"Can we stop finding holiness in poverty?"

I traveled to Pakistan when I was 17, and there I was soberly confronted with profound poverty and some of its many ugly effects.  I have seen varying degrees of poverty since then, and it's never pretty.

"But they are just so happy, even though they are poor."  Have you ever heard this, or said it? I think sometimes we mistake the beauty of a human being created in God's image as happy or full of joy, simply because we are incapable of interpreting his or her smile any other way. 

I came across this blog post this morning.  I'm supposed to be getting myself and my kids ready to head out the door with lunch boxes and notebooks and rain boots and my second cup of chai, but instead I'm finding these words that so deeply resonate and I have to share them. 

Can we stop saying, "They are poor, but they are happy"?

Desperation can lead to evil and abuse and depravity. There is nothing inherent about poverty that makes people holy or noble. However, there is incredible nobility in how certain people bear their poverty, a holiness in how they interact with others. We need to see what is there and not what we want to project. If the poor are noble or holy in their suffering, the wealthy can be relieved of an urgent need to examine our own complicity and apathy.

Poor but Happy
This article on Humanosphere found that in sub-Saharan Africa among those stuck in poverty, their happiness index was far below those in wealthy countries. Poverty is not just the lack of wads of cash. It is the lack of options, choices, autonomy. It often means disease, children dying young, lack of education, illiteracy, hunger, hard labor, oppression. I don’t know many people in these circumstances for whom ‘happy’ is the primary appropriate adjective. This is intensely not hypothetical for me, I know a lot of people in these circumstances.

Denying that inequality is problematic, based on happiness being important and the poor being happy, offers a pretext for not thinking more deeply about the impacts of inequality. Anna Barford 

If the poor are so happy, that alleviates some of the rich person’s guilt. The wealthy outsider can praise their good attitudes, their thankfulness, they can categorize their smiles in the face of dire circumstances as evidence of happiness. And in doing so, they remove the burden of guilt, complicity, and the pressure to act. The also remove the poor person’s natural human ability to feel complex emotions, happiness being one of the most simplistic emotions there is.

blog by Rachel Pieh Jones