Powerlessness

I would like to invite the reader into a personal dimension of life. I describe this dimension as the triangle of my own life. I can describe myself as living within a triangle. Each point of the triangle or each side of the triangle, which-ever way you choose to picture it, is a model of powerlessness. No analogy is perfect, yet I feel this one can be, no matter how imperfectly, worked with.

I live in the basement of an old Victorian house, in the Toxteth section of Liverpool, given world-wide notice a few years ago by the riots there. The house has been renovated and adapted. Apart from the basement, where I live, there are six small flats or apartments. I do not own the house; it is rented by a Mental Health Association. One of its tasks or aims in life is to take houses like the one I live in and set them up for mental patients who are fit, (have they always been fit?), to leave the large mental institution and live in their own small apartment. It is called a Group Home. So above me live a group of people who have known years and years in mental institutions. Very often people who visit here, I notice, shout at them, they do not talk with them. It has not been unknown that large protests have taken place within communities to prevent the establishment of such Group Homes. People ask me about ‘Them' in a strange kind of way.

Descriptions of my friends range from 'loonies' through 'not normal' to a kind of 'God help them'. The 'not-normal' description is, perhaps, the most perverse. There is, for example, out of kindness, a tendency not to consult them. People 'do things for them' and get quite upset when they reject the help. There is also a rather strange, mysterious tendency, to project my friends as always 'full of happiness'. Such language as "They are happy, believe me...They haven't your worries...Nothing really troubles them...", I find quite frightening. For, I do believe, paradoxically, to deny a person the right of suffering, and still more, the capability of suffering, is the ultimate in denying them their unique humanity. My friends are a great 'Christmas concern'. I mean, just like dealing with the elderly, everybody gets worked up about them around Christmas. Normality is a great surface concept in society. It is designed not by the depths of the living human spirit but by appearances and by certain inherited standards of so-called civilization. One walks in a particular way, one talks in a particular way, one thinks in a particular way and one lives in a particular way. The particular way is the result of some kind of majority opinion and action.

I am not suggesting help, and even very special help, is not needed. But help of any kind must have its roots in a helper who is not oppressed by a certain inherited stereotype of normality. It is not a question of what one can do for such people, it is primarily a question of how one exists with such people. Society, I believe, for the most part has made of these friends "nowhere to go people. They are a unique paradigm of powerlessness. In the ultimate analysis, it is not so much a question of what the world thinks of them or how the world perceives them - rather they are an ultimate criticism of how most of us look on the world and how we perceive life. My friends not only suffer because of a sick kind of perception, they have suffered also because that perception has all too often led to a bureaucratic carelessness and oppression.

Only last year, I buried one of my friends. She was long ago, as they used to say, in service". One night the parents of the family in which she was a servant were out. The children asked her for something to eat. She began to open a tin of meat when the tin-opener slipped and cut her wrist. She bled profusely. She was taken to a hospital. But the hospital she ended up in was a mental institution'. Here she lived for 30 years until she was rescued and brought to live here in this home. She became very much the mother of this family and here she died. The crematorium for me was the final act in the drama of so-called definition of the normal and society's perception of the normal.

I have known liberation in this house. But I believe such liberation is not only about the conversion of one's perception, it is also the result of one's 'existing with' one's fellow human beings in a new way.

When I come out of this house most mornings I make my way to another point in life's triangle. But before I describe that point I must stress that I am also just by being where I am, geographically and environmentally, at and in another point of my triangle. For I am in the Inner City.

The Inner City is that "bombardment chamber where the particles generated and accelerated by the cyclotron of a whole society are smashed into each other. It is therefore a very good place to learn about the destructive forces inherent in that society."

The Inner City is obviously a physical reality. But it is also a symbolic projection. It is the symbol of the success and the failure of our Pyramidal world power. There are streets in my inner City named after the owners of slave ships. And through those streets the contemporary black population, many descendants of those slaves, walk day by day. We have pyramids because society progresses, or regresses, whichever way one wishes to look at it, on the basis of its answers to four fundamental questions: How do we organize our material resources? How do we organize our power? How do we organize social relationships? How do we organize the meaning of life?

The answers to those questions of organization are not merely personal matters, they are institutional answers. There is an interaction between style of life and institutional organization of life. Institutions define the economic, political, social and cultural expectancies which make for the 'good life'. Some are able to realize that expectancy. They can participate in the economic resources of society to the point at which life becomes an enriching journey; they can participate in the mechanisms of political decision-making and taking; they belong to a web of social relationships which, at least, brings stability to their present and gives them power to invest in a future; educational success has led to a living success. They are part of the organization of life. And, therefore, they can pursue a certain style of life. But since the style of life flows down from the top of the pyramid, it is in the interest of the top of the pyramid and in the interest of certain sectors of the pyramid to underpin and strengthen the institutions. Thus in the hands of certain sectors of society, style of life and institutions control The resources of life.

The base of the pyramid in our western civilization is represented by the Inner City. They may be consulted, but they never control. Western democracy may offer to us a mode of political representation, but it does not realize equality of human existence. The Inner City is the distinctive stage on which the capitalistic dance of the competitive society is produced and directed. The Inner City dweller is but an onlooker. He or she watches the selfishness, the protection of tax payer, theories of inflation, choreographed by the elite of the pyramid's top. Powerlessness turns into helplessness and helplessness too often Produces hopelessness. The terms 'equality of opportunity' and 'participation in the organization' of society are but a mockery.

Yet the dweller in the Inner City remains alive. Whilst society may look at the violence, which has erupted in the inner City as a tragedy, the violence, and the subsequent riots, are but a sign of the human spirit bursting out of its imprisonment of total frustration.

Though I cannot be a part of the poverty of that Inner City. population, though I cannot be identified with that poverty and powerlessness, my life is dictated by both a desire and an action to be identified with its struggle for liberation.

One may validly distinguish between the degrees of powerlessness in our world. Thus, where I live and work may not lend itself to a comparison with situations one can identify in the 3rd World, but that is a matter of degree. Both situations are the result of the Pyramid. And both situations are about 'survival'. When I hear in my own country remarks about 'Victorian Values' and the 'return to such values , those who advocate such a philosophy can rest assured that the stage-set of Victorian values is still standing! It stands in the twilight of our urban decay. This decay may well be the subject of research for many, but it is the living daily experience for others.

The prison- In this Inner City, the land which cries out for the revision and revolution in our social, political, economic and cultural Absolutes, I make my way on certain days to another expression of an Absolute. It is the Absolute of Law and Order and the Penal System. For the third side of my triangle is a State Prison. I go there as a Prison Chaplain, God's representative, so to speak, with a foot in the door of society's code and exercise of punishment. It is an old Victorian building with an average population of 1300 inmates. Each day I go I must be there for the reception of prisoners, visit those who are in the 'punishment' cells, the Hospital wing, and respond to people who wish to see me personally.

It is strange, really, but one can never say or write anything about a prison without making an apology. I do not mean apologizing for the system, that is quite another question altogether. I speak rather of always having to say things like, "Of course, I don't condone crime...you've go to have something...every society needs a penal system."

Our righteous world can never see the problems behind the fact of crime. It is not without interest to note that my prison is not exactly populated with the so-called respectable world. When it comes to deprivation and social powerlessness as spoken about above, there is more than a high correlation with those who go to jail. The prison does say something about society's communal failure as much as it says something about the personal failure of inmates. I have seen tears in prison, and I have witnessed that last throw of life's dice, suicide. But most discussions about the prison end up on high emotional levels. And when it comes to prison reform it always seems to me to end up on what is there already. Nobody seems to wish to discuss the possibility of alternatives. The mode by which we deal with communal punishment in society is a good indicator of the kind of philosophy we wish to rule our personal and communal life. Locking up people in over-populated institutions does not say much for our social philosophy or theology.

One of my prisoner friends asked me one day: "Have you ever really needed God?" Faced with my rather weak reply he went a step further, asking: "Had you so needed God that you had nowhere to go? nothing or nobody left?" To be perfectly honest I could not answer yes. I knew his background. After his mother's death, a member of the family threw him out on the street. From that time on he's been in and out of prison. All the professionals say: "He's really in need of serious treatment." Of course he is! But he is also in need of an experience of life which cancels out his earlier experiences. He broke into my puzzlement and said: "I have. When you wake up in the morning on a park bench and you have wet yourself, and kids dance around you all day, then there's nowhere to go but to God. Then you need God."

The phrase "nowhere to go" caught my attention and has been with me ever since. I mean the phrase related to God. For the paradox is because I had had somewhere to go, more often than not, incarnated in a Somebody, I have never needed God. Though I have thought about God throughout my life, there is a sense in which I have not thought about God. But those who lived with me and called upon the name of God in an act of loving existence, even in the midst of great suffering, brought God into an existing and living dialogue. In other words, God for me has been a living human experience. What I am saying is that shutting people out of power over destiny, is a mode of snatching away from them the reality of God. It makes them strangers in a land crying for human and divine creativity. More terrible still is to enter into such a plot of marginalization, or agree to exist with it, and still claim to speak about God.

Such is the triangle of my life. I am more and more convinced that the power and powerless question is not merely an item on the agenda, it is the most fundamental item on the agenda which should call the contemporary churches to a profound conversion of life.

Conversion of life is about 'being in a different way'. If we do not face this we continue to collude with a personal and institutional sinfulness which will finally destroy us all. We need to look at Church again, even look at God again in this period of history. Above all, conscious of the terrible divide in our world of the powerful and the powerless, we should decide, with Bonhoffer for that: "....experience of incomparable value....to have learnt to see the great events of the history of the world from beneath: from the viewpoint of the useless, the suspect, the abused, the powerless, the oppressed, the despised - in a word from the viewpoint of those who suffer."

Austin Smith, PhD, is a Passionist Priest, the Director of an Inner City Mission and a Prison Chaplain in Liverpool 8, England. He is an author and has lectured extensively in England, the U.S. and Europe. This article is excerpted from his keynote address delivered at the 4th International Stauros Congress on Powerlessness, held at Duquesne University, June '85.