"Poverty is the Worst Form of Violence"--Gandhi

This is as political as I get these days. Bear with me...

...What is the beggar to me? Jesus first says he is my neighbor (Luke 10:29-37), then ups the ante a bit (after all, not all of my neighbors are sympathetic figures to me) when he says the beggar is himself (Matthew 25:40). King Benjamin gives the beggar a mirror so that I may see my reflection in his plight (Miosiah 4:19) and the image becomes even more clear. I really do know what it feels like to beg. As a genuine sinner I have begged the Lord to take my guilt away and make me new. I have even felt the awful uncertainty that beggars must feel when I have completely humiliated myself in pleading and still been unsure if the one hearing my petition would really respond.
I have also met beggars outside of myself. Gandhi was right. These people have suffered violence. The violence of weather extremes, the violence of police brutality, the violence of bourgeois teens who like to have fun at night (anyone remember that social highpoint of our culture known as "Bum Fights?"), the violence of hunger, the violence of vulnerability (sexually and otherwise), and the violence of social stigma and hate. No wonder these people suffer from an incredibly disproportiate rate of mental illness and no wonder it is so easy to look at them as sub-human.
I remember my mother's fervent desire to make her hopelessly bourgeois teens learn King Benjamin's lesson. We had a lemon tree in our backyard that bore fruit for a neighborhood. But no one liked lemons. Growing up in Southern California, most of the people who I saw picking fruit happened to be a different race than me. This also happened to be the same race that most often frequented the community pantry where my mother volunteered and would drag us kids along to help out on holiday breaks. My mother drank in the brief outpouring of social justice that occurred when her bourgeouis white sons actually picked fruit for their brothers of another race to eat instead of the other way around. After a long morning of picking, we would cram into the van and show up at the pantry sufficiently annoyed and withdrawn to show our teenage status. I remember when the old man cried as he picked through our bucket of lemons. He was so happy to get to eat the fruit he had probably spent most of his life picking but not enjoying. "Lemons!" he kept shouting, as if he needed the echo of his voice bouncing off the wall to convince him that they were really his. Why does he pick fruit that I eat? When will he get to pick his own fruit? I suddenly realized that my lifestyle required his.
Then there was the homeless man in the subway station in Paris. This was not an easy night. We were lost, we were cold, and we didn't know French. We had been stranded in the subway station and the menacing looking man in the corner by the trashcan was making me uncomfortable. From how he moved and groaned, I could tell that all was not right. He was one of the sick ones--the ones for whom the life of violence had left its permanent damage. I remember that he started to masturbate (sorry Natalie, I wouldn't include it if I didn't think it was necessary) and I turned away in disgust. He was like a creature on the Discovery Channel, completely inhuman to me and I remember blaming the Franch government for not keeping its streets "clean" enough for my taste. It was apparent that he didn't have the mental capacity to understand the morality of what he was doing the way I did, and so I cried that this life carried with it such spiritual trauma as well as physical. But I was grateful when the train came and I was able to escape to my hotel room. I've only thought of him when I feel these feelings.
What does it mean to "not allow the beggar to put up his petition to you in vain"? I'll tell you what I think it means to most of us. It means that we move to suburbs and put up gates around our communities and set up Home Owner's Associations and hire security guards and plant big hedges surrounding large fences in order to ensure that neither we nor our children ever meet that man from France on the street. After all, if you never meet the beggar, he cannot put up a petition, and you cannot be held accountable, right? Don't we wish. But in a time in the world's history where choosing to support tariffs here can mean causing an entire village to starve and die there, it's time we used the morality Jesus taught us to use with our local neighbors and applied it to how we treat our global ones.
I love Jesus and I want to learn to properly love his children. I am grateful for His morally challenging gospel and my opportunity to find out how I can take part in it. One day I too hope to be known as a giver of good gifts (Matt 7:11).