Family & Poverty

In this week's Christian Century, (not up online yet - I have the analog version), a writer tells the story of his son's untimely death at 38. This son left behind a pregnant wife and toddler child. The writer points out that while friends slowly faded away in the long course of grief, family made sacrifices to be nearby and to support his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Family, he argues, is ultimately a stronger source of support than friends, and policies and practices that weaken the family come at a cost.

Being hundreds of miles away from my nearest blood relation, the idea makes me a little nervous, personally. BUT! it also has interesting implications for poverty. What if poverty is nearly always a problem of family? Either a person has no family to care for them in crisis, or has destroyed family ties through addictions, or else a person's whole family may already be poor, which means the culture and connections to rise out of it are essentially not there.

This is probably fairly obvious, but I am used to thinking of problems like poverty as localized in an individual poor person, rather than being connected to a slightly larger family system.

Jesus was not particularly pro-family in his teachings. It may be that he recognized that families do not always manage to care for all of their own. In the kingdom of God, then, we are all one another's family, and care for each other as such, regardless of blood or marital relationship. In other words, no-one slips through the cracks. What would that look like in practice, I wonder?