After last week, in which I wrote about the efforts in Minnesota to overcome poverty by 2020, someone wrote me (and thanks for doing that) to say while I had said a lot about Minnesota, what about global poverty. Excellent question.

Last week’s blog was a response to certain recent events in my life, all of which focused on ending poverty in Minnesota by 2020. I am committed to working on that effort as a person of Christian faith, and I am committed to helping my congregation engage that effort through the local organization, Churches United in Ministry (CHUM), through my denomination, The United Methodist Church, and through the Minnesota Council of Churches. All of these organizations are committed to working with persons from other faith communities (Jewish, Islamic, et. al) and from secular organizations to tackle this issue. But can poverty in Minnesota really be separated from poverty world-wide?

Not really. The challenges we face in alleviating poverty in Minnesota are challenges to the human community world-wide. The escalating cost of food is creating greater numbers of hungry people and making purely monetary definitions of poverty quickly obsolete. The rapid rise in energy costs is having a similar effect, and there seems to be a relationship between food and energy as crops are now being used for fuel. Some of my musings from last week are even more relevant to global poverty than to poverty in the United States. It is perhaps statistically easy to define poverty in the United States, using an income figure. Such an endeavor is more difficult globally. To speak of poverty in a global context is to focus on basic needs, and I suggested last week that this focus makes more sense even in the United States. If someone earns enough to be out of poverty, but has no health insurance, and no means to obtain it within their income, is this something to be celebrated? At best, it should be the quietist of celebrations.

The same spiritual/moral imperative which leads me to care about poverty in Minnesota and make a commitment to efforts to eliminate it by 2020 drives me to care just as deeply about global poverty, and pushes me to find ways to make a difference there, too. Awhile back, I was reading an article in a Buddhist journal in which the author was taking his fellow Buddhists, especially in the West, to task for neglecting to work for the alleviation of human suffering. I know we engage in lofty meditations on kindness and compassion and espouse beautiful ideals of love and peace. But note that we pursue them largely as inward, subjective experiences geared toward personal transformation. Too seldom does it translate into pragmatic programs of effective action realistically designed to diminish the actual sufferings of those battered by natural calamities or societal deprivation…. The special challenge facing Buddhism in our age is to stand up as an advocate to justice in the world, a voice of conscience for those victims of social, economic, and political injustice who cannot stand up and speak for themselves. (Bhikkhu Bodhi, Buddhadharma, Fall 2007)

So what’s a nice Christian boy doing reading this Buddhist stuff? I read it because I find it illuminating to see how other spiritual traditions also struggle with living out faith in our day and time, and I found this article fascinating, fascinating in part because of the complement the writer paid to Christian and Jewish efforts to alleviate suffering. He found it ironic that a spiritual tradition rooted in efforts to alleviate suffering could be so removed from working to end some of the most dramatic suffering of our time.

While it would be nice to sit back and simply accept Bhikkhu Bodhi’s compliments, I am aware that there is so much more to be done. And if Buddhists, out of their concern for alleviating suffering, should be advocates for social justice in the world, a voice for victims of social, economic and political injustice, so should we Christians, we who proclaim that God loves the world. When we fail to connect our rich spiritual traditions with making a difference for those who are poor and on the margins, we suffer a poverty of our own, a spiritual poverty.

As a Christian I want to advocate overcoming spiritual poverty, and would be pleased to work with Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and anyone else who seeks to enrich her spiritual tradition by finding in it not simply a means for personal transformation, but also a call to feed the hungry and to do justice. I also think we will need to overcome a poverty of imagination and vision if we are to alleviate material poverty.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of our day as a human community sharing this one planet is the challenge of creating enough so that basic needs might be met, distributing what we create equitably enough so that those needs are indeed met, and all in such a way that we don’t undermine the long-term stability of our planetary environment. It will take spiritual and imaginative wealth to make progress against this challenge.

God so loved the world, and so should we. And for me, loving the world has something to do with justice and with seeing that the world’s people have enough to eat, a place to sleep and access to some basic services that keep people healthy. The struggle to get there is long and I know I need all the spiritual and imaginative wealth my Christian tradition can give me to keep on.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David