[After Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus…] And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized.
- Acts 9:18
- Acts 9:18
We say that we want to help the poor, but do we really? I thought that I was compelled. When I attended my first Ecumenical Advocacy Days conference in Washington DC, I had a conversion moment. I knew that the way I lived out my faith would never be the same. My life had been going in one direction and took a complete U-turn. During those few days I knew, that on some level, I would spend the rest of my life on the side of the poor. My rationale for going to the developing world, for volunteering, was that I wanted to put a face to the statistics. I wanted to engage with people, not just read about them in glossy NGO brochures. I felt that if I was truly going to advocate on behalf of the poor (or if anyone was going to take me seriously) that I needed to spend time on the ground, to witness what it really means to confront the daily realities of poverty. Frankly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I said I wanted to help the poor. Do I really have any idea what that statement means? Am I ready to be converted yet again? That is something about which I’m not so sure…
NGOs, government agencies, and churches (among many others) have institutionalized development work. This is both a very good and a very bad thing. There is a constant emphasis on numbers and results. In “NGO speak” development happens through baseline studies, action and business plans, M & E (monitoring and evaluation), and statistical analysis. The process is clinical and dehumanized. Agencies no longer deal with human beings but with “the poor,” “the marginalized,” “the disadvantaged,” “the [insert appropriate adjective here].” People become objects. It is so much more comfortable, palatable, and safer to objectify a person than to enter into their lives, in the same way that it is so much easier to mail a shoebox full of semi-useless items overseas than it is to think about systematic socio-economic inequality. We praise Mother Theresa, because she selflessly gave her life to serving the poor, but we murder Archbishop Oscar Romero because he asked why people are poor in the first place. Romero was murdered because he threatened the status quo in a radical way, in such a way that people were willing to kill him.
People say all the time that they want to help the poor by volunteering their time and donating their money to charity. It’s a fashionable, socially acceptable, résume-building, even noble thing to do. (And it looks great on university applications.) The wealthy give to charity by attending lavish dinners and golf tournaments. To the world this is “helping the poor.” The entire process is sanitized. The typical charity event involves no interaction with people that are poor, the people that will be scavenging the dumpsters after the event. Even those experiences that are interactive, like volunteering at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, leave the volunteers the luxury of leaving at the end of the day, to returning to the comforts of their daily lives.
Justice is not such a popular, socially acceptable concept. It points to our hypocrisy, the dichotomy between “helping the poor” and sharing in the lives of the poor, coming down on the side of the poor. That is a concept for which people are martyred, one of the very things for which Jesus was crucified. Jesus was always hanging out with the "wrong" people. Who are the sinners and tax collectors of our day? The homeless man on the street corner, the drug addict in the alley, the physically and mentally disabled that act out in public, the illegal immigrant working in a restaurant kitchen, the HIV positive person rejected from her church… What philanthropist is willing to do a photo-op with a homeless person? We have to ask ourselves, who is the absolute last person we would want to be seen in public with? Those are exactly the people, the people on the margins, that Jesus would be spending his time with now.
Six months ago I thought that I was compelled. I thought that I knew what it meant to live with the constant knowledge that a person dies every four seconds from a preventable, poverty-related cause. But I was wrong. I was still operating in the charity paradigm. Have I ever been willing to be seen with the wrong people? What would everybody think? How would I feel? Would I have to think and act differently? Am I willing to be converted again and again? To admit that I more of a Pharisee than I ever thought, because I’m so wrapped up in my own self-righteousness that I can’t see the Son of God right in front of me? This is the kind of conversion that happens every day, as I realize more and more (and perhaps less and less) what sort of life a follower of Christ is called to.
NGOs, government agencies, and churches (among many others) have institutionalized development work. This is both a very good and a very bad thing. There is a constant emphasis on numbers and results. In “NGO speak” development happens through baseline studies, action and business plans, M & E (monitoring and evaluation), and statistical analysis. The process is clinical and dehumanized. Agencies no longer deal with human beings but with “the poor,” “the marginalized,” “the disadvantaged,” “the [insert appropriate adjective here].” People become objects. It is so much more comfortable, palatable, and safer to objectify a person than to enter into their lives, in the same way that it is so much easier to mail a shoebox full of semi-useless items overseas than it is to think about systematic socio-economic inequality. We praise Mother Theresa, because she selflessly gave her life to serving the poor, but we murder Archbishop Oscar Romero because he asked why people are poor in the first place. Romero was murdered because he threatened the status quo in a radical way, in such a way that people were willing to kill him.
People say all the time that they want to help the poor by volunteering their time and donating their money to charity. It’s a fashionable, socially acceptable, résume-building, even noble thing to do. (And it looks great on university applications.) The wealthy give to charity by attending lavish dinners and golf tournaments. To the world this is “helping the poor.” The entire process is sanitized. The typical charity event involves no interaction with people that are poor, the people that will be scavenging the dumpsters after the event. Even those experiences that are interactive, like volunteering at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, leave the volunteers the luxury of leaving at the end of the day, to returning to the comforts of their daily lives.
Justice is not such a popular, socially acceptable concept. It points to our hypocrisy, the dichotomy between “helping the poor” and sharing in the lives of the poor, coming down on the side of the poor. That is a concept for which people are martyred, one of the very things for which Jesus was crucified. Jesus was always hanging out with the "wrong" people. Who are the sinners and tax collectors of our day? The homeless man on the street corner, the drug addict in the alley, the physically and mentally disabled that act out in public, the illegal immigrant working in a restaurant kitchen, the HIV positive person rejected from her church… What philanthropist is willing to do a photo-op with a homeless person? We have to ask ourselves, who is the absolute last person we would want to be seen in public with? Those are exactly the people, the people on the margins, that Jesus would be spending his time with now.
Six months ago I thought that I was compelled. I thought that I knew what it meant to live with the constant knowledge that a person dies every four seconds from a preventable, poverty-related cause. But I was wrong. I was still operating in the charity paradigm. Have I ever been willing to be seen with the wrong people? What would everybody think? How would I feel? Would I have to think and act differently? Am I willing to be converted again and again? To admit that I more of a Pharisee than I ever thought, because I’m so wrapped up in my own self-righteousness that I can’t see the Son of God right in front of me? This is the kind of conversion that happens every day, as I realize more and more (and perhaps less and less) what sort of life a follower of Christ is called to.
2 comments:
I admire your struggle so much, and if you ever find an answer, let me know. Thanks for always being so thoughtful and engaged.
I admire your struggle so much, and if you ever find an answer, let me know. Thanks for always being so thoughtful and engaged.
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