Being wealthy is attractive, being poor is not. I’ve never met a poor person who wouldn’t rather be rich, and I’ve never met a rich person who really aspired to become poor. We are just not wired or inclined that way. And yet poverty, excruciating poverty, subsistence living or even less is a global reality. I will never forget my first face to face encounter with deep poverty on my first visit to Chile during the Pinochet regime. I was walking across 'Plaza de Armas' in the city center and was on my way to visit the magnificent Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago. Its’ neo classical architecture conveys a grandeur surpassed only by the breath-taking beauty of its stained glass windows, frescoes, and ornately gilded altars. Much as I had looked forward to going inside, I just could not bring myself to do so.
Beside
the main entrance was a stooped, barefoot, old woman in rags carrying a grimy
faced infant on her back. Tears were trickling down the old woman’s wrinkled
face as she pitifully stretched out her worn hands pleading miserably for help.
It was the first time I had been confronted so personally by such abject
poverty. I could not pass her by to enter the cathedral, and I had nothing
to give in answer to her plight by expressing the pity I felt for her and the
grimy little baby. To this day I see their faces and relive the shock and
the sorrow I felt.Several years after this I was traveling through India where the scale of poverty was inescapable and beyond imagination – beyond the stuff of nightmares. I cannot even begin to describe the endless scenes of human suffering I encountered on the suffocating streets of Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai). Across from my hotel I saw a feeble old man crouched and spluttering amid the garbage in a gutter. He was a skeleton of rags leaning against the bumper of a car. The driver of the car came, honked his horn and yelled for the skeleton of a man to get out of his way. A passing woman and young girl dragged the old man toward the sidewalk so the car could move and he leaned feebly against the curb before falling into a quivering, dying heap. Another man with one arm ripped out of its socket leaving his shoulder just an oozing mass of ugly flesh tugged at my shirt with his other hand as I left the hotel. Like countless other beggars he was desperate for help – unashamed to through himself completely on the mercy, compassion and generosity of strangers.
Very early one morning I went to visit Mother Theresa’s home for abandoned babies and a place of refuge for vulnerable young children from the streets. On the way I saw hundreds of people sleeping in the open alongside buildings or simply sprawled on the bare concrete sidewalks. An entire family was huddled underneath a pile of rags and dirty blankets. It was the only place they had - their “home.” Many people were busy trying to wash themselves in little grey pools of water at the gutters and under trickling faucets beside the road while others were picking through reeking piles of garbage scavenging for scraps of food. Near the entrance to Mother Theresa’s home a young mother lay sprawled against a building, huddling her baby in a thin piece of cloth on the bare cobblestone street. I wondered if she would soon lose all hope and either trade her baby for survival or simply abandon it on the doorstep of the home as so many others did.
For the desperately poor in India as in so many other countries life begins and ends in the squalor of congested, filthy, inhospitable, misery. There is no refuge, no reprieve from the demeaning clutches of poverty and total dependence for everything in every way. I slowly found myself closing off from the sights and sounds and smells of human agony; it was more than I could bear, my weeping heart became detached from feeling the desperate pain of human poverty. There was little I could do for them, and mostly I hoped and prayed that such horrible poverty would never become my lot in life.
Material destitution is so terribly wasteful, indecent, and dehumanizing. But then wealth can also be terribly and obscenely wasteful, indecent, and dehumanizing. Although material wealth is often accompanied by a different kind of misery than poverty is, I suspect that you, like I would still prefer to be miserably wealthy than miserably poor. So why does Jesus seem to elevate the condition of poverty by calling the poor blessed and not the wealthy? Material destitution with its devastating effects on individuals, families and communities is clearly not what Jesus had in mind when he called the poor and the hungry “blessed” (Luke 6:20, 21); for he called on the wealthy to care generously for the poor as a way of demonstrating their love for God.
The blessedness of poverty that Jesus commended lies in the simplicity of the poor knowing that they are needy and dependent – they cannot help themselves – they need somebody - and they are therefore more receptive to receiving help from others and from God than are wealthy people who tend not to be acutely aware of just how needy they really are. While the poor have no material goods or gods to deliver them in times of distress, the wealthy tend to look first to their own resources and trust their own means. For this reason Jesus looks at the hearts of the poor and calls them blessed, not the wealthy. Although wealth often appears to be a great blessing, it is far less a spiritual blessing than the poverty of being deeply needy and dependent – open to help from God. Wealth inevitably carries the blinding danger of feeling self sufficient, unaware of being needy – of being independent without reliance on God to provide our day to day practical sustenance, security, and survival.
THE
CORACLE is published weekly as a reflection on faith and life.
It is available free by subscription. The name CORACLE - refers to a
small leather boat that was typically used by Celtic monks during the 8th and
9th Centuries. One of the most famous was St. Brendan the Navigator who
undertook a missionary voyage of faith. Without navigational maps and
instruments he trusted that by waves and wind and current, God would bring him
to the place and places where he was meant to be. Yet far from being
fatalistic, his voyage was the deeply spiritual account of a man’s journey in
surrendering to the will of God and trusting God to guide and protect him from
danger and disaster. Brendan’s voyage became famous as an ideal for the
Celtic monks of Ireland who dared to venture into unknown and wild places in
order to spread the gospel. Setting sail in their fragile coracles was at
once a courageous act of faith and a profound expression of their passion to
follow Jesus Christ no matter where the journey would take them or what the
journey would entail.