Madeleine L'Engle on causes.

I'm rereading The Irrational Season, which is L'Engle's book of short essays organized around the church calendar. I've underlined a lot of passages this time (ok, I've underlined them in my head, because I'm too lazy to find a pencil right now), but I especially liked and wanted to share this one, especially in light of recent discussions about politics, liberalism and conservatism:

"I may not want to be associated with much that passes today for Christianity; nevertheless I am part of it, even when I rebel because being a Christian is becoming more and more a do-it-yourself activity. I rebel when the Church feels that it has to succeed. My theology of failure is incomprehensible to many, intolerable to some. I am saddened when the very air we breathe throughout Christendom is Pelagian: the Church can take care of all of the ills of the world as long as we are morally virtuous and politically liberal. Not that I am against either virtue or liberalism! But I watch in horror as a great liberal, passionately interested in the cause of--shall we say--the leper, very carefully avoids speaking to the leper in his path, in order to get on with the cause. And it occurs to me that Jesus couldn't have cared less about the cause of the leper or the rights of the leper. But when there was a leper in his path he did not walk around him, like the priest walking ont he opposite side of the road from the man set upon by thieves, on his way to Jerusalem to preach his famous sermon on compassion. Jesus stopped. And healed. And loved. Not causes, but people."

She goes on to point out that the incarnation is an indication that human beings need to touch flesh and blood and deal with particular people to know compassion, and how the "global village" can actually invite us to complacency, while dealing with the broken lives in our immediate vicinity, including our own, can lead us closer to God and others.

It's also interesting to read this in light of what is happening in the Anglican church, of which L'Engle was a member. She wrote this in 1977, and while she's not a church-basher, it's clear that she was noticing issues that have becoming full-blown schisms today.

What's striking to me is the way it highlights the way that politics are more often than not a way of distancing oneself from humanity rather than being in the trenches. I was quite floored when I read Arthur Brooks' book on charity, because it just didn't jibe with my sense of how we were supposed to understand who cared and who didn't. If you cared, we've always heard, you'd be down with a particular political program. But then you notice, like L'engle, that the guy preaching the political message of love for the poor and the oppressed is hanging out in Beverly Hills and giving a fraction of one percent of his income to charity, or that the guy who really wants the government program to provide healthcare to the indigent doesn't himself bother to pay taxes. There seems to be a kind of disconnect between how people vote and how they use their own time and treasure. And then it's THAT observation that starts to make the whole thing make sense--that one of the reasons it's easy to be drawn into a politics of helping the oppressed is because it's so so so much easier than actually stopping in the street to lift someone out of the gutter with one's own hands.

That hardly means that there's no role for the state in relieving misery or suffering. But it does tell us as Christians that we can't substitute casting ballots for getting our hands dirty.