The passage below belongs to Kip Tiernan, a long time hunger activist who lived in Boston. She was the founder of Rosie’s Place, a highly praised shelter for homeless women in Boston.
We go all of the acceptable routes: we write impassioned letters to policy makers, hold vigils in front of state offices, open soup kitchens and food banks. Yet there are more poor and homeless people than ever before. We could end poverty and homelessness in this country, but we lack the political will. Our theology lacks a certain moral outrage that has not been as harnessed, focused, or driven as it was in the sixties.
We started Rosie’s Place [a shelter for homeless women in Boston, Massachusetts] 14 years ago, when homelessness was a crisis. It is now an accepted chronic act of life. When we started Rosie’s Place, there were maybe 250,000 homeless people. Now there are several million – with hordes more on the way. In 1982, Massachusetts had two-state funded shelters. Today it has over 100, with more being planned, and as many church and other non-state funded shelters.
At first it was okay – the cots, the “it’s better than nothing” mentally (a phrase I am still hearing, after 14 years). “Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency.” Walter Bruggemann said almost 10 years ago. I have been saying a similar kind of thing for a few years myself, only I call it the Politics of Accommodation.
Accommodation to a shelter Society becomes Accommodation to a shelter industry – the fastest growth industry since designer cookies. We are so busy being Do Gooders that we have forgotten how to be Good Doers. We keep finding more places for more cots. We get to feeling kinda’ good about sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. We feed into a frightening but comfortable theology because we know we are doing good things.
Dom Helder Camara – good bishop – not a bad poet – said, “I brought food to the hungry. People called me a saint. I asked why they were hungry. People called me a communist.”
Jesus Christ, as a minister feeding the multitudes was pretty acceptable for a while. But when he questioned authority and demanded justice, he was a pain in the rear and was condemned to death.
Our inheritance from him is a mandate to make justice happen. Justice, not charity. Charity is “three hots and a cot.” Justice is a key to your own door to let the world in if you like and to close the world out if you have to. Justice means having options, charity means not having options.
The South American liberation theology, with which many of us are so enamored, came out of the needs of poor people – an environment of poverty, frustration and deprivation we North Americans created by looting, raping and exploiting their countries.
I have often thought we in North America need our own liberation theology, but that it must come out of the need for us to relinquish. Marie Augusta Neal in The Theology of Letting Go asks a question which will haunt me until the dying day: “When the poor reach out to take what is rightfully theirs, what will the non poor do?” We, the church of North America, a “first world” church in a rapidly growing, “third world” country; America, are rich, powerful and controlling.
This is the key to a Pandora’s Box. How serious would we be about giving up the money, the power, the control? How serious would we be, for instance, about enabling poor people to make the choices? The task of prophetic imagination would be for us to help dismantle our own empire, to empower people to engage in history, to participate in their own destiny.
Poor people are not the children of a lesser God, even though they are treated by many as such. They yearn, pray, work and wish for the same things everyone else does. They just don’t have the options the rest of us do.
I selected the edge as my preferred geography. That’s where I live, but I live there by choice. Poverty is selected for poor people. That’s the difference. I have the option, they don’t.
In opening up Rosie’s Place many years ago, I had a lot of thought behind it. I knew, for instance, it was not a solution. I knew it was one way of alleviating some of the suffering, but that it must not stop me from trying to help eliminate some of the causes for the suffering.
But the closer you get and more infuriated you become about finding and demanding solutions, the less people are willing to listen. I have spent the last 20 years doing my own brand of theology, and its all reform measures: Rosie’s Place, the Boston Food Bank, Health Care for the Homeless, the Boston Women’s Fund and many more teaspoons of sugar.
Yet Jesus himself reminded us that reform was not what we needed. What we needed was an entire turn around. He told us it was the very institutions that created the oppression that had to be changed, that institutions have a lust for power, a desire for prestige, and that only a complete dismantling of those institutions would free us, would let justice happen.
A group of eminent scholars recently met in Texas to talk and reflect on evil. He had been invited to that symposium, what would Jesus have offered? As he did two thousand years ago, he might have said that one stands with the crucified or the crucifier. There is no middle way.
With whom does the church stand today? In some parts of South America it stands with the crucified. That’s what liberation theology is all about. We have that choice, too. We have in the United States the opportunity to be evangelized by poor people. But there is a price. When you stand with poor people, you cannot help but absorb some of the violence directed towards them.
Does the church of North America want to do this? In it, I think, lies our salvation.
Long Pham 
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