Jesuit Journeys
winter 2005

During our first two married years, my wife Leah and I worked as Jesuit Volunteers in Belize City. Our 82-year-old friend and neighborhood matriarch, Miss Olive, would frequently inject in her sentences the simple phrase, “If God wills it.”

See you tomorrow... “If God wills it,” Miss Olive would reply. Hope we get a cool breeze today... “If God wills,” she would smile. Her almost reflexive line implied her gratitude, reliance, and familiarity with God. She lived in a deteriorating wood house on a meager monthly pension. Barring a hurricane, she wagered the house would probably outlive her.

Living among those considered poor by U.S. standards helped us see the world from a different perspective. We slowly discovered how viscerally conditioned we were to invest our hope in pursuits other than God – our careers, possessions and accomplishments. We saw how easy it is to mistake our achievements as of our own making – rewards accrued by hard work alone.

This stance conveniently forgets God’s enormous generosity and the advantages afforded us by others in the form of privileges not everyone shares – privileges such as education, health care, stable mentors, lucky breaks, and family connections.

There’s a danger in believing success is totally of our own making. It allows us to easily blame the poor for somehow lacking effort, initiative or ingenuity. These were the myths we began to un-learn through our experiences in Belize.

Fr. Dean Brackley, SJ contrasts the powerful North American ethos of “upward mobility” with Jesus’ lived example of “downward mobility.” Among his other credentials, Jesus was a bright, literate, charismatic leader who freely chose to ally with outcasts and deliver a message which so infuriated the powerful that he was publicly executed between two insurrectionists. Like those who were irresistibly attracted to follow Jesus, Miss Olive demonstrated total hope in the Lord. For her, there was no where else to invest hope.

In a recent letter on voluntary poverty, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, superior general of the worldwide Society of Jesus, reflects that “the poor teach us about poverty as no document can.” His predecessor, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, challenged individuals who are Jesuiteducated to oppose the consuming society, to “slow down the expanding spiral of luxurious living and social competition.”

Poverty is fraught with paradox. Twenty years after founding the Catholic worker movement, Dorothy Day said of poverty, “I simultaneously condemn it and advocate it. Poverty is simple and complex at once. It is a social phenomenon and personal matter.”

Voluntary poverty, a simpler life in closer proximity to the poor, began to free us from the clutter that crowds God out. It simultaneously helped us understand the conditions that render others involuntarily poor.

Sociologist Segundo Montes, SJ, one of the Jesuits murdered in El Salvador in 1989, allowed campesinos to teach him. Combining his research and his friendships with the poor, he was able to debunk the prevailing myth that the Salvadoran economy was thriving due to free markets and the entrepreneurial spirit of the aristocracy who almost exclusively owned and ruled the country. In fact, Montes showed that the economy was shipwrecked and only buoyed by the repatriated family contributions sent back to El Salvador by those who were exiled by the civil war. He was killed for exposing the truth, standing with the poor, and advocating peace.

Today cities are increasingly configured to have little or no contact with the poor. Demographically, schools and neighborhoods have been re-segregated and the gap between rich and poor is the widest since the gilded 1890s – the age of robber barons. Underground garages and walled communities insulate us from even passing the poor on the street.

Globally, the asymmetries are even more extreme. At less than 5 percent of the world’s population, U.S. consumers burn 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuels. The energy consumed by one American would provide for 395 Ethiopians. We’re world leaders in generating waste – 4 pounds of solid waste per capita per day compared to 1.1 pounds for Cairo, Calcutta or Manila residents.

As Fr. Kolvenbach insightfully observed, written reflections alone cannot instruct the heart regarding the freedom of voluntary poverty and the affliction of imposed poverty.

Joyfully recalling the dignity and wisdom of Miss Olive, and inspired by the poverty of Jesus, how might we explore what prevents us from entering into relationships with the poor? How might we, in the Christian spirit of solidarity, begin to identify their struggle as our struggle?

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