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Imagining Beloved Community: On Charity vs. Solidarity

January 24, 2021

By Kye Flannery

Ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est.

“Where there is love and charity, there is God.” “Caritas” is also sometimes translated as “kindness.” (And God — )

And lord, is that song an invitation. To action. To ethics. To asking hard questions. 

Those are my favorite ethical questions, the tough, practical kind — 

Imagine yourself for a moment as Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She escaped enslavement, survived sexual abuse. She could write and read, a bit. She escapes to Washington DC, gets connected up to some abolitionists, and starts a new life as a maid in one of their homes.

So maybe it’s also important to imagine ourselves, as a northern abolitionist, meeting a woman who had such a terrible story. What’s your first move? Do you get to know her? Do you give her a week to recover and try to get her out and speaking to gatherings of wealthy white people, combatting the awful, widespread misinformation campaign? Do you let her come to live at your house in exchange for maid services? How hard do you ask her to work? How do you encourage her to tell her story? How well do you listen?

In her letters, which we can see — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Willis family — we see people who worked all along this spectrum with Harriet, for better and for worse.

Kindness is a spectrum. Charity is on it, and so is solidarity.

There is a story called “Twenty and Ten” of twenty french Catholic kids hiding ten Jewish kids among them when the Nazis were hunting them. Had they been discovered, the Catholic kids could have lost food privileges — Jewish kids could have lost their lives. 

I grew up Methodist, in south Florida. We used to get bags of clothes from ladies in the congregation. I don’t know how they knew… maybe we were just looking like we could use the help. More than once though i found $20 tucked into a pocket of one of the jackets — or at babysitting jobs… “help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge” — little gestures of kindness which meant a lot.

Give us a chance to explore these, using some real-world examples —

Play a game! 

Polls (4 mins)

• Black lives matter sign in your yard, then a Black man carrying nothing knocks on the door to ask for bus fare to see his son at the hospital who he says is dying. You know this is an outlandish story — you ask but he doesn’t want a ride to the hospital — you know he’s probably not telling the truth. You give him money. Solidarity or charity?
  • Charity. Solidarity means relationships. Charity has empathy, but we don’t know the person’s insides. When we’re being transactional with each other, it isn’t solidarity.

• You work at a hospital. Woman of color in a hospital who is not on your patient list who confides to you that she feels she’s being treated differently because of her race. You tell her, first, ‘that sounds terrible, let me tell you how to get ahold of the ombudsman.’ You have a busy day ahead. But seeing something in her face, instead, you Stop, Listen, Learn that she identifies as bipolar, that she and her wife are having financial challenges and that she’s not sure if her wife is welcome at the hospital. Re-order the day and priorities to be present and find out what support she might need.
  • Solidarity. Taking personal or professional risks in order to fully understand and offer care — learn about someone’s intersectional identity  — learn about mental health challenges, lesbian, and how systems are supporting or not supporting, this is solidarity.

• Therapist who charges $275/hour and doesn’t accept insurance
  • Neither charity nor solidarity. Sliding scale or “pay what you can” means that a person is truly not turned away for lack of funds. 
  • Not enough information? What is the therapist’s situation? Do they have school loans? Do they have a sick parent or kid? Worth asking. Do you have the money? Would you rather keep it in the bank or…?
  • Solidarity means that we know that access is everybody’s job. I remember — strangely — when I worked at a UU church, and did not make a living wage, that a beautiful lentil soup was available after the service, sold by a local refugee family that the congregation had helped to support, I was living on $30 a week for groceries and I literally couldn’t afford the $3.50 for soup. It was a tentative thing to figure out how to ask, who to ask, what to ask? — I didn’t want the family to have to pay for it, I didn’t want anybody else to have to pay if they couldn’t. So they put in place a policy that you could go and ask the office admin for $3.50. Charity. Still felt a little funny. But also I’d done a lot of thinking about this — had education. A lot of poor folks I know wouldn’t ask for something like that.

When we talk about Solidarity, we are speaking of Beloved Community: a place where people are valued, where we are not blind to one another – where we don’t roll over one other to get to a goal, but neither do we hold back from movement when something is just only to avoid hurting feelings… where we see the complexities of one another’s identities — Intersectionality

MLK: “From a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society”

• And this is still the battle we’re fighting “we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it’s won.”
• Hillel: “if I live for others, who is for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”
• Covid focuses this question in, Rabbi Josh Feigelson: “For whom are you responsible?”
  • OUR BREATH AFFECTS PEOPLE
  • How can I help my sister raise a kid during covid
  • How do I safely open my car window to give someone change? Or, what other solution is there?

2 ways in which we can notice when we are needed:

First, a Problem – what we see in front of us – car accident //meet that with ACTION

Absence/unspoken/Hunger in 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/opinion/sunday/2020-worst-year-famine.html?smid=tw-share 

TEACH, CONSTRUCT, DO, Write a check

We usually feel better because we’ve done something. 

And it is usually an important thing. Undeniably, we strike a blow.

It was in this spirit that Harriet Jacobs’ contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote — Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• She was asked to speak throughout the world, she raised money for abolition — 
• And yet when we look at it today, we see Cut-outs, stereotypes
• Still something about the essence of black folks that she did not quite get — she didn’t quite get what it would be like for her to be enslaved — and she didn’t quite get the full humanity of enslaved people. Compare that to the minute calculations of power and consequence we see depicted in Coates’ The Water Dancer — 
• And we see unfortunately that she still saw herself as the arbiter of which ideas were good — where she had just been a vessel for a message, she took on a “gatekeeper” role

What really gets us beyond the charity mindset – I give and you receive – is the knowledge that this is all an exchange. We’re not finding kindness to those who don’t deserve it. In solidarity, We’re giving people there kindness that is their birthright, and ours. If we don’t find it, we’re all poorer.

“The method is the message,” – Angus MacLean, Canadian Unitarian minister — penned this early on… 

(teens) – setting policy relates to teens, we can include them in decision-making…

(nothing about us without us) Disability movement — “Drunk History” segment on ADA

Seeing if our message comes through in our method is a good way to test whether we are practicing solidarity or charity — 

This can be where the second piece comes in – 

We can know we are needed by Absence – what we don’t see //changing our eyes to see what’s not happening – we PAUSE and meet that with PRESENCE

Notice who isn’t at the table – who is in detention, who is in prison… Rev Elizabeth Nguyen, the immigration bond coordinator with the National Bail Fund Network, Black & Pink

Moments of ABSENCE sometimes call on us to Be a chaplain because we don’t always know what we are looking for! because absence is more painful and more tentative than presence.

Being Quiet in a room and maybe creating space for a person to speak, even if I have some expertise around a thing.

• Working with a congregation and their board who had been through a lot… I spoke with them, gave them a string of ideas, I could offer this workshop, this is available — I could see their eyes a bit glazed — what actually empowered the group was asking them “what are you afraid of?” and not fixing but allowing them to speak their fears and listen to themselves. The gift of a mirror is the most basic gift we can give a person who’s been in trauma. Other things can come later… 

Getting ourselves into situations where we are allowing others to shine

• The most chaplain thing to do – the most rookie error of feeling we don’t have the right words – it doesn’t matter that you have to say, outside some basics – it matters that we allow this person, maybe this family, the space to shine clearly, their entire job in cases of serious illness or death is to SEE Each Other and my job is to create the conditions
• And as this is the key to Chaplaincy this is also the key in Justice work – seeing what isn’t being said — which part of the story is obviously missing 
• Amplifying on social media

Walking in the T — learn a lot during the commute if you’re paying attention.

• I lived in Dorchester for 10 years, 3 while going to school at UMass Boston, and then 3 while I went to school at Harvard. And I think there I learned to notice differently. What I didn’t realize in living in Dorchester was that I would learn what it was like to be open in a racially mixed neighborhood, and on the train, and coming home again, to other people’s realities, t-shirts, conversations, music, listening and witnessing, scolding, giving up seats, noticing my own reactions — sometimes it was so much harder — couldn’t miss the last train, sometimes I did — walking down a street where I felt scared — noticing how many women of color were walking with me, we’d square our shoulders and wrap ourselves up and be eyes and ears for each other — all without words — 
• When I was rushing, I noticed subtle hierarchy — who MY MIND/BODY would assume was important, who MY MIND/BODY assumed would be more dangerous to take up “their” space
• People who culturally would be extremely courteous — simply dressed little Asian ladies — I might think nothing of stepping into their physical space — while tall, white men dressed in business clothes I would defer to!? 
• I came up against my biases because I was confronted by them again and again.

Where are the places I would not go –?

• Pema Chodron, “The Places that Scare You”
• Art show, poetry reading in Dudley Square
  • Part of this, we might not speak — patience, this is not something that can change you overnight or that you can change — this is just the start of a habit
  • We are learning, supporting — who we see as “our people” begins to change
  • AND HOW we see people must change. OUR STORIES start to get really small — less grand — our solutions are less simple — because we know individuals. We can speak back to ignorance with stories of individuals.   “That doesn’t really ring true about my friend who was raised by a single black mom.”    “I haven’t met the immigrants you’re talking about, can you tell me who you’ve met who is like that?”

Harriet Jacobs —

After she freed herself, escaped to DC, moved in with an abolitionist family and became their maid — in her free time and with the literacy she had she supported a free school in Alexandria, VA 

We have many Letters (linked below) — Many different players — lydia maria childs & harriet beecher stowe among them

Read a letter written by someone grateful for the ability to know how to write — it is very moving

Letter to friend Amy, white abolitionist: 

 Harriet said she didn’t want to hang out with the abolitionists for several years, saying that it would be too hard to tell her story of sexual assault and abuse in public all the time. But she was able to tell her secrets, the abuse she’d suffered, slowly, a little at a time, to Amy, her friend. And in listening, Amy kept encouraging Harriet to tell her story. 

• Amy said, “you should write your life story down” and then “maybe Harriet Beecher Stowe would help you put it down” and introduced the two

Willis family… 

• Mrs Willis said in private “you should tell your story to Mrs Stowe” but couldn’t stand up to her husband
• Mrs Stowe “might i use some of these facts for my key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin? but I’m not bringing your daughter with me on my tour” Success/Tour
• Mr Willis she felt would not want her to “write my story while under his roof” — sexual content — The Willises also worked her so hard that she could not write a book “in the daylight” — Mrs Willis was encouraging, but couldn’t give the space Harriet would need — Harriet wrote the book at night, in secret
• Lydia Maria Childs was asked to work with Harriet to edit and clarify the story, kept as much of Harriet’s language as she could, just moving things around. “I have not added anything to the incidents, or changed the import of her very pertinent remarks….I had no reason for changing her lively and dramatic way of telling her own story.”
• Harriet writes to Amy, “Mrs Childs, like yourself, is a whole-souled woman.”

Why is it that I knew HBS’s name, but not _Harriet Jacobs_ off the top of my head? 

If we’re writing the long story, and we believe in solidarity, we’re looking for a different name than our own to get written in the history books.

Many kinds of Solidarity

• Solidarity in offering lodging, Dorothy Day or Sanctuary Movt
• Solidarity in spilling blood…  people who walked in Selma — Berrigan brothers who dropped blood on the steps of the Pentagon – I don’t want you harming other humans to ‘protect’ me
• financial solidarity — 
• solidarity in silence — hospital rooms
• solidarity in presence — 
• solidarity in striking — solidarity in the film “Pride” where tough working class miners fought for LGBTQ people from LOndon — 
• Solidarity as a legal observer of a protest — 
• Solidarity in taking personal or professional risks in speaking out against hate. 

Polls

• I have a Black friend who I never talk to about my struggles to because I think they’re ‘not as serious’ as her struggles as a black woman.
  • Charity. Solidarity means relationships and putting something I’m scared to lose on the line. If I’m not showing who I really am to someone in their role as “friend,” what do I think my role is in her life? Am I doing her a service? That then is charity. Does she know that?
• I have a friend who’s a teen, when we talk I mostly listen to what she’s working through, and I give her some details about my life, but I only talk about my struggles if she asks.
  • Solidarity. Solidarity means relationship and putting something on the line, which in this instance is TIME — and good boundaries, and what is ours to deal with. Over time that relationship can change, but this is about knowing clearly if you are there to serve a person.
• Person singing in Harvard Square

• Put money in her box -SOLIDARITY or CHARITY?
• Skip our train, Sit and listen to a few songs, say ‘thank you’
  • In this moment we are UNDOING — we have had a chance to see something which is usually UNSEEN or ignored — we have a chance to witness and to re-order and I take that opportunity as often as I can — and it is less now that I don’t live in a city where I can easily walk all the time… 🙁 

Ubi caritas, et amor – ubi caritas, deus ibi est…

Is an invitation to asking hard questions. And also it gives the simplest answer. 

I have sung it many times with people who were dying, many of them Christian, sometimes families where there were differences in belief there would be the question of if someone was saved —

• I want people and their families to know that however they showed up in this life, the places where they showed love, the light of god was shining through them — it was never a yes/no, it was never EVER a question of IF. 
• As a chaplain this could enrage me… Beloved Community!? 
  • “Forgive me, it is hard, being a human.”

And the question of wounding — nobody ever sat in a room and judged their family member at their death bed without some deep, deep harshness inside that needed deep gentling — 

“whole-souled”

Cross-cultural psychotherapy … Reading about the mindgames you have to play with yourself when you let yourself become part of  a system which brutalizes — 1930s Germany, the project of ethnic cleansing, and then after the war the project of systematically forgetting  — depression, alienation, drugs and alcohol — OR “when the hold of official narratives weakens, when one experiences oneself as shot through with contradictions and opposing desires, spaces open up for drift and rupture” –a hermeneutics of love, moments where new empathies, attachments and solidarities may form outside the rules of control (Sandoval, 2000) Love happens when we are aware, but not too attached to “who I am and what I represent” ((Toward Psychologies of Liberation Mary Watkins & Helene Schulman))

whether we can grasp that solidarity — this was always a matter of our freedom

Are we in solidarity with ourselves? Or do we look in the mirror and undercut ourselves with certainty, judgment, ways we are not fully worthy of connection?

Solidarity was never “for them,” it was always for all of us. 

“Whole-souled”

When we listen to  Hymn to Freedom, Oscar Peterson — Freedom — 

Beloved community — wild animal we can catch glimpses of

Wendell Berry: “Unseeable Animal” – about animals so wild and precious no human has seen them –

That we do not know you

is your perfection

and our hope.

Topics: Imagination