Synopsis "Owning Poverty: A Transformational Journey (in English)"
In the tradition of Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline, transformational development educator, Dr. Michael Pucci, offers Christian organizations a spiritual formation resource for action. How we understand poverty matters. When our definitions become misaligned with a biblical theology of poverty, we can be deluded into believing falsely and acting unjustly. We need the corrective authority of the God-given word on poverty. However, a mental shift is not sufficient. Attempts to merely learn 'about' poverty, typically reduce it to something simple, solvable, and safely external. We need a thorough transformation, a renewed posture of poverty. The Christian spiritual disciplines, though very old, bring something new to this problem. Their practice promises a different way of knowing poverty, by engaging our head, hands, and heart in the process. The spiritual disciplines give knowledge by taking something away. And it is no accident that these voluntary acts of privation: fasting, simplicity, watching, renunciation, solitude, silence, submission, confession, prayer, correspond to aspects of the experience of poverty-lack, hunger, anxiety, disparity, alienation, exclusion, voicelessness, exploitation, powerlessness, etc. Owning Poverty offers a way to identify with the poor, an identity which gains us authenticity in our relationship with God and deeper solidarity with others on the true ground of our equality. The disciplines also improve our capacity to "own up to" our moral poverty and repent our contribution to impoverishing others through unjust structures and our benefiting from the suffering of those whose poverty we fail to treat as our own. Owning Poverty invites us to understand poverty "out there" in light of poverty "in here" and to seek to encounter God afresh. We will always find him, with the poor. The question becomes, not whether anything in us or our world might get messed up, as a result of such a transformational journey, but rather, can anything remain the same?
