Prayer Letter: May Day

A good friend recently explained that - as a distress call - the term “May Day” is really from the French SVP m’aider meaning “please help me”.  Well, this is only a call for help in the usual mode of a prayer letter…

Most of you (if not all) also get the intermittent C4L Bulletins, so you have heard that several government grants are immanent for C4L.  That is a huge lift to me personally, although it is more of a medium term factor than short term relief.  This is because government funding moves with glacial slowness.

However, these recent funding approvals should lift C4L to a new plateau in terms of government funding of training through “learnerships” (a combined work-study approach).  This is part of C4L’s 10-year strategy for sustainability – and succession.  I do not see C4L getting past me in its current incarnation.  It has to outgrow the incarnation before it can outgrow me!  So the ascent has begun…

I have often quoted the adage that the role of nonprofits leaders is “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable”.  In the following poem, which I wrote recently, you can find me caught in this role of intermediation.  Frankly it’s not a pleasant place to be.  Comforting the afflicted has a nice “look and feel” to it - until you recognize the inherent pitfalls.  But afflicting the comfortable can only be described as an occupational hazard for NGO directors. 

You just have to call a spade a spade, as Jesus did when he met the rich young ruler.  From one youth to another, he said that wealth was getting in the way of eligibility.  So I am in good company in writing these lines, which I hope you will take to heart.  Pray for me to deal with the angst that this role causes me.  I think it is captured in the poetry?

Alienated By Entitlement

Only one letter before the F-word

Comes the E-word that nobody wants to hear...

In a global village

Who says that some continents

Can consume natural resources

Faster than others?

No creed condones it

But some still feel entitled

To leave the lights on when not in the room

To drive a gas-guzzler

Even to the parish church on Sunday mornings

Instead of walking

And to give less to Charity

When they hear that Aid begets Dependency

That there are millions who never get off the Dole

Some of them hooked on drugs

Whose sense of entitlement is deeper?

In a rainbow nation

Who is the most privileged?

Those who live behind walls topped with razor wire

Coasting along on accumulated capital?

Or those who don't have to perform to standards

Protected in their jobs by affirmative action

Overpaid and underproducing?

They both feel entitled

To live in their black enclave or white ghetto

Alienated by entitlement

In Sunday morning worship

Whose prayer rises fastest?

Who does God hear above all the clamour?

Not all are privileged with the gift of tongues

Not are entitled to miraculous healing

Thus saith the high and holy One

Who inhabits eternity

I dwell in the high and holy place

And also with him

Who is of a humble and contrite spirit

Is it humble to be so sure that your doctrine is sound?

Is it contrite to have shoes in your closet

That you never wear

When others go barefoot?

Eternal security feeds entitlement

When doctrine was corrected

Purgatory was abandoned

But blessed assurance crashed humility

The body language of a contrite spirit

Is to kneel prostrate before the altar

Not to raise both hands in Alleluias

Like the Pharisee

Praying beside the groveling tax collector

Who did God listen to?

The only thing gold is good for

Is paving the streets of heaven

Interlocking gold bricks as paving stones

Each one with an imprint embedded

Joe the Samaritan helped me after I was mugged

Frank of Assisi clothed me with family hand-me-downs

August of Halle paid my school fees at the Ragged School

William Booth helped me shake off my drug habit

Theresa of Calcutta comforted me before I died

The road to hell is also paved

With good intentions