What is poverty?

I recently finished reading Life at the Bottom: the Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple. He's an English author and psychiatrist who has worked in Africa and in Birmingham. After returning from Africa, to work in England, he wrote these essays reflecting on the culture he encountered in the slums of Birmingham.

One reviewer wrote that "he found what he considered to be true barbarism—the cheerless, self-pitying hedonism and brutality of the dependency culture". I found this article which describes the life of a patient he treated in the slums. It has some similar reflections to 'Life at the Bottom', which is also peppered with vignettes of patients.

I had a few gut reactions to this book...

I was really confronted that I meet patients like this frequently. Crime, poverty, domestic violence, drug and alcohol use, dysfuntional relationships, abuse, mental illness, welfare dependence, homelessness and the failure of government services are all right here in south-west Sydney. We have an underclass like the one Dalrymple describes in Britain. And we have created the same cultural traps that bind people in poverty and powerlessness.

Dalrymple is extremely critical of the middle class and the way we have used welfare, social structures and liberal thinking to rob the poor of a way out of their dilemma. He believes that when someone can use their addiction or their history of deprivation and trauma (for example) to explain their criminal or abusive behaviour, they can then avoid examining their own role in creating their current predicament. Rather than empowering broken people to hope, and strive, for a better life, we are telling them there is actually no escape.

Not only that, we reward extreme dysfunction. The more chaotic a person is, the higher they climb the list for priority housing. So people who work hard but start with little, wait longer for any assistance because there is always someone who is having a more impressive emergency, perhaps even as a result of their own carelessness or refusal to participate in the system.

I can see the points that Dalrymple is making, but part of me longs for him to be wrong. I don't want us to be harsh, or punishing of brokenness. I don't want us to abandon grace and compassion. I want humans to be better than this - but we are so not. I felt sad as I read.

There's a saying - 'If you're not a leftie in your twenties, then you haven't got a heart. If you're not a conservative in your forties then you haven't got a brain.' I don't want to abandon my heart, even though my brain whispers quietly to do so. And we walk this tenuous balance of compassion and pragmatism. We need to struggle here, because there cannot be a solution without grace and transformation.

A tight fear grips my heart - I hear lives told, and they leave me incarcerated with no key. If I feel trapped by the tale, how must the one who tells feel. How can they see possibility or hope if I can't?

The step of faith I need to take is this - Insist there is hope. Talk about change and rescue and redemption even when I doubt the possibility.

This is Dalrymple's sobering reflection on true poverty, comparing Africa and Britain,

"Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul." from What is poverty? Dalrymple, 1999.

#wpp

Lunchtime conversation at work can be interesting. Depending who's at the table. Today I ate with the psychologists. Always thoughtful, slightly kooky and very welcoming. They have a fantastic food co-op in the staff room fridge.

Today I jumped in with a comment about #whitepeoplesproblems, ie. comfortable people talking about life's little unfairnesses. It delivered a bit of a laugh and agreement. I acknowledge that most of the whinges in my life come right down to this ... #wpp. And it fit right in with the mood of the moment.

Later I had a rerun in my head. Yes, I replay conversations later and regret being outspoken. Doesn't everyone do that?

What if they thought I would say that to one of my patients? I wanted to go back and explain - 'you know I'm only harsh with my friends, not with patients of this service.' Wait, that has problems, too. So I let it go. Well, until I sat down here anyway...

Where is that balance between being compassionate and being clear-sighted? Not mutually exclusive, I know. How can I listen attentively and give consolation for minor irritations while having the perspective to see that they are minor? How can I hear heartbreaking loss and not become blase about skinned knees?

I want to be wise as a snake and innocent as a dove. But I don't want to be naive. Sometimes complaining does need to be gently corrected. Sometimes it just needs a patient ear. And suffering is a broken-ness of heart that happens all over the place - comfortable middle-class people meet tragedy, too. Listening is harder when it is tempered with discernment and wisdom. There is not a response that works everywhere, instead I need to carve each one fresh. Shaped by the unique story that draws it out of me.

I struggle to find my balance.

The Ship Song

There are a couple of reasons to share this video. It's been made as a tribute to the Sydney Opera House, the most iconic building I've ever been in. It features some of the best musicians/performers in Australia (imho), and it's a song written by Nick Cave, that I love.

I admit that there are tears in my eyes when I watch it. I walked down the aisle to this song almost 13 years ago.

Tracks and Habits

image from here

The picture is the story. Sheep running along worn paths. Wending through grass, flattened under their feet. My shoes tread the grass down, too. Following daily planted footsteps, crossing the road at just that odd angle. The angle I walked yesterday. Do you step in the worn patches of dirt? Or let the smoothed, worn stone cradle your feet?

Habits form us. Form me. We construct our lives in repetitive, well-worn blocks. Follow grooved, gouged tracks.

It's tempting to concentrate on the bad habits. The paths we trip thoughtlessly along, forgetting their destination. Trapped on exit-less freeways, addictions, weaknesses, sins overwhelm us. "I can't stop." "I didn't want to end up here..."

But every maze has a way out. Don't forget we are the ones who've made the paths, and they can be changed. The first time you deviate is exhausting, time-consuming and messy. The old path calls you insistently back. It resists an overgrown, unused future. The whispered, lingering reminders in your ears are final pleas for existence. But deviating for the first time is exhilarating. Making a new, better, wise path brings possibility and hope.

Habits can also breathe life. Good ones open our existence so that grace can get in. I wish I could find the list of helpful habits I read last week, because it illustrates the sensible simplicity of good habits. The ones that have stuck are - getting 8 hours sleep a night, sitting down to eat breakfast. Alas, google cannot find the rest tonight :)

A wise life is one with well-crafted habits. A network of paths that lead to healthy destinations. Paths painstakingly carved and carefully re-routed when necessary. I long for a life like that.

What about you?

Here is a trustworthy saying...

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.

Proverbs 4:26

Declutter (part 1)

Contrary wishes clutter my heart. It beats and pumps and I waver in the wind.

My mind is a cupboard filled with hoarded bits and pieces. I long to unpack the piles that have collected on the shelves, but I can't do more than move them from one to another.

A preoccupation with what I want and need, crowds inside me. I witness dramas and imagine myself in the starring role. I long for significance and to be noticed. I want to be the one who gets it done. In the nightclub that is my soul, the crowd on the dancefloor are all me just trying to catch someone's eye.

I look around the house, discouraged by the similarites of outward and inward life. Stacks of books. Collected toys and games. Mount Washington just in, off the line. No space to spare.

No one is surprised, that decluttering and simplifying are national pastimes. We talk about them, anyway. We pay to hear the secret of making them reality. Maybe if I buy the book, order, rationality, simplicity, will be possible.

But I need to ask the real question.

How do I declutter my heart? Simplify my mind? How do we purify our lives?

Any suggestions?

Caring

She's living at the house he bought. After the divorce. After winning a hundred thousand on a carelessly bought scratchie. He's had the house since half the money was in the till at the pub.

She's glad to have a place to stay. And doing her the favour eases the jagged edged fact that she is his carer. Not his carer on a welfare form. His carer on the watch for when he starts to be distracted with his own thoughts. Looking for his words to lose their distinct flavour. They can become like mist in the headlights.

He says there's nothing wrong. He lives it, too. If ignoring it were therapeutic, he'd be well. But he's not. He sifts everything he hears to capture words that make him better. But they don't. He careens, rather than slips into madness.

She came home to find the windows nailed shut and the back door couldn't open. He'd left the hunting knife on the table. The police had pulled him roughly out the door, with his arms clasped behind him. He hunted for explanation but it slipped away. She was saddened that he didn't notice his own incoherence. He thought it made sense.

She slept. It felt like days. Repaying the debt of pacing, interrupted nights. She tells me of retreating to her room. That she saw his eyes peering out from the darkness. That he waited for her to sleep and then he walked back and forth, all night. Wry, she laughs. His mad thoughts are funny. They are funny and timid and sad and broken.

Somehow she can shiver at his paranoid preparations and giggle at his oddness. Her steadiness is epic.

Family without burden is enticing. But it spoils us for the true beauty of care for a broken brother. Perfection has been smashed so that love can be glued patiently together. Built piece after piece, sturdily, secured one by one. It's a heroic, humble construction.

Joining Emily,

Five books that changed who I am

There's been a few people blogging about books that have changed who they are. Soph at Storms Dressed as Stars, shared and gave an open invite to join in. I can't resist an open invite, when memes can be kinda exclusive.

I have puzzled and thought. There must be five transformative books in my collection. I can think of books that I've loved, books that I've cried over, books that I've waded through. I have a pile of books that I would like to read, but haven't yet. But books that have changed me?

A Bridge to Teribithia. This is the first book that really moved me emotionally. I lay on my bed and cried as I read (not the whole book, but the sad part). It awakened in me a sense of the power of stories. I read it when I was about ten or eleven. The other book that stands out as deeply moving, like this, was Of A Boy by Sonya Hartnett.

When I was studying medicine, I read The Audacity to Believe by Sheila Cassidy. She tells the story of going to Chile and working as a doctor. She was a Catholic follower of Jesus and she tried to live out her faith. I found this really challenging and it influenced how I wanted to work in the future.

The Bible itself has changed me, but I want to highlight the effect of the Psalms on me. I did a course about the Psalms once and read it through a few times. I always found that reading a book and talking about it (eg. in high-school English) gave me a deeper love of it. This happened with the Psalms. Suddenly the words were passionate and spoke to me face-to-face. I began to understand why the word of God had been described as being sweeter than honey and purer than gold, through reading the Psalms.

The Art of Pastoring. I found this book in the (Morling College) library once and read it because I liked the blurb. Reading it made me see ministry differently. It emphasises loving people and serving them with your life. It was one of the first books that challenged me to listen to people and their stories. That ministry is about building real and genuine relationships and living a life of faith together as family. Challenging.

The final book I've included represents choosing to work in psychiatry/mental health. It wasn't just because of this book, but this book was the starting point for me to see the possibility of healing for disease or trauma through therapeutic/transformative relationships. This book helped me learn but also helped me keep thinking and reading about the mind, how it works and the resilience that helps people recover from all sorts of pain or abuse.