THE TORONTO STAR:
The Poorer They Are, the Harder They Suffer

By Stephen B. Scharper

James Conlon. At the Edge of Our Longing: Unspoken Hunger for Sacredness and Depth. Toronto: Novalis, 2004.

The environmental and social horrors of Hurricane Katrina, which rendered thousands of New Orleans’ most vulnerable residents—the poor, the elderly, people of colour—bereft of homes and help, exposed, through roiling floodwaters, a ghastly underside of U.S. society.

Like a Jerry Springer show gone bad, the footage from New Orleans revealed desperately poor minorities struggling to survive an ecological disaster that quickly segued into a social horror. Days upon days persons struggled to survive, without food or potable water while awaiting rescue that often didn’t arrive until after death staked its claim. Many in North America and around the world realized, for the first time, that these persons had somehow been transformed from U.S. citizens to non-persons. Owing to their colour and economic caste, many observed, they fell below the radar screen of the Bush Administration’s concern. Katrina made clear that short-sighted ecological policies, such as the destruction of surge-absorbing wetlands for oil refineries and cut-backs to levee reinforcement—have the most devastating effects upon the impoverished and marginalized.

For the two-thirds of the world, particularly in nations of the South who daily dwell in grueling poverty, this non-person status is a familiar one. When natural disasters befall them, they have learned not to expect much help from governments that have long abandoned them, literally and figuratively, to the garbage heaps of their societies.

Writing from El Salvador, Jesuit priest and theologian Jon Sobrino, in his latest book, Where Is God? Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity, and Hope, reflects on the catastrophic earthquakes of January 13 and February 13, 2001 that pummeled his nation, leaving several thousand dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. As Sobrino notes, living in El Salvador is always a heavy burden. Officially, half the population dwells in extreme poverty, and many still suffer injuries and psychological scars from the civil way of 1980- 1992, which claimed over 75,000 lives, including six of Sobrino’s Jesuit confreres (dragged from their beds and butchered by the Salvadoran military in 1989.)

For Sobrino, these earthquakes are not just tragedies, but “x-rays” of the country. “It is mostly poor who get killed, the poor who are buried, the poor who face enormous obstacles trying to rebuild their lives.” He likens these natural disasters to cemeteries—some tombs are grand and “sumptuous pantheons of luxurious marble. Others, almost without names or crosses, are piled up in hidden places and consigned to anonymity. These are the majority.”

Sobrino highlights a nexus between environmental degradation and victimization of the poor. Before the 2001 quakes, ecologists and engineers warned that the deforestation of El Salvador’s Balsamo Mountains rendered any housing developments in the area extremely vulnerable to mudslides. Ignoring these protests, hundreds of homes were built, and when the quakes occurred, 270 houses and hundreds of residents were buried in mud four meters deep.

In reflecting on the earthquakes from a Christian perspective, Sobrino points to the need for solidarity rather than simple charity, a sustained commitment to the areas not only to rebuild their hoes, but to build up their communities and weave the “fabric of human relations.”

Sobrino wonders if, in the broader view, we can have real solidarity on a planet where one child in the First World consumes as many resources as 400 children in Ethiopia. Calling for a type of Marshall Plan for the South, Sobrino suggests that unless we “build the Third World, the whole planet is at risk.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand, especially when it is slammed by earthquakes or hurricanes.

James Conlon, an Ontario-born Catholic Priest now teaching in California, also strives to bring the notion of solidarity with the poor into conversation with those advancing solidarity with the4 earth. In his most recent work, At the Edge of Our Longing: Unspoken Hunger for Sacredness and Depth, Conlon strives to meld the “preferential option for the poor” of Jon Sobrino with the “new cosmology” of “geologian” Thomas Berry, who underscores a sense of awe and mystery at the unfolding universe as the basis of ecological concern.

“The world today is one of unregulated markets, “Conlon writes, “where there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor; where the ecological consequences of our destructive behaviour are increasingly visible and felt, where the longings of life are unsatisfactorily responded to by the ashes of consumerism and entertainment.”

Citing Jon Sobrino’s insight that the poor of the world are a diagnostic site exposing the fissures of our moral economy, Conlon argues that the most pressing hallmarks of our world are extreme poverty and ecological destruction. For Conlon, authentic spirituality begins with these two realities, and crystallizes in an “engaged cosmology,” an attempt to find a “new story,” as Thomas Berry has urged. Such a story is “dynamic, interactive and relational, a story that dissolves anthropocentrism, individualism, and greed, a story to enhance the work of partnership and justice, to eradicate systems of oppression…and be attentive to the choices of creation, liberation, and contemplation.”

The quest to marry a solidarity with the poor with a solidarity for the Earth, as reflect5ed in Sobrino and Conlon’s latest offerings, is perhaps one of the most urgent, and important, religious tasks of our present century. And as natural disasters appear to be increasing in frequency and intensity, perhaps owing in part to human activity, as the UN State of the World Report, 1972-1992 suggests, the poor will suffer even greater hardship in future.

As these two Catholic voices from the