What do the Rich Need that the Poor can Provide?

"The Rich are Different," a blog post by a former Brooklyn cop who quotes The Great Gatsby to good effect. I am here at the Interfaith Worker Justice conference, talking to fundraisers at the grassroots about major gifts. For them $100-500 is a major gift. I ask them what the rich need, do not have, and cannot buy nor extort. What do the wealthy want, that the nearly destitute can provide? Make a gift to get a gift. Not all parents, however wealthy, want to raise a Daisy Buchanan. What must we do to be saved? The answer, signed Jesus Christ, was, Faith, hope, and charity. What is charity? Loving each others as God loves us. What does love mean? Treating each other as if the other were Jesus, i.e., godstuff in human dress. So what do the poor have that the rich need and can neither buy nor extort? 

Comments

[Tom Matrullo]

Eagleton gets to something like your question in this piece from a few years back, which doesn't seem dated to me:

Finding "a mutilated innocent as the truth of history" is clearly a sign of an infra dig sensibility, which only the ever expanding lower classes can possibly afford:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching

[Phil Cubeta]

Thanks. Quote from the piece: The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection.