It was early Sunday morning. I sat in the general area of the church where I’m usually to be found. Bleary eyed, I looked passed the sanctuary and out the plate glass windows to the trees now bare in late autumn. I may have looked like I was in some deep meditation. Mostly, I was just sort of glazed. I stayed up a little too late and didn’t have enough coffee before the 8:30 AM service.
In my glaze, I hadn’t paid attention to the printed order of worship. As service began, I was caught off guard. In place of the warm greeting, these words were read with conviction:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your
field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyards bare, or
gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.
~Leviticus 19:9-10
I’m familiar with the passage as well as others like it in the Hebrew scriptures. The mandate to provide for the poor and those without rights in society is consistent throughout what Christians call the Old Testament. In fact, the book of Deuteronomy clearly states that the covenant relationship with the Most High is demonstrated by making provision for the poor in just the way described in Leviticus.
It wasn’t the content of the scripture passage that caught me off guard. Instead, in my glaze, as I heard the words of the ancient text, I imagined stories my mother has repeated many times.
My mother is now 84. Blind and very arthritic, she spends most of her time in her bedroom where she feels most secure. She knows where everything is in the room. The room is small enough that she can navigate with her walker while moving from bed to chair to bathroom. As her world has become smaller, particular stories from her life are more often repeated. These stories must be important memories for her.
My mother grew up during the years the United States was recovering from the Great Depression. Living in rural Western Pennsylvania, in a company owned coal town, both of my parents grew up in poverty. The company town of Acosta was nestled among farms of various sizes. My mother shares stories of these farms and her childhood friends.
She remembers the family who had an apple orchard. She recalls how she and her friends would slip into the orchard and pick up fruit that fell to the ground. Occasionally, some of the boys would climb trees to pick the ripening fruit. “I didn’t know it then, but the farmer had to know what we were doing. I guess if we didn’t take too much, he was okay with it.”
Mom tells another story of the farmer who grew beans and peas. “At harvest time, we’d follow the truck through the field after the beans were picked. We picked up what fell off the truck or what was left on the plants in whatever we had: aprons, old shirts, or flower sacks.”
Of course, there was also berry picking: along the roads, in the woods, and wherever the berries grew.
In comparing my mother’s experience of growing up in poverty 70 or 80 years ago with the growing rate of poverty today, what strikes me is that there was a sense of generosity in the community that can’t be found today. Those who had resources did what they could to ease the burden of others. To be sure, there were people of great wealth in the area as well. When my mother was young, Frank Lloyd Wright was building Falling Waters for the Kaufmann family about twenty miles away. The Mellon estate was also not far away. My mother knew people who worked at both places. She recalls how they would bring clothing and other items from the homes of these wealthy families to share in their small town.
Today, it seems that we have lost a sense of compassion to care for those who struggle with financial hardship. The tendency is to blame those who lost homes or investments for not being wiser in their choices. Those who lost jobs find that no one wants to hire the unemployed. Worse yet, elected officials and policy makers blame the poor for the problems of the global economy – as though that makes any sense at all. Yet, they publically blame the victims of policy decisions that were short sighted.
In this context, words written four thousand years ago make so much sense today:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your
field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyards bare, or
gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.
~Leviticus 19:9-10
Making provision for those in need is not about socialism or communism. It’s about ethics and common good. It’s about living with compassion toward others. It is the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Right ON, Lou!