The Holiday Season is officially upon us. I flipped my calendar over to November and the plans and events of the season began rolling in right on cue. This is a time to reflect on our blessings as individuals and as a community, to stop and give thanks to God for all that we have and to remember that “every good and perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17).
It is also a season of giving. Generosity seems to well up more during the holidays, maybe because we are more aware of all the blessings we enjoy or maybe because the needs of people are so much more apparent. This is the time of year when it is perfectly normal to be asked for money wherever you go: the grocery store collects food and takes donations for the hungry, the mall has a tree up where you can buy a needy child a Christmas gift, the bell-ringers are out collecting change and the schools are gathering supplies for the homeless shelters. A feeling of Goodwill Toward Men warms our hearts. But where does it go the rest of the year? How do we come to terms with the needs of the world and our great wealth in comparison?
In my reading recently I have been paying attention to questions of wealth and poverty. Does God love the poor more than the rich? Should I feel guilty about the wealth we enjoy here living in the developed west? Is it a blessing? a stumbling block? a responsibility? Is it okay to have and enjoy nice things while somewhere in the world hunger and disease are robbing a mother just like me of her ability to live her life in peace and joy? And in the end, what can I do about it anyway? What is the call of God for Christians living in plenty?
I don’t pretend to have the answers. I am struggling with the questions and trying to find my own way here. Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, tells of her conversion to the Catholic faith. Day is a stretch for me. She was a Christian anarchist, a believer and practitioner of voluntary poverty, a labor organizer and a prolific writer of political manifestos championing the rights of the poor. She founded the Catholic Worker movement and established many homes of hospitality for people out of work in the Great Depression. While her ways are not my ways, I admire her greatly. She lived out her faith according to her conscience and went beyond theories and writing to align herself wholeheartedly with her convictions. She never gave up believing in the dignity that belongs to each person and she was able to see Christ in everyone who came to her for help. I can learn a lot from her. Day believed that God’s preference is for the poor and she identified herself with them. There is no getting around the truth found throughout scripture that God does have a heart for the poor. He cares for them and as John says,
“If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” -1 John 3:17-18
I certainly believe in God’s deep love and concern for the poor, but I don’t believe it means he loves them more than the rich. I thought it would be interesting, though, to hear your views and to explore other ideas on wealth and poverty here over the next month or so. Do you consider yourself rich or poor? Have you come to terms with life in an affluent area or is it something you struggle with? Do the needs of the world’s poor affect your giving during the holiday season? Post your thoughts and stayed tuned for Part II.
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3 comments:
Hi Mom! Yesterday at Westwood the vicar mentioned something about how everyone should be facing some sort of persecution in their lives, and if not, they should be asking themselves why. I know I've talked to you about this before, but your post made me think of it again. I don't really agree that being persecuted is any sort of sign of the state of my relationship with God, but at the same time, I feel like living in a place where I am not "persecuted" very often (and "persecuted" here is in the lightest sense) allows me (or makes it easier for me to allow myself) to be more relaxed and less serious about my relationship with God. I am able to more easily say "I believe such-and-such" without having to question or think about it, or even live it out in my daily life. I guess, despite being a "poor college student," I would consider myself more wealthy than poor, and I sometimes (often) wonder if my being from a wealthy background affects my pursuit of a meaningful relationship with God. I know I have a problem with allowing myself to become apathetic in my walk, and sometimes I wonder if I would be more easily able to focus on God if things had been different, if I had grown up in a more difficult environment. Of course, my background doesn't change the fact that I often am living out a "lukewarm" faith, and the fact that I wonder about whether things would have been different if I were from poorer origins is really just another way I distance myself from my relationship with God. I don't really know if that ties in... and wow, that was longer than I was planning. And also, since I know you’re calculating what time I’m writing this, it IS midnight, and I AM going to bed straightaway! ;)
While I don't believe God loves the poor more than the materially blessed, I do believe the poor, experience God more clearly than I do. They know they need Him more than I know I need Him. And remember to turn and lean. He's provided all this stuff and it has made Him more transparent to me and, yes, I believe given me responsibility to not turn away from the poor. And a stumbling block and blessing. Living with resources just has difficult as living without them.
I had been thinking along those lines...yes--certainly i consider myself extremely financially wealthy. So, I'm rich in money. And I'm rich in other things...rich in health, in education, in opportunities, in friends, in family, in beautiful surroundings....
But I'm fairly (to extremely) poor in other areas--especially, I believe, I'm poor in faith and in love. And as Ginger and Megan said, someone who is financially poor could very possibly be rich in the very things I am poor in.
The list of questions you asked in the third paragraph was so wonderful, Valerie... I'm so looking forward to Part 2, when you give me all the answers... my rich friend!
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