It’s not enough just to worry about the poor
Perspective
from The Olympian September 5, 2009
by Selena Kilmoyer
One of the many blessings in my life was my thoroughly Irish mother, who came equipped with wise and powerful sayings for all occasions, and the inimitable Irish brogue that made them music to the ears.
For this occasion, she would have offered the simple wisdom of “Sure you tire and begin again.” I listened to her time and again, growing weary of living in poverty, or recounting tales of even worse poverty back home in the old country, and concluding, with a strength from a deep and sustaining faith, “sure you tire and begin again.”
I am blessed today that I can live simply but not in dire poverty. But others around me do live in dire poverty.
I claim advocacy for them as my vocation.
I voice the needs of those who are too weary, too tired by the stress of living day-by-day, without sometimes even basic necessities, to take the time to talk about their needs.
A great part of my vocation is to try to put words together to move you; to shake you, to touch that place in you that will cause you to respond to the cry of the poor.
Today, I am tired of talking about poverty.
I have grown weary of recounting the fear and loneliness of their nomadic existence; the children and adults who call a vehicle or camp site home, whose eyes speak so deeply of trauma inflicted; the almost invisible elderly poor, isolated and depleted; and the many wandering in the wilderness of mental illness and addiction, for whom transiency is a way of life.
It is time now to come together to think and plan anew our response to the cry of the poor who walk among us.
Is giving a bit of money sufficient?
Is being part of your faith community's food or blanket drive the best we can do to live out the tenets of our faith?
Or is there another path?
Can we be the agents of change, like those who in past generations have made waves, shook up the status quo, changed social structures and created reforms that improved the lives of millions of the poor?
Together we must become partners for change, because, the simple truth is that we can no longer provide a semblance of a social safety net for those in need.
The myriad needs far exceed our capacity to meet them.
Regardless of our weariness, the seeming impossibility of the task at hand, and the sometimes overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of growing poverty, let us commit to tiring AND beginning again.
Today, let’s stand with Robert Fulghum, Unitarian Universalist minister and author of “It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It.”
“I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope, I want to know what you will work for.”
Please join me on Sept. 12, at St. Benedict’s Episcopal Church in Lacey. Bring your weariness, but also bring your muscle.
Bring your passion.
Bring your willingness.
Bring your questions.
Together, as members of the many pluralistic communities of faith here in Thurston County, let us open avenues of communication and begin to grow new strategies in our work to respond to the cry of the poor.
Let’s demonstrate that a wall of apathy does NOT exist here in Thurston County.
Together we can sustain other. Together we can grow weary but boost each other.
Together we can continue.
We are the voices for those too weakened by the stresses of poverty to shout for themselves.
Selena Kilmoyer is the coordinator of Out of the Woods Family Shelter, Chair of the Panza/Camp Quixote, and a member of the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation.