There’s no love for a poor man...

“There’s no love for a poor man,” ahhh, now there’s a Google search term that just broke my heart. It isn’t true, you know, there is lots of love for a poor man, poor in riches, but well off in spirit. I married such a man, on purpose, and it was the best decision I ever made. He has a good heart and soul, comes from a large family, and built himself a business that has always kept food on the table and the lights on. How can I not admire such a man? He’s made something out of nothing. Besides having raised four kids, we’ve taken trips, gone camping, bought a house, had some great fun and good memories.

One of the best things about my job is that I get to work with a lot of widows and widowers and they tell me the most beautiful love stories, the stuff of fairy tales and romance novels, and yet very raw and real. They speak to me of how “he didn’t have two sticks to rub together” not “two nickles to his name” and yet they knew he was the one. They tell me tales about the Great Depression and WW2 and how they started with nothing, how poor they were, how they put their babies to sleep in dresser drawers.

The men tell me about having spied the most beautiful creature they had ever seen, about being scared and yet being hopeful. Some who never doubted for a moment that she would love them back, and some who doubted so much they rubbed their eyes every morning wondering if she was for real.

In hospice work they like to give you helpful handouts designed to comfort those in the grieving process with some useful “facts.” One such fact is that when you lose your wife or husband you tend to idolize and idealize them. A woman in her 90’s with the language of a sailor, told me that was a bunch of hooey. “I worshipped the ground he walked on while he was alive,” she said. “It’s only now, for the first time in my life I’m angry with him because he left me.” Painful stuff, but bittersweet, too. We have a great capacity to love.

That search term got to me because I know how important it is for many men to provide, to have a sense of self-worth that comes from their work. I see the toll a bad economy and limited opportunities take on men. Yes, women suffer too, but there is just something so innate to men that makes their work important to them. It goes farther than simple provision, it becomes a part of their identity, how they define themselves, their sense of self-worth and value. Pride, the good kind, often comes from having work you enjoy and being employed.

Times are changing and in spite of all the hype, the economy is not doing so well. Businesses are collapsing, people are being laid off. It is tough out there and there is collateral damage strewn about all over the place. We in the current age do not have the same economic opportunities all my widows and widowers had. It is far more challenging for us even earn a living let alone to rise up from poverty and create what our parents or grandparents did.

We are not our wealth or our work. We are not even our ability to produce and provide, we are so much more and we are all greatly loved. These are hard times that call for many of us to become rich in spirit, to store our treasures up in heaven. Traditionally men have often gotten their identity, their value, through their ability to provide and to provide as lavishly as possible. That is The World however, the materialistic way we learn to define ourselves. That is not who and what we are, that is not what God sees in us.

Now here’s something that men could actually learn from women, “work” is not always about money, work is about what we do and who we are and how we love.

It’s a serious issue, lots of suicides out there, financial stress breaking up families, young men feeling lost and unsure what their role is supposed to be. Be gentle with yourselves and oddly, look to your mothers and grand mothers. They are the one’s that understood that “work” is not always about money and that being “poor” does not have to mean being poor in spirit.

So, there’s no love for a poor man, yes, yes there is. All those great romantic stories I am so blessed to hear, all those long and happy marriages, began with a poor man who was greatly loved.

sanitized truth and fairytales

As a kid I was blessed to have gotten my hands on an ancient book of fairy tales, many ancient books actually, the original Nancy Drews, the Wizard of Oz. Some people don’t realize it, but these versions are different from what we see today. They have characters full of dimension, angst, suffering, sometimes a rare triumph and victory. We have edited and sanitized these stories, bringing them more in line with the political correct attitudes of today. The modern versions of Nancy Drew are so flat and two-dimensional, so full of stupid and boring, she has been rendered nearly impotent, transformed into something so unappealing many girls have no interest in her at all anymore.

I remember reading many of these tales and being horrified, traumatized even. But is that not the sign of a really good piece of literature? Isn’t it somehow wonderful to finish a book feeling as if you had just walked through those adventures yourself and to now look up and realize your very perceptions of reality itself have changed?

When it comes to fairy tales, disneyfication happened, sanitizing those tales into something pleasant and charming, something people would find appealing to share with their children. We don’t want any trauma here, no uncomfortable feelings, and certainly not any complex moral issues that might cause one to think too critically or to question anything. Also, everyone must always get their prince or princess and live happily ever after in a palace….

I’ve been known to run around singing like a teapot a la Angela Lansbury or trilling to the forest creatures like Snow White, so it’s not as if enjoying these versions are bad or something.

It’s simply that in the modern western world we now live a rather sanitized and insulated existence, walled off even from the nature of our own selves. Even love is now reduced to something akin to a Hallmark card, a somewhat flat and two dimensional thing involving receiving little commercialized tokens of affection and endless romance. It is no surprise we have so much divorce, so much unhappiness, so much frustration. Where’s my happily ever after, the trilling forest creatures, the palace I ordered??

In the Gift of the Magi, she sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch, while he sells his watch to buy her some combs for her hair. Those somewhat comical stories of human foibles and sacrifice for love are all but forgotten today.

In the original Little Mermaid there is no fun loving Ariel. She gives up everything, her identity, her very life itself, just to taste what it is like to have a human soul, to suffer unrequited love. She sacrifices her very life just to know human suffering. She does not get her prince in the end, she sacrifices herself and finds God instead.

Cinderella isn’t really a story about true love and finding your prince, it’s a story about suffering and grief, about unfair circumstances and injustice and the cruelty of human beings. It’s about sexual competitiveness, power struggles, and the hierarchies of human nature. It’s a about preserving your soul and keeping your heart soft in the face of such challenges. It’s about the beauty to be found in suffering, graciousness, humility. “Cinderella,” the name itself, in all it’s different versions and translations, means one whose worth is not seen on the outside.

Beauty and the Beast is about sacrifice too, about letting go and learning how to love in the face of fear. Beauty must let go of all her preconceived notions, her fears and simply trust her heart, take a leap of faith. But the Beast must let go of Beauty herself and risk living under a curse for the rest of his life. There are lovely themes about freedom, sacrifice, and love, woven all throughout the original story.

These are such valuable and important life lessons to know, so I perceive the loss of these fairy tales as a kind of theft. We have been robbed of the truth about our own selves and deprived of the commonality of the human experience.

Pinocchio, he wants to be a real boy, but he is trapped in his own deceptions. Truth is something we as people tend to have a hard time with, always thinking we can improve the tale of ourselves, simply by retelling it in a fashion more to our liking.