A Few Words About Being a Recipient of Stolen Goods

When we lost my husband's income in 2011, we never thought we'd still be in this situation two years later.

He spent his first summer of "unemployment" taking a small business course. He had been helping me with my sole proprietorship for years, but the time he took to turn it into an LLC and smooth out some of our operations allowed our revenues to take a leap. Unfortunately, it was not a high enough leap to support us entirely.

Because he still had the unemployment compensation last spring, we decided to take another kind of leap and enroll him in a teaching certification program. For years he'd wanted to do a more service-oriented profession and leave the corporate world, where he felt less and less sense of purpose. We were assured that his unemployment compensation would last through his job retraining, but in the fall, right before he embarked on the (unpaid) internship part of the process, the Legislature decided he'd received unemployment long enough--that he and all the other lazy n'er-do-wells should quit milking the public. We were pretty unprepared for this and as he was in the middle of his program and already committed to the internship, we just dove into the darkness and prayed for the best.

Since then, we have continued to work hard at our business, I've taken on additional teaching hours, get speaking gigs as often as possible and pray that my upcoming royalty statement will actually have a check in it. And since September, we have received food stamps, help from our church, friends and families, grants from the electric company, and charity medical care.

I had a "friend" refer to any kind of tax-supported social program as government theft, chastising me for receiving "stolen goods," which was not only immoral, but "bad for the soul."

Yet I am not repentant about being a "welfare mom." I believe that this passage is here to teach me something, not only about humility and gratitude, but about what many folks endure for a lifetime. Though I have no doubt that our situation will turn around, not everyone is able to break out of poverty. Those who are in it longterm often simply give up, beaten down by a culture that blames them for their situation. 

I know this from sitting in waiting rooms for hours, queuing for my turn to get help from overwhelmed social workers. I know it from filling out forms that assume I am out to cheat the system. It's hard not to succumb to shame as one answers those questions--as if maybe I should just go home and figure out something else (like, say, homelessness.) But this is my time to endure short-term humiliation for longterm good.

I can't tell you how grateful I am that there is a safety net. Our church has gone above and beyond in helping us, but there are so many in need. That's why we as a caring society must continue to make it a priority value to help the poor, just as we make it a priority to provide roads, schools and police officers to our community.  When we had a corporate salary income I did not feel robbed supporting such things with my taxes.

Even if we had NO compassion, and believed that the poor were all drug-abusing parasites who should simply go away, the fact is "the poor will be with us always." And that fact is a challenge to us as human beings. What are we going to do about that? It's not only the job of the church (though it is the job of the church); it is the job of any civilized society to make a safety net available. Without the safety net, the community itself is weighted down by poverty which begins its insidious crawl through every infrastructure.

Because of the safety net, our family will make it to the other side of this relatively intact. Without it, we would be moving into the home of a friend, sending two of our kids (who are living with and helping us) to find their own friends to live with. We'd be so behind on our bills right now that we may never be able to crawl out. Our car would have been repossessed long since. We'd be choosing between electricity and food. 

None of this would be conducive to growing a small business, starting a nonprofit, or any kind of focused job retraining. None of it would be conducive to our continuing to contribute to our community. It's hard to help the swim team when you're drowning.

I will hear that we are the "exception," that we actually do believe in work, but that the majority of social service recipients are criminals. I hear stories of welfare cheats every time I am brave enough to talk about this. Every time. It's as if the person I am talking to doesn't hear me. They breeze right over my experience and tell me about their friend, whose son was told to say he was homeless so he could get benefits he wasn't entitled to. Or about Octomom, or some other media welfare sensation. Or about something they saw in a reality show.

My "honorary daughter" is doing a degree in social work and here is the statistic she shared with me: Yes. People do cheat. There are numbers for that. The numbers are 2%-4%. 2%-4% of welfare recipients are actively cheating the system. The other 96%-98% of us are invisible--the people for whom a temporary hand up makes the difference between a tough but achievable transition and years spent climbing out of a hole. I'm 50. I don't have years to spend climbing when I've worked so hard to get to this point. We had our legs knocked out from under us by a job loss and we have the opportunity to make something good come out of that. Or to let it flatten us.

My two cents.

Thinking 'bout the Saints

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. Hebrews 11:32-38

I know a man who, when it is his turn to read this passage, cannot get through it without tears. I wonder if it is because after years of not only studying, but celebrating daily the lives of the Saints, these events do not seem to him like something that only happened in Biblical times, but at all times in our history as the Church.

Today's my birthday and I'm thinking about Saints. (I wish there was a connection, but there's not). On this day (in the Gregorian calendar) we celebrate The Hieromartyr Charalampus, Bishop of Magnesia, the Martyrs Porphyrius and Baptus and Three Women Martyrs, who suffered in the year 202, The Holy Virgin Martyrs Ennatha, Valentina and Paula, who suffered in the year 308, and Saint Prochorus of the Caves, who was a native of Smolensk, and entered the Kiev Caves monastery under the igumen John (1089-1103). (For more go to www.oca.org and click Feasts and Saints)

In looking at the Saints listed above, I would note that only one of them, St. Prochurus, could be called specifically an "Orthodox" Saint. This is because the Church split in 1054. Up to then, we were one Church. (There were no Protestants until the Reformation, several hundred years later.) So it begs the question -- if these Saints are our great-grandparents in the faith, why don't most American Christians know about them?

That's how I've felt as a convert to Orthodoxy. And I grew up in a liturgical church. While the Saints are not God, neither are they ordinary. They are the ones who have, at great expense, pressed into God to the point that His light shined through them. Here's just one example from Scripture of their not-ordinariness:

And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.Revelation 20:4

I first began reading hagiographies before I was Orthodox. I was writing a book about St. Vaclav ("King Wenceslas"), who was a 10th century saint. The things said about him seemed so fanciful to me that I despaired of finding some "real history" to read about him. All the miraculous stuff was thrown right in with the "real" stuff. I read hagiographies that way for several years, kind of winking and snickering, even at the gruesome deaths of martyrs. It seemed so over-the-top.

Now it occurs to me that I never winked and snickered at the crucifixion, nor at the story of the youths in the fiery furnace, nor at the beheading of John the Baptist. Those stories seemed "real" to me because they were in the Bible. And the fact that Jesus rose from the dead and that he previously walked around with Shadrach, Mishak and Abednigo in the flames was easy for me to swallow because I'd been told those stories since childhood. Yet I'd discount as fanciful the stories of the Christians who followed over the 2000 years since the Resurrection and gave their lives wholly to Christ. They gave themselves way, way, way more than I have, and many are doing the same today.

So I think it is at our peril that we discount the Saints. Without them, we would have no Bible, no Church, no Good News. It would have been lost to the ages, just as many of their lives have been to generations of Christians.