POVERTY

God is being very surprising this Lent. This morning the message sprang from two programmes I watched last night in which 4 rich and famous people spent three days living with a poor person or family. There is nothing new about the concept. It has been done before and I very nearly didn’t bother to see it. However, something I had read beforehand in which one of the rich visitors commented on the fact that the amount of money, £3, which was all her host had to buy food for three days, was the same as she would spend on a flat white coffee, prodded me to tune in. At the very end, in conversation with the adults in the second family she visited, she told them she paid £6 to have her groceries delivered to her home. They were astounded. £6 for them was a small fortune. 

As someone who also has her groceries delivered, although I don’t pay as much for delivery, I was led to think long and hard about the issues raised. I have long questioned some aspects of the way we religious/spiritual people approach money. Seeing the people on my TV struggling to survive on meagre benefits, caught in a multiplicity of poverty traps, having to justify claiming food from food banks, existing on one meal a day, unable to heat their homes or provide themselves with hot water on tap, parents going without so that the children could eat, I thought of the money I spent on online Lenten retreats, how easily I press the One Click button on Amazon and download yet another ebook on spirituality. I think of all the retreats and conferences I have attended over the years at which I have been fed abundantly both physically and spirituality. Can they all be justified in a world I share with sisters and brothers who are in such need? 

I remember what Pope Francis said about pastors needing to share the smell of the sheep and his constant references to being a Church of the poor. I ask myself if our focus on spirituality can be a form of self-obsession. As I indulge my own pursuit of greater spiritual depth, how much though do I give to those who would love to have the money that I spend on such things just to be able to live a life without hunger? 

I’m not able to provide any answers to the questions which are coming up for me but I sit with the questions. Is it valid for a Church of the poor to hold so many lavish conferences attended by the comfortably off? What do such events do for the many who are in need? I often express my indignation about social inequality and unjust systems. How far do I collude with them? Those making the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius these days are asked to spend time praying about social sin and their part in it but it is much easier to hold a seminar on other aspects of the Exercises and debate the exact meaning of Ignatius’s instructions than to invite people to a radical review of our collusion with sinful structures. 

The more I reflect on these matters, the more uncomfortable I become. In the parents I saw on TV going without food for the sake of the children, I see my own Mother who had to do the same when my siblings were small. I need to sit for a long time with my discomfort and pray for both a personal conversion and a conversion for our Church.