The Church of the Poor Devil:
Perkins, Pheme
THE CHURCH OF THE POOR DEVIL John S. Dunne Macmillan, $14.95, 155 pp. Pheme Perkins THE TITLE is taken from the popu-lar name of a chapel of St. Anthony in the Amazon river town of Manaus. It had...
...It had become a compelling symbol for his journey in passing over from personal religion to the religion of the poor...
...Dunne does not deny the awful, dehumanizing effects of poverty and oppression...
...It is also the location for an annual festival with all the color of popular religion...
...Dunne also hints that a journey from the religion of the poor to personal religion may be necessary from those on the other side...
...But he refuses to accept the ultimacy of their account...
...Dunne came upon the chapel at the end of a river voyage in which he had seen the power of human life to cut across the barriers of class and poverty that separated those below deck and the still poorer people in the huts along the river from those in the cabins...
...Those accustomed to pleading the "option for the poor" in liberation theol-ogy with its underpinnings of critical theory, social science, and Marxist her-meneutic will find the sub-jectivism of the book disquieting...
...He suggests that we are incapable of love unless we can move beyond fulfillment of our needs, "beyond the pleasure principle," to a sense of the suffering of all humanity and to a relation with others that is based on willingness to share suffering...
...He acknowledges Marx's "cry of the op-pressed" and the even more terrifying river journey into the evil of the human heart in Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
...The inferiority and subjectivity of Dunne's model of understanding by pass-ing over and returning to ourselves, still seems a bit thin when confronted with the massive socio-economic relations thai support world poverty...
...Without it we would not see their oppressive char-acter...
...Though the chapel went unmen-tioned in his journal, he was drawn back to it two years later, at the time of the festival...
...Dunne rightly insists that we cannot dis-cover the light beyond the "heart of darkness" unless we have a vision of humanity's relation to God that goes be-yond the calculation of needs and their satisfaction.satisfaction...
...That longing, in turn, only finds coherence in the duality of a vulnerable God, one who can be con-fessed as present in all the evil and suffer-ing of the world...
...Yet, its criticism of the Marxist vision of human liberation and its defense of out common humanity deserves attention...
...Dunne argues that the religion of the poor also speaks with a genuine voice (not illusion as Marx thought...
...Dunne suggests that personal religion has a difficult time per-ceiving that truth about God, since it creates a self which stands over against "my fate," suffering - let alone over against that of others...
...The local imagination tied the chapel to rites of the devil, though the woman involved took the au-thor on a nocturnal visit to a model of the chapel in which saints' statues were said to correspond to African gods...
...That voice is rooted in the "heart's longing" and speaks of a human essence which emerges when the structures of oppres-sive social relations are broken...
...Willingness to share the journey of the poor, to give according to one's ability, also requires one to receive according to the needs that are laid bare by that journey through suffering, fear, death, and the struggle for emergence, for recognition...
...It is easy to read this book as the self-indulgence of per-sonal religion in its own subjectivity...
...3) it is on a human scale...
...They may move from immersion in the "things of life" and the common joys and sorrows to a sense of having a real relationship with things and thus a personal life...
...Religion of the poor thus embodies a duality: the cry of oppression and the signs of hope rooted in our common "heart's longing...
...In order to touch the "heart's longing," one must move be-yond the complexity of'' meeting needs'' to the simplicity which seeks one thing, the will of God...
...Cordolina's chapel expresses the heart's longing in its three essentials: (1) it is a labor of love...
...Such "consciousness-raising" reveals the truth behind Marx's slogan, "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" in the process of passing over...
...2) it is an expression of relationship with God...
...It had been built during the rubber boom by the mistress of a local cabaret owner, who called himself "the poor devil" even as his business thrived on the boom town economy...
Vol. 110 • January 1983 • No. 1
