Elizabeth Bruenig:
Consider how we now reflect on the poor.
The poor are accused, more often than not, of being lazy. Their alleged indolence is supposed to be evidence of moral failure on their part, which places the burden of action on them, not anyone else. They are construed as indiscriminately criminal, sexually promiscuous, self-indulgent and unscrupulous. Metaphors of hygiene and disease — poverty as infectious, poor people as dirty — often creep into our conversations about those of little means. They are more often than their wealthy counterparts victims of crime, sometimes of the cruelest sort; the National Coalition for the Homeless tracks hate crimes against the poor, including beatings and other abuse of people living with no fixed shelter. When a recent study found that people seem generally disgusted by the homeless, one liberal pundit wrote: “About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that.”
It was once understood that poverty is not a kind of crime. Now that simple fact seems less certain. Masses of fees attached to even the smallest infractions mean that poor people who end up in jail often have no way of righting their situations; inmates are, in some cases, charged room and board for jail cells and billed for public defense, and consequently wind up spending more time behind bars for their inability to pay these sundry fees than the initial crimes they were charged with — in one case in Georgia, stealing a can of beer worth less than $2.
And when we deign, either privately or politically, to address poverty, we often misidentify the source of the injustice. We presume that the poor deserve their circumstances: That they have failed to earn the requisite education or credentials to work jobs that would afford them better circumstances, or that they have not yet elected, out of good habit or good sense, to live well and work hard. Our policies and practices are often aimed at ‘fixing’ these errors. We would rather teach the poor to compete with us for their share of the world than consider how we might simply share it with them.
So it seems to me that we again have an ‘imagination’ problem before us. And it is up to us as Christians to challenge ourselves, and our fellow Christians, and the social imagination at large. It is up to us — in fact, it is required of us — to reshape how our culture reflects on poverty and the poor...
[First,] we must campaign in our own times and places for a just order, and that means a just distribution of property, which is merely a matter of civil law. “Whence does anyone possess what he or she has?” asked Augustine. “Is it not from human law? For by divine law, the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s.” Augustine was correct. The great structural determinants of what goes where, who owns what, who may use this or that — are all encoded in law, and are changeable. Insofar as we, as citizens, can influence and shape our laws, we ought to demand those which favor equitable distribution of the world’s bounty, and those that would reduce the misery of the most vulnerable people...
Second, we must not confuse that duty, which is a duty to justice, with the duty to charity. If all things really were held in common by all and no poverty endured, we would still be required to act charitably to one another, that is, to act with generous love. Sometimes charity takes the shape of almsgiving; indeed, to be virtuous, all almsgiving must be done in the spirit of charity. But we shouldn’t accept the error that charity and justice are mutually exclusive...Every family, every community has its members of lesser means in need of charity — not just their own share of the world, but love, generosity, care, fellowship, friendship. We must insist on both.
Last, we must again see Christ in the poor. Jesus Christ could’ve come as a king or an emperor, but instead he came as a person of little status, of lowly means. Again and again, he commends care for the poor, and damns injustice toward them. None of this is a coincidence. It was, in fact, revolutionary: It overturned an ancient mode of organizing society and introduced as meaningful and urgent the station of the poorest members of our society. It extended dignity and value to people otherwise invisible. It charged generations of Christians, present company not excluded, with the holy task of finding the face of Christ the Lord of all things in the pain and suffering of those with nothing. Christ is with the lonely and hungry people who wander city streets in need of money and medical care. Christ is with the families fleeing ruined, flooded homes in Puerto Rico, who have no recourse, no food, no medicine for their injuries. Christ is with the refugees who find themselves in foreign lands, leaving their lives and families and communities behind in blood-soaked, war-torn places. In our modern world we struggle with faith; we want tangible proof, evidence we can see and touch for ourselves. Here is your chance: Christ comes to us as the poorest of the poor, and in touching them, you touch his wounds like Thomas, and drive away the shadow of doubt.
https://medium.com/@ebruenig/talk-on-finding-christ-in-the-poor-st-lukes-parish-ca558e35d5ff
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