Poverty is unattractive. It is not a word with which people hope to be identified. In our culture, being poor is tantamount to having leprosy or gangrene. Poverty is a political hot button in an election year when the domestic economy is the key issue. How can one avoid becoming aligned with the poor and appear not to neglect the poor? Government support, the so called safety net programs, is under scrutiny. Many politicians would like to reduce or eliminate these programs. Christians should be concerned about federal budgets that increase military or defense spending, but reduce spending to help the poor. But we have been party to that logic for a few decades now. And Christians are not outraged. The majority of us are not poor and those of us who are poor do not have a voice. So, with rare exception, Christians do not share one mind or one voice on poverty and the poor.
I have said before that I have come to see poverty as deeply systemic and broader than financial sufficiency. There are wealthy people who are impoverished in their relationship toward God and others. There are financially poor people who are rich toward God and others. There is a spiritual poverty that can accompany financial poverty or wealth. Spiritual poverty is at work in every aspect of health; mental, physical, and relational/emotional. But Americans have privatized spiritual matters to the extent that we do not see the connection between God and wealth. We do not correlate spiritual poverty and other presenting issues. We don't have the diagnostic tools to recognize how our spiritual condition affects the life we are living. We have marginalized or ignored those people who have those tools. We prefer to listen to people with a positive message. We only appreciate the power of positive thinking and our ability to tune out negative voices. Avoidance,denial, and self-medication to amelioriate pain is the name of the game. Because pain relief is the key to life. We thing that acknowledging the poverty in our lives is acknowledging failure, weakness, and insufficiency. BUT, avoidance is costing us our very souls! (Not the 'going to burn in hell for eternity' cost; but the 'quiet acquiescence to the hellish brutality that is life on earth' cost.)
