I was walking around UBC with a UBC student as part of a part-time job I've picked up. I explained that I go to Regent and, before we ducked into the library, managed to clarify the venn diagram of Christianity and Catholicism for him (although I'm not sure he got it entirely. It is confusing).
Later, though, we were talking about how expensive things are in Canada and it opened up a discussion of why things cost so much, why taxes are so high, and why people who are homeless can't get jobs. He claimed that the best job in Canada is being a beggar, and this time, I managed to affirm that yes, while there are probably some street people who are working the system, there are probably many others who are just getting by. I pointed out that it's hard for homeless people to find work because they haven't slept, haven't showered, don't have "appropriate" clothes. I somehow managed to work the idea of the cycle of poverty into the conversation as well. We talked about education and he told me his mom's advice: if he didn't want to go to school, he could always be a gangster, but--if he was going to be a gangster, he had to be the top one. Otherwise it wouldn't work out. I think his mom was a very wise woman.
Our dialogue was good exchange of ideas and assumptions. It made me realize that my understanding of poverty (and related social issues) is rare. I'm no expert on poverty--my understanding of the various theories and explanations of, say, homelessness, is rudimentary at best. And it should be noted, in the world of social understanding, there is no one "right" answer because people are complicated, data is incomplete, theories are approximate. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't have all the answers--and neither does anyone else. Of course we can generalize reasons and come up with working theories (I think we have to, for mental organization) and of course there are wonderful social scientists doing excellent research that goes a long way towards explaining our social ills and how we could possibly fix them. Ultimately, like my conversation with my co-worker, it has to be a dialogue. We have to keep sharing what we know and figuring out which ideas make the most sense, but we need to start with the certainty that we don't know the answers.
Most importantly, however--this is a theme I see in all three of these conversations--I have to remember that all this theorizing, all this discussion is about *people.* In some sense, I stumbled over my conversation with my homeless friend because I cast the encounter in terms of roles. It was Michael the homeless man vs. Christina the child of privilege, instead of person to person. In my talk with the neighbor, it was old vs. young, not woman-to-woman.
Relating to people as people is a fuzzy, fuzzy thing. I can only think of it as an exercise in humility, that virtue that is notoriously tricky to define and acquire--as soon as you realize you're humble, you're not humble any more, because humility, at heart, is self-forgetting (NOT self-degradation, it should be noted). How does one become humble? I'm going to steal the punchline from President Wilson's talk at the first chapel service here. He cited someone (I think Thomas Merton), whose definition for humility was something like this: the proper posture of standing before God as his creature, a sinner and a saint. That's the starting point.
No comments:
Post a Comment