a few proverbial observations about the poor

The poor is disliked even by his neighbor, but the rich has many friends.

Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity
than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool.
...

Wealth brings many new friends,
but a poor man is deserted by his friend.
...
Many seek the favor of a generous man,
and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts.
All a poor man’s brothers hate him;
how much more do his friends go far from him!
He pursues them with words, but does not have them.

You don't have to exercise your imagination too much to wonder where I got these observations. In the last ten years the most I have heard pastors say about "the poor" is merely to discuss that a theology of wealth is bad but that, by general time devoted to the other false alternative, that a theology of poverty is worse. At a lay level there tend to be adherants to one who say that the poor are poor because of hegemonic and systemic influences that lead to injustice that must be addressed. The other has adherants who broadly say that if those evil stupid sinners would just go get any old jobs and stop parasitically living off the revenues raised by good people whose money is wickedly taken from them in the form of taxes then the less-taxed would be creating the wealth needed to give the poor jobs.

These caricatures seem to be as far as either side is willing to go. To propose that some of the wealthy are so because they are wicked rather than righteous is both necessary to say but also pedestrian and mundane in a pastoral setting now. To say that some are poor due to the effects of their own sin (either their own sins, as conservatives are want to say or the sins of others, as liberals almost invariably announce) while others are poor because they refuse to sin is also admittedly pedestrian and mundane.

There are plenty of anecdotes about how the poor people whom the liberal wants to help have not mugged him yet explains entirely how he can imagine they are victims of societal oppression. The old saying is that a Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged. There are the old anecdotes about how welfare mothers bilk the system and go around in Cadillacs. Then there are anecdotes about upper management cutting peons loose to keep their big fat annual salaries. These are anecdotes which, even if they could be proven true, are merely anecdotal arguments. What they prove, if anything, is the persistence both right and left of confirmation bias.

To this point, it is hard for me to forget a fellow who eventually became a pastor who said there were, in the broadest possible of terms, no righteous poor in America. None. Zero. Zip. A week later someone apparently had talked to him and he conceded there were some righteous poor in America but that he didn't think there were very many of them. In other words the number was not zero but there were so few righteous people in Sodom and Gommorah, in other words, that the Lord was right to just annihilate the entire city complex for its sin. So it went with the righteous poor in America what was not said was as crucial as what was said.

Generally I prefer to guess the best about people but even with this in mind the last year or two have been challenging for me at a social level. When you've got no income and social life requires money you don't have much of a social life. You can get invited to places you can't go to do things you can't do because you can't afford to. To suggest a purely and flatly literal reading of proverbs such as the above would be to miss their point. The friends of the poor man don't really hate the man, do they? Why even say the poor man has friends if everyone really hates him?

But it is true, very often true, that the poor man pursues friends with words but they remain far from him. This is not out of malice or even neglect so much as that life goes on and the poor man often has no particularly compelling reason to be visited in the time of his affliction. The poor man (or woman) often has greater need than entertainment value for the entertainment of friends. I don't say that sarcastically, mind you. I have some friends who are poor and they don't get to hang out with people much. People used to visit them but rarely do now. Even I have been stuck in visiting one of my friends because I have no income and his health is not too good.

Of course there is also the proverb that a friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity. My family has been fortunately very helpful to me at this stage in my life. My "brother" has been born for adversity and I am grateful for that help. Different people play different roles in life and in poverty you can begin to appreciate distinctions between friends and family. Family (assuming you haven't burned every single bridge between you and them or vice versa) can be of mutual aid in times of crisis where friends may depart. Yet there is a friend that is closer than a brother. As I've been saying at various places in this blog, real wisdom does not reside within a universal application of a proverb but in the mysterious path of seeking the Lord and seeking to gain the insight from which to discern when a proverb applies and when it doesn't.

I can admit here (and elsewhere) that there are some passages of scripture that just don't leap out and mean anything to you until you find yourself stuck in the situation those scriptures address. Now for some single man or woman who wants to be married being outside that spot will make you see a passage like "let her breasts satisfy you at all times" as though it's the scriptures talking about all this cool experience you can't have, especially when certain preachers and teachers and bloggers go on about that.

But that's the temptation of envy guiding us there, isn't it? It's easy to go look at Proverbs 5 for the single guy and say "See!? The Bible talks about enjoying one's wife." Yeah, well, like I was saying earlier, if you don't have a wife the scripture isn't telling you to enjoy the wife of your youth. If you're an old man and married do you stop enjoying the old lady because she's no longer young? Of course not. If the wife of your youth has died and you're still alive can you enjoy her embrace anymore? No, and the proverb can't possibly apply to you, can it?

We're not likely to think about passages about poverty if we're Americans, are we? If we do think about it we're likely to imagine that the poor people in our lives are not even really poor because they're American. You can't really be poor if you have access to the internet, an email address, a cel phone, or maybe even a personal computer, can't you? The use of city libraries would only come up in a discussion as a way to, depending on one's views, as bemoaning socialism and unfair government taxation.

I am not sure all proverbs are intended to be guidelines as to how things ought to be but observations about how people actually behave despite their means of self-exoneration. We can choose much of the time to just look away from the poor and suppose the worst about them or, alternately, to suppose the best about them. We transform the poor into something other than people; we transform the poor into those who confirm our ideas and refute the ideas of others. We can talk freely about how Jesus became a poor carpenter if it suits us to refute a prosperity teaching that says Jesus was well off but we can turn around and still find it in our hearts to suppose that people are poor because they're either lazy or stupid or both. And, let's face it, some people are poor because they are either lazy or stupid or both. I have often wondered if that's not true about me about half of the time.