| Listening to the Poor |
Some last things that Romero said
"I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All of this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally."
"How easy it is to denounce structural injustice, institutionalized
violence, social sin! And it is true, this sin is everywhere, but where
are the roots of this social sin? In the heart of every human being. ...
Be converted!"
"... we know that we only teach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes,
which have turned everything upside down to proclaim "Blessed are
the poor, blessed are those who search for justice, blessed are those who
suffer.""
"The Word remains. This is the great consolation of one who preaches. My voice will disappear, but my word - which is Christ - will remain in the hearts of those who have wanted to receive it."
Throughout our study we have heard how Merton and Romero found found their
courage and their voice in their being centered in their faith, and hearing
the call to justice.
But unless we are most attentive, we will hear only a call to further charity. And though charity be a grand obligation, it is not enough. Charity tends to sustain the very bonds of slavery that cause the problem that needs charity. Charity tends towards dehumanizing the recipients. Charity creates a dependence, and reduces initiative. Charity should be the companion of justice.
There are two more exemplars to teach us. Two more voices that from encounters
with the poor, bring us a truth to heal the world. Persons who not only
attended the poor, but listened and learned from them. For the poor are
not poor in spirit, nor in imagination, nor in seeing what needs changing
in the world.
Larry has a special connection to these two persons, and a special insight
into the ways their message resolves the themes of this course. He will
introduce to you Paulo Friere of Brazil and Ivan Illich of Austria.
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| IVAN ILLICH : A Well-Disciplined Christian Anarchist Mentor |
In 1969 I was employed by the Alberta Human Resources Research Council (HRRC) to be something of a socratic gadfly, one of the most fascinating and productive jobs I've ever had and one that every critical thinker or philosopher would give her or his eyeteeth to obtain. It was there that a friend, and co-worker, Gordon McIntosh, called my attention to a recent "New York Review of Books" article by Ivan Illich called "Outwitting the 'Developed' Countries". I immediately fell in love with the ideas and life of this iconoclastic thinker who argued that Western civilization through its religious and secular missions was unwittingly engaged in "polluting the social imagination of the so-called Third World". Illich had said to a Conference on Inter-American Student Projects (CIASP) gathered in Cuernavaca, Mexico, "I am here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help."
I was studying for my PhD in political science at UofA and Illich fed my disenchantment with a process which, if left unquestioned, would do nothing to reduce the gaps between the poor and rich, the powerless and powerful. I began to incorporate Illich's ideas into my HRRC papers but more importantly they allowed me to take seriously my own yearnings. I read "Deschooling Society" and "Tools for Conviviality" and by the time I had a full-time teaching position in Halifax I knew what my teaching career was all about. It was in essence a mission to work towards the deschooling of my immediate society: it was significant to note the difference between what Illich called the "disestablishment of the school" and "the deschooling of the culture" or removing the notion of schooling as professionally sanctioned practices and commodities from one's heart.
Everywhere, even in countries which could scarcely afford a mere year or two of Western-defined formal education, "schools" were becoming increasingly universal and compulsory. Those who could not complete their elementary schooling would forever be branded as, and accept without question, the social nomenclature of "failure". Schools had an "invariant structure" they were replete with a "hidden curriculum". The chalkboards, the straight rows, the "licensed teacher" "the grading process" "the required courses and prerequisites" all these structures embodied and radiated a silent curriculum which imprinted upon the student her inadequacies, her disconnectedness, her place of powerlessness and dependency.
I felt an angry passion within as I watched both faculty and students bow to what Illich had called "the institutionalization of values". We accepted the social conventions and institutional goals and values as substitutes for our own passions or hungerings for understanding, learning, freedom, creativity, or meaning.
I designed courses like "The Politics of the Educational Process" and "Educational Alternatives for Political Awareness" and I wrote and published papers like "The Evils of University Education", "University Education-A Great Social Disaster" and "Branding Time at Bar-Alma U: Campus Politics and the Loss of Spirit".
My courses became a remarkable success. Students felt empowered. Over the years they became increasingly aware and critical of their passivity, their veiled lessons in oppression. The courses themselves were hungrily gobbled up by the neighbouring Dalhousie Education department which was experimenting with alternative schools and was then headed by Doris Dyck a somewhat radical and creative figure in the United Church of Canada at the time.
My family and I bought a farm in rural Nova Scotia and I continued to pride myself on being something of an "angry young man" who raised his six kids on organic food and our own milk, eggs, butter, honey, home-made bread, milk-fed and farm-raised pork, beef and chicken. I commuted each week to work .
Then in 1976 I was advised by a colleague in PEI that they had to cancel out on a visit by Illich and would I be interested in hosting him in Halifax. I immediately contacted him through one of his esteemed colleagues. In those days Ivan Illich was writing about the "limits to medicine", the notion that doctor-induced illness was everywhere present and that modern medicine was robbing individuals of their right and their capacity to care for themselves and to employ self-engendered or other spiritual/religious resources to deal with their own well-being, their own suffering, their own meaning. Illich had become one of the most widely sought social critics of the age. His work was world-renowned. He could garner thousands of dollars for any public appearance, if one was fortunate enough to attract him to one's country.
We were victorious. Ivan, as I soon came to call him, would come to Halifax with no cost but airfare provided we arranged to have him meet with his friend Edgar Friedenberg, an American emigree to Canada, who had come to Canada and Halifax because of the political climate surrounding the Vietnam War. Edgar was a close confidant at CIDOC, the Centre for Inter-cultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico where the critics of schooling and other Western-defined institutions would gather, people like Edgar, Paul Goodman, Joel Spring, Herbert Kohl, Dennis Sullivan, Jonathan Kozol and Everett Reimer.
When Ivan Illich arrived he was the first person off the plane. He carried a duffle bag over his shoulder and literally ran down the stairs to greet me, ignoring completely the escalator that adjoined the stairs at the Halifax International Airport. He was wearing, as I distinctly recall, an olive-coloured cardigan sweater with holes in the sleeves. I asked him if he wished to stay at the Lord Nelson Hotel, Halifax's then leading hotel where I had booked him a room, or would he prefer to stay at my home, where there were six kids, a dog, eight puppies and a gerbil. He quickly chose the kids, puppies and gerbil and later revealed that in addition to knowing seven different languages at the time (he eventually came to speak ten) he had learned to be a dog trainer.
I left a copy of Edgar's then latest book: "The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes" for Ivan in the bedroom reserved for him in our Spryfield, Halifax home. He devoured the book during his stay.
In my office before we walked to the auditorium-in-the-round where he would speak to eager people from all over Nova Scotia, he practiced a bit of yoga and head-stands to ready himself for the gathered assembly. In our walk down the corridor to the auditorium I informed him that I had managed to enlist the support of the Dalhousie audio-visual department to video-tape his comments. He stopped abruptly and said "if you keep those cameras you will get a 'performance' from me and nothing better". Within the space of fifty yards we had canceled the video-taping.
Illich sat on a stool and talked about schooling as a commodity, the unfortunate depoliticization of legal testimony by deference to experts and the equally undemocratic definition of health and health treatment by health professionals. He asked people to write down questions and send them into him for serious consideration. He gave generously of his time, fielding thoughtfully every question, every conceivable side, criticism, nuance, about his ideas and the world we live in.
My Dean was sitting in the audience with a friend and colleague. They came in late. They never took off their trench-coats. To my disappointment they left early. The following day I excitedly visited the Dean in his office expecting words of admiration and deep respect. Instead, much to my profound shock and emerging disgust I heard my own Dean say of Illich's generous giving of himself the night before: "That was the most abominable performance by an academic that I have ever witnessed in my life". Even today when I think of that judgment I realize the distance that exists between what I think is the essence of intelligent social critique and creative living and so many others around me who have no idea of what I or Illich might be talking about. I have remained ever more committed to bridging that gap.
When I said goodbye to Ivan, we hugged each other and he promised to send me his book "Energy and Equity" once he got back to the UK and could speak to his publisher. I remember thinking "yeah, well, with all the things you've got to do I shouldn't expect for a moment to see that book". But he did have the book sent to me, along with a beautiful post-card of York Cathedral thanking me, and a Mexican dream-catcher. His next stop was Italy and working for a new alternative political party. He balanced his life between periods of research and writing and direct political activity.
One of the biggest regrets I have in my life, and it carries an important lesson, is that I did not continue my contact with Ivan. I believed he was too important a man to continue to be bothered with me. I realize today that my view of another's importance was a statement about my own ego, my own misunderstanding of greatness. Ivan would not have been too busy to maintain the friendship. Much of his most valuable energy and writing was about friendship. He visited friends when they were in danger from political authorities or threatened by homeless persons as was the case of Bishop Dom Heldar Camara. Or he would stay at the apartment of the lonely Philip Aries after his wife died of cancer.
He was a man of complete consistency. One of his last essays, delivered on CBC ideas was called "The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society". I used this fascinating work in my year as a visiting professor at Menno Simons College at the University of Winnipeg. I and my students met in the student lounge in a course inspired by Illich: "Love, Friendship and Politics: Re-envisioning Peace Education and Research". CBC writer and producer David Cayley summarized this seminal essay by saying:
$ > "The corruption of the best is the worst. This old adage sums up Ivan Illich's view of the fate of the Christian gospel during two-thousand years. He speaks as a Christian who believes that through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, something gloriously new came into the world: the possibility of knowing and loving God in the flesh. But along with this came a new and unprecedented danger: that the call to love more abundantly would become the basis for new forms of power in the hands of those who organize and administer the new testament. "Wherever I look for the roots of modernity," Illich says, "I find it in attempts of the churches to institutionalize and manage Christian vocation."
I will return to this subject as a conclusion of this tribute to Illich as mentor and as he described himself to us in Halifax in 1976: a well-disciplined Christian anarchist.
Illich argued from his own experience that the only truly revolutionary form of politics available to us in the late 20th century arose from the disciplined commitment of politically passionate friends in devoted dialogue with one another and out of which creative political action would emerge as a direct result of that passion and deep community experience, free of all institutional inhibition.
And in another seminar I relished the opportunity to talk about the two teachers I most admired in my life only one of whom I had had the privilege of meeting: "Pedagogy, Politics and Peace: The Inspiration of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich".
My son Peter died of suicide in that year in Winnipeg and a very different Dean, Dean-Dean Peachy visited my class on Illich and Freire in my absence. He didn't need to do that because the students in that class were well prepared to learn on their own. Dean had said in a telephone conversation to me in Vancouver where I was arranging Peter's funeral that he had considered it an honour to be in that class. I found out later why he said what he did. The students upon hearing the news of why I was absent had said to him: "We don't want to talk about Illich and Freire tonight, we want to talk about the professor who we love". I still weep tears of deep joy and satisfaction when I repeat those words.
When I returned to my final class of the year, and following the laying of Peter's ashes in a small grave beside his grandparents in Edmonton I consciously invited my lost son to come with me to this class which more than any other embodied what I loved as a teacher. Peter would see the fruits of his father's life work. The classroom and my office was full of student art, their poetry, their written tributes to me. And the substance of the evening was a dramatic portrayal about higher education, partlyl about those students whose position and attitudes in life made university rather straightforward for them. But it also told the story of those who found higher learning a huge block to their freedom and creativity. The playlet was acted out on the classroom tables. The actors walked by us as we sat there listening to a ghetto-blaster provide background sounds to their story of struggle. I knew Peter would love every iconoclastic, creative, explosive moment of it. It was his nature and it was the nature and spirit of Ivan Illich that was being relived in a class I was so proud to call mine and amongst students I was so proud and supremely grateful to call my loving and understanding friends.
One of the most moving descriptions of friendship which Illich is still helping me to appreciate both through his past writings and through my personal, albeit brief experience of him, is how he understands Jesus. He does not speak of Jesus as a powerful God-man, Ivan does not see Jesus as the command-giver, the concomitant guilt-inflictor because of our failings. Rather, Illich sees Jesus as the beautiful, caring close friend and what we feel when we fall short is simply what we feel for any good friend that we have failed in any way. We feel a remorse because we let down our good friend.
I don't speak about Jesus very often. I don't really like to. But the one place in my life which has some meaning is this notion of a dear friend, a friend like Ivan that I want to be close to and I want to be supportive of as he is to me. I make no distinction between my good friends and Jesus. I strive equally to see friendship in Jesus and Jesus in my friendships. Both are equally God made flesh. That perspective moves me more than any theology, any religious dogma, any moral imperative and I gleaned that insight, I am now proud to say, through the writings, life and work of my mentor and friend Ivan Illich.
- Larry J. Fisk, November 29, 2004.
Prepared for St. David's Adult Education Class on Philip Yancey's "Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church".
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