#ows

Too busy now for my own words. Am borrowing from Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God, from chapter 4, "Liberating God of Life," which we are covering in class for this week:

"Idolatry entails putting alien gods before the true God of the Bible, worshiping something which is not divine. In the Latin American situation these gods are money, the comforts it brings, and the power necessary to make and keep it. Starting with the conquistadores and continuing for five centuries through successive ruling systems up to multinational corporations today, greed has divinized money and its trappings, that is, turned them into an absolute. Core transgressions against the first commandment have set up a belief system so compelling that it might be called moneytheism, in contrast to monotheism.
Like all false gods, money and its trappings require the sacrifice of victims. Whether the poor are offered up indirectly through the economic conditions necessary to produce profit, or directly through the violence necessary to sustain those conditions, their lives are the sacrifice. What is most insidious is the way traditional preaching and theology put a superficial veneer of Christian  belief over the face of these idols...Neutral in the face of injustice, the racist, sexist, classist image of God perverts the actual contours of the living God in the service of moneyed interests" (79-80).

It won't fit on a sign. But it is to the point. I don't know if Jesus would #ows, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Sister Elizabeth there.

Lenten disciplines

This year, our Lenten disciplines as a household are pretty simple and practical: top of the list, no more casual eating out. This is harder than it sounds, even for me, who grew up practically never eating out. Now that I'm all grown up (hmph) I appreciate the implicit training I somehow soaked up from Mom's disciplined weekly menu planning and grocery list making and shopping. It's what I do. But I'd fallen into the habit of planning for 5 or 6 meals a week and counting on one night of beng able to talk Brent into pizza, Chinese, or burritos or whatever. Plus, I'd gotten very permissive about indulging my love for egg sandwiches...stopping on the way home from Clare's preschool to buy myself a happy little breakfast is the kind of expense I'm usually good about resisting, but I'd gotten sloppy. So what this really means is paying a bit more attention to what we're eating, making sure that I plan and buy enough food for all our weekly meals, staying within our budget--while "eating well," mindfully and sustainably and nutritionally. It's a bit more work but truthfully, not that much more than I was doing before anyway. And I've found that a judicious combination of Trader Joe's and the Shoprite near St.Stephen's is the economical way to go. (I'm especially happy with Shoprite's new organic store label...my canned tomato buying is much simplified thanks to that.)

Personally I'm also trying to re-start my habit of the daily Jesuit pray-as-you-go podcasts. I'm not doing so well on this one yet but I'm not giving up. Sometimes it just takes awhile to get back into the groove.

The other personal Lenten discipline that I'm resolved upon is a little vaguer than the concrete goals of not eating out and listening to the prayer podcasts, but no less important. I am finding it harder than usual these days to maintain a sense of willingness and ability to give to others, probably fueled by all the apocalyptic economy talk. I suspect this is the case for lots of other people at the moment as well. It's hard to spontaneously and generously give to others when you suspect the tradeoff is your own security. But this instinct of withdrawing and pulling back from our commitment to other people is the problem and not the solution. So I'm looking for ways to remind myself that we all depend on each other, and the illusion of self-sufficiency created by shrinking back into our own households actually makes us all more vulnerable.

If you're looking for a good Lenten discipline to remind you of all the above, think about visiting the Webb family's site and donating a few dollars to help with travel expenses to Ethiopia for their two adopted daughters. A better reminder of the dependency of all human lives on each other, this material world, and ultimately the mysterious sustenance of God that fuels this creation, cannot be found. $25 won't break your budget, but it may remind you that a willingness to share, to love, to recognize our connection, is what makes human lives worth living.

This Sunday on the train back from the city I noticed a poster advertisement in the train car. A lot of times these posters are for TV shows, or just some random product. It's the kind of advertising you stare at mindlessly for awhile before it sinks in that you're staring at it and your brain is absorbing it for no reason--other than that you're on NJ Transit bored out of your skull. This time, though, the poster wasn't for some new Fox show or whatever. It was a poster advertising surrogacy. This piqued my interest because the topic of surrogate motherhood is one of those places where all my various interests intersect: biotechnology, birthing and motherhood, feminism, social justice, genetics and ties of kinship, categories of same and other.

The idea of surrogacy doesn't freak me out. Sure, it's "unnatural" but I don't use that word in the "bad way" that reactionary folks seem to. But the more I consider it, the more uneasy I become about it as a potential social reality. See, I can imagine becoming a surrogate mother as a kind of gift to another woman--someone who longs for a child but for whom that isn't biologically possible in the "natural" way. Especially since--unlike some women--pregnancy was a almost completely positive bodily experience for me. But in that imagining, there are some parameters assumed: that it is my decision, that it is a gift, that it is based upon or itself creates a relationship between me and the mother, that there is no question of a beloved and secure future for the child. And that may indeed be beautiful, but it dreams up an isolated gift economy for the context of this imagined surrogacy. And we don't live in a gift economy. We live in the good ol' US of A.

Coming down from my dream high, it strikes me that the first problem with a widespread practice of surrogacy is the way in which our capitalistic economy has always defined bodies. We "own" our bodies as the irreducible unit of economic exchange: our bodies are what enable us to work, to become wage-earning labor. As we gain skills we increase our value as workers and blah blah. Those without skills--unskilled laborers--have just their bodies to market as their basic exchange. Those who have nothing else to offer the job market in exchange for the necessities of life sell their bodies. Physical laborers. Migrant workers. Prostitutes. Biotech advances don't change that--they simply open up new markets. Selling organs on the black market. Surrogacy seems to fit that pattern all too easily; yet another way women's bodies are particularly exploitable.

That's serious enough, but as I sat on the train and thought about the motives someone might have for entering into surrogacy on both sides, I realized that surrogacy also serves to further our cultural preoccupation with genetic identity. Why would you opt for surrogacy rather than adoption, if not to secure the genetic identity of your offspring? Why would this matter so much? I observe that it does, but I have ceased to understand it. It seems to me at this point that genetic identity is just another arena in which we inscribe the "we are the same so I love you" and "we are not the same so I don't have to care" dynamics that poison so much of our society already.

So despite my technophilia and my fascination with pregnancy, I am becoming more doubtful about the beneficence of surrogacy as a widespread social phenomenon. It is, after all, being advertised on train posters as an economic opportunity in a time of worldwide economic crisis. Surrogacy: biotech's newest twist on the world's oldest profession?