I’m one of those Christmas people. I am not a Christmas cheer evangelist; I am not trying to convince you to be thrilled that Christmas is approaching. It’s more the reverse: throughout the long year with its long days I am usually very outwardly disposed, going places and seeing people and responding to all kinds of spontaneity (summer is notorious for this), but by the time Christmas approaches the days are short and the nights are long and cold and collars rise around looped scarves which consume the ears and train the eyes straight ahead. The quintessential winter activity is walking home alone in the dark, lost in thought. When Christmas is on the way, I have nothing but time to think to myself, and I imagine this would be a very grim period (being consumed with thoughts and whatnot) were it not for Christmas itself.  If I turned inward and found anything other than the gleam of hope — Christ, yes, but first the sparkle of the Star of Bethlehem — the season would just be winter, the annual performance of death.

But because of Christmas, there are lights strewn through the black of winter — the multicolored bulbs on the houses of my suburban Texan neighborhood glow in my thoughts, and at night when I glimpse streetlights and neon shop signs in Providence through the blur of tears resisting cold wind, I can see them again. Christmas is about hope, and anticipation: there’s an intentional buildup, and a kind of trepidation, though the payoff is assured and absolute. If nobody had ever written any other verse about Christmas than ‘God and sinners reconciled’ it would have been enough. But I’m glad they wrote others.

And it seems so much of what we do at Christmas is done with such a tremendous investment of hope. You travel with the hope that everything will go well, not only that you will be safely delivered, but that this will be the year your family doesn’t do that thing they will most certainly do. And you buy gifts, send cards, all with the incredible hope that they will be accepted at the least, at most received well. All of these exchanges and movements of stuff and people, all this shifting around — always it is accompanied by the timid hope that something good will come of it.

This is why people detest Christmas. All of the objects and cultural products routinely excoriated for their obnoxiousness — Christmas trees (messy; pagan; environmentally unfriendly); Christmas songs (bad; boring; pagan); Christmas gifts (expensive; pagan; materialistic) — are recruited as symbols of disappointment. Charlie Brown’s humble tree at first appears this way, but in an answer to Christmastime cynicism, it turns out alright. Not perfect, not very much majestic, but just right. This is how Christmas ought to be, and all kinds of media about Christmas tell the same essential Christmas story: the lowly and meek will more than suffice. The problem is just that it doesn’t always turn out that way.

The holidays produce expectations that go unfulfilled; lonely people feel lonelier amidst demands for cheer, commercialism and the immediacy of ownership are swapped for faith, and everything comes out feeling commodified and artificial. Every year, the same op-eds about materialism arise drearily, informing us that the Christmas-industrial-complex is a scam. Sure, but everything is. Where are the daily op-eds about the commodification of everything, about the fact that all personality, all sentiment, all relationships are not only expressed but experienced through consumption? You’re not really you in any unique sense until you’ve differentiated your iPhone case from hers: if I can’t tell you’re a certain kind of person by the jackets you buy, are you really that kind of person at all? But the low murmur about the crisis of commodification (which has been going strong for many decades now) doesn’t crescendo into a shrill keen until Christmas, and there’s a good reason for that: Christmas isn’t just a good example, it’s an offensive one. While iPhones never promised not to sink to the level of base salesmanship, Christmas did. Christmas gets slammed for its collusion with consumerism precisely because we hope for so much more from it. Christmas should be better than this.

And it is, even if we’re not. Hope is bound up in the essence of Christmas, it’s the bright beaming star in the middle of the story. If there weren’t a glimmer of hope to be frustrated, then there wouldn’t be such remonstration, every single year, against the disappointment that can slip in between unhappy relatives and lovers and friends. If there has been a failure in presenting the message of Christmas, it’s this: Christmas does deliver on the hope it promises, in that God and sinners are, as a result of this event, reconciled. And all the wrongs that come in between, all the pain and suffering and loneliness and brutality that passes on earth, will also be soothed in the fulfillment of this promise.

So for Christians fearful over the seemingly rapid disengagement of Christianity from culture, Christmas haters should be a comforting sign, not an unsettling one. People who are intensely bothered by Christmas have seen a hope in it that has gone frustrated, sometimes over and over again. This is what makes the holidays such an excellent time to reach out to people who are suffering, and offer to suffer-with. It is right to remember that not everyone has somebody now, and that it is especially painful not to, precisely because the world can seem to shimmer, especially on snowy evenings just a few weeks before the day itself, with a sense of electric expectation. It’s painful when the moment passes unannounced and impotent.

But I think the struggle to reach out to people who suffer especially at Christmas is one of the things that makes the season perfect. You are their hope, and they are yours. People who suffer need others to relieve them, and in the relief of suffering we touch the wounds of Christ. And I don’t mind all the glitter and the shine; I know it can all seem like a spectacle, and that spectacles always lend themselves to the inauthentic and artificial. But to me it all commends the sparkle in the dark, the hope that even in such vulgar, commercialized times can’t quite be extracted from the heart of Christmas. So I am one of those Christmas people, I was born on St. Nicholas’ feast day, and I’m all into the crazy kaleidoscopic brightness of it all, and the hope, every year.

Couple days ago Rod Dreher had a go at a poor teenager in New York City and his family. He titled the column, “Poor and Foolish.” It’s about all the things poor people do — like having children out of wedlock, taking jobs instead of going to school, and so on — that allegedly make them poor. The gist of the article is that poor people keep themselves poor, ostensibly because they’re stupid; if they weren’t so ‘foolish’, they would make better choices, and be less poor.

There is a lot to say about whether or not this is factually true. Will education actually undo poverty? Doesn’t seem like it: someone has to clean toilets, do week-long carpentry gigs, and mop up vomit in hospitals. If we all had college degrees from Ivy League universities, someone would still have to do those jobs. Furthermore, white high school drop-outs have more wealth than black and Hispanic college graduates — because wealth accumulates.

And those harlots having babies out of wedlock? They don’t actually do much better when they do get married, because poverty is a stressor that leads to divorce, and divorce hits women harder than men financially. Further, because women who get pregnant out of wedlock, especially as teens, are often already poor, teenage childbearing out of wedlock is actually not as disastrous (compared to poor teens who miscarry or marry) as one might presume. This doesn’t mean teen mothers do well, it just means that poverty is so terrible that whether you have a kid or not isn’t as major as whether or not you’re living in poverty when it comes to determining what your life will be like. Over the last few years, while rates of single motherhood have risen, the percentage of poor women who are not married has remained more or less flat, meaning single motherhood isn’t actually doing that much to shove women into poverty.

Of course, there’s more to the story here. Poor people aren’t stupid, they’re not irrational, and pretending that they are supposes what is open to a middle class or wealthy person is actually available to poor people. It severely underestimates stress and the cognitive effects of scarcity, and carries that snide air of I’d-do-it-better-myself. As for me, I’m not sure I would.

But that’s all really secondary; it just feels good to sass-talk people one perceives as less rational than themselves. It’s why there’s always this truly bizarre ejaculation of  “he put himself in harm’s way!!!” every time ISIS releases a videotape of a journalist or humanitarian’s execution. I sometimes suspect people who react in that way to terrible misfortune are like people who glimpse over a precipice and run several yards away, much further than is really needed to be safe from a fall. It’s comforting to know you’re really so far removed from danger, and to reaffirm it.

I also want to meditate here on worth. The notion that poverty is an obvious and appropriate end result of ‘bad’ decisions supposes the economy has a natural moral instinct, that the invisible hand that guides resources to people operates with respect to worthiness. But none of that is necessarily true. We know it isn’t, because there are plenty of rich people who do nothing but make horrible decisions and nonetheless remain rich, and because there are people who get rich through totally unscrupulous means. Further, social mobility is something we can measure, and we know different societies have differing degrees, and the ones with high social mobility are not the ones with a special investment in free market economies. Here again, then, we should be ensuring that the destination of resources honors human worth, not contenting ourselves that wherever resources wind up tells us who is worth what.

In Luke 6:24, Jesus says:

“But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.“

In the story of David and Bathsheba, we get basically the same report: God is angry with David in part for taking Uriah’s only wife, when David himself had everything he wanted. The situation is this: if you are well-to-do, if you have everything you want, what are you doing taking shots at people who have very little or nothing? The fact that one’s wealth is consolation means people without it haven’t been consoled, it means they’re hurting, it means Jesus Christ is aware of the pain of poverty, and condemns those who are wealthy and consoled and still indifferent to the suffering poor. This is attitudinal. For God, who made all creation for people to have in common, the stupidity, foolishness, or irrationality that supposedly leads to poverty appears to be of much less interest than the approach those who wind up on the fortunate side of things take to those who wind up on the unfortunate side.

If you take Christ seriously, then, and you imagine how you conduct yourself in this life to be preparation for the next, the really foolish thing is talking trash about the poor.

 

Paul Bourget wrote that “one must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.” The point being: it’s not really stable or tenable to maintain a values system that’s completely removed from how you actually live your life. Eventually you’ll either modify the values system or modify the way you live.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article out on Arnold Abbott, the 90 year old man who has been cited twice in Fort Lauderdale for feeding homeless people even after ordinances were passed to stop that. The CS Monitor wonders: “is this charity or a crime?” Well, both — but they mean crime in its normative sense. Is this charity, or is it something harmful?

Supporters of anti-homeless ordinances do say that rendering aid to homeless people is harmful. Their reasoning:

“The people feeding them are enablers, and they enable the homeless by making their lives easier…Hunger is a big motivator. Are people more likely to seek help when they’re hungry or when they’re fed and happy?”

“Feeding people on the streets is sanctioning homelessness…Whatever discourages feeding people on the streets is a positive thing.”

The notion that homelessness is something that persists only so long as it’s ‘enabled’ is completely true, but the homeless persons themselves are not the agents of it. Societies that fail to provide an adequate accessible standard of living for all people — including people with mental and physical illnesses they can’t afford to treat, which constitutes a significant number of homeless people — are the agents that enable homelessness. The idea that homeless people rationally choose to be homeless thanks to the food they periodically receive from charitable sources is complete lunacy, and I’m not even sure the people who spew it believe it.

But there is a reason they go with that approach. The real reason cities ban homelessness (in effect) is because businesses demand that they do, in order to sell things to wealthier people. People who come out to stump for those ordinances come up with a rhetoric that works because ‘homeless people are business-killing eyesores’ is no longer an acceptable public sentiment.

The sentiment that is acceptable is that charity is wrong because it allows certain conditions of poverty to persist, that is, it allows poor people to keep being poor instead of enacting some (what?) heroic measures to join the ranks of the worthwhile. Now this is an argument with some oomph: it’s the exact same one being used to go after the earned income tax credit, for example; it’s often phrased in terms of ‘dependency’ or ‘reliance.’ It’s a punitive idea, a strategy that denies structural causes of poverty and proposes that poor people will quit being poor if you just make poverty hard enough for them. Tough love, without the love.

But here’s the curious thing: usually dependency narratives — like Joni Ernst’s recent stab — lament reliance on the state, but refer with all due nostalgia to a time when people relied on charities, families, and churches. So why would the rhetoric surrounding the ‘enabling’ of poverty apply here, where private charity is being condemned?

Because you end up living as you think, after a while, and there really is no clear distinction between the enabling of poverty that arises from state assistance and enabling of poverty that arises from private assistance. Charity will be condemned with the same rule that condemns welfare, because the ‘dependency’ argument is an intentionally blunt instrument: it doesn’t really have an interest in poor people; it just proposes a premise on which to cease aid.

*(In case there is concern re: do you actually know homeless people and have a good sense of what enables homelessness? Yes, I do! It’s a topic that matters a lot to me.)