Wanted: Good Samaritan
Ivan Illich told me that he wakes up each morning wondering, what will be
today's 'pilon'. We were riding along route 95 on our way to a weekend
to which he had
invited a group of friends to explore the question "Are there cultural alternatives
to human service programs?" The gathering was to be at the home of Bob Duggan
in Columbia Maryland. Duggan had been Illich's altar boy and language guide when
Illich first came to America - "No Monsignor Illich, you must say 'donkey'.”The
Blessed Mother went all the way to Bethlehem on her skinny little donkey."
We would, this weekend, compare the story of the Department of Health and
Human Services with the story of the Good Samaritan. I would have the
time to confront
the questions of what does Hillary Clinton's National Health plan have to
do with the head bowed stance of a man in the subway barrio who shoved
a paper
into my hands - lab results - that said, HIV+. There would be time to ask
if all my
meetings, fund raising, accounting, reports and proposals and telephone calls
institutionalize doing good, or is it meant to make doing good unnecessary?
Or worse: does this way of responding to troubles make doing good impossible,
imprudent,
or illegal? I now witness a campaign here in Philadelphia. The city government
opens a shelter and then asks our support to outlaw feeding the hungry, or
giving to beggars, while in City Council criminalizing homelessness is debated.
Agreeing
or disagreeing aside, to me the wonder of it is that I have come to accept
that this kind of discussion is sensible.
When we sense some evil exists that is bigger, more widespread, or further
away than we can personally touch, our response is often to demand the organizations
of which we are part to respond. Sadly we often witness that something that
had
seemed to be a generous impulse becomes corrupted - I don't understand all
what is happening in Somalia but now I recoil at the sight of pictures of
the bloated
dragged body of a soldier, as I had earlier of swollen-bellied children.
And I have trouble connecting the dissipated vitality and health of the
subway
dwellers that are encircled by the magnificent medical institutions of Philadelphia
(Jeff,
Hahnemann, Temple, Graduate and HUP) to the nation's discussion of the care
of our health. Last night I visited Rabi, who until last week was living
underground at Broad and Spruce. He is now in the step-down ICU of Jeff
hospital receiving
$3000/day health care, and if he survives he will likely be back dwelling
in the subway in a couple weeks (or worse if the city sweeps the homeless
out
of
there.)
Beside this sad senselessness is another kind of senselessness less sad.
Illich's 'pilon". He tells me that in Mexico, at last call in a public house, the
publican will sometimes make a gift to people present more or less out of sheer
joy that they have had this time together. It is a surprise, it is not a sales
ploy, it is an unexpected bestowal of something undeserved. It is a gift, it
is pilon. It makes no sense.
The Samaritan could have kept walking. This is what is so remarkable, he
could have, he was entirely free to have, kept on his way. The act would
not have
been human had he not had this liberty. The great chance, a great chance,
exists for
us not only in building immensely powerful institutions - I ride down the
expressway look down the river from the Girard Avenue and I am so proud
of this city we've
built, its skyline and history - but we are also frustrated by our constructions
- I remember a night near Christmas some years ago when a homeless man looked
up at the magnificent lit up skyscrapers and asked me "What are we going
to tell our grandchildren when the ask why we made such wonderful buildings and
then made the people sleep outside them?" We are stunned sometimes by
the extent of troubles that we assume, not always rightly that a large scale
response
is necessary and workable. We ask the 'Good Samaritan Corporation' to make
sure victims of brigandage are cared about.
In 321AD, at the same time that Constantine was making the Christian Church
a legitimate part of the Roman Empire, the church erected the Zeno Dociendi
- the
home of strangers - a shelter for the wandering homeless. Until this time
it had been the duty of the head of each household to offer hospitality
to the
homeless, now it became the duty of the recently institutionalized church.
The relocation
of the obligation of hospitality didn't have to relocate the opportunity
but something was changed. The gift, the pilon; something that can't
be relocated
to companies, governments, agencies from the heart in which it arises.
Illich has written that we have constructed for ourselves a regime of scarcity.
Children have always been abundantly curious and have learned - now the need
education and that is scarcer and more expensive than curiosity. People have
always gotten sick and gotten better, have suffered and have died, have consoled
and comforted one another in this - now we can no longer afford this without
adding to the national debt. To dwell in a God-given place has always been
our lot - now we have uprooted ourselves and only the well-off can afford
to make
a home.
I know there are places on earth where it is impossible to be homeless.
There one's home could be no more separated from a person than his leg.
Here we have
been able to bring into being a situation where it is possible to estrange
- to make one a stranger to - one's own home. This also does not make sense,
but
it nonetheless is.
Joe Ferry, Bethesda
