Conversation: Fr Phillip Linden, priest and theologian

Sydney
24 August 2003

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Conversation: Fr Phillip Linden, priest and theologian - Suffering in the face of the poor

By Chris Lindsay

“You can’t expect to solve today’s problems with the same situations that created them,” says Fr Phillip Linden, quoting Australian Jesuit leader Fr Mark Raper.

The American priest and theologian, in Sydney to lecture at the Australian Catholic University campus at Strathfield, is a veteran of the race conflicts in the US South during the 60s and 70s and, as such, has personal experience of how social conditions perpetuate rather than solve social problems.

“As descendants of slaves you can’t find solutions in the situations that created slavery,” he says.

“If society is the problem, you can’t talk about the problem in terms of that society, rather through how Church history has talked about it.

“Somebody has to talk about the untruth that the world’s divisions create. You have to become part of those who suffer.”

Fr Linden (pictured) rejects the social engineering concepts of helping people improve their lot within a society that oppresses them.

“Often the projected solutions are in terms that are abstract, such as how are you going to ‘help’ people,” he says.

“But you are talking about something that is different from the real human condition.

“You are only dealing with individuals, not the social and historical problems that created the hunger, the refugees and the violence.

“You are dealing with ideas on how to improve production for the state. The good - the ‘alleged good’ - within the existing society is accumulating values of dominance, which is really what produced the poverty and the violence to begin with.

“Can you discuss ethics with someone who is hungry?

“No, you have to give them something to eat.

“And is ethics merely a way of propping up the system? Does it foster the dominance?”

A priest for 34 years, Fr Linden has been an associate professor for 12 years at the Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, where he teaches fundamentals in theology. Xavier is the only all black and all-Catholic university in the US.

Before that he spent 12 years in a ministry in inner city Baltimore, Maryland, where he worked with many social and political organisations trying to deal with problems of police brutality, guns and drugs - “what we would now call problems with violence”.

“It was government-sponsored violence by the police department,” he says, “and when the riots started the National Guard would come in. This was in the 60s and 70s, very tough days.”

Has the situation improved?

“Let me just say there have been some changes,” Fr Linden says. “We have moved from civil rights campaigns to the dehumanisation of the inner cities.

“There is what I call the totalisation of the situation, which is created by fragmentation. It is a divide-and-conquer policy, which is also what is happening now in the international scene. There is a focus on individual interests.

“These individual interests equal the idea of progress and success; in this case, the focus on society is also a focus on the individual.

“The programs of the 60s blunted the aspirations of black Americans. Now they are virtually indistinguishable from those they claim oppress them.

“There is no renewal for the blacks in America because they are always defined in terms of self-interest.”

Fr Linden says the real concern for those who are suffering in the world is in theology.

“Despite where we stand today, what is required is the search for God in those who are suffering,” he says. “In theology the suffering of Christ is not a matter of surrogacy; it is a model for us in our own response to the world.

“Instead of guiding people towards social solutions, this is a way to help them to realise these projects will not bring them hope in the current circumstances.

“There are many ways to view the world. Theological ways and non-theological are two of them.”

Fr Linden says questions he has often had to deal with regarding the circumstances of the poor and the suffering have come from the non-theological and dealt with ‘answers’ coming from social projects, politics and the economy.

“There is no possible solution there for the believing person,” he says.

“Instead, what we are seeking is healing, a sense of wholeness - the personal as opposed to the individual.

“Rather than pursuing the individual, we should be looking at our relationship with nature and with others, based on context, not on the abstract such as ‘helping’ and ‘process’.

“In the 60s and 70s I ‘crossed to the other side’. I don’t see the world from the dominant side any more.

“Society, politics, economics don’t see the naked face of those who are really poor.

“Once you see their suffering it is for real; it is not an abstract. You are engaged.

“Once you are at that level you are speaking back to the systems and structures that oppress.

“In Baltimore I saw the ‘underside of history’. There was no ‘hope’ anywhere.

“The systems and structures are not the solution. They are placed in opposition to them.

“Instead we must work to achieve wholeness, communal activity, the willingness to sacrifice to the point of death.

“We must go where they are. That is where Christ went when he became totally identified with the poor. His solidarity with the world gave people hope, hope for meaning in their lives.

“Society gives false hope. What we need is the rejection of this false hope. I no longer have hope in structures that have oppressed me.

“Look at Bl Mary MacKillop or Mother Teresa; there is hope whenpeople can look at each other in love.

“Dominance will never change - it will always look at new ways of profit. Hope in the political side is false; it is not even human.

“People on the underside of society are not the most pitiable on Earth.

“The universe was created for God; we are not happy unless we are in the pursuit of God.”

Fr Linden says he thinks there are three dimensions to dealing with the suffering of poor people.

“The first is kenosis - an emptying of yourself. Christ emptied himself when he became totally human to the point of death. People like Mary MacKillop and Mother Teresa have often been involved in this.

“The second is love, or compassion; and the third is the cross - people who are willing to die for the sake of another.

“Kenosis is an empty-handedness. People like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, I do not doubt they had love and compassion for others. They ‘died’ for others - Mandela’s 30 years in jail were a ‘death’.

“But were they empty-handed? Martin Luther King died with millions of dollars. Mandela has millions; Jesse Jackson, who travels the world ‘fixing’ problems, has tens of millions.

“People are starving for God, they crave God, but the systems and the structures do not let them have access to God. And Church structures don’t always lead us to God.

“In the US the God they speak of so much often turns out to be the god of private property.

“At the end of the Cold War, when there was an opportunity, no one spoke up for those who were suffering. That was seen to be redundant.

“And it is getting worse. The shift now is to more than just material wealth, they are now talking about ‘control’ - which is what globalisation means; the control of human potential.”

Fr Linden says technological developments such as cloning and stem cell research are redefining what a human being is.

“We have lost our way, we have lost the centre,” he says. “More and more people are looking for the exotic, talking about the drug Ecstasy, having a desire for transcendentedness.

“The great saints never looked at the world from the perspective of the individual; always from the perspective of God.

“And this is not a hagiographic statement, you can find this when you study what happened in their real lives. None of these people had self-interest as their motivation.”

For himself, Fr Linden says he rests his hope in God.

“As a teacher all I can do is speak for the underside of history,” he says.

“My parents were always people who sacrificed themselves for others.

“My father ran for public office, to the school board, in 1946 in the South; I was six years old.

“His platform was for quality education - not quality education as it is meant today, but just that everyone be taught to read and write, to do mathematics, to have moral character.

“I can remember my uncles coming on election day to tell my mother that his opponents were bringing out the sick in wheelchairs and stretchers to vote. He was massively defeated, of course.”