You will always have the poor...

You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.

-Jesus, (John 12: 8 NIV)

I have a weird relationship with money.  I know I need it, but I don't really like it.  It seems like I generally have just enough to get by, but never enough to feel comfortable.  I'm thankful about the getting by part, and in many ways I am acutely aware that I've got more than enough, but it's just strange.  I'm becoming a little obsessed with the word "enough," what does it mean?  Is there a concreted dollar value assigned to enough?

I know that, when I was younger, the amount of money I make now would have been an absolute boon, and I could have been living high on the hog.  But with two kids and a mortgage payment, "enough" seems to always be skipping out ahead of you somewhere.

For me this is sort a spiritual consideration: having the discipline to manage the adequate resources that I have, but for others it's a hard, cold, all too physical reality.  I can complain about money, but at the end of the day, I know that my kids aren't going hungry, and that provides me with a pretty good baseline for thinking about poverty, because I know there are a lot of people in the world who live with the basic reality of what is called "food insecurity," which is a different metric than what we commonly think of as the poverty threshold.  The "poverty line" is an important thing to consider, but in the real world, simply being above the poverty line doesn't amount to much of a life.  In our society, where there is such affluence almost everywhere you look, the poor seem more desperate and despairing.

When I was in Guatemala a decade or so ago, I saw people living in abject poverty, in cement shacks with dirt floors and no running water.  Funny thing was though, pretty much everyone in the village was in the same boat, they formed a community where a level of income that would drive an American to utter emotional ruin, was "enough."  People smiled a lot, and laughed frequently, and somehow had a dignity that is often missing from the desperately poor of this nation of ours.

Community and solidarity seemed to be the key, though they were unspoken values.

It seems to me that the community that God was trying to establish among the Hebrews and the kind of community that Jesus encouraged among his disciples were also governed by this mysterious concept of "enough."  I learned in my study of Guatemalan culture, that the indigenous religion and the syncretism that formed between that pagan form and Roman Catholicism, both had a certain leveling mechanism built in.  If you had a good crop, and were "well off" you were expected to be generous and support a celebration for the town, a Fiesta (a word we have badly bastardized in translating it as merely a party).  Call it redistribution of wealth if you want, but it was bigger than that, it was a socially valuable and largely enjoyable part of life.

The protestant missionaries that eventually arrived on the scene were appalled by this culture.  They saw drunkenness and debauchery and wasteful savages.  They brought, along with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the "protestant work ethic," and an emphasis on temperance.

If you became protestant, you stopped drinking, started saving money and getting ahead.  You also left your neighbors behind, you also removed yourself from certain aspects of community life.  And perhaps most importantly you entered what we might call "the rat race," the constant drive to get more and more and the constant process of ignoring any concept of what "enough" really is.

I don't mean to glorify the old way, because it has its flaws (just ask the women), but I find an interesting connection between that drama, which I can study from a distance, and the economic and social situation in 21st Century America, in which I am immersed.

Protestant ethics, for better or worse, are foundational assumptions in this democratic republic of ours, which creates a conundrum for the poor, and leads to a great deal of soul-crushing poverty.  We are bell curve kind of people, and we privilege success.  What I mean by that is that we cannot seem to envision a truly just society, because it doesn't seem fair to us.  If you work hard and follow the rules you should be able to get ahead.  But we all know that some people just aren't going to work hard so that there are always going to be poor people (Jesus said it after all, they're always going to be with us, who are we to argue with our Lord?)

Let's just say I find some flaws in that thinking.  First of all, there's the rather disturbing fact that the most important determinant of whether you're going to live in poverty through your life is whether or not you were born into it.  People who are born poor, tend to stay that way and people who are born rich tend to stay that way as well.  Second, there is the reality that poor people seem to have to work awfully hard just to feed themselves, and the rich seem to have much more leisure time for thing like golf and vacations and such.  Are their leeches on the system? No doubt, but the vast majority of poor people are working their tails off just to stay at the bottom of the curve.

Jesus wasn't being fatalistic about poverty either, he was responding to Judas, who was making a sanctimonious display of false concern for the poor.  Jesus spends more than enough time exhorting his disciples to care for the poor, and more than enough time healing the blind and the lame.

We need to work for a just society.  We need to consider the word "enough" before we consider getting what we "want."  We're actually pretty good at tossing crumbs to those "in need," what we need to do better is invite them to the table and make sure they have at least a chance at staying there.

We need to stop pretending that the ethics of getting ahead that have evolved during and after the enlightenment are not, in fact, virtues that befit followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

We are probably always going to have the poor, so maybe we should do as much as we can to treat them a little better, give them a few more opportunities, and see what happens.