faith, the poor, & Farmer
I’m going to post this because I found it provocative. They are a series of quotes from my Journal that contains quotes from Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest for Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2004):
While in Haiti, Farmer became interested in Liberation Theology. He himself is Roman Catholic, but had never came across this kind of Catholicism:
“The Marxists Farmer had read, and many of the intellectuals he knew, disdained religion, and it was true that some versions of Christianity, and more than a few missionaries, invited impoverished Haitians into what Pere Lafontante called ‘the cult of resignation’, into accepting their lot patiently, anticipating the afterlife…
“But the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: ‘the shrewd conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score” (p. 78).
Tracy writes: “And if the landless peasants of Cange needed to believe that someone omniscient was keeping score, by now Farmer felt the need to believe something like that himself. In the peasant phrase, an unnecessary death was ‘a stupid death,’ and he was seeing a lot of those. ‘Surely someone is witnessing this horror show?’ he’d say to himself. ‘I know it sounds shallow, the opiate thing, needing to believe, palliating pain, but it didn’t feel shallow. It was more profound than the other sentiments I’d known, and I was taken with the idea that in an ostensibly godless world that worshiped money and power or, more seductively, a sense of personal efficacy and advancement, like at Duke and Harvard, there was still a place to look for God, and that was in the suffering of the poor. You want to talk crucifixion? I’ll show you crucifixion, you bastards’” (p. 84).
Farmer continues: “The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor—not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too—made me even more convinced that faith must be something good” (p. 85).
What do you think?
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surely this is one of the ugly underbellies of religion. Promises of an afterlife a plenty have, for as long as religion has existed, been a means to enable the voluntary imposition of unacceptable conditions of existence and the gratuitous tolerance of suffering. There is nothing wrong with living in the now and living your life to its fullest. Sacrifice, in the religious sense, is an illusion.
Hi Dave and Jake. I appreciate your comments. As a minister’s kid, I always subscribed, in theory, to an Eden-like eternity spent with Christ, while simultaneously harbouring a secret resentment that my time here on earth could be cut short. As a child, I used to pray things like “Jesus, no offense, but you could you please hold off on coming back until after Christmas…until I get married…until I have kids…until I meet my grand-children..” Okay, okay…I still pray these things! As an adult, I have managed to sustain a belief and a hope in the afterlife promised to us in Christ, though I can’t begin to envision how or what it will be. Quite honestly, I don’t spend much time thinking on it. Like you,Jake, I believe that there are many who dream of heaven solely as a means of coping with their intolerable conditions. Though I am truly grateful for the promise of eternity, I do love my life. Despite the injustice and suffering here on earth, I like it here! I choose to live my life in the fullest and most meaningful way that I can…loving, laughing, making a difference in whatever way I can. Sounds a little “Polly-Anna,” but it’s genuine. I don’t believe that GOD created humanity to endure horrific suffering soley as a means of manipulating us into longing for the afterlife. I think he truly meant us to have joy. Sigh…if it weren’t midnight, and I wasn’t heading to off to bed knowing I’ll be up every two hours all night long with my baby daughter, I might do a little more in terms of backing up my idealistic, Polly-Anna comments. Perhaps another time.
Don’t know who you are, Jake, but I value your contributions. Thanks.
Points where I agree:
1. Using the promise of eternal life to oppress people and treat them cruelly is ugly.
2. Using the promise of eternal life to consign ourselves to “the cult of resignation” when it comes to suffering is underbelly-ish.
3. There is nothing wrong with living in the now and living my life to its fullest.
4. When religion says that those it oppresses are living sacrificially, it is an illusion… smoke and mirrors to distract from its cruel inhumanity.