Choices

This year's choice for "One Book, One New York" is the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ((c) 2013), which I just finished reading.  I recommend it to you.  While reading this story of Ifemelu and Obinze -- their lives in Nigeria, the US and England, and their coming to terms with being black outside of Nigeria -- I was struck by the following paragraph (p. 341):  "[The guests] all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.  They would not understand that people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty."

Then I read the biography, Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah ((c) 2016), in which he says (p. 162):  "For the first time in my life I had money, and it was the most liberating thing in the world.  The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices.  People don't want to be rich.  They want to be able to choose.  The richer you are, the more choices you have.  That is the freedom of money."

Writing in the Boston College magazine, C21, in 2014, Sister Sandra Schneiders noted (p. 19), "The real difference between the truly poor and those who choose a poor lifestyle is that the latter choose it, and they can unchoose it if things become too difficult.  Even if they never do, the fact that they can assuages the violent determinism that constitutes real poverty. . .

This has led me to wander and wonder more deeply into the vow of poverty that I have taken, especially how it is not a vow to be poor, but to practice poverty.  Since I have choices in most situations, I am not poor.  Because I share everything in common with others and I attempt to live simply, I live my vow of poverty to the best of my ability.  The car I drive is not in my name.  The house I live in does not even belong to my religious community.  My cell phone is in the name of the community.  All these are given to me for my use during the time I need them to minister here and they will be used by others after I leave here.

Delving even more deeply into the vow of poverty requires me to lay bare some of the frustrations of my current ministry.  Especially with undocumented immigrants, I feel the most painful sting of poverty when all I can do is listen and be compassionate because nothing can be done for the person in pain.  I turn to Schneiders again:  "In many areas, we really have few or no options for effective action against or for non-participation in structural injustice.  Our frustration matches in some ways (certainly not all) the frustration of our victimized brothers and sisters.  What they cannot do for themselves we cannot do for them, and the more we care the more this hurts.  The name of that hurting is compassion and it is the fruit of genuine poverty."

So today I wonder about my choice to take a vow of poverty and how the mere ability to freely choose poverty makes me rich.   Hmmmm . . .