Mountains Beyond Mountains

I just finished reading Tracy Kidder's biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. What an inspiring story! Farmer is a doctor who lives to serve the poor, living out the social gospel curing one person at a time. He also works to improve the living conditions of his patients, giving him/her a tin roof, paying the children's tuition, in other words preventing the conditions that permit the disease to happen in the first place to happen again. His work has given me a new way of thinking about how public policy, which tends to focus on cost-effectiveness and tends to rely compromises to achieve the so-called greater good. This stands in stark contrast to work that impacts one person at a time, without consideration of cost. Of course, there are still decisions to be made, and helping one person necessarily means not helping another at the same moment of time. But as Farmer said, it's all a long defeat we fight and the victories along the way is just gravy.

This books goes well with two others I just finished, Danielle Allen's Talk to Strangers in which she used the event of school desegregation in Arkansas following Brown vs the Board of Education to illustrate how social change happens via private negoations, one conversation at a time. My husband and I were at a book reading which was part of a week-long Martin Luther King celebration at which Danielle read her new book. I was happy to get an autographed copy of this elegant little pale green book. The other work was good old "Walden", by the old curmudgeon Henry David Thoreau, in which he of course lived a private revolt against all the trappings of so-called civilization in mid-19th Century New England. I skimmed this old favorite quickly before hearing Paul Friedrich's talk about three weeks ago, in which he discussed, ostensibly the poetics of "Walden" but of course got into the politics of it as well. All three stories are revolutionary and prophetic, and all elicit wonderful reflective moments that are fitting to this Lenten season.

Talking about reflective teachings, I must go back to Paul the great apostle himself. I read chapter 14 of Romans today, in German, and wrote out the following verse for reflection for the week. It fits amazingly well with the service of Paul Farmer to the poor, the calling of Danielle Allen to political friendship, and the devotion of Henry David Thoreau to only the things most essential in life.

Romans 14:9
Denn hierzu ist Christus gestorben und [wieder] lebendig geworden,
daß er herrsche sowohl über Tote als über Lebende.