It’s way too early. In from walking the dog, after a night of a lot of tossing and turning and sleep that was a battle with no clear victor, I tried to nap for a bit on the couch but that’s not happening either. It’s cold outside, now. We had our first real snow on Monday and I’m reasonably tolerant of the cold, kind of cold weather people, the husband and I. But the short block I walked the dog was bracing, and all I could think about as I tucked back into our home and turned up the heat in advance of little feet wandering out was all of the people out there, all of the families, for whom this is merely the beginning of a long, painful and dangerous stretch of time because where they lay their heads each night is uncertain.
I posted an article a few weeks back from The National Journal about the complete disregard both presidential campaigns had given to the issue of poverty. In a comment on Facebook an old friend who now teaches in a school district hit particularly hard by the recession wrote, “We have children at my school who cried when they found out there was no school on Thursday and Friday this week. They don’t have food at home and school is where they eat.”
I cried when I read it, the kind of crying where you bite the heel of your hand because you’re trying not to make any noise, and I’m not sure that the intermittent crying that has happened in the weeks subsequent isn’t because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
A week ago Tuesday I stayed up into the wee hours watching election returns come in. The man I thought the better choice for our country was successful in his re-election campaign. Here in Minnesota, two constitutional amendments were defeated that were, in my opinion, serious threats to civil rights. I went to bed happy, and woke up tired and hopeful. Several sunrises later, I’m still bone-tired, and if my hope were a halo it would be tarnished and hanging a little off-kilter.
See, I had really, really hoped that in the days following the election some of the bitterness and divisiveness of the election would subside. People need time to grieve, absolutely, and people were passionate about this campaign in so many ways and for many there was a very real and profound sense of loss. But what I have not seen, what I am not seeing, are either side really reaching to embrace the other. There is so much absolute hatred out there, leveraging the anonymity of the Internet to magnify itself and grow unchecked. If the Devil exists, he created the technology for comment boards.
A friend of mine forwarded me a message from a pastor in Texas, who wrote to his congregation immediately after the election. His missive was not one of peacemaking, it was apocalyptic. America had broken its covenant with God-as-King. The End Times will be shortly upon us. Jesus will come again, and we’re all going to suffer a lot for the journey.
We heard a lot of talk on the campaign trail about the middle class, preserving a comfortable way of life, but I can’t say in anything I’ve ever studied that Jesus had much concern for the same. Now poverty, on the other hand, and unlike either presidential campaign, Jesus had a lot to say about. I know we like to hear what we like to hear, and cherry-picking the Bible seems to be a favorite pastime of both the religious right and the religious left, but if you look at the text, He wasn’t forgiving of people for whom protecting their comfortable lifestyle was the A1 priority. If you’re looking for some recognition for giving to charity, the Old Testament throws you some shade (irony!), but Jesus. Nope. In Matthew He tells us that if we wish to be complete, we should go and sell our possessions and give them to the poor, and go and follow Him.
It’s something I’ve been wrestling with for a long time, how to live in this world and be the kind of Christian that Jesus seems pretty clear He expects of His followers. I don’t have a lot of “stuff,” I’ve never placed any real value on accumulating the same. The stuff in my life that matters are the people that occupy it, the family I was born into and the family I’ve made over the years. But I have an abundance relative to so, so many and that weighs more heavily on me now than it ever has before. There are so many hungry, there are so many in need. They are strangers, they are my neighbors. But more and more we build walls around what is ours, literally and metaphysically, and shore up our foundations against “the other.”
At some point, it became more about not just providing enough for ourselves so that we have what we need, it became about having what we want. We don’t exist in a vacuum. The money we make, the things we accumulate - they’re not God’s reward for our virtue, but a pool of resources made possible by the work of many. If you have to vilify someone to justify having more than them, something has gone deeply, desperately wrong.
I was at an informal gathering Saturday night and it was lovely, absolutely. We ate delicious cheeses and drank spendy wines and there was so much we could have talked about - so many big and weighty and important things - but the conversations were safe and in my head I was screaming because I am so hungry for more. We are called to be more.
Maybe that pastor in Austin is right. Maybe the end is upon us, but I have to believe it is not because we have as a country, in his words, embraced socialism. If the Big Man Upstairs decides to call time on this little experiment called humanity I suspect It is because we have continued to isolate ourselves from one another, we have turned our backs on the hungry and the hurting, cast strangers as enemies and hardened our hearts against those who are not carbon copies of ourselves. I’m not using the global “we” here. I’m talking about myself, too We say prayers in our civic life that are meaningless platitudes, empty of intention because we cannot or will not do what is required of us to make good on them.
I have always been in something of a wrestling match with my faith. I have always had questions and been searching for answers, for as long as I can remember. But the last time I was this uncomfortable in my faith, we took separate vacations for a while. This time is different though, this time the discomfort is not in a perception that my faith has turned its back on me, but that I have turned my back on it. Jesus is pretty clear in what he asks of us, we who have so much. And responding to that call by working harder to protect what is in our own coffers seems willfully ignorant at best.
There are so many who are hungry and hurting and desperate and cold and they are reaching out for us. We are reaching out for each other. I am called, we are called. But for the life of me - God help me - I don’t know how to answer. I don’t know how to be who He asks me to be, and yet I can no longer pretend not to understand just how much He is asking.
Philippians 1, 3-5 says: I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy.
I do. Every day, with joy. No matter how far apart we are, literally or metaphysically, I hope you pray for me, too.
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