Guilt Trip

I heard a story on the radio this morning about a family in India who were the first in their village to own a refrigerator.  You heard me right a refrigerator.  The man of the house said he had saved a little money for 10, count em 10 years, to get a refrigerator, so that he could free his wife from the constant grind of always having to shop every day and make everything fresh.
To tell you the truth, I never really think much about my refrigerator, unless it's broken.  In fact, I have two refrigerators, one in the basement that's mostly empty unless we just stocked up on groceries, or are having a big gathering.  Sure it's a pretty major investment as far as household items go, but I was still boggled by the idea that the purchase and delivery of an appliance would be the life-altering, village-celebrating, event that it apparently was for this family and their neighbors.
Then I began to feel really spoiled.
It was one of those count-your-blessings-check-your-privilege moments, and I didn't need any self-righteous politically correct type to prompt me into it.
I thought of all the things that I consider disposable, which would be momentous acquisitions in much of the world: cars, refrigerators, a good well that supplies clean water.  And I thought of the fact that this Indian man and his family probably work, in the average day, a whole lot harder than I do.  And I have a hard time reconciling how this is justice.  I was born into this hyper-consumptive world, where the reality is that new is often cheaper and more "sensible" than repaired.  Likewise, some people are born into a world where "getting ahead" means you get to have cold water in the summer time, can actually store your leftover curried chicken.
You could hear the excitement from both the man and his wife about... leftovers.
I also noted, in the story, that the whole village was happy about the arrival of a refrigerator, it was going to lift all the boats, so to speak.  And this is one of the enviable aspects of poverty and hardship (yes I know, it's a stretch); community.  People help each other, because they have to.  They don't have to like each other or agree about everything, but they do have to help each other, it's survival.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the human need for connection, and the reasons why the church is foundering in Western Society, and I think it has something to do with the fact that we can all too easily do things for ourselves.  People who live without the luxury and comfort of disposable income must rely on one another when times get rough.  You hear stories about this from old time rural folk all the time, how when a barn burns down the community rallies to build a new one and temporary measures are taken to help out the downtrodden, because next month or next year it might happen to you and then the favor comes back around.
The impact of individualism is far reaching, and in most cases corrosive.  Not-my-problem syndrome infects everything from how we invest in our children's education to how we treat our aging mothers and fathers.
All of the sudden, I didn't feel quite so bad for the poor people in India and Africa, and other places where everyone is pretty much in the same boat.  But I felt worse for the poor people who live in the consumptive disposable world.  We have kicked away all of the communal support mechanisms (the ones that actually worked) and replaced them with a welfare check, some food stamps and a handful of overwhelmed government agencies and said: "Good luck, work hard and you'll get ahead."
Once upon a time, I thought that enough good people being charitable could actually solve this problem, but I don't think that's true any longer.  We need to reforge our connections to one another.  We need to be held together by more than just tax-paying.
This could, and should, happen in churches, but I think we may have drunk the self-sufficiency Kool-Aid along with everyone else.  Why are people consumers and spectators of our religious services and "performances" instead of fellow disciples?  Why is it hard to get a commitment? Why do people float away from our communities so easily?
Because they sense somewhere deep down that we don't really need them.
And so they don't really need us.
As so many things do, this reminds me of the Beatitudes, those peculiar statements where Jesus said people were blessed, when intuitively they didn't seem to be: blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, etc.  Maybe that Indian family who just got the first refrigerator in the village really are as blessed as they sounded.