Mission as Kinship on the Margins

A note on “kinship”

“Kinship” expresses a particular connectedness between persons; we could distinguish four types of kinship, those of blood, milk, water, and wine. “Blood-based kinship” is kinship through birth, referring to a common descent, sharing in a way of being creatures; this common descent shapes the person to a certain extent. The German word Kind (child) expresses this kind of connection. “Milk-based kinship” is kinship through shared family life, offering protection and nurturing practices. It is kinship expressed in rearing and caring, beautifully expressed in the Old English word cynn. “Water-based kinship” is kinship based on compassion (giving water to the thirsty); it occurs by seeing and listening to the other and can be linked to the word cynde, originally meant to express the feeling of relatives for each other. Finally, “wine-based kinship” is kinship through celebration and companionship, characterized by presence and participation, as expressed in the German word kennen (“to know”).

These four types of kinship can be translated into each other. By accepting a baby into the family, we transform blood-based kinship into one that is milk-based (which is, one would say, a natural thing to do). Turning water into milk is the dynamism of accepting a stranger in need as a member of the family into the home; turning water into wine is the transformation from compassion into celebration, from support into community.

Mission faces the challenge of offering “kinship moments” and “kinship structures,” especially as community-building, thus transforming water-based kinship into wine-based kinship. Kinship on the margins makes people move toward kinship moments with the most disadvantaged, makes people experience wine-based kinship with the most vulnerable, makes people build kinship structures that facilitate kinship moments and the transformation from distance into kinship. Such transformation moves the basis of kinship from water to milk to wine—based on a deep commitment to our shared creation story as children of God (i.e., blood-based kinship). ⁶

A key concept to express this transformation is hospitality. Aristotle regarded hospitality as an essential ingredient of “external friendships” insofar as they require an unspoken contract of trust between host and guest, with each reliant on the other in some way for this hospitality to work. One crucial factor at the heart of hospitality—not to be underestimated in mission practices—is civility and courtesy, something that Harald Weinrich recognized: “In my opinion, we need to rethink the whole issue of correct codes of conduct, put the ‘outside alien’ center stage and make basic civil courtesy and good manners the top priority. In other words, how polite we are to our stranger guest depends exactly on how ‘different’ she is.” ⁷ A visitor needs more support but may also be the bearer of unknown possibilities, arouse keen interest and even curiosity; a woman who is a foreign guest finds herself in a land surrounded by strangers— in other words, beyond the boundaries of her own ways of life and in a social context with codes of conduct alien to her, an experience we could compare to quasi exile. “Mission as kinship on the margins” reflects this exodus.

This idea is the foundation stone of the work of Georg Sporschill, SJ, a man who manages to combine hospitality and mission with the war on poverty.

Hospitality and kinship on the margins: Georg Sporschill, SJ

Georg Sporschill, a Jesuit priest from the most western region of Austria, has been living and working in eastern Europe since 1991. He has set up social projects for thousands of children from the streets and sewers of the Romanian capital and since 2004 has dedicated himself to helping orphans and neglected children in Moldova. A few years ago he returned to Romania to work with Roma families.

Sporschill’s lifework is based on three commonsense insights: (1) providing suitable infrastructures, (2) valuing the inner dimension of people’s lives, and (3) facilitating shared responsibilities.

A reflection on kinship on the margins and Concordia

So far we have seen that infrastructure, the inner human dimension, and shared responsibilities are key terms in Sporschill’s street work agenda, an agenda he calls Concordia. ⁹ As kinship experiences can take place only in concord, Sporschill’s Concordia is a coming and bringing together of human hearts and minds in peaceful harmony and symbolizes both the path struck to alleviate poverty and what Martin Kämpchen terms a system of “friends serving friends” (Freundschaftsdienst). So when Sporschill is not physically able to offer a tangible infrastructure to the youngsters who come to him for help, what he can offer and what they want and need more than anything else is friendship (123). Of course, he realizes that in creating a common ground between vastly differing cultures—street-kid mentality vs. Western-European-voluntary-worker thinking—there is a high risk factor involved when these two worlds collide (162). A main element of this “friends serving friends” philosophy is the wrestling for the heart of the human individual, which takes a lot of time, effort, and above all imagination (196); lasting ties and bonds of friendship grow out of this work (198), relationships in which each person has a chance to see, feel, and experience how unique she or he is.

Kinship experiences take time, slow you down, and make it impossible to judge work primarily in terms of efficiency. Concordia manages to provide possibilities and opportunities that together create an infrastructure that can be described only as home. It is all about microcommunities because it is the small community that can best replicate the warmth, care, and attention lacking in the life of a youngster without a family. The huge orphanages (the “institutionalized barracks”) that were the direct result of Ceausescu’s draconian family-planning laws and in which children were left, abandoned by parents unable to cope financially, failed miserably in providing these children with the right goods for life; these children let down by everyone were left to struggle and survive as best they could on the street. Sporschill attempted to provide kinship structures instead.

These children need to feel someone is listening, someone cares, and someone accepts them as they are; more than anything, they need to feel that deep human sense of belongingness (27). A community usually looks to one person to guide and lead it (28), but a community will grow and move on only when there is a power shift, when the cards are reshuffled and existing structures are rearranged, redistributed. A community will grow when it realizes that its strongest members are in fact its weakest ones (106); this paradox is particularly important for social and street workers, who can feel that their daily encounters are gifts they would not normally be given in a run-of-the-mill job anywhere else (29). Sporschill reported that it was the street children “who made me rich, who gave my life direction, gave me a real sense of belonging which no one can take away from me” (29). A root question that needs to be asked is: who needs me? What do these people need to whom I have been sent? (123). Such powerful questions show us just what is at stake in working “in” poverty; it is not a battle between the haves and the have-nots, donors and sponsors, givers and takers. Rather, it is about working together in concord in and against an inhuman condition.

Concord is the underlay of homely space; street children have no idea whatsoever what love and security are, which is a huge deficit (16). Concordia is a structure based on communal living faced with the challenge of building a culture of life with all the resources it has! Concordia sets out to create a familial environment for kids to come home to but in which no one is blood related; such an environment requires a regular routine and a daily rhythm like fixed mealtimes or times of prayer (62). The daily routine often poses the greatest challenge, as is so often the case in “blood” families, where the monotony of everyday life can become a veritable pain in the neck (41). Getting a daily routine going is absolutely essential for any structure if it is to provide a secure basis, a supportive construction, because the everyday gives our lives a familiar routine we can rely on; it shows us the way through the day, the week, and shared family situations.

Kinship on the margins has a lot to do with “building an everyday life,” building trust based on familiarity and the familiar, the regular and the taken-for-granted; the stability of ordinary life includes a pattern of structuring time by way of repetition, by turning space into “home,” and by establishing habits. Everyday activities are morally and spiritually relevant, and there is the missionary challenge of filling them with deeper meaning; the human person’s work is a participation in God’s activity, which ought to permeate even “the most ordinary everyday activities.” ¹⁰ In her investigations into the everyday, Agnes Heller was convinced that the big things in life, those once-in-a-lifetime decisions, breakdowns, conflicts, and losses, all stem from little, everyday things. Agnes Heller’s findings could be compared to the context of poverty alleviation as we have seen in Georg Sporschill’s work with Roma children: he has to invest most effort in the nitty-gritty everyday bits and pieces in order to keep the whole communal structure stable and prevent it from breaking up. Our everyday routine, our daily habits, guide us not only through the structure of a day but through the structures of a lifetime. Stable structures are robust structures that will not be toppled lightly. Stable structures require regularity and repetition in a familiar environment. And this is where the transformation of water-based kinship into milk-based kinship can happen, and then later on the transformation of milk-based kinship into wine-based kinship. We learn a lot about a community by looking at what they eat and when they eat it—the things they share in on what days of the week, and how they manage to escape the daily grind. Community finds its strength in celebration: “At Easter there is always chitterling soup. I detested it at first—bits of intestine cut into strips and then cooked in lots of greasy fat. . . . It took me ages to overcome my queasiness, but I had to, since it is a rare delicacy for these children here” (60).

Toward a mission theology of kinship on the margins

The example of Georg Sporschill has brought out the features of infrastructure, interiority, shared responsibility, and ordinary life as key elements of kinship on the margins, where witness to the joy of the Gospel is happening. Sporschill has established kinship structures that allow for kinship moments and kinship experiences. Sporschill admitted that he does not see himself exclusively or primarily as teacher, but also as the one to learn, to receive, and to be transformed. This is a reflection on the notion of a “church of the poor.” Evangelii gaudium develops a clear vision of a church of the poor; ¹¹ here Pope Francis underlines the “special place of the poor in God’s people,” and in section 198 reminds us of the testimony of Christ, who lived his life among the poor, a sign that they would always have a special place in God’s heart: “This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ.” As agents of sensus fidelium, the poor are the subjects of the evangelizing spirit in their bringing us all nearer to Christ in a way only they can do. They are teacher and evangelizer. “We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them.” The poor are not to be seen as recipients of charitable acts, but as agents and teachers. In encounter, a poor church has a duty to invite those people outlined in Matthew 25, who recognize Christ in their own singular way and who need to be given space and possibilities to receive the Gospel God has sent them. Poor people, as those depending on God without the illusion of self-sufficiency, generally have “a special openness to the faith; they need God” (EG 200). If a church fails to not only see and feel the suffering of the poor who have to fight to physically survive, and if the poor also have to suffer the discrimination of not being given the spiritual care they need, may this not also demand a switch from perfectly polished prepared phrases to a rougher and less polished approach and mode of expression? The poor can teach the church because of their deep sense of vulnerability. A person who suffered, a person with wounds, has insights to offer.

Kinship on the margins is another way of expressing the concern with a church of the poor. Insights into the learning curve can be taken from the experience of students. The Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame each year sends about 230 students to serve in various sites throughout the country “being with the poor.” This is mission work in the sense of witnessing to Gospel values and expressing the joy of these values. This is also an explicit experience of kinship on the margins, both because of the design of the program and because of the prominent role of Greg Boyle’s approach in the preparation for the experience. Looking at dozens of essays of students reflecting on their summer experience in the light of the concept of kinship, I can summarize some key insights, citing several of these essays, numbered here by student (S).

Kinship experiences are based on listening and giving attention (S1), the recognition of full membership in a community (inviting everyone into the circle) and also the recognition of responsibility for the other (S2). Kinship experiences are grounded in the recognition of a shared humanity; kinship experiences happen if strangers are welcomed into one’s life (another incident of talking about hospitality! S3). One student experienced this as a key challenge during her summer experience: “The idea of developing kinship while living with complete strangers in such an intimate setting seemed so challenging. I wondered how I could relate to people with such different life experiences. What would we even talk about?” (S4).

Kinship on the margins means making an effort in reaching out (“In order to obtain true unity and kinship, the poor must be disproportionately assisted,” S6); it is about the effort of “being with” as/and “doing with” (“Looking back on my service experience, had I not been able to live with the Christian Brothers or drive the bus with all of my kids, then this site would have an absence of kinship. Not only was I able to help these children by giving them a mode of transportation to a wonderful camp, but I was able to really be with them,” S12). Kinship is about the effort learning from the other (S10) and about the effort of seeing ("On the other side of the spectrum of kinship, racism occurs when people fail to recognize the gifts that a certain group has to offer, only focusing on a few, largely false negatives,” S8). Kinship on the margins is about the effort of sharing everyday life, as we have seen in Father Sporschill’s case; a student who took part in a camp wrote: “Ergo, experience was the pivotal component in fostering the development of kinship and thus, solidarity. Eating, sleeping, working, and praying together with the campers and the counselors allowed me to grow in my relationships with them and allowed me to develop a kinship with them that is both transcendent to and dependent on the shared human experience” (S9). Kinship moments can happen in unexpected places if life is being shared: “Eight weeks soon seemed a short time to form kinship. Relationships grew at odd times: they grew while playing go-fish, they grew while taking down laundry from the line, and they grew while sitting post-dinner on the stoop. They were not quantifiable, but that does not make them matter any less” (S16).

A key dimension in kinship on the margins is patience:

Patient actions, actions that reverberate throughout the course of time are surely the way to form bonds of kinship with others at the margins. Patient actions are actions based on the faith and trust between individuals and the faith and trust that God’s presence will eventually manifest itself in justice. In my experience, patience involves continually working with a frustrated student or a student with disabilities over and over again in order to solve a math problem—not just giving him the answer and moving on. Patient action is stopping class—even if a math problem or two might help someone do marginally better on the state exams—to give students a one-on-one, man-to-man conversation that they may be bereft of in their lives; or as we have referred to it, an intimate feeling of solidarity. . . . As Nouwen, McNeill and Morrison put it, “Impatient action prevents us from recognizing the possibilities of the moment and thus easily leads us to an intolerable fanaticism.” . . . Patient actions allow us to be present to others when they need us most and begin to form trust at the margins. . . . Some automatically lose patience with those at the margins because those at the margins do not look the same, do not act the same, do not share the same cultural attributes and are seen as a burden . . . many people don’t want to stand at the margins, more want to race ahead and outthink those at the margins, but the true servants of God will remain, patiently standing with those at the margins—the ultimate form of infinite compassion. (S17)

Kinship, as another student wrote, is about “the value of being simply present”—“This summer, kinship meant to move beyond my role as an adult help ‘fixing’ the children; it meant standing beside them, trying to understand their history, empathizing with their pain, and affirming their sense of self-worth that life had diminished” (S21).

Kinship on the margins happens in real situations, in kinship moments: “Late on one Friday afternoon, I realized that one of the older boys wasn’t with the rest of the group. I found him in the playhouse, sobbing very, very hard. He said that he missed his friends from where he used to live, and that since he had no transportation to go visit them, the only way he could talk to them was through video games. At that moment, he sounded much too heartbroken for ten, and I was at a loss. The situation was so far beyond my power to fix that almost anything I said would ring false, or make me a dismissive adult. And though it felt impossibly, stupidly inadequate, I did the only thing I could do: I stayed there” (S11). Kinship is about abiding, staying, holding out. “Kinship means being with people as they go through situations” (S12). Kinship experiences are fostered in a setting of simplicity when focusing on what is essential: “Kinship is very apparent at the Dorothy Day Center, in part because of the separation of our clients from material goods. I noticed that because of the lack of extravagance in the lives of the impoverished, most people embraced the simple objectives of life, which often centered building relationships with others. Among the numerous lessons Jesus teaches in the Gospels, kinship, compassion, and trust are some of the greatest” (S 14). “I have come to see that true service as kinship is characterized by love as well; service should be done ‘not because they are all good, or because I am all good, but because God is good’” (S19). This is an obvious point of connection between the joy of the Gospel and the kinship experience that is built from there.

Concluding remark

Kinship on the margins may be the future of mission: “The concept of kinship with one another is an important way to keep Christianity relevant in modern society” (S10); kinship on the margins is an experience that changes concepts and semantic landscape, as well as practices and a spirituality of mission. One student wrote: “To quote Father Boyle again, he says, ‘I suspect that were kinship our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it’” (S17). Wine-based kinship makes the Good Samaritan and the person he cared for sit at the table of the wedding of Cana.