‘If you hear his voice, harden not your hearts’
Credit to Author: The Manila Times| Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2019 17:36:57 +0000
Woe to the complacent in Zion! Lying upon beds of ivory, stretched comfortably on their couches, they eat lambs taken from the flock, and calves from the stall! … Therefore, now they shall be the first to go into exile, and their wanton revelry shall be done away with.
– The Book of Amos, 6:1, 4-7
At our Tuesday Bible sharing, a participant with decades of spiritual work admitted being mystified by a priest’s comment on last Sunday’s Mass readings: “We are a Catholic country, yet why is there so much poverty around?
Now, that remark could not be referring to economics, since non-Catholic nations do tend to be wealthier than Catholic ones. In Europe, northern Protestant countries like Britain, Germany and Switzerland have long led the region.
In the Western Hemisphere, the United States and Canada are far richer than Catholic Latin America. And for decades, the only Catholic nation in Asia lagged behind its Confucian, Buddhist and Muslim neighbors.
Rather than comparing national wealth and religions, however, the homilist probably lamented that Catholic Filipinos did not practice Catholic teachings, so that the rich didn’t do much to uplift the poor, as Jesus taught. Hence, the masses wallow in material poverty, while the elite lack charity — the wealth of the soul.
That picture was, of course, the very parable Jesus told in last Sunday’s Gospel reading, about a rich man and a poor man in life and after death (The Gospel of Luke, 16:19-31).
From destitution, eating scraps from the rich man’s table, Lazarus (not the Jesus’ friend raised from the dead) finds solace at Abraham’s bosom in heaven. But the man of wealth ends up in the netherworld, tormented by flames and pleading with Abraham to give him relief, and warn his brothers by sending Lazarus to them.
To which Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets.” The rich man countered that “if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.” Then Abaham said, “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.”
In the words of this week’s responsorial Psalm 95, the rich man and his brethren, like other wealthy people all the way to our day, heard the Lord’s voice in the pleas and plight of the poor, as well as the admonition of the prophets, but hardened their hearts.
Like the “complacent” mentioned by the prophet Amos in the above-quoted reading from last Sunday, the rich live it up with little care for God or His suffering creatures.
The uncaring rich
So, what’s it about wealth that makes those who have it turn cold to God and man?
Commenting on the September 22 column two Sundays ago, one online reader disputed the article’s point that the rich could learn generosity from the poor (https://www.manilatimes.net/2019/09/22/opinion/columnists/topanalysis/why-god-cares-for-the-poor-and-we-should-too/620039/).
Yet in truth, wealth does have a way of making one less mindful of faith and the supernatural. And contrary to conventional wisdom and the online reader’s comment, the rich often do fall short in generosity, as shown not only in Scripture, but in academic studies, too.
A team of researchers at leading science institution University of California Berkeley (UCB) found greater generosity among the poor in a series of experiments. Participants were to share $10 with strangers. A few days earlier, they filled out a questionnaire on their socioeconomic status.
Those placed lower on the social scale were actually more charitable. This squared with surveys showing that lower-income people shared a larger percentage of their income than the wealthy (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_poor_give_more).
Another UCB experiment put participants through exercises that made them feel they were of higher or lower status. Then they had to apportion set incomes among food, recreation, charity giving and other spending. Result: Those of lower status allotted more to donations.
Other research found the less affluent willing to do acts of help and caring than the rich. But when the latter were induced to have more compassion, they did the same kind acts. This suggests the poor have more sympathy, maybe because they are more exposed to the needy than the rich are.
This apparent lack of compassion was found in another experiment, where participants were shown videos of patio-making and cancer-stricken children. The less well-off felt greater sympathy for the cancer patients.
As published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers led by UCB psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, concluded: ““Whereas lower-class individuals may give more of their resources away, upper-class individuals may tend to preserve and hold onto their wealth. [This could] could serve to exacerbate economic inequality.”
There’s more. The Chronicle of Philanthropy found that between 2006 and 2012, including the 2007-08 US financial crisis, donations from various income groups tended to grow less or even drop as the donors got richer (https://www.vox.com/2014/10/7/6920269/recession-charity-chronicle-of-philanthropy-rich-poor-inequality).
Those earning $25,000 or less raised the proportion of their income given to charity by 16.6 percentage points, while at the other end, donors raking in $200,000 or more annually cut the income share of their donations by 4.5 percentage points.
The UCB researchers “suspect that … wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused,” reports Scientific American magazine (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/).
The need to heed God’s voice
Today’s Mass readings may offer the solution to uncaring wealth. For if the rich lack charity due to excessive self-focus and independence from others, then they should hear in their hearts, not just their ears, the prophet Habakkuk crying to God for succor, the apostle Paul urging sacrifice for Christ’s Gospel, and the Lord Jesus extolling the power of faith — not just our belief in God, but our deep relationship with Him.
Plainly, if one allows affluence to shut the heart from both God and others, then charity and compassion shrivel. And not even a dead man’s visit would soften one’s heart.