Santa Lucia ~ December 13th

Santa Lucia

December 13 is the traditional feast date of Saint Lucy of Syracuse, who is also the beloved Swedish figure, Sankta Lucia. Lutheran churches of Swedish heritage in the United States have celebrated Lucia’s feast day since the late nineteenth century, and Lucia fests still happen each December. Some are community-based, typically sponsored by Swedish heritage groups, and others are ecclesial, most often in Lutheran churches originally populated by Swedes. In these celebrations, a young woman is chosen to represent Lucia, which involves dressing in a white gown with a red sash and wearing a crown of candles on her head (some, but not all, are now battery-powered.) Other similarly-dressed young women make up Lucia’s court, and sometimes small boys are cast as Starboys; they dress up in white conical hats and wave star-tipped wands and accompany Lucia and her court. Traditional Swedish music is performed or sung by the congregation. The task of Lucia and her court is to engage in hospitality for the congregation or assembled crowd: Lucia serves coffee and Swedish baked goods. In simpler home celebrations, the oldest daughter of the household dresses as Lucia and serves her parents coffee and rolls in bed.

All of this is charming, and in my household Lucia Day is a cherished part of the Advent season. But what deeper theological significance does Lucia have, if any? The traditional story of the Sicilian martyr, dating back to about the 6th Century, portrays her as a young Christian woman living in the 4th Century, engaged to marry a non-Christian man. Even more problematic, Lucy had taken a vow of virginity after her mother’s miraculous healing at the tomb of Saint Agatha. Rather than go through with the marriage, Lucy donated her dowry to the poor, thus simultaneously following Jesus’ command to care for the poor and rendering herself no longer eligible for marriage. Revealed publicly as a Christian by the young man, she was tortured; accounts differ as to whether her eyes were taken out during the torture or whether Lucy herself removed them so as to discourage further suitors. Lucy was eventually martyred, and is often depicted by artists as restored to life and health, but carrying her eyes on a plate or platter.
What of this story remains in the modern Swedish tradition? The Swedish images of Lucia emphasize her virginity but efface the martyrdom (although the red sash may symbolize blood, this is not universally attested). The traditional Swedish rolls served on Lucia Day, lussekatter, do contain raisins or currants, which resemble eyes. A sanitized account of Lucy’s martyrdom is often read at Lucia fests, and there is a clear connection between Lucy’s act of giving generously to the poor and Lucia’s role of serving food to the assembled congregation. But Lucia remains in danger of slipping from the position of a powerful religious symbol – she was a woman who chose to honor her religious convictions, and who followed the instructions of the Christ whom she loved to care for others, even at the cost of her life – to charming cultural figure. While the Swedish tradition is fun, and appropriate for children, and offers a chance to pause during the hectic month of December and enjoy the hospitality of one’s community, without deep reflection on what martyrdom meant to Lucy and how she can guide us on our own Christian journeys, something important is lost.

If you have a chance to attend a Lucia fest, this year or another year, take a moment to consider who Lucy, the historical martyr, really was and how she can connect us with the early Christians. As you eat your lussekatter and watch Lucia and her court, remember Lucy’s radical act of care for the poor. And as you consider the meaning of Advent, recognize Lucia as someone who points us toward the Christ.

Courtney Wilder

Democracy, Community Organizing, and the Question of Responsibility

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” What are we to make of that line, dripping with sarcasm, delivered by Sarah Palin during a speech accepting her nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate? First and foremost, let’s acknowledge Palin’s quip—an extension of Rudy Giuliani’s earlier jab—for what it was: a mean-spirited attempt to undermine deserved criticism of Palin’s résumé by casting aspersions on Obama’s work with churches to ameliorate poverty in South Side Chicago neighborhoods. Moreover, it was an effort to limit Obama’s entire life experience to a single three-year period after college. Nevertheless, it resonated with the Republican audience.


But why would such a claim have traction? Why would the delegates disparage the idea of working with groups of people—and from churches no less—to meet community needs? (Rather ironic, given that one of the themes of the Republican convention was service!) It must be because the delegates understand the concept of “community organizer” much differently than I do. Perhaps “community organizer” is code for “agitator,” a “rabble rouser” seeking government handouts for poor people (of color) who can’t succeed on their own. Perhaps there is even more than a hint of racism and classism underlying her statement and its reception. However, to put a more charitable point on it, I believe that the real point of traction is that the idea of organizing communities must appear, to Palin’s supporters, to deny the importance of central Republican tenets, such as personal responsibility and individual effort and achievement.


And thus, while Palin’s statement was a sneering bit of political rhetoric, it was also something much more; it was an indication of an important philosophical difference between the Obama and McCain tickets regarding the task of a democratic government. Is government intended to conduct its work in isolation, checking every two or four years to see if it’s on the right track, keeping people safe and maintaining order? Or, in contrast, is it intended to be proactive, developing and attending to the structures within which all of us can actively participate in creating what we envision as the “good society”? These contrasting models of democratic government, I believe, underlie Palin’s comments.


The first model contends that the task of government is to provide “freedom” for people to be “productive members of society.” This freedom is achieved by means of a strong defense and minimal interference in the lives of individual people. The second model argues that the task of government is to create the structures by which full participation in society is fostered and then to foster said participation. Of course—and this is the essential point—the models at some level entail each other. Neither individual responsibility nor the context in which responsibility is exercised makes sense without the other. Unfortunately, in the rough and ready world of power politics, emphasizing one discourse necessarily means that the other is deemphasized. When deemphasis reaches the point of despisement, political rhetoric becomes dysfunctional. And that is what happened here.


Let me take a step back to assess the need for community organizers and to describe their “actual” responsibilities, and as I do so, I’ll note a failure of the Republican model. What, exactly, does a community organizer do? Imagine walking around the downtown of a major Midwestern city, being picked up by the police, brought out to the suburbs, and dropped off with no money or transportation, all because the city leaders didn’t want tourists to see homeless people. Imagine shopping at the local mall and being detained by mall security for “shopping while black,” mistaken for a shoplifter, even though the only characteristics you share in common with the suspect are skin color and gender. Imagine sitting in a college classroom, learning about the ways in which you are complicit in harming others—by buying clothes made in sweatshops, by receiving a set of privileges for being white that you didn’t ask for, even by driving your car—and feeling guilty and hopeless.


These stories are all too real. During a year spent organizing communities against police misconduct and later a number of years teaching ethics to undergraduate students I’ve heard these particular stories and many more like them. Obama’s organizing experience was surely filled with similar stories of inequality and mistreatment. I recognize that being hauled off by the police because of one’s race and feeling bad about one’s privilege are not nearly the same thing. But these stories have something important in common: the people involved experienced a sense of futility, of not being in control, of being an object of forces outside of themselves. And the stories illustrate that community organizing can be a tool of empowerment not just for people on the margins, but for all people.


The task of the community organizer is, first, to attend to and facilitate a change in the perception of powerlessness, and, second, to work with groups of people to create real, sustainable changes in their communities. These two responsibilities are intertwined such that the accomplishment of the second often generates the achievement of the first. And these responsibilities are pursued by assessing community needs, generating a plan for creating the changes identified by the people in the community, mobilizing citizens to participate in creating their own change—testifying at city council meetings, implementing a letter writing campaign, engaging in collective action to encourage power brokers to respond, and so forth—evaluating the effectiveness of the campaign, then beginning again, improving the community and empowering people along the way. For Obama, community organizing involved, among other things, working with church members to create effective community responses to a loss of manufacturing jobs in the area.


But do community organizers have “actual responsibilities”? Do they make decisions of importance? The ability to make executive decisions—being the “decider”—is an indicator of power, not of responsibility. Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker making the rounds: “Jesus was a community organizer; Pontius Pilate was a governor.” Being responsible in a meaningful sense means being responsible to a community, listening and taking into account the needs and perspectives of others. This emphasis on accounting for others’ points of view is visible in Kant’s call to recognize the other as a person with her own interests and goals as well as in the Christian claim that humans are made in the image of God.


Just as an excellent small-town mayor, or governor, negotiates competing interests, always considering foremost the perspectives of those whose voices are quietest and least powerful—something not so apparent in Palin’s own tenures as mayor and governor—so too does an excellent community organizer, creating campaigns that empower those whose voices are least likely to be heard and considered by those in positions of power. Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez highlighted the problem of the “nonperson,” those who were objects rather than subjects of their own lives; for Gutiérrez being human means, in part, being an active participant in one’s own destiny. In many ways, it is this problem to which community organizers—and many, many others—direct their attention.


Denying the significance of community organizing has a corrosive effect on one of Republicans’ own most cherished beliefs, that of individual achievement. And this occurs because Republicans underestimate the importance of the social and political structures that make individual responsibility and achievement possible. The emphasis on the individual assumes structures of possibility that don’t exist for too many people. Community organizing emerges out of and works to create a particular model of social life in which individual achievement becomes possible. Its denigration and the promotion of a solely electoral model of democracy demonstrates either a disdain for genuine human empowerment or an inability to recognize the ways in which current structures silence and disempower people.


The two rhetorics, that of individual achievement and structural support, necessarily entail each other—one cannot be understood or exist apart from the other—and a recognition of this is the common ground on which our political and cultural dialogue needs to take place. Creating a context that fosters human flourishing is a responsibility that we share as members of society, whether we are small-town mayors or community organizers, doctors engaging patients in their own health care, pastors pushing parishioners to think critically about their own theological assumptions, engineers developing safer and more environmentally sustainable buildings, and so on and so forth. We share this responsibility as individual members of society, and, in a democracy, the government shares the responsibility along with us.

Jeremy Rehwaldt Alexander

Midland Lutheran College Religion Department