poverty – an underrated blessing
Given our country’s current economic turmoil and crisis, this observation from Assault on Eden offers an insightful perspective check. (This excerpt was written over 30 years ago but is as timely now as it was then.)
Poverty is viewed as the single greatest sin in our society. It is an enemy to be annihilated, a shame to be hidden. Whether springing from the conservative sources that say success is a sign of God’s favor or from liberal sources that say we must all enter the heaven of the median income, the message is the same: we must be saved from poverty. But one has experiences when one is poor that are forever denied to insulated society, hermetically sealed in financial security. Of course, like anything else, like drugs or education or geography, poverty is raw material. It can be just as easily subverted as wealth, making its subject spiteful, petty, brutal. But in our society, the positive potential of poverty has been obscured. We scoff at its romantic advocates, pity its victims, ignore its Teacher.
I learned from poverty what I could learn from no other school. I learned not to rely on possessions to supply an identity. When you drive up to the bank in a rattletrap truck with slick tires and try to cash a check that you pull out of a worn flannel pocket with fingers permanently blackened from soot and axle grease, you learn to be prepared for people who don’t believe in you; yet even against that heavy wall of denial, you know your own worth. You learn to stare down the insolent eyebrows of other customers who pay cash when you pull out your food stamps, refusing to accept their ignorant estimate of yourself and knowing that we all ultimately live by welfare and grace. And, if you are very lucky, you learn how close to the edge all human life is lived, how we are held in existence from moment to moment by a power we don’t control. You can rejoice in life as a gift. In poverty there is no pretense and no protection.
What are we discovering in these trying times?
