My community is an open one. It continues to surprise me how open the people are with what goes on in their lives. Well-to-do neighbors and friends of the suburban culture are uneasy with vulnerability. They hide the embarrassing problems in their relationships with family or the “black sheep” of the family and carefully maintain the façade of having it all together. You may hear the whispered rumors of a family’s problems while the parents sit together in church on Sunday, pretending they aren’t sleeping in separate bedrooms.
After a few minutes with my new neighbor down the street you’ll know that she has cancer and will be living on disability for the rest of her life. You’ll also find out about some of the problems she faces raising and caring for her daughters and the other kids she often ends up caring for, for varying reasons and lengths of time. Talk to the neighbor across the street and you may hear that he’s losing everything. Talk to another woman who lives a few streets away and you’ll see that she’s having trouble making it to take care of her kids and another that she’s taken in, all without any of her three vehicles running. You’ll also see her pain as her daughter moves out to go live with her father. Talk to the woman who just got out of prison and she might tell you about her realization that she’s been hiding in prison so that she doesn’t have to face the fact that she won’t see any of her four children for another eleven years.
When I was a sophomore in high school, my family found out that the company my father worked for was going to be moved to a different state in another year and at that point he would be out of a job. Having a year’s notice enabled us to prepare for the loss in income by moving to a smaller house. This house was just outside of town, and was actually a trailer. I struggled a lot with embarrassment over the situation. I knew this was ridiculous on my part, because I was very blessed that my parents had never struggled to provide my brother and me with the things we needed or even the things that were wants. And I knew I had a lot more than most people in the world, or even in the city. Plus the trailer was actually really nice. But it was still a humbling experience for me. I wanted people to understand that we had lived in bigger house, and that the downgrade was through no fault or lack of desirability to employers on my father’s part.
So it’s rather odd to me, someone who was embarrassed about downgrading to a trailer, that people would be so open about financial and personal struggles like these. Maybe this openness is mainly because the struggles faced are so common in the culture they are a part of that they aren’t so out of the ordinary to be embarrassing. And these realities need to be faced and dealt with by the Church in response to the call to take care of the poor. But blessed are the poor who rely on God instead of pride in their things and accomplishments. Blessed are the poor who can be open and vulnerable about their struggles instead of feeling the need to maintain the appearance of having it all together. And blessed are the poor, not only in their poverty, but also when the mother can rejoice in her husband finally finding a good job so that they don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, even while she still can’t get enough sleep with a new baby keeping her awake at night, because hopefully, they won’t forget how to rely only on God and boast only in the cross as easily as someone who has had other things to boast in most of his or her life.
Anna Fowler, CLDI/Fellowship House Intern
