Chest of Drawers and Tent Cities

Several years ago, when I began studying poverty, I asked Sister Pat Lamb of Saint Francis De Sales Church to lunch. I had taken a 30-week JustFaith course on social justice issues from her. I knew a little of her back story. She had been an elementary school principal when the religious and lay people were being killed by death squads in El Salvador. It was intolerable for her to be comfortable while others were dying. She left education to work in social justice. Sister Pat was compassionate but didn’t tolerate anyone trying to work the system. Authentic, I often referred to her as “the real deal.”

I remember four things she told me over lunch that gave me a start on my research.

1. “How long might it take a family to move out of poverty?” I asked. The pause following my question would be the longest of that day. “Fifteen years,” was her reply. If there were any illusions I held about quick fixes, they were gone by hearing just two words. Poverty is a complicated subject. Part of the solution to poverty is the transformation of governmental support, but gridlock stifles transformation. With multiple factors affecting a family, it can take years to get an education, find subsistence employment and affordable housing, land a job with a decent wage, use reliable public transportation, obtain child care and health care, and develop an emergency fund. That said, some families move into and out of poverty in less than a year. While the number living in poverty is relatively stable, 43,000,000, who those exact people are is dynamic.
2. Sister Pat recommended that I begin by reading Nickel and Dimedby Barbara Ehrenreich. At a lavish lunch, she and her editor began to ponder how people make it on the wages of unskilled workers. In an era of cold aggression against those at the bottom, “How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market going to make it on $6 or $7 and hour?” Ehrenreich walks out of her comfortable life and into poverty by taking low-income jobs, trying to find affordable housing and learning about the lives of her fellow low-wage workers. In her summary, Ehrenreich underscores America’s unique position of neglecting to do for the poor what other developed nations have done and that, “we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they are down.”
3. We are prone to take our family legacy for granted. We grow up with parents coaching us on how to be successful and teaching us skills along the way. Chronically poor families have little to work with or to pass on to the next generation. Sister Pat shared a story about helping a family get settled in an apartment. When a chest of drawers was brought in the family asked what the piece was for. No one knew how to fold clothes and then place them into the chest of drawers.
4. “I suppose you should visit the tent cities,” was another comment. There were three I could visit, but I should take with me someone from law enforcement. The three locations were behind the Pilgrim Home Cemetery, down the railroad tracks near there and behind D&W Food Market off of Lakewood Boulevard. While living a comfortable life, I don’t see poverty and I certainly don’t see the deep poverty that some people experience. How can I become concerned about radical inequality if I’m not even aware of it?

 

I came away from this interview thinking:

1. We must commit for the long-term to end poverty
2. U.S. leadership is unique in its ambivalence toward its own people
3. Moving out of poverty often requires obtaining skills and knowledge
4. Many factors must align in order for a family to move out of poverty
5. We must become capable of seeing poverty and allow what we see to transform us
6. Against the stark realities described, every day families move out of poverty

Unitive Consciousness (Connectedness)

We have been discussing ways to find compassion for the poor.

In previous weeks I suggested that our own family’s history might give us sensitivity to those experiencing poverty. Education, learning about the challenges the poor face, might do that as well. And last week I wrote that we can take our gratitude for the gift of life and channel it toward improving the lives of others.

Another path toward compassion for the poor is havingunitive consciousness. The term “unitive consciousness” may be a little off-putting, but UC just means that we are conscious of the fact that “we’re all in the same boat together.” We are able to feel our connection with all living things. When we realize that someone is suffering, we begin to suffer.

Experts don’t agree on how many levels of human consciousness there are, but differences can be obvious to observers. At a certain level of development, seeing children separated from their parents at the border proves troubling to some, while others remain unphased. At mass shootings, some people risk their own lives to save others while others flee.

The feel-good videos of people being unusually kind to others are often evidence of unitive consciousness. While some may come by unitive consciousness naturally, others may have to do the inner work required to reach that level. The Aha! moments and “peak moments” that people experience are evidence that their consciousness is shifting or has shifted.

Trappist Monk Thomas Merton did the inner work to reach unitive consciousness. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he describes the revelation he had in downtown Louisville:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Whether given or earned, unitive consciousness gives us the experience of connection, “that the poor are ours and we are theirs.”

Finding Compassion for the Poor

In the last two posts, I described paths to finding compassion for the poor. One path could come from your family history and another was being well-informed about how forty-three million Americans are struggling with poverty. This week details yet another path—gratitude. Gratitude for life often asks for a response and one response to having the gift of life is to “pass it on,” seeing to it that others have more life.

I had the good fortune of being in the pilot program of The Courage to Teach, sponsored by the Fetzer Institute. I attended nine quarterly retreats over a two-year period. The Courage to Teach was a “formation” program closely related to what the religious experience when contemplating their true identity and vocation. Each retreat had a theme and I remember three in particular.

Death. Our culture denies and rails against death, even though it is inevitable. What happens if you immerse yourself in considering your own death? To my surprise, the results are positive—gratitude for the gift of life. Rilke advises, “Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened.” Embracing the inevitability of death eventually leads to saying Yes! to life and all that it holds.

Abundance. Walk the aisles of a big box store. Walk in the woods. Turn on a faucet. Breathe. How many species are there on the planet? In the story of the loaves and fish, disciples suggest sending everyone away, so the crowd can find food. Jesus asks about what’s available. “Go and see.” We are surrounded by abundance, but we must be open to it. Recognizing abundance in your life leads to gratitude, thanksgiving.

Gratitude. The retreats on death and abundance gave us a foundation to be grateful So much of our lives are characterized by grace. So much of what we have is given and not earned.

Jack Jezreel says that our anchor to serve others is joy. How are we going to say thank you to the world? How are we going to pay it forward?

At least for me, radical inequality is a scandal. The gap between what is and what could be is too great. An Oxfam report declares that poverty would have been eliminated seven times over had the recent tax cut gone to the world’spoor instead of billionaires.

It’s easy to find compassion for the poor. Next week, I’ll outline one other path.

Billionaires could end poverty

(above is link to Oxfam)

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