Every Christmas for several years, the single parent program that my mom participated in (an amazing program called Project Self-Sufficiency which I will always advocate for and have still not written an article I promised to write for them...oops, sorry Mary!) paired participant families with small companies or other individual families as Christmas sponsors. I have nothing but fond memories from those years. Really, I don't. However, I do remember that the first year we did not have a sponsor, my wonderful, amazing, beautiful mom told my sister and I (a little guiltily, it seemed) that Christmas gifts would be very, very simple that year. I also remember that I never got to know our sponsors; they were always anonymous. More on the relevance of those two things later.
Now, why do I bring this up at all?
I am currently helping out with a project at work which involves a holiday sponsorship program. As per the usual, sponsored people (in this case children, seniors, and teens) write holiday requests, which are then delivered to sponsors, who are either corporations or families (though mostly corporations, I think). The sponsors buy the gifts, deliver them to the third party non-profit (in this case, my work) through whom the sponsored people were selected, and the non-profit then distributes the gifts to the families.
It's a frequently-used model, both domestically and abroad (Operation Christmas Child, anyone?) but as I am helping organize it through my office this winter, something about it feels...off.
My thoughts as a Christ follower...Two things about this sadden me.
The first is that this type of program plays so directly into our purely Americanized idea of what Christmas should be. If a family is not able to purchase "nice" Christmas gifts (those gifts on par with the social norm - video games, Adidas shoes, Bratz dolls, etc.), then the idea is that the solution somehow lies in giving them the ability to play into our capitalist Christmas...by buying said gifts and consuming said products. In saying this, I acknowledge that I have not been absolutely destitute; even though I was a "sponsored child," I nonetheless probably would have gotten a stocking full of trinkets during those difficult years. I clearly am still speaking from a position of privilege and I acknowledge that. However, the question that I am constantly learning to ask myself as I am trying to pursue the radical life of the Way is "Are we not called to something greater?" I think of the notorious Banksy and his shopping bag crucifix... Sacrilegious? Perhaps. Off base? Not at all. What have we done to our Christ?
[Tangent: the spelling of the word "sacrilegious" is ridiculous. One would think that "religious" would be in there, no? English is so illogical...]
The second thing that saddens me, and perhaps the more important of the two, is the implications this type of program has on interpersonal relations. I firmly believe, both in my Christian thinking and in regards to development in general, that true change--reconciliation--shalom, if you will--will never happen without relationships. Programs like this remove relationship from the equation completely. What's worse, is it allows the whole system to continue on and on as is. The upper class feels good for the holidays because they have completed their duty as the upper class by giving to the poor and to the needy.
Is this inherently bad? No. Is it as good as we think it is, though? No.
My reasoning:
Programs like this allow the respective parties--wealthy and poor alike--to stay within their comfort zones. For the wealthy, they are allowed to speak in a language they are comfortable with: their money. It is easy and convenient for them to go to the store and buy whatever is on their sponsor's list. There is no awkwardness, there is no discomfort, there are no uncomfortable encounters with people who are different than them. For the poor, well, not much changes. They stay where they are at, and they might even feel worse off for it as parents who cannot "provide Christmas for their kids" and instead let other people fulfill this roll. Neither do they have to deal with the awkwardness that can come from being relational with someone different than themselves. Why is this a problem?
Some Global Studies friends were recently joking about our enthusiasm and obsession with the term "shalom"--the Hebrew word for peace. In the Bible, it is frequently used to reference the picturesque Kingdom which Jesus talks about, the Kingdom where the world's order is flung on its head, where the rich are jumping through needles, where the last are first and the first are last, where debts are erased and where prostitutes wash the feet of the Lord with their loving tears. I admit, I'm obsessed, and it's probably just because I don't understand it. At all. In all reality, the Kingdom of the Lord is a weird place. It is a place of strange and beautiful reconciliation. It's a place that makes most of us turn our heads and say "What the [insert-profanity-of-choice-here]...?" Reconciliation--shalom--is at the core of this topsy-turvy Kingdom. It is communal. It is loving.
When I express frustration with programs such as this one, at its core it is because it is the easy way out. As Christians called to more, I truly believe that God gives us the whimsical imagination of a relational Creator. That's my way of saying we have the Holy Spirit. We are called to build bridges and to love our neighbors. We are called to be relational. Material giving mediated by a third party, while not inherently bad, isn't really loving...it's just easy. I was recently reminded of the verse (too lazy to look it up) where Jesus tells his audience that "the poor will always be among you." A lot of people tend to quote that when they talk about poverty. The way I've heard it put, though, is in terms of relationship, of shalom. The real question this verse poses is "Are the poor actually among you?"
Really...most of us would have to say no.
We distance ourselves from the poor. Really, we [all of humanity] keep ourselves at a comfortable arm's length (or gated neighborhood's length) from those who are different than us, whether they are poor, ugly, rich, annoying, awkward, smelly, nerdy, Mormon, or purple, we keep them in a safe place. Aka not close. Most of us won't admit it outright, but we do it because it's comfortable. And then we are allowed to take the easy road and participate in programs like this one, programs which in some ways allow us to feel good about ourselves while not really having to invest in relation with the Other.
Without that relation, though, we cannot even say that the poor are among us, because they are not. We cannot say that we love our neighbor, because we do not. We have not even begun.
I am guilty. So guilty. What's hardest is that I believe that reconciliation--true, God-given, beautiful change--will happen only when we are in relationship with the Other. With the poor. Or really, with whichever people group we struggle with distancing ourselves from (for me that's actually white, evangelical conservatives. But I'm working on that).
That is why I believe that for the Christian, simple programs like these do nothing of the sort.
I think it is time we begin to crawl out of our comfortable places and use our imagination to create ways to become truly relational with those whom we fear. Let's begin to brainstorm this new way of life together.
Where to begin?
0 comments:
Post a Comment