I picked up an "old" book I read a couple years back that is once again wreaking havoc in my mind. The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker is a powerful read and helpful as I continue to wrestle through all things Know Sweat and the issue of poverty in particular.
Here's just one part of a paragraph that has stopped me in my tracks today:
"Part of the reason poverty feels so intractable is because there is a conscious spiritual force committed to keeping people bound in states of oppression.....When you're desperate or even angry there is at least a shred of hope that things might be different, a holy discontent. But despair is what happens when you're tired of being desperate." : Page 57
From my comfortable middle-class life, its hard to truly understand a life in poverty. I am guilty of thinking I understand it when I make a brief foray into poverty for a day. A week. A summer. But in the end I'm not really there because I'm around it but not in it. At any moment I have the escape clause ready to pull me back out to "safety".. And yet I have the audacity to think I'm "helping".
I grateful for people's paths I have crossed in the past months as they've shed light on the path and spoken truth. Still, I am confused. How do we best help "the least of these" and see them as peers, as just as divine and worthy as we see ourselves, rather than as projects or object lessons or slide shows?
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