The Poor With You Always

I wrote this in the form of an email home two and half years ago during my last term in Bangladesh. At the time, I was living in the capital city of Bangladesh, Dhaka, which ranks as one of the worst cities in the world to live in, and studying the Bangla language.

The oftener I am in Bangladesh, the harder it is to write meaningfully about this place and it poverty and the more it begins to shape the way I think. 

At the risk of sounding like a missionary flyer, I could write about the little beggar girl in the wheel chair whose mother brings her back from begging as we are leaving our class. The first time I saw the beggar girl she reminded me of a friend of mine, and I smiled at her. The mother and daughter beamed in reply like an illustration from the Story Mates, momentarily destroying my concept of hollow-eyed beggars. They were a pair of the happiest people I have seen.

Just a few days ago, I met them again. Their faces split, and immediately, they called out to me from the wayside. I stopped to talk briefly, expecting a question about my nationality. Instead, the mother poured out effusions upon me; so gushing were they that I boggled in the stream of Bangla and gulped, guppy-like, at the trickles. This is more or less what she said…

When she saw us girls, my team members and I, we looked so happy and different, that she wondered what on earth we knew or had in us to be so happy. (So far, so good… This is the impression we Christians tell ourselves that we leave on the world, although it produces a reassuring glow to be told occasionally.)  So she begged God to bless us, and she prayed that we would be able to do the work that we are doing.

The interview lasted only thirty seconds. I said something clumsy in reply. Other passers-by had stopped to eavesdrop, so they went their way while I went mine. I will not delve further into the irony of the ignorant Muslim beggar praying for the rich American missionary, and although eager for a little story about the supernatural, I will not surmise that she was an angel. She is what she was, and I do not make her more than that. This I do know. God hears the prayers of that woman.

There is irony on these streets. The man who wears a mask against the choking pollution, and who pushes it up so that he can smoke a cigarette… the brand new and empty trash barrels placed at intervals along the street, tiny next to the piles of garbage.

In the big cities of a developing country, paradoxes are everywhere… the lowest of the low who dig around in stinking refuse and the fancy cars that glide by; the dingy squatter shops set up on the sidewalk in front of a glittering fashion store; the high rise apartment building beside the river of sewage; the coinciding noise of worn out bus tires exploding and the thunder of fireworks from the cricket stadium down the street.

The other evening, June and Dori and I traipsed along the aforementioned sewage river on a narrow pathway that admitted only single file. To our left was a high brick wall; to our right was the dead gray and black liquid that oozed by, a blasphemy to the idea of a river. It was only natural that we should meet oncoming foot traffic, oozing by each other in imitation of our surroundings. When in Rome or a sewage dump, do as… Directly, we reached a slum built inches above the slimy water where we were going to visit a good friend, and like any missionary with an update to write, I had to ponder. Hear my thoughts.

Reports home of slums by sewage rivers and crippled beggars are written to elicit pity. Having just done my best to inspire the appropriate horror, I now chose to object to this reaction.

We have been studying the book of James in class, all about applicable things like not giving respect unto the man with the fancy clothes and giving respect to the poor and jewelry and drying up in the hot sunlight and life being a vapor. (James is graphic. Being an epistle which I tend not to read, it took a foreign language to jar some of this into my head.)

First off on entering the slum, I thought ho, hum, nice day in the slums, admired the sunset which turned the ugly water incandescent, and hoped the noodles would be good. I am used to Bangladesh, after all. Since, however, it is a matter that I have taken up with my conscience to not grow hard-hearted, I began to think about these poor people, living like rabbits, piled on top of each other in a slum nearly in a stream of sewage (little trickles of suspicious water ran through the house, even in the dry season). How sad or, rather, plain awful it was… I remembered James and wondered how I could give respect unto them with the poor clothes. It was my wish to lift these people out of their poverty. I wished I could change their circumstances…

Then I asked myself… What if what I am really saying is, “You are less than what I am. I need to bring you up to my level.” Help always goes down from upper strata of society to lower strata. I want to enjoy my soft bed at night with a clear conscience, so I give and give. I make myself think of the poor woman sleeping on her hard floor. I punish myself with scenes of others’ hardships, so that after a bit of realizing “how good I have it”, I can roll over and fall peacefully into sleep. Without uneasy consciences, how would charities survive?

But… who ever said that the poor need to not be poor? What if I would give, not to “bring them up to my level” but to trim off my excess, share what I have, and “take me down to their level?” God says it is more blessed to give than to receive. Share because it is good for me to have less, not because the person who does not have cannot be happy unless they have what I have.

God’s vision is not for the poor to become rich. He sees the needs of the poor, yes, and because of that, I must not be careless with suffering. God has commanded us to give. God, however, likes the poor. Sometimes it even seems that He would like the rich to be a bit more poor. He would not be alarmed to see the North American daughter of a business owner living in a slum, smoking herself out cooking curry… not nearly as alarmed as I would be, at any rate. I am pretty sure He would be comfortable with me living in a slum.

If I think people who have less than me have a horrible life, I am saying that if I had less than what I have now I would have a horrible life. That means that I am valuing my life according to its living standard. Why do I turn soggy when I see poor people and feel sorry for them because of their hard beds and repetitious diet? People are not their living condition. Pity for circumstances is too easily confused with compassion, and too often the respect that we should offer to the poor is lost in our fixation with living standard.

Therefore, “…I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content, I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound…”

…and I desist.

 

        ~ I love beauty and truth too much, but not enough.

 I miss these things; I crave them.

Desire is good, but it is too easy

   to turn

to warmth and good food and nice clothes and pleasant places

            instead of fire and the bread of life and the naked innocence

            of created beings and an eternal heaven.

   It is too easy to just hang out and not to love,

   to amble along the paved road and

            not run to along the mountain tops.

   It is easy to worship a good living standard,

 to confuse comfort with beauty, and

           lose the culture of Eden, the thing we were meant to be.

         …and the warmth becomes hell, and the good food a poison,

and the nice clothes the nakedness of a crucified man, and the pleasant place a tomb.

        Through the crucifixion, the grave is emptied.

And it must be emptied.