Social Justice
by Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green
October 02, 2013
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/frederica/social_justice
Transcript
This is Frederica, here and now.
I wanted to say a few words today about social justice and us serving the poor and those requirements laid upon us as Christians. Mostly because I feel like the way I see that whole matter is so different from the popular way that it is viewed, I feel very much out of step with my times, so I'm going to venture out there with an opinion that may well be shocking for all I know, but among the many things that I've noted and that kinda bother me is, for one thing we often hear a distinction between "there are people who are prayerful and there are people who are active". There are people who are contemplative, they're kind of like the Marys and then there are the Marthas who actually go out there and do good works. And it's as if these are two separate categories of people. I just think that's false. I don't think that's the case at all. That it seems to me that most prayerful among us are the ones with the most tender hearts who are reaching out and helping people. I'm going to talk more about that in later shorter podcast, I think part of that is, part of the problem is that our culture today has this view of people who are needy in a material sense differently from people who are just needy and wounded and hurt and who need care and who need love. People who are extremely wealthy and extremely powerful can still get cancer, can still have child die, they can still wrestle and struggle their faith, and feel like they don't feel the presence of God anymore. These are genuine needs and should attract our compassion and our care and our prayers. And it's not like just because they happen to be wealthy that we should have contempt for them, wealthy people are not necessarily bad people, bad Christians. I think we need to view them...the rule about not distinguishing between the poor and the wealthy has this corollary which is we don't despise the wealthy. They are our fellow brothers and sisters too, so that we should embrace them, we should be blind, you know, rather than thinking that the poor have an exalted status and just reacting and reversing a previous preference for the rich which is not healthy. You know, don't go to the opposite extreme but just try to love everybody. So I think that's kind of a shocking thing to say.
Another thing that bothers me is that as I read the Scriptures and sort of read through the history of the Church it seems to me that there is positive, genuinely that there are these two different camps, there are the powerful and there are the weak and the needy, and like I said we don't despise the wealthy. Just the other day I had the thought that the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary was the daughter of a wealthy household, that Joachim and Anna, were extremely well to do, and that's the whole beginning of the story of the virgin Mary's conception is that Joachim gave abundantly, he gave not only for himself but he gave sacrifices for all the people and for the sins of the people. He was extremely generous as the wealthy faithful are apt to be. So the Virgin Mary did not grow up in a poor household, she actually was the daughter of a very wealthy couple, although of course from the age of three she was growing up in the Temple instead of in their home. So we should not despise the wealthy.
A second thing as I was saying in the Scriptures and so forth we tend to see these two categories, somehow today we have three categories, we've got the wealthy and we've go the needy and then in the middle we got these pure hearted people who give to the needy and who defend the needy and who identify with the needy. They're not actually needy. They're not actually wealthy. I think it's partly a function of guilt, of guilt feelings of people who are in the middle and they can look up this scale and say I don't own my own airplane that's for sure you know and I'm really not as wealthy as them but I am able to go out to a restaurant on Friday night and have dinner, I am able to have cable TV, I'm able to have a home, there are so many ways I'm better off than the profoundly needy. And that, in that kinda in the middle position, you tend to run in circles sometimes feeling guilty, sometimes feeling deprived, and a way of resolving that is to really focus on how you care about the poor. To think of yourself as someone who defends the poor and stands for the poor and is not poor but identifies with the poor, and some of their spiritual elevation. And you see the poor as being spiritually higher and more exalted, some of that rubs off on us because we identify with them. But I think this is kind of an artificial category that we have developed perhaps because of a sense of guilt. It's kinda a new thing, this kind of middle stance, where you're neither poor nor wealthy, but you see yourself, you're very aware of your self identity of being an excellent pure and wonderful person who is identifying with the poor.
Sometimes when I'm in situations where I have to attend worship among mainline Christians, I find this very wearying, that so many of their hymns are about great we are because we care for the poor. It's not even really about God, it's about this excellent role of being defenders of the poor. It's so self conscious, it's so self congratulating that it's very tiring for me to be around. I think another factor of our current attitudes in our culture in our generation about social justice, what's really troubling to me is that we see the needy as only recipients as if they have nothing they can give. There is nothing valuable that the poor can give to us or to anyone else or even give to each other. They can do nothing except, it's like they're just laying on a hospital bed receiving an IV, receiving an infusion. All they can do is take, there's nothing valuable that they can give. And we would never dream of asking them to give.
I read something years ago in American Charity is that if a poor person came into a home to spend the night, a home that was established to give care and shelter to the poor, they would be expected to provide something, to give labour. An old woman maybe could only sit in a rocking chair but she could knit a blanket that later might cover a strong young man who needed to stay in the shelter but who would be outside in the afternoon chopping wood for the fireplace and for the furnace. At night he'd be covered by that blanket. I think there's something actually more respectful of the poor if we understand them as people who have something to give and who are able to give. It's very debilitating, a stream of disability in our culture that undermines people's senses of themselves at all levels, at all economic levels, this seeing ourselves as consumers rather than producers. We identify with "I like this kind of music, I like that kind of movie, I drive this kind of car, I like this kind of cooking" it's all just taking it and gobbling gobbling and gobbling more and more inward. And you know there's at some point you think, I don't produce anything. I've nothing of value to give, I can just spend money. I do think that this is disabling to see yourself that way and I don't think healthy for us to treat the needy that way.
I recently read an article that said Think about what percentage of your time you spend producing something that other people want, that other people could use, and what percentage of your time do you then spend consuming things that other people produce. It's kind of a poignant question, an uncomfortable question. I think one of the reasons this is such big thing, is this big invisible wall in our culture, that we are consumers rather than producers, that it has to do with the fact of our economy and advertising. Advertising is an extremely persuasive medium and they spend so much more time and money on a thirty second commercial than they spend on the one hour or thirty minute TV show that you're watching that the commercials are embedded in. They think so deeply about psychology and how to persuade you. But they're all about getting you to consume stuff, so the act of consuming becomes much larger in their awareness than the act of producing does. Even in our jobs we're not sure what we're producing is of value to anybody or maybe we don't have a job that has anything to do with producing things.
In our waking life there is a great imbalance and I think advertising continues to blind us to it and make us think about how excellent it is to be consuming this great stuff and how great it make me look, that this is the brand that I consume. I think it doesn't help the needy for us to perpetuate that upon them and to treat them as only consumers but absolutely nothing of value they could give. They are defined by being needy. They are defined by being black holes that we pour stuff into. I think it's much healthier if they have a way to give but as a friend of mine said there's I think it's called Gresham's law, that bad money drives out good money. I have a friend who used to say "bad charity drives out good charity." That if all the other social services in the city are just pouring stuff out the door for free with no requirement to give in return. If you try to set up the lone charity that's going to actually take them seriously as human beings who have things that they could give, they won't come to you. Bad charity drives out good charity. They're going to go to the one that's giving away stuff for free. I saw this recently in a charity that I visited, and the director was saying, "we had a terrible time about six months ago. We ran out of coffee, we didn't have any money to buy more coffee, and so our clients were saying to us, you better get more coffee or we're going to go to a different charity, a different storefront and spend our time there instead of here." It just kinda sounded wrong to me, anyway that's another one of my points.
Another thing is that so often we are not in a relationship with the poor that we give to, we give to quote "Charity" unquote and we maintain a distance between ourselves and the ones who are really in need. This state of affairs comes about because it's phenomenally more efficient. It is so much easier for everybody to pool their money and then you have an expert who divides it up and gives it out. But what a gap there is between us and the needy. Certainly for most of human history, certainly for most of Christian history money or goods were given within a relationship. You wouldn't need an organization and of course this does still happen in our Churches you know where there's a family that is poorer than your family, they have a disaster, the house burns down something like that, and so you go through your pantry and you bring out food and you give them your food and you bring around meals every night for a week, everybody divides up the work. That kind of giving was really was the main kind of giving to those in need for most of Christian history. And now we have now changed over to a model of having organizations that are go betweens, that are in the middle and they do the relating for us. I think we lose something in that, in accepting that that is the normal way that charities ought to work.
For early Christian history it was the Deacons that were in charge of this, so it was kind of an interim thing which is within your Church, you would give your ten percent to the Church and the deacon taking in all of this knowing where the needs were, actually serving the Church first and so often St Paul and the early writers talk about this giving for people who actually attend your Church and are in your Christian community. Or for Christians who were out of town but they're travelling and they're journeying and you take them into your community, provide for their needs. In the first three centuries of course the Church was very very poor, it wasn't able to give very much beyond the boundaries of the parish but that strong strong emphasis on giving actually had to do with giving within your worship community. And because it was a big Church and you couldn't know everybody and it's not really appropriate for you to know all the needs with another family, the deacon was the go between. But that's still a far cry from the anonymity of writing a cheque to an organization you approve of and giving away the money elsewhere, with no knowledge of how that's being, or who it's being given to.
In my own...my husband and I back when we were still in Protestant Seminary long before we dreamed of becoming Orthodox, we were convinced that the Biblical Tithe is the expectation, that when it says in Malachai, "bring the full tithe into my storehouse and see whether I will not open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing on you." Bring the full tithe into my warehouse, that means give the full ten percent to the Church. And my husband Fr Gregory and I have done it for forty years now. We took that very seriously, ten percent, the top ten percent of everything that we earned goes to our local parish, and we've always done that even when we were just getting by on a shoestring making forty dollars a week cleaning...being janitors at a Church, going in once a week and doing janitorial service...we put four dollars in the plate. [Laugther] And we were blessed during those seminary years when we were so poor, there were a number of times that we would go to the bank, this was before ATMs, you would give over your bank book for your savings account and they would stamp it with how much money was in it, how much you deposited. I remember times when we found mysteriously an extra fifty dollars had been deposited in our savings account...nobody else had access to this. So that was a big award and encouragement to us, putting your little four dollars in the plate and being blessed so abundantly in return.
There was a period of time when we took that ten percent and we divided it half and half. Five to the Church, Five to charity, but after a couple of years we were convinced that "bring the full tithe into My storehouse" really meant ten percent to the Church, giving above that to charity. So since then we've been able to range up to an additional ten percent to charities, additional ten percent to the poor. Ten to the Church, Ten to charity. Sometimes it's been as low as five percent in addition to the ten to the Church, it's ranged depending on how well we were doing in any particular month. And it wasn't our charitable giving...I like to give to people I know...we support the mission, the Orthodox mission in Pakistan, and Orthodox mission that is near us in the neighbouring city...the OCMC, Orthodox Christian Mission Center has a program called support a mission priest and we give to that, that's one of our larger givings every month, is to support priests who are starting missions in Africa and all around the world, and we can learn about those particular priests through OCMC and know exactly what their Church is like and what they're doing. And when I see what it is like for them and what is was like for myself and my husband when we were founding Holy Cross Church, when there were only five families in our Church in addition to our family and we already had so much more than these mission priests do. So that's an important place of giving for us, is to the support a mission priest programme that the OCMC offers.
And finally, all these things I'm naming they're all missions, these are giving to missions so people can know the Lord Jesus Christ and this is something that has become very controversial. Many people believe that you should not involve your faith in any way in your giving. Now I understand that with the IOCC, International Orthodox Christians Charities, their mission is more like the Red Cross, and they receive moneies from the US government, they go to lands that have historically had a large Orthodox population but they don't have any test to those they give to. They give to muslims, they give to people of all different religions, the IOCC has that mandate. But I don't think we should say that it is wrong to preach Jesus Christ to the poor, I think that should be a component that we should give evidence of our live, that we should show that we are Orthodox Christians and I think we should keep in mind that it is good when we talk to those who are in need, who are poor, who we are giving to, that we should preach Christ to them. Many people feel that that is wrong, that we should never say that. I think the shocking part of this is that I believe that the poor are sinners, I think we're all sinners, that you're not automatically sinless because you have suffered. Suffering does not make you sinless, being poor does not make you sinless, nobody is sinless, we all need Jesus Christ, and we may be able to give alot of different material goods by God's blessing, we may be able to give a great deal, but all of that is worthless compared to salvation in our Lord Jesus Christ. What account will we have to give on the Last Day, if we say yes we gave money and furniture and shelter and food, and the Lord will say "you didn't teach them how to be saved, you didn't teach them how to begin the path of Theosis, you didn't teach them how to overcome their passions." All those things we expect of others, our economic level and in our social group, that we see the urgency of, I think we need to see that as urgent for the poor as well, or else we are withholding the one thing needful. As our Lord said to Martha, Mary has chosen the good portion, the portion of clinging to Him, listening to Him, receiving His life, becoming one with Him, that path of Theosis is the calling every single human being alive, not only for Orthodox Christians, not only for Christians, not only for well to do Christians who have the leisure to read books, but for all of us. We shouldn't be withholding that from the poor.
So those are some really controversial ideas that I have, and I just wanted to spend a little time talking about. This is Frederica Mathewes-Green, you can reach me through my website frederica.com , and transcripts of these podcasts are gradually being posted there as well. My speaking calendar is handled by orthodoxspeakers.com
by Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green
October 02, 2013
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/frederica/social_justice
Transcript
This is Frederica, here and now.
I wanted to say a few words today about social justice and us serving the poor and those requirements laid upon us as Christians. Mostly because I feel like the way I see that whole matter is so different from the popular way that it is viewed, I feel very much out of step with my times, so I'm going to venture out there with an opinion that may well be shocking for all I know, but among the many things that I've noted and that kinda bother me is, for one thing we often hear a distinction between "there are people who are prayerful and there are people who are active". There are people who are contemplative, they're kind of like the Marys and then there are the Marthas who actually go out there and do good works. And it's as if these are two separate categories of people. I just think that's false. I don't think that's the case at all. That it seems to me that most prayerful among us are the ones with the most tender hearts who are reaching out and helping people. I'm going to talk more about that in later shorter podcast, I think part of that is, part of the problem is that our culture today has this view of people who are needy in a material sense differently from people who are just needy and wounded and hurt and who need care and who need love. People who are extremely wealthy and extremely powerful can still get cancer, can still have child die, they can still wrestle and struggle their faith, and feel like they don't feel the presence of God anymore. These are genuine needs and should attract our compassion and our care and our prayers. And it's not like just because they happen to be wealthy that we should have contempt for them, wealthy people are not necessarily bad people, bad Christians. I think we need to view them...the rule about not distinguishing between the poor and the wealthy has this corollary which is we don't despise the wealthy. They are our fellow brothers and sisters too, so that we should embrace them, we should be blind, you know, rather than thinking that the poor have an exalted status and just reacting and reversing a previous preference for the rich which is not healthy. You know, don't go to the opposite extreme but just try to love everybody. So I think that's kind of a shocking thing to say.
Another thing that bothers me is that as I read the Scriptures and sort of read through the history of the Church it seems to me that there is positive, genuinely that there are these two different camps, there are the powerful and there are the weak and the needy, and like I said we don't despise the wealthy. Just the other day I had the thought that the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary was the daughter of a wealthy household, that Joachim and Anna, were extremely well to do, and that's the whole beginning of the story of the virgin Mary's conception is that Joachim gave abundantly, he gave not only for himself but he gave sacrifices for all the people and for the sins of the people. He was extremely generous as the wealthy faithful are apt to be. So the Virgin Mary did not grow up in a poor household, she actually was the daughter of a very wealthy couple, although of course from the age of three she was growing up in the Temple instead of in their home. So we should not despise the wealthy.
A second thing as I was saying in the Scriptures and so forth we tend to see these two categories, somehow today we have three categories, we've got the wealthy and we've go the needy and then in the middle we got these pure hearted people who give to the needy and who defend the needy and who identify with the needy. They're not actually needy. They're not actually wealthy. I think it's partly a function of guilt, of guilt feelings of people who are in the middle and they can look up this scale and say I don't own my own airplane that's for sure you know and I'm really not as wealthy as them but I am able to go out to a restaurant on Friday night and have dinner, I am able to have cable TV, I'm able to have a home, there are so many ways I'm better off than the profoundly needy. And that, in that kinda in the middle position, you tend to run in circles sometimes feeling guilty, sometimes feeling deprived, and a way of resolving that is to really focus on how you care about the poor. To think of yourself as someone who defends the poor and stands for the poor and is not poor but identifies with the poor, and some of their spiritual elevation. And you see the poor as being spiritually higher and more exalted, some of that rubs off on us because we identify with them. But I think this is kind of an artificial category that we have developed perhaps because of a sense of guilt. It's kinda a new thing, this kind of middle stance, where you're neither poor nor wealthy, but you see yourself, you're very aware of your self identity of being an excellent pure and wonderful person who is identifying with the poor.
Sometimes when I'm in situations where I have to attend worship among mainline Christians, I find this very wearying, that so many of their hymns are about great we are because we care for the poor. It's not even really about God, it's about this excellent role of being defenders of the poor. It's so self conscious, it's so self congratulating that it's very tiring for me to be around. I think another factor of our current attitudes in our culture in our generation about social justice, what's really troubling to me is that we see the needy as only recipients as if they have nothing they can give. There is nothing valuable that the poor can give to us or to anyone else or even give to each other. They can do nothing except, it's like they're just laying on a hospital bed receiving an IV, receiving an infusion. All they can do is take, there's nothing valuable that they can give. And we would never dream of asking them to give.
I read something years ago in American Charity is that if a poor person came into a home to spend the night, a home that was established to give care and shelter to the poor, they would be expected to provide something, to give labour. An old woman maybe could only sit in a rocking chair but she could knit a blanket that later might cover a strong young man who needed to stay in the shelter but who would be outside in the afternoon chopping wood for the fireplace and for the furnace. At night he'd be covered by that blanket. I think there's something actually more respectful of the poor if we understand them as people who have something to give and who are able to give. It's very debilitating, a stream of disability in our culture that undermines people's senses of themselves at all levels, at all economic levels, this seeing ourselves as consumers rather than producers. We identify with "I like this kind of music, I like that kind of movie, I drive this kind of car, I like this kind of cooking" it's all just taking it and gobbling gobbling and gobbling more and more inward. And you know there's at some point you think, I don't produce anything. I've nothing of value to give, I can just spend money. I do think that this is disabling to see yourself that way and I don't think healthy for us to treat the needy that way.
I recently read an article that said Think about what percentage of your time you spend producing something that other people want, that other people could use, and what percentage of your time do you then spend consuming things that other people produce. It's kind of a poignant question, an uncomfortable question. I think one of the reasons this is such big thing, is this big invisible wall in our culture, that we are consumers rather than producers, that it has to do with the fact of our economy and advertising. Advertising is an extremely persuasive medium and they spend so much more time and money on a thirty second commercial than they spend on the one hour or thirty minute TV show that you're watching that the commercials are embedded in. They think so deeply about psychology and how to persuade you. But they're all about getting you to consume stuff, so the act of consuming becomes much larger in their awareness than the act of producing does. Even in our jobs we're not sure what we're producing is of value to anybody or maybe we don't have a job that has anything to do with producing things.
In our waking life there is a great imbalance and I think advertising continues to blind us to it and make us think about how excellent it is to be consuming this great stuff and how great it make me look, that this is the brand that I consume. I think it doesn't help the needy for us to perpetuate that upon them and to treat them as only consumers but absolutely nothing of value they could give. They are defined by being needy. They are defined by being black holes that we pour stuff into. I think it's much healthier if they have a way to give but as a friend of mine said there's I think it's called Gresham's law, that bad money drives out good money. I have a friend who used to say "bad charity drives out good charity." That if all the other social services in the city are just pouring stuff out the door for free with no requirement to give in return. If you try to set up the lone charity that's going to actually take them seriously as human beings who have things that they could give, they won't come to you. Bad charity drives out good charity. They're going to go to the one that's giving away stuff for free. I saw this recently in a charity that I visited, and the director was saying, "we had a terrible time about six months ago. We ran out of coffee, we didn't have any money to buy more coffee, and so our clients were saying to us, you better get more coffee or we're going to go to a different charity, a different storefront and spend our time there instead of here." It just kinda sounded wrong to me, anyway that's another one of my points.
Another thing is that so often we are not in a relationship with the poor that we give to, we give to quote "Charity" unquote and we maintain a distance between ourselves and the ones who are really in need. This state of affairs comes about because it's phenomenally more efficient. It is so much easier for everybody to pool their money and then you have an expert who divides it up and gives it out. But what a gap there is between us and the needy. Certainly for most of human history, certainly for most of Christian history money or goods were given within a relationship. You wouldn't need an organization and of course this does still happen in our Churches you know where there's a family that is poorer than your family, they have a disaster, the house burns down something like that, and so you go through your pantry and you bring out food and you give them your food and you bring around meals every night for a week, everybody divides up the work. That kind of giving was really was the main kind of giving to those in need for most of Christian history. And now we have now changed over to a model of having organizations that are go betweens, that are in the middle and they do the relating for us. I think we lose something in that, in accepting that that is the normal way that charities ought to work.
For early Christian history it was the Deacons that were in charge of this, so it was kind of an interim thing which is within your Church, you would give your ten percent to the Church and the deacon taking in all of this knowing where the needs were, actually serving the Church first and so often St Paul and the early writers talk about this giving for people who actually attend your Church and are in your Christian community. Or for Christians who were out of town but they're travelling and they're journeying and you take them into your community, provide for their needs. In the first three centuries of course the Church was very very poor, it wasn't able to give very much beyond the boundaries of the parish but that strong strong emphasis on giving actually had to do with giving within your worship community. And because it was a big Church and you couldn't know everybody and it's not really appropriate for you to know all the needs with another family, the deacon was the go between. But that's still a far cry from the anonymity of writing a cheque to an organization you approve of and giving away the money elsewhere, with no knowledge of how that's being, or who it's being given to.
In my own...my husband and I back when we were still in Protestant Seminary long before we dreamed of becoming Orthodox, we were convinced that the Biblical Tithe is the expectation, that when it says in Malachai, "bring the full tithe into my storehouse and see whether I will not open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing on you." Bring the full tithe into my warehouse, that means give the full ten percent to the Church. And my husband Fr Gregory and I have done it for forty years now. We took that very seriously, ten percent, the top ten percent of everything that we earned goes to our local parish, and we've always done that even when we were just getting by on a shoestring making forty dollars a week cleaning...being janitors at a Church, going in once a week and doing janitorial service...we put four dollars in the plate. [Laugther] And we were blessed during those seminary years when we were so poor, there were a number of times that we would go to the bank, this was before ATMs, you would give over your bank book for your savings account and they would stamp it with how much money was in it, how much you deposited. I remember times when we found mysteriously an extra fifty dollars had been deposited in our savings account...nobody else had access to this. So that was a big award and encouragement to us, putting your little four dollars in the plate and being blessed so abundantly in return.
There was a period of time when we took that ten percent and we divided it half and half. Five to the Church, Five to charity, but after a couple of years we were convinced that "bring the full tithe into My storehouse" really meant ten percent to the Church, giving above that to charity. So since then we've been able to range up to an additional ten percent to charities, additional ten percent to the poor. Ten to the Church, Ten to charity. Sometimes it's been as low as five percent in addition to the ten to the Church, it's ranged depending on how well we were doing in any particular month. And it wasn't our charitable giving...I like to give to people I know...we support the mission, the Orthodox mission in Pakistan, and Orthodox mission that is near us in the neighbouring city...the OCMC, Orthodox Christian Mission Center has a program called support a mission priest and we give to that, that's one of our larger givings every month, is to support priests who are starting missions in Africa and all around the world, and we can learn about those particular priests through OCMC and know exactly what their Church is like and what they're doing. And when I see what it is like for them and what is was like for myself and my husband when we were founding Holy Cross Church, when there were only five families in our Church in addition to our family and we already had so much more than these mission priests do. So that's an important place of giving for us, is to the support a mission priest programme that the OCMC offers.
And finally, all these things I'm naming they're all missions, these are giving to missions so people can know the Lord Jesus Christ and this is something that has become very controversial. Many people believe that you should not involve your faith in any way in your giving. Now I understand that with the IOCC, International Orthodox Christians Charities, their mission is more like the Red Cross, and they receive moneies from the US government, they go to lands that have historically had a large Orthodox population but they don't have any test to those they give to. They give to muslims, they give to people of all different religions, the IOCC has that mandate. But I don't think we should say that it is wrong to preach Jesus Christ to the poor, I think that should be a component that we should give evidence of our live, that we should show that we are Orthodox Christians and I think we should keep in mind that it is good when we talk to those who are in need, who are poor, who we are giving to, that we should preach Christ to them. Many people feel that that is wrong, that we should never say that. I think the shocking part of this is that I believe that the poor are sinners, I think we're all sinners, that you're not automatically sinless because you have suffered. Suffering does not make you sinless, being poor does not make you sinless, nobody is sinless, we all need Jesus Christ, and we may be able to give alot of different material goods by God's blessing, we may be able to give a great deal, but all of that is worthless compared to salvation in our Lord Jesus Christ. What account will we have to give on the Last Day, if we say yes we gave money and furniture and shelter and food, and the Lord will say "you didn't teach them how to be saved, you didn't teach them how to begin the path of Theosis, you didn't teach them how to overcome their passions." All those things we expect of others, our economic level and in our social group, that we see the urgency of, I think we need to see that as urgent for the poor as well, or else we are withholding the one thing needful. As our Lord said to Martha, Mary has chosen the good portion, the portion of clinging to Him, listening to Him, receiving His life, becoming one with Him, that path of Theosis is the calling every single human being alive, not only for Orthodox Christians, not only for Christians, not only for well to do Christians who have the leisure to read books, but for all of us. We shouldn't be withholding that from the poor.
So those are some really controversial ideas that I have, and I just wanted to spend a little time talking about. This is Frederica Mathewes-Green, you can reach me through my website frederica.com , and transcripts of these podcasts are gradually being posted there as well. My speaking calendar is handled by orthodoxspeakers.com
