We Carry the Fire

Family and Citizenship as Spiritual Calling

Richard A. Hoehn

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781640653825
• eBook ISBN: 9781640653832
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We Carry the Fire describes a social and political spirituality defined by actions that save families, civilization, and the planet.

These actions, based on values articulated in religious congregations, result in tangible outcomes in the real world: people live instead of die, democracy is strengthened, nature is restored, and the human spirit flourishes.

The author shows how an action-spirituality is different from me- and escapist-spiritualities. Spiritual meaning is found by working in solidarity with people around the world to love our neighbors, as well as those who aren't our neighbors, as ourselves. As congregations are struggling to adjust to contemporary realities, Hoehn brings the passion and knowledge of a pastor, academic, author, activist, and grassroots organizer down to earth in real time.

Part I

Fire Spirituality

CHAPTER 1

The Fire We Carry, Carries Us

Transformative spirituality is a “life-energy.” It is a breath of fire . . . an ember that sustains the flame of one’s heart. It . . . calls the person to go beyond oneself, to concern for, and relationships with, the others. . . . finding the truth of one’s existence and discovering the fire within . . . to be in solidarity with the poor in their struggle for freedom from all forms of unjust systems and structures present in society.

—Dr. Rico Palaca Ponce, Institute of Spirituality in Asia¹

Embers, Flames, Extinguishers

In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road, a father and son struggle to hold onto their lives and values in a dystopian future. They search for food, avoid predatory thugs, and see a “corpse in a doorway dried to leather” as they head south in freezing weather. The normal trappings of organized polite and policed civilization are gone. Their wife and mother, drained by their untenable situation and believing that all three of them would likely be raped, murdered, and eaten if they headed south, had committed suicide.

The father and son enter a house, open a trapdoor, and see emaciated human beings imprisoned alive for future consumption by a gang of hunters who are soon to return. The father assures his son, “We don’t eat people. We are the good guys. We carry the fire.” They flee, yet again, as the father protects and sacrifices for his son. The son trusts his father.

They eventually arrive at a coastline where the father succumbs to wounds and deprivation. The boy wanders alone. On the third day, he encounters a family.² The boy asks if they eat people. They say no. Then he asks if they carry the fire, vaguely aware that it means something like “Are you the good guys? Do you practice civilized values?” At first, they are unsure what “carrying the fire” means, but then answer “yes.” They unite to become a new family, pilgrims traveling together toward an uncertain future.

Rico Palaca Ponce’s call to discover “the fire within” is an articulation of “how to be a follower of Christ in today’s context.” Fire is also one of the great metaphors of classical mythologies, along with earth, air, and water. When Zeus withholds fire from humanity, Prometheus, the shaper, protector, and champion of people, steals the fire and gives it to humanity who use it to develop, and sometimes harm, civilization. Prometheus is also known as the father of the arts and sciences which is pertinent to our discussion here.

In the Bible, God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with fire, appears to Moses in a burning bush, leads the people of Israel with a pillar of fire at night, and sends the Spirit as tongues of fire at Pentecost to empower the crowd to go forth and spread good news.

The myth of the firebird in both Eastern and Western culture typically involves a lengthy quest that has great promise, but also hardship and danger. The colorful Phoenix symbolizes rebirth. It lives, dies, then rises out of the ashes to live again. Funerary events in India and Indonesia sometimes include dramatic fire rituals.

It is not surprising that fire has played a significant role in the language and experience of spirituality. Fire is the mesmerizing mystery of dancing flame; smoke rising skyward and disappearing above like fading spirits; burning, consuming, destroying (sacrificial altars, St. Joan, witches, the KKK, torture, hell); but also lighting the path ahead, protecting from the hidden dangers of darkness, campfire camaraderie, and ghost stories; even cleansing and cauterizing. It goes cold and dies if it is not protected, rekindled, and tended.

In The Road, “carrying the fire” seems to mean “to support one another as family and press forward with civilized, humane values.” People carry the fire in many places and in many ways. The focus in this book is on families, the public sphere, and congregations. Reforming addicts who have experienced personal dystopias tell us that when you face disaster, it is important to walk forward with the support of others—in their case, NA/AA families.

The COVID-19 crisis vividly demonstrated our need for other people, whether through the experience of being socially isolated or sick in hospitals. And it has freshened our awareness of the importance of political decisions for our daily lives—at its most dramatic, fewer or more people die depending on the decisions of political leaders.

The father and son in The Road never have personal names. They are, in any given moment, us. Life is already deeply dystopian for the people in the world who suffer oppression and injustice. Climate change threatens an engulfing chaos that some say is the end of civilization for all. No life is without trauma or existential threat.

Innumerable people throw water on the fire of our responsibility to live toward civilization’s highest values, believing that their self-interest is the only thing that counts. Healthy self-interest is good, but when self-interest becomes a consuming selfishness, it scorches souls and leads people to oppress others.

The great majority of people have ambivalent embers that glow and dim, that need warming and tending to burn brightly. Families, congregations, and society provide the kindling. We Carry the Fire provides a little oxygen. It is up to you to help carry the fire that keeps our civilization’s best values alight and alive.

In 1948, member countries of the United Nations General Assembly approved a shared commitment to fundamental human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration was an expression of basic human values that underlie the protection and enhancement of civilized life. Nations came together across lines that normally separate and divide people and committed to a more moral human future.

In 2015, the United Nations Assembly went beyond rights and approved seventeen Sustainable Development Goals as a substantive expression of humanity’s highest hopes. People of 193 nations—all creeds, races, religions, and regions of the world—committed to address the world’s biggest concerns. The Global Goals represent a shared vision of a peaceful, plentiful, just, and sustainable world where the human spirit can thrive.³

The Declaration and the Goals are hugely important, but meaningless unless underlying social and political structures affirm and actively pursue them. Families, political systems, the arts, and religious congregations have historically been among those structures. At their best, they sort, preserve, teach, and model the core values and practices that have risen out of long-term human experience.

Grassroots on Fire

I worked at Bread for the World (BFW) and the Bread for the World Institute for seventeen years, beginning in 1988. There I encountered people in the United States and around the world who were fire-carrying practitioners. BFW staff and members around the country lobby Congress for policies that help people who are hungry and poor, both at home and abroad.

The staff made substantial sacrifices of income and time to work for and with poor people. It felt good, morally good, to be making a difference with my life, however small my individual impact. And it felt good, spiritually good, to be working in solidarity with other people in the office, around the country, and around the world who were committed to share the warmth—the fire of our joint actions—to implement humane values, help families, promote civilized life, and embrace a faith that we could make a difference.

Author J.M. Coetzee has one of his characters say, “Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit.”⁴ It takes an enormous amount of faith and hope to believe that one’s own efforts will make a difference, sooner or later, on the larger page on which societies are written.

At BFW, young people competed for $9,000-a-year internships with health care. A staff member reluctantly gave up his car when the odometer reached 250,000 and the dials stopped registering. In 1989 someone donated a microwave, but many did not know how to use it because they could not afford one at home. As it turned out, it did not matter because the microwave blew the electrical circuits and had to be unplugged.

On the many nights we worked late, it was scary to walk the dark and isolated path to the Metro. There once was a shootout in the parking lot; another time, someone pulled the copper loose from the air conditioning unit on the roof; and yet another time, a guy stole boxes of hunger reports from one of our cars. When a staff member shouted from the third-floor window, “What are you doing down there?” the thief shouted back, “Stealing your stuff.” Bemused by his honesty, we wondered what the street value of a hunger report might be. Since then, BFW has upscaled salaries and offices.

We shared a sense of solidarity, values, and vision, because we were working together to help people who were poor and hungry. It was an exhausting day-to-day slog that did not often feel spiritual. But our goal was not to have “spiritual experiences.” The spirituality came from working for justice (political spirituality) in solidarity with and for others (social spirituality)—a spirituality that strengthened and celebrated our relational, social, moral, and political existence by doing things that helped people who experienced profound suffering and sometimes death.

It was spiritual in many senses: a commitment to values and vision that affirmed goodness; participation that worked to realize those values; solidarity relationships in working with others; and results that improved the human spirit in the real world. If you tracked down those former staff today, you would find that for most, it was not a starter job but part of a lifelong commitment. A spiritual calling.

The first three years at BFW, I was a grassroots organizer, traveling to meet members and prospects—to preach, teach, and lead workshops in churches and college campuses in eight states.

To save money, flights often required two or three stops. Organizers stayed overnight with regular dues-paying activists instead of in hotels because it was more economical and helped us understand and bond with members. On a tight budget, it was worth driving an extra hour for Denny’s five-dollar spaghetti, salad, and roll. Another day, another Denny’s. That was fine with me because, as the child of Depression-era parents, the definition of “good food” was cheap heaps of eats.

We had salaries, however modest, whereas local members were paying dues and contributing time on top of their regular jobs, children’s dance lessons, soccer practice, and congregational and community activities. The members were awesomely inspiring, not only for their political work with Bread for the World, but because of their moral commitment and the values they evidenced in other parts of their lives, such as volunteering at food banks, soup kitchens, Meals on Wheels, and congregational suppers. They lived a committed spirituality of “family + congregation + charity + citizenship,” a.k.a. charitable politics.

I met Vivian, who with her husband, made jelly, raised their children, milked their goats, convened a loc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I / Fire Spirituality
• Part II / Citizen Spirituality
• Part III / Family as Social Spirituality
• Part IV / Congregations as Social Spirituality
• Spiritual Disciplines of Public Life
• Afterword