A few years ago, my older brother and his family were headed for Niagara Falls, Canada. But before they made it in, he experienced racial profiling at its best. Border patrol agents asked him to pull aside while wondering aloud whether he was a terrorist. They asked him which part of the Middle East he was from and about his activities in the United States. He told them where he lived, what he did, and that he was Puerto Rican. They said he looked Iranian. “My family and I just want to see Niagara Falls,” he repeated. Even after he produced his US military ID and passport, there was still quite a bit of back and forth. Finally, after an exhausting ordeal, the border patrol allowed him and the family to enter Canada.

I am much lighter-skinned than my older brother—we Puerto Ricans come in all different shades and sizes. As a result, I’ve never really been harassed because of the color of my skin, at least not to my face. However, I have been put down because of my background. I’ll never forget the spring concert in junior high where I heard a white mother behind me talking to her son about me. I was the only Hispanic/Latina at the school. In a voice dripping with contempt and loud enough so that I could hear, she told him, “Puerto Rican women are sluts.” What did “slut” mean, I wondered? Whatever it meant, it couldn’t be good; her tone was one of derision. I asked my friends to tell me what “slut” meant. Seventh-grade explanations, accurate or not, left me feeling downtrodden.

“Why would she say that?” I speculated. I wasn’t sexually active. In my life, neither experience nor exposure contextualized the word slut. I simply had no idea what it could mean, how it could be applied to me. What was she talking about anyway? She didn’t know me. To hear such curled-lip, sneering contempt dripping from a mother’s mouth, an adult—and one of the richer ones at the school—pierced me. In her eyes, my ethnicity meant I was inherently less than. To her, I was a sexualized piece of trash because, apparently, all “Puerto Rican women are sluts.”

Inherently less than.

Well-acquainted with grief.

These two phrases describe the first half of my life. Being poor and a Hispanic/Latina with a parent who suffered from mental illness meant that I was on the lower rungs of society. I had no financial safety net whatsoever. If one thing went wrong, there was a crisis. Inevitably, something always went wrong.

Once, I tried to keep track of weeks without a major crisis. What I mean is, I wanted to see how long we could go without a volcanic eruption in our household. Not one week went by. On a weekly basis, I was filled with anxiety over whether my bipolar and self-medicating-with-alcohol parent would make it home at night. Would we have food in the refrigerator or money for school events and fees? I could eat lunch at school because I qualified for a free lunch. Sometimes it was the only full meal I had. Yet, I was embarrassed to display my brightly colored lunch ticket because other students recognized it as the “free lunch ticket.” My lunch ticket publicly marked me as a poor have-not.

Another frequent worry in our household centered on heat in winter. I spent most weekends of my childhood and adolescence helping cut, split, and haul firewood. We sold it to others in order to have gas money and also to heat our home when we ran out of fuel oil in the winter. Our chimney wasn’t in the best shape, so smoke from the wood in the fireplace always hovered in the air like smog in Beijing or Los Angeles. When I walked out of the house and boarded the bus in wintertime, I reeked of smoke—another major source of embarrassment, another mark of poverty.

I loathed the holidays, especially Christmas. I remember a few Christmases without anything. No gifts. Furthermore, many Christmas days we’d be outside cutting, splitting, and hauling firewood to earn a little extra money. On those nights, I’d bury my head into my pillow and cry my eyes out while imagining all the happy kids with their Christmas cheer, visits from far-flung family members, traditions, and food. I had none of that. Alone and anguished, I wondered why God had forgotten me. Christmas was a sad time, a reminder of the bad news in my life. I longed to know what peace in my household and goodwill toward me meant.See Luke 2:14. I had no idea about how God’s goodwill in this life would be made manifest toward my family and me in a culture where Christmas sure seemed to be more about the gifts we received than about God with us. And so at Christmastime, too, I was acutely aware of my “have not” and “less than” status.

I certainly don’t want to convey the idea that all minorities, or even all Hispanic/Latino people, are poor. It’s just not true. However, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin reports that 45.6 million people, or 15 percent of the United States population, lived in poverty in 2012. The same report states that of those in poverty, “Blacks and Hispanics have poverty rates that greatly exceed the average.” Growing up, I often asked God why I was born into a family that was, on many levels, impoverished.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly loved my parents and siblings, and they loved me. I just hated the constant chaos and suffering. And at the time, as a child and adolescent, I could find nothing redemptive about what felt like a soul-crushing existence.

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01.  Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

I had a roof over my head—for that I could be truly grateful. Still, I knew what it was like for circumstances to force me into asking God for my daily bread.See Matthew 6:11. For the first half of my life, asking for my daily bread was a way of life. How did I learn to do that?

Well, as a young child I devoured the Bible on a daily basis. From the ages of ten to fourteen, I read the Bible for two to three hours after I did whatever chores needed to be done. I hated the constant drone of the television in the background, and so I’d escape to my room, or, if it was a nice day, I’d read outside while lying in the grass under a tree. Sometimes, I’d hide in a bush where I could see but not be seen by others. At an early age, I began practicing lectio divina, even though at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was.

As I read the Bible, I’d enter into the story. For a long time, I read the Old Testament. In my poverty, I could identify most with the Israelites in the wilderness. I returned to these verses in Exodus 2:23–25 (NIV) time and again:

 

During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

 

I entered the narrative and could identify with their guttural groans and their desperation for deliverance from their cage-like circumstances. In addition, it was comforting to know that God was concerned about me just as he was concerned for the Israelites. One of my favorite pictures, one that I still imagine over and over again, is the Israelites with their backs against the sea. After Pharaoh let them go, he changed his mind and chased them with his army. They were hemmed in—the Egyptian army had backed the Israelites against the Red Sea.See Exodus 14 So many times in my life, my back has been against the wall. I’ve been surrounded by difficult or menacing circumstances with no way of escape. At those times, I remember the Israelites with their backs against that watery wall. I reinsert myself into the story. I feel their suffocation, grief, unbelief, and near hopelessness. I look in front of me and see the Egyptian army. I look behind me and see the sea wall. Then I pray and picture my deliverance coming in some version of Psalm 18:6–7, 16–17 (NIV):

 

In my distress I called to the Lord;
I cried to my God for help.

From his temple he heard my voice;
my cry came before him, into his ears.

The earth trembled and quaked,
and the foundations of the mountains shook;
they trembled because he was angry.

He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
he drew me out of deep waters.

He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
from my foes, who were too strong for me.

 

In due time, which is never my time, he rescues and delivers me. Deliverance often comes out of left field and never how I imagine it will come. “Then [my] mouth was filled with laughter, and [my] tongue with shouts of joy” (Psalm 126:2, ESV). Like the Israelites, I find myself rejoicing, shouting, dancing, and doing a jig, because God has come through.

In Matthew 5:3, Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” When one is poor with no rich family members, connections, or ability to network, God is the only hope. Looking back, I realize that without me knowing it, my growing-up life cultivated a poverty of spirit within. Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton describes poverty of spirit this way,

 

In a way, I suppose, but not necessarily . . . if you were economically poor, you might have a sense more clearly of your need of God and of all that God can provide.”Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, homily on February 2, 2014. Private event.

 

He goes on to further explain,

When we have way more wealth than we need, sometimes we begin to think that with that wealth, it gives us power. We can do what we want; we don’t need anyone else. We don’t need God. How wrong.Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, homily.

 

Throughout my life, I’ve needed God for everything. Everything. I’ve had no other options but to turn to him. So while I was loathing my life and my circumstances, it’s only recently that I’ve begun to see that God used them for good.See Romans 8:28. Jesus calls people like me “blessed.”See Matthew 5:3.

Once, I was invited to give a talk about my life. A man in the audience asked a question and then publicly made this comment, “You are very childlike.” At first I was taken aback and embarrassed. What about me communicated childlikeness? I can only imagine it was what Brennan Manning calls “ruthless trust” in God. Like God’s poor children throughout the world with no safety net to catch them, I’ve had to learn how to run headlong into (what James Bryan Smith rightly calls) our good and beautiful God’s arms.James Bryan Smith, Our Good and Beautiful God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009). I’m certainly not trying to communicate that I’ve somehow made it or that circumstances are always dandy—and that is easy to do. Even now I go through great periods of darkness in the wilderness. That is why I mentioned earlier that God comes through at his time and in his way. When I am waiting for him, I don’t always like it. Sometimes I throw temper tantrums and accuse him of wrongdoing even while running into his arms. I can feel claustrophobic in his arms while he tries to soothe me during my wait for deliverance. I am no saint. What I am trying to say is that I’ve had practice. Running headlong into God’s embrace has become a spiritual discipline. It’s often my first inclination, but it is still a discipline.

More sophisticated Christians call me and my faith “simple.” It’s as if they are condescendingly patting me on the head and saying “Atta girl.” It’s as if the God I know doesn’t exist and that I am a simpleton in the kingdom. They treat me like I am naïve.

But if we are going to understand race, poverty, and spiritual formation, we have to learn that my experience is the experience of many of the poor and marginalized. Like blind Bartimaeus, the poor make a racket when we hear Jesus is passing by. Our desperation increases as Jesus approaches. We make a racket until we get Jesus’s attention. His presence emboldens us to yell all the more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” (Mark 10:48). After all, no one else hears. No one else notices. No one else has been able to help, liberate, or deliver us. When Jesus stops and asks us, “What do you want me to do for you?” (verse 51), we boldly make our requests because we trust James 5:16 (NIV) is true: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” Indeed, we are like the widow who persistently went after the unjust judge.See “The Parable of the Persistent Widow” in Luke 18:1–8. We persist in calling on God until he comes through, though we dare not believe that God is akin to an unjust judge (although at times we’re faced with the temptation to believe this).

Reading my Bible like I did and learning to trust God has leveled the playing field for me. Like the Virgin Mary in her Magnificat, I can sing,

 

My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant”

(Luke 1:46–48, NIV).

 

By internalizing the Scriptures, I’ve been able to climb the tree like Zacchaeus and see Jesus by sitting perched above the crowd.

I have the audacity to believe that God actually loves and cares for me and others—especially the poor, down-trodden, and marginalized. I may have been financially poor, but I’ve discovered God has given me a rich divine imagination and a wealth of relationships.

May we not dismiss the spiritual formation of the poor or of minorities. May we not treat them as less than in the kingdom because they are not as theologically sophisticated or complex or nuanced as we are. Maybe we have something to learn from them. Maybe they have a message for us.

Instead, may we dare to believe that God has met them in a way that he hasn’t met us. Believe them when they say God has come through in spectacular ways when no one else has. Perhaps we can learn to cling to God and his promises as they do. Let us not equate childlikeness in the kingdom with childishness. Didn’t Jesus tell us, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3, NIV).

Jean Vanier picks up on this theme in his thoughts about the intellectually and physically disabled. His words apply also to the poor and other marginalized groups. In his book Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John, he writes:

 

People with disabilities may have many disadvantages when it comes to capacities of knowledge and power, but in respect to the heart and things of love, many have an advantage. They need help and cry out for presence and friendship. In a mysterious way, they seem to open up to the God of Love and the love of God. By contrast, those who are seeking influence, acclaim and wealth for themselves often seem closed to God in their self-sufficiency.Jean Vanier, Drawn Into The Mystery of Jesus Through The Gospel of John (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004) 172–173.

 

What then can we learn about the connection between spiritual formation, race, and poverty? I think it is this: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3).