This morning I walked into the rehab unit and talked with the case manager.
Told her how when auntie was a little girl, her father walked out on the family, her mom got a job as a live in maid, and then put the girls into an orphanage, paying for their keep with that job. The girls, my auntie and my mother, didn’t get out for five or six years.
An old and a deep wound.
And being in the rehab is pushing those buttons.
The case manager is a nurse with years of experience, she recognized the wound as I described it, there is much hurt in this world, and people in her line of work see a lot of it, and said when the staff meet tomorrow that bit of information will be part of the mix…
That task done I drove back to the church.
All this reminded me a bit of other stories from those years, mostly of family wounds…
Probably the thing that most hurt my grandmother, if the returning over the years to that particular story is evidence, is how at some point she was accused of stealing food by her employers. She never forgot the humiliation. This was someone who was willing to do any work however degrading to support her children. She drew short of stealing. I probably would have. But, she didn’t…
Another wound. Grandma is gone. Long gone. But there is a half life to that story, a small worm in my soul.
And so I think about poverty. I think about those who minimize it. I think about those who celebrate it.
I don’t think kindly of either position.
There is no dignity in poverty. There is no grace. It does nothing to make people better.
It is just a gaping hole in the soul…
And anyone who says different is lying.
Lying, or they’d never been poor themselves.
Bullpucky.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night with the awareness of how grateful I was to have entered Homeless World.
I guess I’m contrarian even in my sleep. Contrarian even before I read the blogpost I’m contrarian to.
I’m sorry but the romanticised view is this blogpost on poverty, not the reality as it is now and probably has been.
A big part of why I am happy about the impoverished world I’m in certainly has to do with knowing the truth of it, as I do now (somewhat). I cannot have imagined that I could have been so ignorant about anything — but I was.
Perhaps all the indignity and broken-home qualities of your grandmother’s circumstance is quite different, but the phrase that woke ME up in the wee hours was this: “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
There are many things in Conventional World, where y’all live, that is disengenuous and self-serving and full of hot air in the ego balloon. It is nice to get all that broken down. The view from the floor, if you will, offers the enormous benefit of being a spectator to all the false dramas and daily knifings. While there are knifings down here, too, to be sure, they are of a different sort. Being poor, or having been poor, has its benefits. Many could tell you that, and the furthest thing they would be doing is ‘lying.’
Tom, your words have wisdom.
And, I think there’s an and here…
I know how I don’t wish my life away, any part, including some pretty terrible parts. They made me, me.
And, I’m grateful.
And, like other circumstances in our lives that make us, us, poverty has no intrinsic goodness about it…
My thoughts at the moment I composed my words were going to those who justify a system with poverty built in as somehow being good for people. And with it, thinking a little about those who think poverty is a choice…
Fondly,
James
I think this season breeds a mentality of “has” or “has not”. To give, I must first get, I must acquire, I must shop. To receive, I must need, I must want, I must find the void that needs filled.
The Koan Mu teaches us different, doesn’t it? Like swiss cheese, I’m full of holes… but missing nothing.
All suffering, all wounds, are complete and whole, as am I. Only realizing this, might I act to save all the beings of the world, worldly rich or worldly poor. Your Grandmother’s karma feeds us all. Thank you _/<3\_
A fool justifying another's suffering only justifies their own. Delusions are inexhaustible…
I’m with James, there are billions of people on this earth who don’t have enough to eat, shelter over their heads, or health care for what ails them through no fault of their own. One doesn’t have to have experienced poverty to have empathy. I have experienced that one meatball moment from the song, but when I was young, as an educated, strong, white man in the US, it didn’t last long. More recently, as a 57 year old man, being out of work for 6 months was more scary — I thought it might be the last job I had. To the point, in the current political milieu the Randist celebration of selfishness and greed has defined poverty as self inflicted, and therefor not worthy of any concern on the part of those that have. We all have to understand that “there but for the grace of chance go I” (I’m an atheist), and take better care of each other.
Apropos Feeding the poor Matthew 25:42-45 “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ “