Prov V

The annual Prov V gathering for college students held this year at Turkey Run State Park in IN over the weekend including April 1st was great fun. The park has beautiful hiking trails and the weather was cooperative in the early afternoon on Saturday when everyone had free time to go hiking. The speaker for the weekend, Sarah Dylan Breuer (blog here), was delightful. The theme for the weekend was the verse from Micah about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before the Lord. Mostly the talking focused on social justice and giants in past struggles for justice such as Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu. All in all a lovely set of meditations on what justice and mercy require of us in broad terms. One piece that particularly stands out as being excellent was the obligatory anti-racism bit. Sadly I can't recall the name of the African American lady who led this part, but I think Collins Asonye, the coordinator for campus ministry for Province V, should have noted her name and parish or campus ministry. Anyway, she didn't restrict concideration simply to race, but pointed out how bound up with economic conditions, history, and discrimination racism is. She did this by beginning the segment by inviting everyone to identify a road that divided their city or town between the "good" area and the "bad" area. From there she had the group describe how one could know one was in a "bad" area of town. Then we did the same for the "good" area of town. After that we explored what things both parts had in common, and how the common systems functioned to maintain the disparity between the two sections in broad terms. The major complaint I heard afterwards was that it mixed racism and economic injustice and perhaps some other difficulties that are closely tied with both those issues. Personally, I am inclined to think that these issues cannot really be separated as neatly as might be desired since they are all tied together and frequently reinforce each other.

There was only one somewhat disturbing note in the weekend. In the discussions of the meditations given to the whole group, the model of Christian living that was more or less exclusively held up is what I would call the heroic virtue model. Archbishop Tutu is one great example of the type of person everyone looks to as an exemplar of this model, since he was hugely important in ending apparteid and is generally a giant in speaking to social justice issues. I found myself wondering, however, where this left the ordinary people who don't have something like apparteid to fight. Heroic virtue seems to be almost beyond their reach, and there doesn't seem to be any other way of living that is praiseworthy. I think there is another way of living, and that an anchor for that sort of life can be found in the snippet of scripture used in the noon devotion for individuals in the BCP. That meditation is thoughts for another time, however.

Jon