better, not better off
spending to consume instead of giving all we have
St. Francis thought
that to choose to be poor
is just as good
as if one should marry
the most beautiful girl in the world.
We seem to think
that poor people
are social nuisances
and not the Ambassadors of God.
We seem to think
that Lady Poverty
is an ugly girl
and not the beautiful girl
that St. Francis of Assisi
says she is.
Yesterday, I said that poverty is freeing.
And of course that’s not true.
One just has to look a few miles south.
“In the US, the language of migration tends toward the hydraulic: surge, wave, pressure, influx, flood, flow. These terms cast human movement as a physical force rather than the outcome of decisions made across decades and centuries,” writes Pooja Bhatia in the London Review of Books. Bhatia interviewed several Haitian refugees in Mexico, awaiting entry to the United States in September.
“Haitians have hardly failed to notice that they are being forced to seek refuge in the country that has made their own unliveable,” she writes of the Haitians—2 percent of the population—that have fled a country wracked by instability to beg for entry at the border of the nation that overthrew Haiti’s president in 1991.
Although U.S. politics presents non-white immigrants as a threat and a danger, in reality, it is“quite the reverse: the border is unsafe for migrants,” Bhatia writes. The International Organization for Migration has described the U.S.-Mexico border as the world’s deadliest land crossing. There are more fatalities—700 officially recorded in 2022—at the Southern Border than Panama’s infamous Darién Gap.
To be poor in this world is obviously severely, debilitatingly limiting. The wealthy are not waiting on the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert sun without shade waiting months for their appointment to show up on the barely-functional Customs Border Patrol mobile phone app; the wealthy are buying passports from Portugal and Cyprus and hedging their bets of global political or economic or ecological collapse by building bunkers in Hawaii. The wealthy are not fleeing Sudan or imprisoned in Gaza.
To be poor means you can’t flag a taxi, book a last-minute flight, or hop in your car. When you are poor, you have no mobility. You have to beg for subway fare (or hop the turnstile); you have to ration gas; you can’t afford to leave and you can’t afford to stay.
“Poverty is the dream-killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential,” writes Matthew Desmond in Poverty by America.
But, as Desmond writes, poverty is not existential. It is manufactured. And you and I may not want to participate in the continued creation of poverty—you and I may not want to continue to perpetuate exploiting our neighbor; you and I do not want our own flourishing to be built on the destroyed capabilities and wasted potential and defaced dignity of our neighbor. You and I don’t want that.
But we live in a society that is built that way. If we do not choose something different and make something different then we will continue to live in a world where our food, our clothing, and our retirement funds are all given to us at the cost of taking food, clothing, and stability away from our neighbor. Whether that neighbor lives in the city closest to our suburb or is a fellow member of the Mystical Body of Christ living in Peru. We live in a world that runs on the “evil business of exclusion and poverty creation,” Desmond writes.
“These ‘everybody wins’ arguments ring false because they are. If ameliorating poverty and racial division would get rich kids into better colleges or bump up a company’s stock price, wouldn’t well-off Americans already be doing it?”
We want a world where rising tides lift everybody’s boats, whether the boats are big or small. But the rising tide lifts some boats, others are drowned in it. Most of us are, of course, trying to keep our necks above water and being the lucky few who float rather than drown.
Of course, there must be a better way to live.
Christ offers the rich young man a better way to live. The rich young man is probably like us: poorer than some, richer than most. Perhaps he is quite wealthy to the point where he never worries about money: paying rent, tuition, mortgage, school fees, car payments, whatever it is. Perhaps he is stressed about all those things, too.
He comes to Christ seeking happiness. He wants to know what he must do to obtain eternal life. He is like us: he goes to Mass and keeps the commandments: What else must I do? he asks Jesus. Jesus answers him: “If you want to be teleios…” The Greek word teleios is often translated as “perfect” and sometimes “complete.” And what it means is that you have reached your goal. If you want to reach your goal, Jesus answers him: sell all you have and give it to the poor.
The rich young man can’t do it. He walks away lypoumenos “in sorrow” or “grieving” or “sad” because Jesus gave him a message of liberation, a message of freedom. And he cannot set himself free. He cannot reach his goal and be complete.
In the United States, we are told that the way to keep ourselves afloat is to buy. To consume. We fill our houses with things and surround ourselves with things out of the anxiety we all feel—that we do not have enough—that we need security, stability. Life seems to cost more than we have. Birth, death, cancer: for some reason, all these things have a mind-numbingly expensive price tag. Who among us can pay the cost of living?
Unless you are a saint, a minimalist, or perhaps extremely mentally healthy, our houses tend to accumulate with things. This is an extremely odd fact of the past 150 years of human existence, a weird, cancerous accumulation of things. When in human history were humans ever surrounded by things they did not make themselves? Things that had been bought or traded or handed down from one generation to the next were precious: treasures, heirlooms. Now they are bric-a-brac at flea markets or homes to dust mites on countless credenzas. Factories that once manufactured are now storage units that hold our possessions, even if their owners don’t have a home themselves.
The funny thing is that those things we buy don’t make us richer—they make a group of shareholders very rich—and we continue to enrich a very small percentage of the national population by continuing a frenzied buying of things and throwing them away.
It is unnatural to live this way, it is straining the environment almost beyond repair, and it is depleting. It’s exhausting and enslaving.
It’s very easy in the United States to feel instantly Francis’ statement that it is more blessed to give than it is to receive.
Because we possess so much that is of so little value, to shed ourselves of it, to let go of the minor possessions, to break the cycle of constant consumption, is such a low-hanging liberation for us to reach out and pluck.
A personalist
is a go-giver,
not a go-getter.
He tries to give
what he has,
and does not
try to get
what the other fellow has.
He tries to be good
by doing good
to the other fellow.
Yes, we are right to be afraid of being poor. Too many of our fellow Americans (to say nothing of the global population) are suffering in poverty for the sake of the unimaginable wealth of a very few. We are right to say: poverty is an evil. We should not be complacent about it.
But you don’t have to be St. Francis to see that the first step toward freeing our brothers and sisters from the shackles of poverty is to make ourselves just a little bit poorer. Just a little bit. In order to solve America’s constructed poverty, “we’d have to give up some comforts and familiarities of life behind the wall,” Desmond says. We can’t hedge ourselves in like the rich man who stockpiles his treasure in his barn. “Yes, we’d have to give up some things, but what we’d gain in return would be more valuable.”
We are never told, ever, blessed are you poor. Except in the Gospel: for yours is the kingdom of heaven. Which is not a promise for a delayed healing or a complacency for the rich that the poor will be rewarded without their help, it’s simply a statement: blessed are those who have nothing, because they are closer to inheriting everything that is worth having.
I don’t know if you can really believe that statement if you do not believe in a God who became man and gave his life away for the sake of a people who didn’t even love him that well. But if you do believe that God is love and that love has a name, Christ, then it is impossible to know the God who loves the poor without truly loving the poor yourself. And it is hypocritical to love the poor if you are unwilling to become a little bit poor yourself. How can you love someone if you do not want to take their suffering upon yourself? Not so that you can all suffer together in homelessness or illiteracy or hell, but so that we can—all of us, not just some of us—be free?
It is hard to talk about poverty, because our world is so harsh, we have to have so many protections from it. Oh so you want to be poor, people respond, I don’t see you on a tent in a Chicago park. You’re not poor and you don’t want to be poor, you are just a little rich white girl who wants to play at being poor. That is correct: of course I don’t want to be sleeping on a Chicago sidewalk in a tent in temperatures 20 below zero. But how can I rest in my bed knowing that a friend is sleeping in that tent?
The goal of voluntary poverty is a bit amorphous as well. That’s why most religious orders in the United States have completely abandoned any real grappling with poverty. Franciscans have cooks who prepare meals for them. What would Francis say to that?
Francis probably would sleep in a tent in the park with his neighbors. Peter Maurin slept in flophouses with his. I think they were full of joy because they had found their teleios. They did not walk away sad.
Voluntary poverty is freeing because it is freeing to have less than the artificial richness of the United States. It is freeing because Mammon is enslaving, even though, in a world run by filthy lucre, it can often be limiting and frustrating to be without it.
But it doesn’t change the fact that on one hand, the sorrows of poverty can’t change the fact that it is more freeing to be poor than to be rich. The air is purer.
And, on the other hand, the point is not for all of us to sleep on concrete or to pace sleeplessly, but to recognize that it doesn’t have to be this way. It is not a law of the universe that some people get Sleep Number King Beds and others get concrete. It is not inevitable, like gravity or rigor mortis. Someone (or a group of someones) invented this system for their benefit, not ours. The world doesn’t have to be so harsh—if concrete weren’t so hard, we could run barefoot—and if we did not live in such a punitive society, we could have stronger communities, better relationships, more hospitality. And fewer tents. Perhaps we could all embrace the freedom of poverty if poverty didn’t mean sleeping on concrete. Perhaps if poverty wasn’t made to be so punishing—a dream-killer, a destroyer of dignity and potential—we could all be free.
Of course, nothing teaches you pride or your own attachment to comfort like trying to give up all you have. I am often, like the rich man, walking away lypoumenos from my own teleios.
The one thing that can truly protect us from the harshness of the world is the softness of a human heart, but our hearts are so hard. Do I dare to soften my own heart? Do I really believe that those who lose their lives will save them?
What we give to the poor
for Christ’s sake
is what we carry with us
when we die.
We are afraid
to pauperize the poor
because we are afraid
to be poor.
Pagan Greeks used to say
that the poor
“are the ambassadors
of the gods.”
To become poor
is to become
an Ambassador of God.