giving attention to the journeys of one another is to take time and energy from the already dfifficult task of “working for justice”.

I myself am glad to have groups that do this and to which I can contribute, but I also recognize and long for the accompanying attention and disciplines (the alternative “technologies of desire” needed to “fund resistance to capitalism”). I continue to give money becuase I know that in a sense, I am “holding out” a fuller giving of my personal energies because I sense that there is a neglect of attention to discerning call, and discovering gifts, and listening to God for new and needed structures of resistance and mercy and alternative emodiments.

This throws our consideration of this into the classic struggle between the Journey Inward and the Journey Outward, of which the writings of Elizabeth O’Connor attest and give testimony, and of which we desperately need more and ongoing narratives to bring to the light of day the dark inner struggles we have in bringing to ministry the wholeness of dimension it requires in order for us be faithful.