So, instead of violently prying the hard-earned cash from your grasp, perhaps we could reflect on how wealth as a blessing can be utilised in relation to the poor. In short, if we have been blessed, how should we treat the poor?
Recently, there was an incident that took place in another country, famous as the Land of the Free. At present, the southern border has been breached by economic refugees, all desperate for a better life. The Governor of a state besieged by these illegal migrants decided to send 50 aliens in a jet-plane to Martha’s Vineyard—a supposedly self-declared sanctuary island. The reaction to this so-called political ploy was not only explosive but revealing. In fact, the same reactions to these migrants being bussed away from the border states were detected in other similar sanctuary cities.
Politics is always dirty but away from taking sides, the reactions possibly expose a chink in the armour of those who claim to care for the poor. After all they proudly declared themselves to be sanctuary communities and cities.
Their responses can be understood if we consider a condition known as addiction to love. It is a craving for the feelings associated with falling in love. Those who have been in love know that being in love evokes a kind of warm fuzzy feeling that can be therapeutic. It feels good to love and to be loved.
You may have heard of this phenomenon called “disaster tourism”. An example we are familiar with is known as “rubber necking”. Imagine E3 near Kempas where there is a massive pileup of cars. The side of the highway with no incident or mishap is also jammed because necks are craning and straining to see how badly smashed the cars are or better, to read the number plates so that you can buy 4D. That is just voyeurism. What disaster tourism does for some is to give the opportunity to virtue signal—a kind of moral grandstanding that one is there just after a calamity in the thick of where the action is.
To love the poor, it demands more than “virtue signalling”. According to James Bartholomew, the journalist who popularised the term, “Saying the right thing violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness”. To love the poor, requires more than just proclaiming that we have a place for them “theoretically”. To learn how to love the poor, turn to the most relevant and recent example: St Teresa of Calcutta. She embraced the poor where they were. In short, it means getting our hands dirty, not because the poor are dirty, but rather getting down on our knees to serve the poor.
If we idolise the poor, it is easy to keep them at arm’s length. We create a category in our head that there is a group for whom we need to champion that easily we lose sight of where they are. We group them into a generic whole so that we can easily handle them and in that way, we can feel good about ourselves.
Over the years, Sunday schools throughout the various parishes have tried to conscientise children on the reality of the poor. One way of doing it is to organise the catechism children to visit the poor. Have you ever noticed that come Christmas time, so many companies and corporations are falling over themselves trying to achieve their quota of CSR? However, it is observed that when children are brought to the homes of the aged or to orphanages, many of them will group or gather amongst themselves because they do not know what to do or how to behave with those not of their social status or standing.
Maybe awkwardness is a reflexion of the reality that poverty is too profound for any individual to handle. We may never have adequate resources needed to feed all the poor in the world. In fact, not in a million years will we be able to solve structural poverty. Why? Whatever framework we may come up with to overcome poverty, soon enough other forms of exploitations will emerge from whatever loopholes there are in the structure. Think of the Telcos who participated in soliciting donations. Can you imagine the cut they took for each Ringgit a person donates? As high as 30%. So much for CSR.
The point here is not fixing poverty as if we hold the answer to abolishing it. Instead, what is necessary for our salvation is to take more than a topical interest in poverty. When we reduce poverty to an ideology, it is easy to shy away from being personal and when we are not able to be intimate, the tendency is to virtue signal, that is, express pious sentiments to indicate how good we have been.
In the Gospel, the story revolves around Dives, who is sadly unnamed, and a man, who is starving outside the gate, named Lazarus. It was not a story of a stratum of people, that is, the poor class. If anything, the contrary is more condemning because Dives is not a personal name per se. In Latin, Dives means “rich” and it can easily be translated generically as the “rich class”. In other words, this story is personal in the sense that this specific Dives could have befriended not THE poor as a class but this particular poor man, Lazarus.
The saints routinely model for us their own interactions with individual poor people, not just the poor as a stratum of society. Mother Teresa was saintly because she held and helped so many dying lepers. For her, everyone was important as an individual. In short, her hands, feet and blue-lined cotton-white sari habit were soiled simply because she routinely engaged poor persons.
The way for St Teresa of Calcutta to love the poor was to love Jesus Christ. She and her sisters spend an hour before the Blessed Sacrament every morning before they go out to serve the poor. The more we love Jesus personally, the more we can see Him in individual poor persons. “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was naked and you clothed me… etc”. There is no other way for us to love the poor except personally. Loving the poor ideological can only take us so far. It is when Jesus becomes Whom we love with our heart and soul that we will willingly walk that extra mile even for the poor man or woman who can be ungrateful and who does not deserve our care and concern.
The Gospel of Dives and Lazarus shows us that real contact with an individual poor keeps our love grounded and honest. It makes our love for Jesus Christ more authentic. It is good to take a keen interest in the current issues surrounding poverty but it is infinitely better to befriend, love and serve a poor person because he or she may be the only passport that opens the gates of heaven for your entrance into eternal life.
