Poverty: Healing Is Possible
Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde
Kal, one of my blogger friends focused his attention today on Blog Action Day and their theme for this year is Poverty. Thanks for posting on this, Kal!
I looked at their site, and I think it is truly a wonderful effort that so many have made in joining together to heighten awareness of the poverty that exists worldwide. If each one of us did our part, whatever that might mean for us, that effort will become part of the solution.
One could write volumes on poverty. It is a dilemma that is painful to come to terms with. It is a fact in our world. Yet, as painful as it is to look poverty in the eyes, it teaches us so much. If only we would not be afraid of it and understand that what we fear out there is that…which we really fear within ourselves.
Poverty can manifest itself in many different ways. The most visible, of course, is the poverty we see when men, women, and children sleep on our streets and under our bridges. When we see beggars holding their hands out for just a little something, we notice the lines on their faces, which only masks their true age. When the mentally ill are left to themselves endangering themselves as well as others, one cries out that humanity would be healed, forever rising above such deprivation. Juvenal, a Roman poet (55 AD-127 AD) once said, “It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.”
And so it is, when men are hunched over in poverty, they have little strength to stand to see all the possibilities. Benjamin Franklin said, “Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.”
There is another kind of poverty that concerns me just as much as the one that is so readily seen. It is the poverty of the soul. The poverty of the heart. The poverty of the mind. It is a poverty that I see so often and in so many different places. It is a poverty that I have seen within my own heart and soul. It has often deeply troubled me. I work hard to rise above it, each and every day of my life. Mother Teresa said it right when she said, “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.”
Growing up in an orphanage from the time I was one and a half years of age until I was fourteen brought an underlying loneliness into my life. Coming to America without speaking a word of English and without being understood by anyone was a loneliness that to this day is difficult for me to explain. I was looking forward to having my own family, but was only met with disappointment because the people that I came to live with were deeply impoverished themselves. Therefore, it only served to drive my loneliness even deeper into my soul. When my brothers were adopted and I was not, it made me doubt my own worth again and again.
It was a feeling of being forgotten and left alone. It was a feeling of not belonging anywhere or to anyone. It was a feeling of being unloved and uncared for, and a feeling of total isolation and abandonment. These were feelings of impoverishment that I have often felt ashamed of in my life. It drove me into further isolation from a world that did not see me. It drove me to protect myself from as much pain as possible. Many times, because of that, I forgot to live life to its fullest. I simply shut life out.
As I have grown older and experienced some healing through the gentleness and graceful mercies of Love, I often notice an orphan mentality in many even though they grew up with parents. Feeling loved as a child is something that many miss out on. Such pain often brings many complexities into the heart and minds of hurting souls. The poverty of love is profoundly painful and drives many to suicides, drugs, alcohol, and criminality. I have experienced, though, that this same poverty of love can also open a window to experience the greatest Love of all. This process can take some time and often many tears are shed during the process.
Poverty! Oh may we find the courage to rise out of our own poverty’s that we may reach out and help heal another hurting heart. The poverty which we have experienced ourselves is the very poverty that has equipped us with compassion to help heal someone else.
This post is part of Blog Action Day 8 – Poverty
