By Jim Harney

To stand on behalf of those who toil is dangerous. In certain parts of the world, people pay up with their lives when they make a decision to defend labor over capital. And when people step into the thick of the pain done to working people and confront that pain brought on by systems of injustice, a seed of hope is planted.

A world of possibility surfaces when human beings begin to redefine reality. The word reality has its roots in Spanish, meaning royal, and in English, meaning regal – the class that controls wealth does the defining. Ignacio Ellacuría, a Jesuit priest murdered in El Salvador, indicated that we had to redefine reality – turn it around 180 degrees – and because of that he paid with his life. He called for a civilization of Poverty over against a civilization of Capital, which now violates so many people.

Imagine. Pray. Resist. Build. It comes as a challenge to pause and break company with those who define reality so that we can’t imagine ourselves doing all of this. Praying so that our lives depended upon it. So that we might resist – imagining ourselves in the thick of the suffering of the world and building a beloved community. The work of our hands, our minds riveted to the task, and our bodies feeling the power that comes with linking with others a threadbare distance from death.

Keeping the poor out is so much easier than ending up in common cause with them. To go with their exclusion means that we don’t move a peg in life; it means we’re cut off from the juices of the world. A refusal to keep the poor distant means that eros that was meant to pump through us like the air we breathe suffocates. Robbed of eros, we don’t smile. There is no joy, no celebration: none of what perks the best in us.

There is something to meeting head-on the evil of the world and being in solidarity with the impoverished – hope abounds. Just thinking about it means that I have to struggle for breath.

We live in land infected by a neoliberal economic policy: the infection is global. It borrows into the culture that fashions us, posturing us to love things; setting us up to buy and sell in a feverish pace so we don’t get time to think of any other meaning in life other than money; the more-of-it-the-better-regardless-of-the-consequences mentality. As the infection grows, our work takes on less meaning and we become a planet’s distance from ourselves and anything that smells of life.

In the thick of all this, what is there to count on other than things? We become things. Money defines who we are and what we do and where we go. What is there to count on? How do we maintain the ability to make promises and reinvent our world, explain the fire in us? In this infectious world of market-driven forces it becomes a crime to feel all the out-of-sight things at work that make for cruelty. And then: defy them.

Hunting them out; doing the work to expose them never was easy. Usually, those who took on this task had a rope put around their neck, met the guillotine, or were left to rot behind prison walls. Doing the work means opening the door to the hurt of the world and refusing to go along with it. It’s all that I can count on – never to turn my back and run from it. Too much depends on it. It’s the only thing that gives me life. When I open the door I see people in situations of degradation, hear the clamor and see “the living activity of the dead.” Something happens, so powerful that I don’t know how to explain it. And to try to means that I need others who care, and who have at some time in their lives tried to open the door; it’s in the trying that we come up with language that allows us to talk with one another, create community and name the world; develop a language that wrestles with what is, because what is lies at the belly of vocabulary that we use. So opening the door and the attempt to walk into a broken world brings out the poet in us.

As the neoliberal infection spreads, making consumers out of all of us, our ability to express inner feelings becomes jeopardized. Language becomes battered by the thousands of things that we can buy on the market, every possible desire fulfilled with the purchase of an appropriate thing: all but meaning. The assault of consumerism on all of us is so great that some have called it a form of genocide, for it is an attack on the dignity of all of us. Commercial language reduces us to a common denominator of a sixth grade level as it stimulates us to buy; generates the habit of buying and possessing in every part of our being; to a point where the transcendent is lost. With the best in us under such heavy assault, it comes as no surprise that “compassion fatigue” sets in and isolates us from one another and from experiencing the transcendent and the joy of being in relationship with the crucified of the world. With the demise of language, where substantive conversation about meaning in life has shriveled us, is it any wonder that civil society lies in ruins as more and more people converse about the buys and the things they have experienced at malls where they spend so much of their time, making shopping the national past time?

So when things go awry, I know there are others who wrestle with the pain done to human beings, and that’s what makes me feel human, having those solitary thoughts that others are in this too. In different parts of the globe, others take the risk of building what the market can’t buy: relationships of solidarity, and a spirituality that leads women and men to claim an option for the poor as an essential ingredient of the human.

I came across a poem that brings me back to opening the door and walking through it. Roberto Sosa, a Honduran poet resonates with me:

The Only Door

Somewhere at this very moment
someone
in confused complacency
is setting down in beautiful language
the science of lying.

Meanwhile, at different points of our planet
groups of ex-children
dazzled by the gleam of cash registers
writhe in hunger.

Nevertheless far or near,
there are other human beings who believe in the right to beauty
who understand
that this morning is the only door
through which we can enter happiness
as a liberated people.

Adrian Rich keeps reminding me to read as though my life depended upon it. Sosa brings that counsel to me as well. I need to head what both of them have to say so that I connect with the ex-children who agonize in states of hunger. The ex-children I saw in El Salvador sniffing glue and hardly able to communicate bring home as well the urgency of untangling the relationship between their horror and those who utilize the science of lying, the hurt that comes with that lying. Yet if I but tap the poet and believe “that this morning is the only door” then there is possibility to say with bell hooks: “(We) can take our pain, work with it, recycle it, and transform it so that it becomes a source of power.”