What an outstanding post from David Hilfiker at the inward/outward blog I just mentioned in my previous post.   Below is a small portion,  but read the entire post,  and follow the comments as they come.

Does Charity Choke Justice? at inward/outward
But soup kitchens and food pantries are now our standard response to hunger; cities see shelters as adequate housing for the homeless. Our church-sponsored shelters can camouflage the fact that charity has replaced an entitlement to housing that was lost when the federally subsidized housing program was gutted twenty years ago. Soup kitchens can mask unconscionable cuts in food stamps.

The fundamental problem for the poor in our country is not homelessness or AIDS or hunger or the like. They are just symptoms; the problem is injustice. In promoting our institutions, it is natural to emphasize the importance of our own project. But this can lead to subtle impressions that if we just distribute enough food, or create enough bed space, or find enough homes — that is, if we just treat the symptoms — we will have solved “the problem.” Injustice, however, is more deep-seated. It is the inevitable result of the structures of our society — economic, governmental, social, and religious — that undergird inequality.

….So even if we ourselves perceive the need for systemic changes, we may feel compelled to whisper those perceptions rather than shout them for fear of alienating those on whom we most depend. Charity offends almost no one; at one point or another, justice offends practically everyone. Working for justice is messier and far less rewarding than charity.

Hilfiker has lived his commitment to works of mercy with his very livelihood (moving his family to live in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood where he began work as the resident doctor for Christ House in 1986 or so).  His book, Not All Of Us Are Saints: A Doctor’s Journey With the Poor ,  is an account of his experiences in a ghetto not far from the White House.  His experience with the patients and the American health care system makes for some crucial highlighting of the issue of particular vs systemic ;  of acts of mercy AND systemic alternatives;  of what the role of the church is in addressing particular problems of health (medicine and food)  and the systems which keep sending “customers” to places where “acts of mercy” are faithfully carried out.  Hilfiker has lived for 20 years now in the “alternative society” that seeks to respond to the needs of the poor,  and continues to ask and experiment with what can be done to help fix or encourage (or both)  the system “upstream” where the refugees are thrown in to the water,  and finally “picked up” downstream.  Being concerned about what is happening upstream as the task of “rescuing the drowning” goes on,  Hilfiker asks the question that dogs the “agents” of the works of mercy,  figuring out how to work on the root of the problem upstream.

This is also a worthy lesson to consider in the “War On Terror” that so many Bush-supporters seem to vehemently reject when It is suggested that the “War on Terror” should be dealt with at its root: the imperialism of America and the West on a culture who recognizes how they are being damaged by such a prescence of “corrupting influences”. How dare they.  This is America.  They should greet us as “liberators”.  Yeah, right.  Tony Campolo says that we should be working on the “swamps” where misquitos breed and multiply (meaning dealing with the social realities that lie at the root of why terrorism has spread.  America has thrown water on a grease fire by reacting,  predictably, with escalated force.  YOu hear people say “this is the only language they understand”. It seems that this is the case wth us as well.   It’s the only “response language” WE understand.  And the glaring, obvious contrast to the gospel is lost with nationalism that supplants Jesus with nation,  and the “life we live” that is to be protected at all costs.  Blasphmey against God.