THE COMPLEXITIES OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION

Father Jim McCartney is the Director of T.H.O.M.A.S.

We set up EDGES magazine for people like Susan who are broken and wounded and live out their lives on the fringes of society. Five years on, EDGES has become a national publication. It is published quarterly and we have an opportunity to reach 60,000 people each year. The people who write for our publication are often the homeless, addicted to drugs and involved in crime. Equally, those who feel discriminated against because of their sexuality, colour, physical or psychological disability also find a voice with our EDGES project. People all over the UK and in different parts of the world communicate with us. Our organisation also operates a drop-in centre. This is where I live. We have an open house and can feed up to 70 people a day.

Living in the midst of this environment you have got to familiarize yourself with the word failure. Each day in my life as a Priest I meet many young people who are controlled by an addiction to and a fascination for substance abuse. Amphetamines, Crack, Ecstasy, and Heroin are the frequent seducers of their lives. The cunning and appealing personality of Heroin rapes the bloodstream and destroys the brain, depriving my friends of a healthy and normal way of life. Exiled from family and friends, they drift into the criminal world for survival, and leave behind the broken-hearted family, left to pick up the pieces in despair.

An agenda of crime is planned to feed the habit that will not let them go. Helplessly, they battle against a powerful force that rips them apart. The qualities of love, compassion, generosity, respect and dignity can be suffocated by the tragedy of their lives, and animal-like instincts for survival invigorate the mind. Such young people are held captive in a violent relationship that is hidden within the absorbed drug that wants to be the totalitarian occupier of their body and soul. Each day, my friends leave my house and I wonder: will they return, or be caught by the poleic? Although I never allow them to bring stolen property onto the premises, I am concious that they are out on the streets, like birds of prey, searching for currency to pay for the ammunition that will enter their veins and blow thir heads out of reality. By teatime, they are in the killing fields, tooting, snorting, swallowing, and injecting the companion that holds them captive, wanting to lead them to the grave. Their young lives are disabled by the utter dependency of a destructive force. This is not the demolition of a building but the wreckage of human lives. It impels a crippling effect on the intelligence of mind, and drives a current of derangement and illusion into a brain that once enjoyed logic and reason.

Success has no place within this environment. Many of the people who still come to our house still use narcotic substances. In the eyes of society their inadequacy makes them unproductive. Junkie, Smackhead is the descriptive jargon for such impotence and weakness. Yet working with these weak and broken people, I am reminded of an important aspect of Priesthood. As Priests we must not be tempted to drift into the school of triumphalism where success is measured by achievement. The Lord entered into the struggle and toil of our human existence. If we follow in the footsteps of the Lord , we cannot calculate success in the eyes of the world. Failure does not sit easily in our secular society, yet how we deal with it is of fundamental importance in Christian ministry.

If I can take the time to give dignity to a human person who fails, it provides an environment of acceptance that in turn can be transforming, averting alienation. The alternative is that we fail to comprehend the bemused cries and bewildered mentality of the drug addict; this in turn adds to the chaos of their lives and creates a state of hopelessness. To understand the personality of the junkie, I have to develop a dialog of trust. Never condoning the taking of drugs, but always valuing the person who is addicted, I believe this paves the way for hope. When you are hooked on chemical substances you can resort to the most inhuman activities; it is understandable that we close our doors and turn away from such people. However, if there is to be any hope we must recognize the hardships experienced in the battlefields of narcotic stimulation. We need to provide a shelter from the bullets that puncture the veins. This is done by honouring the victim who bleeds each day in the battlefields of drug taking.

Watching young lives drift further and further away from a healthy and normal lifestyle is a devastating experience. As they lose the will to come off these addictive substances, death is marked on their faces. Yet in the midst of death, we as a Church have always to proclaim life. This enables me to continue to work with fragile and weak people, where I measure achievement in very small volumes. It may be that someone has had Heroin only three times this week instead of seven. This is a moment of success and needs to be noted with applause. We know what it is like to lode young people. we have stood at the graves of those who have given up the fight to live; we have stared into the faces of those left behind, weeping and asking the question why. This is the world of reality on the streets of our cities and towns. Yet in the unexpected we see the signs of hope.

Sometimes we find it difficult to live with our own human weaknesses. We can become blind to our own inadequacies and at times fail to recognize our own human limitedness. Why? Because we are not allowed to do it. With our western culture unsympathetic to failure, we hide our insecurities as we fight and grapple with each other to succeed. There is no room for the breakable person and the feeble condition. To be effective and credible you need to be strong. The modern trend is to treat a human life like a business, where economics provides us with material prosperity and is seen as the universal god. The financial market mentality has become engrained in our human thinking. A life can be seen as a product not a person. The commercial markets are not interested in products that cost more than the revenue they produce, or in customers who cost more service than they pay. However a human life is not a business:


each one of us has a unique identity and a specific personality.