In the 1970s members of Catholic religious congregations held often heated conversations about poverty. The reasons were complex. The heat was understandable.
Catholic spirituality is the following of Jesus whose life, mission and way of death were bound up with poverty. This was normally interpreted in terms of simplicity and austerity of life, a guilt-inducing enough topic of conversation when community arrangements were put into question.
Discussion became more complex when Catholics recognised that the poverty of the many was not simply a fact but was imposed on them by the choices and attitudes of the few. They resonated with Anne Sexton's address to Jesus, 'Skinny man, you are somebody's fault'. Many religious privileged ministry with and to the poor and the advocacy that it required. The discussion then turned to the relative value of different works to which people had given their lives. It became a conversation best avoided.
A recent book by Fr Tony Herbert, Disturbing the Dust: Notes from the Margins, invites a return to this conversation. A Jesuit priest who has worked for over 30 years in India with the poorest villagers, he grapples with three questions: what to make of poverty, what happens when you commit yourself to people who are indigent, and how, in living, the three aspects of poverty — religious poverty, material poverty and its injustices, and personal emptiness — come together. He builds his reflections around encounters with villagers on his own journey.
His story begins when his religious ideal of serving the poorest of the poor leads him to enter their dusty reality. He finds himself a stranger there, unable to read situations, to understand people's lives or to lead them to better themselves.
Social analysis helped him to understand the nature of their poverty and its effects. They were of lower caste, in debt to higher caste landlords who underpaid them and took their land, abetted by the judicial and administrative system. Young people who protested against the injustice were savagely beaten by higher caste thugs and came to see themselves as naturally inferior and worthless. If they stood in the way of coal mining in the area, they were simply pushed off the land. They were not seen as inferior: their humanity was not seen at all.
Any foreigner who wished to associate with Dalits was naturally suspect and unwelcome in this world. When disturbing the dust of poverty by encouraging people to stand up for