On Love.

                      

Christian Greetings Brethren,

Poverty is a funny and fickle thing. It can influence a great amount of resilience for people who grow up with it, while also placing heavy restrictions upon individual societies and families who find themselves within its grasp. President James Garfield once talked about not praising poverty, saying instead that we should imagine what individuals could achieve if they had just had a little bit more.

That idea was deeply personal to him. Garfield was born in a frontier cabin, came from very humble beginnings, and later taught at what would become Hiram College, then known as the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. He carried the memory of scarcity with him even as he rose to become president of the United States. That quote has always made me think, especially about how differently his life might have looked if opportunity had been expanded earlier rather than later.

When we turn from Garfield’s reflection to our own moment, I reckon that same insight ought to make us reassess just how we treat the poor and the homeless among us today. If a person has a four–bedroom house and all the bedrooms are full, and a homeless person asks to stay, the homeowner will likely say there isn’t enough room. Tho, why is it more unconscionable to put someone on a couch or on a pallet on the ground in a living room than it is to have them sleeping outside, particularly when they are sick, older, or a child?

This tension becomes even clearer when we consider the broader social landscape. We are surrounded by extreme wealth every day, people with far too much money sitting comfortably beside obvious need. Personally, that begins to look like hoarding dressed up as respectability. When we choose to protect excess rather than people, we lose our humanity while pretending to keep the social contract. The ultra rich have effectively broken that contract, because if you are rich enough you don’t have to follow the law or depend on anyone else.

Ordinary humans accept limits because we live together. Those with unlimited resources step outside those obligations, and in the same vein they reveal a moral failure that belongs not to poverty itself, but to a society that would rather see a neighbor suffer in the cold than share the warmth of its own living room.

Circling back to the original concern, reassessing how we treat the less fortunate leaves us Christians with a particular question of great moral seriousness: are we doing our job? Scripture says, “Birds have the sky and foxes have their dens, but the Son of Man hath no place to lay his head.” It also says, “What you have done unto the least of these you have done unto me,” and that line comes directly from our Lord Jesus Christ. Those passages do not allow a believer to hide behind ignorance or convenience. They confront us plainly.

So, more concretely and more uncomfortably, what are we doing, particularly in the winter? Every night there are people freezing to death in our cities, our neighbors, our fellow human beings, and we do not bat an eye. Many of us do not even think about it, but that does not stop it from happening. We have somehow trained ourselves to see homelessness as normal, as though it were simply part of the scenery of daily life. From a Christian perspective, however, that acceptance itself becomes a quiet moral failure.

This failure is made visible by our priorities. Look around at how much effort we pour into protecting things instead of souls. We have sheds zoned just to store big chunks of metal used to mow our grass, and shelves full of chemicals to care for our yards. We build entire garages, and even separate buildings, to keep our cars safe and clean. In the same vein, we maintain extra rooms, extra houses, and extra property for our comfort and our treasures. Tho, when a human soul asks for warmth or a place to sleep, we suddenly claim there is no room left. That contradiction ought to trouble a conscientious believer far more than it usually does.

At the root of this contradiction is a misplaced sense of permanence. We focus so much on taking care of worldly possessions, things that are not going to last. When this old world passes away, our cars and lawnmowers and sheds and garages will go with it. But the soul will not. What we do to others, we do to Jesus, and by extension we do to ourselves.

Moving forward, then, I reckon we as Christians should reconsider just how we live our lives,how much money we keep, and whether our hospitality and compassion are real or merely theoretical. Poverty may be fickle, but Christian responsibility is not. It calls us every day to choose people over excess, and to remember that ignoring the suffering outside our doors does not make us faithful, only comfortable.

We cannot save the whole world by ourselves, but we can refuse to ignore the piece of it right in front of us. The question, finally, is simple but demanding: are we going to be the kind of Christians who say there is no room, or the kind who make room? This question has long been at the heart of the Franciscan tradition. From the time of St. Francis of Assisi, the Franciscan family has been animated by a persistent impulse to return to the Gospel in its most direct and demanding form. 

Father Francis himself initiated a movement of ecclesial reform grounded in radical simplicity and voluntary poverty. Over the centuries, numerous Franciscan saints and reformers have sought to recall the Order to humble, authentic poverty and a mode of preaching embodied in lived practice rather than mere words. In doing this, they consistently resisted the relaxation of the Rule, opposing accommodations they deemed to be luxurious or incompatible with the original spirit and intent of St. Francis.

The theological foundation of this path lies in the Incarnation itself, God becoming human. It is through the Incarnation that the path chosen by Francis is shown to us. Jesus is the exemplifier of that path. He is the one we imitate; hence the term Christian, meaning to be like the Christ. Our relationship with Jesus, then, is fundamentally one of student and teacher.

From here, the discussion naturally turns toward the nature of God. God is dynamic in expression and immutable in essence. Within the Trinity, the Godhead operates in three distinct ways: process, function, and mystery. In process, God may be understood as the underlying program, the hidden thread, the cotton within the tapestry, that gives rise to the functioning of our daily universe. In function, God is encountered in the processes that operate within that program. These two are the visible exemplifiers of God’s presence with us: the laws of science, mathematics, and physics, which teach us, show us, and reveal something of God’s identity.

Tho, it is within God’s facet of mystery that relationship is truly formed, where knowledge gives way to encounter and understanding yields to trust. God’s mystery manifests itself as nuance, and we are surrounded everywhere by that nuance. Socrates himself said, “The only thing I can be sure of is that I know nothing.” As much as we might wish for the world to be black and white, clear and settled, that is neither how the universe works nor how it is meant to work.

Often, it is tribulation and trial that form the strongest relationships. It is precisely by leaning into this mystery of God that relationship deepens. As St. Paul writes in Romans 11:33–34, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths. Who has known the mind of the Lord?”

It is when we begin to say, “God, I know nothing about you. You cannot exist within anything I have ever been taught, because if you did, you would not be God,” that we are led toward a deeper understanding. God is beyond transcendent. God is immediate and experiential. Emmanuel, God with us, means precisely that. God is encountered not as an object “out there,” but as presence. God cannot be grasped by intellect or concept alone, but only approached through surrender and unknowing. The Cloud does not deny reason or theology; it simply brackets them.

Within this same mystery, we also glimpse God’s sovereignty and unchangingness through the ages. History teaches us that nothing lasts forever and nothing stays the same—at least not on the concrete level in which we live. The manifestations of God do change and will continue to change. Even still,  the mystery and nuance that reveal God’s true presence and nature remain unchanging. This mystery cannot be resolved, because if it could be resolved, it would no longer be God.

Seen through this lens, the shortcomings of more conservative and fundamental theologies among our brethren become apparent. The Incarnation is already with us. Christ chose to come here, to be present with us. The idea that we must come to Christ does not fully honor this truth. He is already with us. Therefore, we do not come to Jesus so much as acknowledge the path he has been walking in our lives, the role he has played, and the role he will continue to play.

If God is truly Emmanuel, present and encountered in the flesh of our neighbors, then the way we respond to poverty is already a theological act. In the same vein, we are confronted with a choice that is both spiritual and concrete. Either we cling to excess, certainty, and comfort, or we step into the vulnerability and the fog where God has always chosen to dwell. The mystery does not resolve our responsibility; it sharpens it. And in the end, the question returns once more, quieter but heavier than before: having seen where Christ is, will we finally make room?