Religion Can Be Force for Good (Reflections for Holiday Season)

[jbg]

This New York Times article (link), excerpted below, shows that religion can be a source for true beneficence. It is appropriate for the season. I deliberately am posting an article having no relation to my particular religion, which is Judaism, to make the point.

December 24, 2006

Coming Out of His Tunnel and Helping a Bronx Nun

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

In a city of lights, Johnny Five lives in the dark. He calls his home a cave, but it is really a kind of dungeon, deep in the crevices below an abandoned train station in the Bronx.

He slips inside at the edge of a high cliff not far from Yankee Stadium. As he crouches along a narrow passageway of concrete slabs and steel beams, stepping farther and farther into the subterranean belly of a station platform, the sounds of the city slowly fade. Sunlight and moonlight vanish. Johnny’s makeshift room is in a far corner, past garbage bags, old mattresses and mini-stalactites.

He has been bitten by bedbugs. A mysterious gray goo clings to the walls. His air shafts are holes the size of a fist. It is stiflingly hot in summer and so cold in winter that a quart of milk freezes in 15 minutes.

He loves it here.

He hates it here.

The cave is the confessional where he talks to God, the bedroom where he watches kung-fu movies on a portable DVD player, the hideaway where he drinks and gets high. It offers him what many of New York City’s homeless seek beyond mere shelter: a dark place to shut out the world. He has lived here off and on since 1986, settling in on a more permanent basis about eight years ago.

“There’s times I come here and say there’s no place like home,” he said. “I know where I’m going, where I am. This is hell.”

This Christmas, Johnny, whose real name is John Carbonell, will emerge from his cave and walk to Ogden Avenue. There, he will meet Sister Lauria Fitzgerald, who has looked after the homeless in the Bronx for nearly two decades.

Johnny will not receive help that day. He will give it. He and Sister Lauria will hop into a van and deliver food to the homeless.

This is Sister Lauria’s holiday tradition, and it has become Johnny’s, too. Last year, on Thanksgiving, they walked toward a bridge in the West Farms neighborhood where the homeless congregate.

Down some steps, they came upon a statue of Our Lady of Charity, or Caridad del Cobre, the Patroness of Cuba. Past the statue, Johnny helped lift Sister Lauria over a wall, so she could reach the homeless in the trestles of the bridge. They brought hot chocolate, socks and gloves.

They have come to rely on each other and to trust each other, the man in the cave and the Catholic nun in the Bronx.

She is a member of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Blauvelt, N.Y. She wears blue jeans and sneakers. Her father arrested drug addicts as a narcotics detective for the New York Police Department; she has befriended them. She works for the nonprofit Highbridge Community Life Center and manages a thrift shop on Ogden Avenue run by Siena House, a former convent, which is now a women’s shelter.

He is a high school dropout and ex-convict known in the neighborhood as Johnny Five, a nickname taken from the robot character in the 1988 movie “Short Circuit 2.” He is 44, a thin, muscular man with a few missing teeth and a raspy voice. He was born in Manhattan but grew up in the Bronx. He ran away from home as a teenager. He often walks by the building where he used to live.

*snip*

Several months ago, Johnny told Sister Lauria he wanted out of the cave. He wanted her to help him find housing. She said it was the first time in the eight years she has known him that he expressed any interest in leaving the cave for good. Before, she said, he would never consider it, despite her begging.

Johnny said he was simply tired. “Old age caught me like a thief in the night,” he said. “My body is not the same.”

Sister Lauria contacted the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, a nonprofit group that provides services for the mentally disabled homeless. On Thursday, Johnny signed an application for housing assistance.

After he signed the papers, he went back to the cave. He was beginning to feel ill from the flu. Later that evening, he crawled out. He went to the thrift shop on Ogden Avenue. Sister Lauria was there. She had been expecting him.

[margrace]

Oh Oh watch out you will get accused of pushing religion.

[Liam]

I don't think you'd get much argument from anyone that religion can be a wonderful thing, but the people who sit in seats of power of certain religions (televangelists, Islamicists, certain pedophile-protecting Catholic bishops, evangelicals who want to impose their own form of sharia on society, etc.) give aspects of religion a terrible name.

[jbg]

I don't think you'd get much argument from anyone that religion can be a wonderful thing, but the people who sit in seats of power of certain religions (televangelists, Islamicists, certain pedophile-protecting Catholic bishops, evangelicals who want to impose their own form of sharia on society, etc.) give aspects of religion a terrible name.

Exactly my point in posting it. I want people to see that it can also be downright wonderful and positive.

Someone very close to me is dieing of cancer. It will be any day now. In my religion, the death rituals provide for a swift closure (burial in 24-48 hours, mourning for a week or less), and then back to rebuilding lives that have been neglected during the illness of the loved one.

I found that very comforting, back in 1972-3 when my father passed away (on January 5, 1973) after a 1 1/2 year bout with colorectal cancer. During the "Shiva" (I was 15 at the time) my friends and I congregated in my room, and we played ou respective favorite music. A little over a month later, my mother was dating the man who she'd marry 17 months later. His wife had died in May 1972. They're still married, and we're still close. The religious part is the encouragement of closure and rebirth.

[Melanie_]

I am not a follower of any religion - I personally think it is a delusion that provides comfort to those who choose to be comforted. However, I have a colleague who is a devout Jew, and her faith and practice is a testament to the positive power religion can have in a person's life. When she spoke of the preparations for her daughter's recent Bat Mitzvah, I was genuinely moved by the attention to detail and the meaning behind each element of the ceremony and celebrations. There is nothing empty or superficial in her faith, but at the same time she recognizes that it is her faith, and doesn't try to impose it on anyone else.

[jbg]

I am not a follower of any religion - I personally think it is a delusion that provides comfort to those who choose to be comforted. However, I have a colleague who is a devout Jew, and her faith and practice is a testament to the positive power religion can have in a person's life. When she spoke of the preparations for her daughter's recent Bat Mitzvah, I was genuinely moved by the attention to detail and the meaning behind each element of the ceremony and celebrations. There is nothing empty or superficial in her faith, but at the same time she recognizes that it is her faith, and doesn't try to impose it on anyone else.

I did not try to impose my faith on anyone. Indeed, getting a rabbi to agree to convert a non-Jew to Judaism is quite a difficult task.

[Melanie_]

I did not try to impose my faith on anyone. Indeed, getting a rabbi to agree to convert a non-Jew to Judaism is quite a difficult task.

I wasn't implying you were, and I'm sorry if it sounded like I was - I had no intent to offend you. I actually meant to agree with you that religion can be a force for good, with an example of the person whose personal faith I most respect. If more people just lived their faith honestly, without trying to convince others that their version is the correct one, religion could be an even greater force for good.

[PocketRocket]

I believe that like anything else, what you get out of religion is exactly what you put into it.

Those who use religion as an outlet for anger or oppression can do terrible things in the name of their God.

Those who believe, and use that belief as a source of comfort and solace get exactly that.

Those whose religious beliefs are based on GIVING comfort and solace will tend to spread goodwill amongst those they meet and/or help.

[geoffrey]

I believe that like anything else, what you get out of religion is exactly what you put into it.

Those who use religion as an outlet for anger or oppression can do terrible things in the name of their God.

Those who believe, and use that belief as a source of comfort and solace get exactly that.

Those whose religious beliefs are based on GIVING comfort and solace will tend to spread goodwill amongst those they meet and/or help.

Extremely well said.

[jbg]

I believe that like anything else, what you get out of religion is exactly what you put into it.

Those who use religion as an outlet for anger or oppression can do terrible things in the name of their God.

Those who believe, and use that belief as a source of comfort and solace get exactly that.

Those whose religious beliefs are based on GIVING comfort and solace will tend to spread goodwill amongst those they meet and/or help.

Agreed. Inherently violent cultures put the kind of emotion into religion that results in planes crashing into buildings. More constructive cultures use religion for unification and healing, fo rthe furtherance of a civil society.

[cybercoma]

I believe that like anything else, what you get out of religion is exactly what you put into it.

Those who use religion as an outlet for anger or oppression can do terrible things in the name of their God.

Those who believe, and use that belief as a source of comfort and solace get exactly that.

Those whose religious beliefs are based on GIVING comfort and solace will tend to spread goodwill amongst those they meet and/or help.

In the end, it's the actions of people that actually are.