Poverty and the Religious Community

Extract

The first thing to be clear about when speaking of religious poverty is that we are using a metaphor, an equivocation. Religious poverty, whatever its exact form, is a certain renunciation of material goods voluntarily undertaken. On the moral level, therefore, it has only a superficial resemblance to actual poverty, the indigence of the people who are poor in the social sense. For actual poverty is not voluntary and its result is to reduce the person who suffers it to a kind of powerlessness, a slavery. The poor are by an inevitable social logic in the power of the rich. They have very little control over the course of their own lives. The poor in our industrial cities for instance are reduced to the exercise of that little bit of illusory freedom that is handed out to them by the rich in the form of choice of different brands in the supermarket, choice of programmes on TV, the unpredictability of the bingo game or the betting shop, the promise of something new in the amusement arcade where working-class housewives can be seen any day of the week trying to increase their housekeeping money playing the fruit machines. Economic poverty is one term of a relationship within society and not a mere simplicity of life. It is the foundation of other kinds of poverty: powerlessness to maintain local community in the face of council planners and property developers; educational deprivation; a ruined environment, and so on.

Poverty, then, is something suffered at the hands of other people and therefore worlds apart from a condition of life freely undertaken. The poor are not masters of their own lives. The religious, however, is a master of his own life. It is a matter of free choice from the outset.