Analysis From Above

"Isn’t there in all our analysis- I mean your analysis… no, better call it ours- aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man- in analysing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh?"

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov

Breaking The Back Of The Church

"..... all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches for the starving!....

From the distance of a half a century, it is easy to reproach the patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian Church ought not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources might not be available to the Soviet government, and who it was who had driven the Volga into famine....

Bishop Antoine Granovsky, a member of the Central Committee of Pamgol: "The Believers fear that the church valuables may be used for other purposes, more limited and alien to their hearts." .....

The petrograd Metropolitan, Veniamin, was similarly impelled by a mood of trust: "This belongs to God and we will give all of it by ourselves." But forced requisitions were wrong. Let the sacrifice be of our own free will. He, too, wanted verification by the clergy and the believers to watch over the church valuables up to the very moment when they were transformed into bread for the starving..... 

Veniamin announced: "The Orthodox Church he is prepared to give everything to help the starving." It's a sacrilege only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was unnecessary.....

The Metropolitan said: "The heaviest burden is division and enmity. But the time will come when the Russian people will unite. I myself, at the head of the worshippers, will remove the cover [of precious metals and precious stones] from the icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan. I will shed sweet tears on it and give it away."  .....

The newspapers began to howl about the "evil pastors" and "princes of the church," and the representatives of the church were told: "We don't need your donations! And there won't be any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government - and the government will take whatever it considered necessary."  ....

 All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 

My Church Is Richer Than Jesus!

"To me it is not possible, O my God, to be rich and at ease and enjoy a prosperous life, when you were poor, struggling, living laboriously. I cannot love thus. ’It is not right that the servant should be above his Master, nor that the Bride should be rich and the Bridegroom poor,’ especially when he is voluntarily poor. S. Teresa, wearied with the importunities of those who wished her to accept endowments for her convent at Avila, was once almost ready to accept. But when she went to her oratory and saw the Crucifix she fell at the feet of Jesus, hanging naked on the Cross, and implored of him the grace never to let her receive any endowments, but always to be as poor as he was....."

- Charles de Foucauld. Méditations of a Hermit.

Speaking To My Chatacter

"Another time, my dad gave 50 bucks to a guy who said he needed to buy medicine for his kids. I told my dad he was probably going to spend the money on alcohol or something, but my dad said that "whether he was lying or not says something about HIS character, but hearing someone in need and choosing not to help when l have the means to says something about mine".

I never forget that."

- Josh Wolcott

We Don't Have Any Money

Life for many rural Africans I know. How many time have I heard this?

"Have you given him any medicine?" I asked.

"Yes, yes," he said. "We gave him aspirin and vitamins every day."

I shook my head.

“You know that's not enough. You've got to get him to a doctor. You've got to go to the mission hospital."

A look of shame and embarrassment crept onto Kanyenda's face. "Teta katuena ne falanga to," he said. "We don't have any money."

There they were. Those five words: "We don't have any money." They were permanently stitched to the sleeve of serious illness in Kalambayi, speaking like an epitaph for 90 percent of the chiefdom's dead and dying."

 

(Mike Tidwell. 'The Ponds is Kalambayi. pig 130)

The Great Depression Politics

"It was the Great Depression, and misery, starvation, financial ruin, despair, and suicide were affecting thousands of lives. In response to the raw need of the people around them and their search for social justice, my parents lives and home were infused with a panoramic sense of history and big ideas of economic and social reform, democratic processes, and populist politics. They looked for deliverance from the awful conditions that threatened to destroy their community. Mostly, they refused to accept the prevailing political notion of the traditional political establishment that there was nothing I'm to be done but Riding the Storm."

- Preston Manning. Think Big: Adventures in Life and Democracy. 

You Are Causing My Nakedness

Expose injustice. You don't  have to get violent and refuse to give up your coat and suffer arrest. There are nonviolent  ways to expose  injustice. 

Jesus' form of non-resistance does nit mean you have to be a doormat.

Your repressive sytem and excessive tarrifs and demands are causing my nakedness. You want the very cloths off my back. Take them all, tale my undergarment too so that people can see how much of a strangle hold you have on me. You take my coat everyday, truth is you are taking all I have anyway. So give him the undergarment as well. Walk naked so people will know you are naked becuuse of your dealings qith this man.

It will bring shame on him. 

"The cloak-and-coat comes from debtors court, in a situation where wealthy landowners held unjust, usurious liens against poor tenant farmers, who were perpetually in debt. The poor debtor had only the coat on his back to give as security for his loan. He must appear in court each day the debt is not paid and surrender the coat for security, but he may retrieve it again in the evening to ward off the cold or in the night. In that Culture, the shame of nakedness fell not on the naked man, but on the one who caused the nakedness. Jesus's counsel was that the next time the debtor went to court, he should strip off his undergarment along with the coat that he surrendered for security, and walk around naked all day to give witness to the unjust system that caused his nakedness."
- J. Denny Weaver. Becoming Anabaptist 

The Life I've Chosen

"I figured I'd put myself into an impregnable position and that no one would threaten to drive me from the life - and the death -  I had chosen. I stood up to the tearful, tragic letters from my mother and the free one one-way airplane tickets to Los Angeles or San Francisco sent to me by friends who couldn't believe that I lived as I did because I wanted to."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

Trying Poverty

""If you want to see a performance of monumental ugliness just leave me over here a day without cigarettes." 

"Oh Jesus, that something so tragical ever happens. You know, hermano, for years you have been talking this bulshit about the nobility of poverty, and now for the first time you got a chance to get a little taste of what it's like. But no, a day without eggs and you begin to panic; a day without bread and you collapse. Bread and eggs, food for the Ricos, food poor people don't even eat. Why don't you think about sharing the experience of the poor man who is under the tension of wanting to smoke a cigarette without the two cents to buy one?"

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

Poverty Does Not Make Every Pauper Kind

I had spent ten years with poor people, full of Illusions about them and out of pity and rage ready to forgive them almost everything. Their sense of involvement with life, their capacity to endure through endless periods of deprivation and catastrophe were qualities I found heroic. But now for the first time I was plunged into the reality of a poverty that couldn't be disguised by Ramones presents to intervene for my protection or to explain in a softer way certain irrationality and brutalities. I had come over to this further side wondering if I could handle the jungle, never suspecting that it was the people, not the forest, that would fill me with despair. On one side of me lived a group of drunken louts who, if they had had the courage, would have killed me; on the other side, my friends, the ones who came to my house in the late afternoons - to visit me when I was there or to rob me when I was gone."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

Wasted Life Of Sneers and Jeers

"Repudiating my father's values, which were solidly bourgeois to the point of farce, I had repudiated the whole middle class and had wasted a lifetime's energies in sneers and jeers....  The rulers of the world have become, in enslaving the masses of the poor, completely enslave themselves by their sad possessions. "

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure. A Journey On Two Rivers 

The Illusions Of Care About Poverty

"There is no way to live with the illusion of being made happy by the things that one owns, especially in a country like Ecuador where a comparative handful of people own everything, without developing and armor of blindness that makes one not only insensitive but contemptuous of the overwhelming poverty through which one moves. Perhaps worse than the contempt is the hypocrisy of pretending to be outraged while living a life devoted solely to the consumption of things that almost the entire population is on able to enjoy. I am thinking of a recent dinner party in one of the more modestly priced French restaurants where each of us ate sixteen dollars worth of food while talking about the corruptions of the world and the plight of the poor Ecuadorian Indians, most of whom live in the absolute feudal degradation that arrived in the 1540s with the Spanish conquistadors. Talk about engaging in an orgy of unspeakable acts. Our sin was not in enjoying good food but was much more complicated and suggestive the whole disintegration of our moral sensitivities. How could we have left that restaurant stuffed like pigs and half-drunk on Chilean wine and French Brandy and not vomited the whole thing up in self-loathing when we encountered the barefoot citizens of Quito ransacking the garbage cans in deserted nighttime Avenida Amazonas? How strange and awful; we know that living this way is gross and unnatural but we keep on doing it."
- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure. A Journey On Two Rivers.

Poverty On The Edge of Perpetual Crisis

Living Poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a  battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat; there  is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a  state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming  from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things."
 - Moritz Thomsen. Living Poor.

Begging For A Chicken

Having worked internationally for many years i can't begin to say how true such dynamics really are. What is a seemly simple task to us, calls upon every resource a poor man to woman has to prove something to us before we act. 

"I made contract with the town's children that I would give them gringo chickens to taise if they would first build little bamboo chicken houses for them. It turned out that the kids and their fathers were too poor to buy nails or bamboo, too poor to own hammers and saws. Still, the little boys were crazy to own chickens. How they pestered and begged."
- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure. 

The Soul Her Sacred Page

"One Holy Church of God appears
Through every age and race,
Unwasted by the lapse of years,
Unchanged by changing place.
......

The truth is, her prophetic gift,
The soul her sacred page....

....
With bread of life earth's hunger feed;
Redeem the evil time!

----------

~ Samuel Longfellow. Hymn: One Holy Church of God Appears

The Bent Ones

How blessed (or “happy”) are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. —Matthew 5:3

“Poor in spirit” means an inner emptiness and humility, a beginner’s mind, and to live without a need for personal righteousness or reputation. It is the “powerlessness” of Alcoholics Anonymous’ First Step. The Greek word Matthew uses for “poor” is ptochoi, which literally means, “the very empty ones, those who are crouching.” They are the bent-over beggars, the little nobodies of this world who have nothing left, who aren’t self-preoccupied or full of themselves in any way. Jesus is saying: “Happy are you, you’re the freest of all.”

An Ecology and Poverty That Allows Time For Prayer

"Lord, help me choose a simpler life-style that promote solidarity with the world's poor,
helps me appreciate nature more,
affords greater opportunity to work together with my neighbors,
reduces my use of limited resources, creates greater inner harmony,
saves money,
allows time for meditation and prayer,
incites me to take political and social action.
May all my decisions about my style of life celebrate the joy of life that comes from loving You. Amen

~ Thomas Pettepiece. Visions of a hungry world

If Jesus Is Lord What Is Not Lord?

"When Christians say “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20) or “Jesus is Lord” (1 Corinthians 12:3), we are actually announcing our commitment to Jesus’ upside-down world where “the last are first and the first are last” (Matthew 20:16) over any other power system or frame of reference. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not! If Jesus is Lord, then the economy and stock market are not! If Jesus is Lord, then my house, possessions, country, and job are not! If Jesus is Lord, then I am not!"

~ Richard Rohr

When Charity Is A Kickback

"In 1995, the director of the U.S. aid agency defended his agency by testifying tohis congress that 84¢ of every
dollar of aid goes back into the U.S. economy in goods and services purchased. For every dollar the United States putsinto the World Bank, an estimated $2 actually goes into the U.S. economy in goods and services."

Globalization:
A View from Below
BY JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE

I Know Why They Are Broken

"Our driver, a local Haitian, tried to explain his own tension in watching his fellow citizens become savages: “I have known many of these thieves since I was a young man. Many were my closest friends. I see them now in alleyways, waiting to mug, hurt, and steal, but I still love them. I know them, and I know why they are broken.”

~ Hugh Halter. Flesh