Thia Reggio, Poverty Initiative Fellow and graduating M.Div., was recently published in the May/June 2012 issue of Unbound:  An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice, in its “Inside Agitators:  Seminarians for Justice” edition.  Each article reflects on the social justice ministry and advocacy taking place on a seminary campus.  Thia’s article, “Justice at Union Theological Seminary:  Legacy of Justice, Lens for Action,” discusses the many ways that the Union community is working towards realizing justice, including the work of the Poverty Initiative in carrying forward the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Poor People’s Campaign.

Thia’s work with the Poverty Initiative has focused on development and communications.  As a mother of three, Thia sees great promise in the coming generations and is committed to helping build a future without poverty and promote a present without prejudice for all children of the world.

Congratulations Jeff!

Below is a  personal reflection from Crystal Hall who knew Jeff through his involvement in the Poverty Scholars program and through her involvement with the work of ROC NY.

Jeff and Michael Ellick of Judsom Memorial with the Golden Calf during the height of Occupy Wall Street

Moments after officially being ordained a minister of the United Church of Christ

I first met Jeff on a sidewalk outside a fine-dining restaurant in New York City.  I was discerning my own call to ministry, but still wasn’t convinced that organizing and church work could fit together.

I met Jeff as he taught a group of seminarians how to organize a candlelight vigil.  We quickly put theory into practice that night.  We sang and prayed outside with the workers fighting for their rights inside the restaurant.  Jeff was one of the first people, for me, who embodied what it means to be a religious leader committed to the work of justice.

In the months ahead I would join Jeff again and again on the sidewalk in front of restaurants being organized by ROC-NY.  I would continue to learn how to organize.  But I also learned something about, in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the “freedom church of the poor.”  We didn’t just protest.  We held church on the sidewalk.  Through Jeff, organizing became “fishing for people” and protest chants became prayer.

Jeff embodies the Poverty Initiative’s mission of raising up generations of community and religious leaders to build a movement to end poverty, led by the poor.  A leader develops other leaders, and Jeff continues to raise up those around him.  As you take this newest step in your ministry: may you continue to teach as you fight. My you learn as you lead.  May you know that God, through the plight and fight of the poor, walks with you.

-Crystal Hall

On this occasion of Union’s 175th Anniversary, we remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was at Union when he decided to give his life in the fight against Hitler and fascism; Myles Horton who was at Union when he came up with the idea for the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for the industrial union and Civil Rights Movements; Delores Williams who was at Union when she co-developed and then taught a theology that took seriously the suffering and resistance of the oppressed. Their legacy of engaged scholarship, strategic action, and moral courage are not only an inspiration but a challenge to us all.

So it is with great humility and a deep sense of responsibility, that I thank Union, it’s faculty, staff, students, trustees and especially alumni for giving me this honor and for the long legacy of social justice advocacy that Union represents. I want to thank my family, friends and colleagues, including those who are here tonight. Your love for all God’s creation, passion to work tirelessly, faith that poverty can end, knowledge of who and what came before, and tenacity when times are tough are sustaining.  I want to thank my kids, Sophia and Luke, who are two more reasons why we must work for a world without poverty and war and who have taught me about the urgency of actually achieving justice.

But this honor is not about me. I do not receive it alone. Nearly two decades ago, I joined a budding social movement to end poverty. This movement is made up of an incredibly diverse grouping of people. Many of the people in this movement are the real heroes and heroines in our world, a community of saints who are rarely thanked or recognized at all for dedicating their lives for the betterment of everyone.

This community of saints who make up the Poverty Initiative includes people like Rev. Jessica Chadwick who was a dual degree Masters of Divinity, Masters of Social Work student here at Union, who co-founded the Poverty Initiative, brought her whole family into this work while they simultaneously struggled with unemployment, housing foreclosure and student debt, and is the kind of pastor our country needs now in this time of economic crisis. This community of saints includes Lucas Benitez, director of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization of farmworkers who have won better wages and working conditions for those who pick the tomatoes we eat for the first time in a generation. This community of saints includes Marian Kramer, President of the National Welfare Rights Union, a movement elder who marched alongside Dr. King and now 45 years later is a grandma raising her grandchildren, resisting the cut offs of 40,000 homes from running water in Detroit each year, who mentored me and many others when we first got involved. This community of saints includes Larry Gibson, who has endured over 120 threats to his life for protecting his family, land and ancestral burial ground from Mountaintop Removal in the Appalachian mountains.

This group gathered together a few summers ago in one of our Poverty Initiative Leadership Schools. There, Jess, Marian, tomato pickers from Florida, taxi workers from Philadelphia, shackdwellers from South Africa, uninsured mothers from New Jersey, public school students from LA and many others gathered on Larry’s family property, Kayford Mountain.

Together we led, learned, sang and prayed – we saw that all our struggles are connected – that we are all part of what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called, “an inescapable network of mutuality”. There we recommitted ourselves to King’s Poor People’s Campaign, to the “Freedom Church of the Poor”, to the beloved community where everyone is welcome. As I look to the future, I imagine all of us there on that mountaintop looking out
to see not the devastation brought by greed and poverty, but rather a world that shares its bounty with all God’s people. Thank you.

Below is a prayer based on Matthew 5:3-10 that Crystal led on the second day of the fast.   To see more powerful images from the strike and to learn more about CIW follow this link.

Crystal Hall in Lakeland, Florida

Holy and living God,
You are a God of justice.
You are a God of liberation.

From the words of Matthew we know
That you bless those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
You will fill them with good things.
You bless those who are persecuted for the cause of righteousness.
Theirs is the kingdom of God.

Knowing that our cause is righteous and just,
We give thanks for a new day.
We give thanks for the inspiration to commit to sacrifice.
We give thanks for this fast as a witness to the work of justice in this world.

So we ask your blessing this morning:
For us as we hunger for righteousness.
For the law enforcement with us,
That they too might know your loving protection.
And especially for Publix,
That they may come to the table of mercy and justice.

In your many names and the name of Jesus,
Amen

The Poverty Initiative immersion courses, like all of Poverty Initiative’s work, are aimed at developing leaders who will be able to unite other leaders in a social movement to end poverty.  The task of educating ourselves about our history – how it grounds and guides us today – is an essential element of that leadership development.

Biblical Reflection, "Paul the Social Movement Maker," in the Poverty Initiative office the night before we left for Baltimore.

We learned several things on the immersion that, as Romall might say, give you the willies.  We learned about “Christians” justifying slavery using scriptures.  We learned about the mayor of NY, Ferndando Wood, who proposed seceding from the Union because he too supported slavery.  We learned that, even after their enslavement was over, free Blacks in Baltimore had to abide by a curfew set by white police officers and lived in fear of arbitrary violence from their white neighbors.  And we learned about the mother in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia who fought poverty and homelessness with all her might, only to have her children taken from her and then in desperation, lose herself to heroin.

I personally find it easy to get depressed after learning these things.  It’s easy to think we as a human race just aren’t capable of treating each other right.  If we haven’t stopped doing these things yet, maybe we never will.  I even find it easy to wonder if God is yet at work or if God just gave up on us.  Because if God were working, why would people be so terrible to each other?

But supposedly, there’s Good News. We’re told there’s a reason to say ‘hallelujah.’  Paul says in Romans that we are made righteous when we believe, and that the One God of all of us uses our faith to manifest her justice.  Yes, apparently, the good news is that the same one who wrote a higher law calls us into deep and transforming relationship.  And that is good news.  But do we believe it?

In Paul’s letter to the Romans- to this church situated in the Roman empire- he writes that God’s justice works through faith in Christ for all who believe.  Though most translations read “faith in Christ” the Greek actually allows for “faith of Christ,” meaning perhaps that God’s justice doesn’t happen automatically when we say Jesus is Lord, God’s justice happens, maybe, when we live with the same faith that Jesus had.  When we believe in God’s love and God’s power- and when we act in accordance with that belief, that’s when God’s justice happens.  Why do we normally hear that we need ‘faith in Christ’ instead of ‘faith of Christ’?  Maybe because it’s easier to profess Christ with our mouths than to live Him with our time and our bodies.  It’s certainly easier to control a group of people if they’re sitting around talking about Jesus than if they’re standing up and acting like Him.

Decades later than Paul but inspired by the same person, the gospel writer John explained what he thought this faith of Jesus could do.  He writes: “Yet any who did accept the Word, who believed in that Name, were empowered to become children of God.”

For the gospel writer ‘The Good News’ is that the same one who holds us to a higher law …The same one who condemns in no uncertain terms the travesties we inflict upon each other and the apathy with which we unhurriedly go about seeing if we maybe could, at some point, consider doing something about them– is the same One who has called each and every one of us ‘my beloved child.’   Is the same One who has said to you and to me ‘I have counted every hair on your head.’  Is the same One who has said to us ‘those who have my faith shall do all this and greater works besides.’

Harpers Ferry, view from Jefferson Rock where the Shenendoah and the Potomac meet

John must have seen some crazy stuff to start talking like that.  He must have seen people changed because of Jesus’ message of God’s love for them and for their neighbors.  He must have seen people give up everything they owned to chase an adventure with God.  He must have seen stuff kind of like what the heroines and heroes of the Abolition movement did: believe enough in their worth as God’s children to fight for the freedom that should have been theirs from the beginning.  Believe enough in God’s promises to lay down their lives in order to see them fulfilled.  Love their fellow human beings enough to risk it all to liberate them.  It is Good News that we are called children of God.  It’s Good News that we have what it takes, especially together, to manifest God’s justice on earth.  That the One who holds us to a higher law also gives us a higher power.  And when we recognize our status as that One’s children, there is no limit to what we can do.  Lord, help us live up to that calling.

What I want to say is that the stories I heard and the conditions I saw in the Borderlands forbid me from discarding “Christianity” as solely a spineless institution bound to the self-interest and corruption of political and economic powers, which for the most part is the embarrassing reality of a man-made tradition that claims to represent the word of God but in fact gives legitimation to the interests and will of men.  One example: the Mexican-American bishop of Brownsville, Texas who has yet to prove solidarity with the poverty, suffering, and lack of opportunity of the mestizo people trapped in the Brownsville borderlands by strategically placed, militarized checkpoints.  Another example: in my own pursuit of becoming a “master of theology” I have and will inevitably continue to participate in a game of touting my knowledge of technical vocabulary and abstract theories, tempted by the prospect of “universal truth” that comes with the comfort of privilege, too busy in the library to consider the truths that are known on the streets of Harlem, in the shelters of Baltimore, in the colonias of Cameron County, TX.

Mary holding the brutalized body of Jesus in San Fernando Church, San Antonio; the paint has faded from Jesus' knees from the constant touch of prayer

What I need to express is the overwhelming feeling that I could not shake as our group reflected together on the Stations of the Cross at the Basilica of San Juan.  It was the simultaneous realization that I am not spared from pain and suffering, I don’t have to deny my own experience of the metaphorical burden of the cross that is felt in different ways by us all.  The image of Jesus’s last moments—the pain of a mother watching her son suffer, the relief brought by a friend’s hands lightening the load of the cross, repeated depictions of falling and having to get back up, alone—these are relatable portraits of very human experiences to which everyone can connect their own stories.  But as I reflected at the station of Jesus falling for the third time, I could not shake the image of the mother of three daughters whose two hands were severed in a preventable maquiladora machinery accident.  How does she get back up?  Where does she find the strength to pick up her cross once more, with no physical option for continuing to support her children, when her “worker’s compensation” lasts only a few months, and then the rent and cost of food in the colonias will be too much to bear?  It was these sorts of questions that we eager seminarians asked the female leaders in that bedroom meeting in the colonias, that we asked the woman who had fled to the United States in a tire, in hopes of a better future for her son.  Where do you find your hope, when you are defined as cheap labor, when everyday you agonize over the future suffering of your children, when you are denied pubic lights by a state that is the fifteenth richest economy in the entire world?  The unwavering answer by every single individual we have talked to on this trip has been just one, whispered word: faith.  A faith so deep, so real, and so subversive, that all I can try to do is keep telling these stories of suffering, survival, and an unwavering faith in God that are not my own.  I can bear witness.  And I can continue to demand that the Church, that theologians, that any person claiming a Christian faith, speak, and more importantly act, out of the recognition of the Galilean principle of which Virgilio Elizondo reminds us: what human beings reject, God chooses as God’s very own.

Dr. Machado, who organized our pilgrimage to the border, is fond of telling students how important maps are. They can help us understand why wars were fought, the value of certain locations, and, often, tell us something about the mapmaker’s worldview. Certainly the map I found on a postcard in San Antonio speaks volumes about how Texans see the world, and the borderlands in particular:

As you can see, Texas has swallowed up most of the United States and Northern Mexico, with the other continental states relegated to insignificance. (Alaska and Hawaii don’t appear; Puerto Rico and the other territories have certainly not been considered at all.) This self-centered worldview is not really that unusual in the U.S.: New Yorkers certainly are guilty of thinking the world revolves around us.

I was more struck by the way the borderlands are completely missing. Brownsville is, after all, a fairly large city, but it’s cut off. South Texas has been erased. The countries with the highest poverty rates in the Texas are gone. The “no-man’s land” between the Mexican border and the internal Border Patrol checkpoints has been left off this map, just as it has stayed hidden from most of the people in this country. The borderlands, it seems, do not exist in the “Texan’s Map of the United States,” just as they do not exist in the “American” imagination.

When our group visited a curandera this week, I was told I had problems with my eyes. I don’t know about my physical eyesight, but I certainly have realized how blind I have been to the reality of the border. I hope that your eyes—like mine—are starting to open.

I have found my theology challenged in this borderland.  We met recently with Mike Seifert, the lead organizer of Equal Voices, a non-profit organization coordinating ten different non-profit social justice and community development organizations.  Mr. Seifert, in the time we spent with him, made it clear that he was infuriated with the passivity of the church in South Texas.  He and the other leaders he works with across the borderlands, have confronted churches on many occasions, finding little commitment; acquiescence to a disinterested religious life of social concerns seems to have taken hold.  I can sympathize.  It seems this statement accurately characterizes my home church in Kansas.  Now, I do not want to make statements concerning church participation or church activity within the United States.  To reconcile Mr. Seifert’s anger, it would be useful to focus on the social empirical reality of our country.  You have seen, in this blog, our reflections on real life stories.  You have read real life suffering, and real life pain.  Were these stories new? Are you surprised these conditions exist in and are caused by the United States of America?

The stories we have come across are not unique, however, in their experience of poverty.  To use common and inadequate stereotypes, one might find the “third world,” in the “first world” of New York City.  Children all throughout this country suffer from hunger:  1 in 4 children in the United States is at risk of hunger.

But how many communities have you witnessed as trapped?  How often do you hear of youth committing suicide because of stunted dreams?  The Latino community in the Borderlands is a community assaulted from all sides.  Every day operations, such as going to the store, or going to school, or going to work are activities that are ridden with crushing anxiety. So what can I do?

I asked Kellyann Conners and Stephen Tickner this question last night.  Late, we had a night free where we might decompress a bit.  As we played cards, our game slowed and the conversation deepened.  Loud sighs filled the air.  Oftentimes we become overwhelmed with the impressiveness of these problems.  How do several seminary students speak a theological, just, social truth to debilitating maquila power?

In everyday actions:  from the products we buy to the way we talk about immigration issues and the truth of NAFTA’s economic repercussions. We have come to understand that all of us are caught in violent struggle.  I don’t assume we end consumerism, I ask we merely begin to think about how we are operating in the world.  Yet is that enough? For many of us seminarians, we will make large decisions in the upcoming years as to our life direction. I don’t assume everyone will have the same passion for the Texas borderlands as I do.  After organizing with an IAF organization in San Antonio last year, this trip sits well in  furthering my life education on this space and place.  Yet, as Dr. Machado put so well in a reflection earlier in the week, our communities cannot respond to things that they don’t know about. Undeniably, those who have seen and heard of this space (certainly unique if not in its poverty, then in its militarization) carry with them charge to continue telling this story.  Again, as we reflected on this responsibility during the same reflection, it became obvious of our return: our ability to leave this space.  Questions of how we use our citizenship become extremely important:  how we vote, how we engage in our community, and what sort of institutions we create. Start conversations with family members on what poverty looks like in your community.  Educate yourself concerning the cracks in this nation that speak of disturbing truths.  Only when we know this land can be begin to change this land.  For certainly, as has been said, the churches we create are emblematic of the communities we desire.

I don’t claim to be any farther along this path than you all; I claim to begin this muddling through, this difficult yet important process of being a witness to all of the realities that exist in our country. These are tangible small steps that begin to suggest the undeniable structural and ideological change that needs to occur to bring justice to all of our communities.

“I realized that immersions are about something much bigger than, although certainly inclusive of, the experience of the students who participate from Union. Immersions are about being introduced to an entire network of Poverty Scholars Program organizations, committed to the work of developing and uniting leaders to build a movement to end poverty, led by the poor. Over time, as I began to work with the Poverty Initiative after that first immersion, I would grow to appreciate the breadth and depth, the history and experience, of the work I was stepping into.”

- Crystal Hall, Poverty Initiative Staff and Fellow

(Read the rest of Crystal’s reflection on the 2012 Immersion Tumblr page)

Next Monday, January 16,  the Poverty Initiative will begin its 7th immersion course.  This year’s course brings students, staff, and other leaders from the struggle to end poverty to NYC, Baltimore, Harpers Ferry, and Charles Town, West Virginia to learn, experience and reflect on the US Civil War, the Abolitionist movement, and the ways in which this history both helps define the ongoing struggles against poverty in the US and World, and how we can gain lessons from this history as we build a movement for change today.

Follow us throughout the trip on a special Tumblr site that has been set up to record the thoughts, images, and reflections from participants along the way.  Also follow us on  Twitter @povertyinit  and Facebook

“We can’t back up, we will overcome. We are overcoming because ours is a revolution of the mind and heart. –César Chávez” A sign at The Union of the Entire People (LUPE), founded by César Chávez, in McAllen, TX.

“The dispossessed of this nation…live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize…against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”  (MLK, Jr, 1967)

I have burning in my bones just a little taste of the rage that must burn in the undocumented youth and their families, and indeed the whole Latin@ community.  Immigrants and Latin@s are the object of so many injustices and downright hate.  Consider the youth.  Half of the population in this S. Texas county are under 23.  Immigrants and Latin@s are, on average young, young people with vigor that can be developed as leaders that bring about change.   Immigrants have as core values buying land, building houses, and staying, committed to creating a better life for their families.  US Hispanics are hard-working, in fact, the hardest-working people group at this time in our country—look around at who’s carrying, cleaning, picking, and sweating these days.  Numbers of Latin@s in the US are increasing rapidly, becoming majorities in many areas.  And they are culturally a communal people, valuing strong communities, families, and relationships.  I recognize potential in all these factors for a base for a “new and unsettling force”, a social movement that can lead change for the most poor in society, if the silent rage, youth, hard-work, relationality, and growing numbers can be made purposeful and leadership developed.