poor

One of the reasons, if not the reason, I am continually falling in love with my wife, over and over again, is that my wife shows me the face of the poor.

My wife was born very premature and very small, and only just survived with a lot of care, but she has had a lifelong illness that has been crippling or life-threatening when it’s not in remission. Her mother abandoned the family when my wife was a child. Her father became wealthy but, when he died, the family’s fortune was lost, and my wife and her brother suffered, their hopes for college and a bright future dashed. My wife, when I met her, was an orphan, broke, and sick, though her disposition was so sunny and cheerful, open and expressive, that you’d never know it.

Continually, when I see the poor of the world, I see her. When anyone is suffering or deprived, the fact that they are Somali or Kenyan or Cambodian or Indian or Palestinian doesn’t intrude – it’s as if, in their faces, I can see her face so clearly; in fact, I see in their faces the same simple hope, the same crushing pain, the same humanity I see whenever I look at my wife. She has shown me the poor, and turned my heart toward them, and so toward her.

I take no great lesson from this; I don’t know what the lesson is. I do know that it seems to be unusual. The people I know, good people, don’t look at others of different colors and features and nationalities the same way. They see a dichotomy between foreigners and their own, and there’s a rift between them and the world, and I don’t know how to communicate through that barrier. It’s a sadness and an alienation that will always be with me, and it seems to be the American attitude.

I go to work, and the Indian contractors call everyone “Sir”, because they are afraid of making a mistake (which could be ruinous for them in our hypersensitive corporate culture), and no one responds “But we’re the same, you and I. I’m John (or Peter or James).” They eat smelly food (which is delicious), and they sit among themselves, and no one intrudes to join them. They are looked upon simply as “they” and, since they are temporary, there’s no real need to identify with them on a daily basis. Instead of being our honored guests, they are our “guestworkers“, and you know what that term has meant, historically.

Among my associates, I watch eyes glaze over when I talk about the poor in other countries, and I watch a nationalism come out that talks of “my own community” (even among conservatives who ordinarily wouldn’t use the word “community” to save their lives). They don’t realize that precisely because the “foreigner” seems distant to you, he is your stranger, your poor. He is Christ the Stranger, Christ the Foreigner, Christ the Alien, the Unknown Christ. But we live in a religious culture that behaves as if, when it doesn’t openly assert, that nothing about Christ in unknown. We have Him fully circumscribed. And in such a culture, Christ does not come to us in the stranger. He is not found in the wounded Jew cared for by the Samaritan. He is not in the suffering beyond the sea. He is Citizen Christ, of the United States. He is only the rich poor, and the rich’s poor.

Rationalizations abound, and I’ve heard them all – so much that they seem a drone of platitudes that each person parrots but presents as his original thoughts. Justifications, without real regard for truth. And I’ve no patience for it. It’s heresy. But give me the heretics who love the poor; they are my brethren. I must be willing to be even a heretic for their sake, though it is a grave thing to be considered so by one’s brethren.

My wife:

I was blind. Years of blindness. And my wife came and saved me. She showed me the outcast Somali woman, shunned by her own family for being sterile and incontinent from a childhood childbirth of a juvenile marriage. Made to live in a shack of sticks added reluctantly onto the back of the house – just enough shelter that the hyenas can’t get to her. That young girl dreams of belonging, of having a family, of being loved and wanted. My wife shows me the Kenyan woman who runs a barren stall under a tattered awning and dreams of getting just a little ahead, so she can make a life. Just a few extra wares, and she can sell all she can procure. She shows me Cambodian and Indian children, abandoned and with nothing, who are given pretty treats by passing adults (candy is easy to buy), but not enough real nutrition to grow properly, and who have no chance to go to university; it’s just a distant dream. Some of them may end up slaves, and some may wear away their lives in misery with never anything but the clothes that cover them in the fields. They begin to wonder why they are alive, why other peoples lives seem to have meaning. They begin to lose a sense of self. My wife shows me the Palestinian family, trapped in Gaza, the walled city, like the Jews in the ghettos of Germany, but this time the Jews are the jailors; a family any one of whom would work two shifts a day every day for the other, but surrounded by barbed wire and tanks, and not allowed even to seek a chance on the open streets in a fair market, while just beyond the tanks are high-rises and lush parks.

When I look at my wife, I see the simplicity, sincerity, the most basic desires that indicate a human spirit, and I look back and forth between her and the world, and she is everywhere. And we are the rich, the privileged, who complain because our 8hr jobs are too tiring, but she has taught me to see wealth differently. My wife has taught me to love the poor, and the poor have taught me to love my wife.

This is all I know about it. I am nothing special for being given this vision. It’s a grace. An unmerited gift. It has filled my life with such joy, such agony for others, and such sadness that I don’t know how to give it away. My wife has saved my life, saved me, a closed-minded, selfish, person who did not see the world and the poor for what they were. That’s all.