Poverty, stigmas, and faith.

I've been chewing on this reading for a while.  Here's a section of it, if you're interested.

"Confronted by the suffering, disfigurement, impotence, and rejection suffered by lepers and the poorest of the poor generally – real threats and assaults on human beings to be sure – and overwhelmed by these conditions, those who stigmatize these people are overwhelmed in anxiety by their own vulnerability to this condition as something death-dealing that will radically strip life of its meaning – a ‘living death.’ To deflect their anxiety and to assure their own safety, they interpret those actually subjected to these conditions as deserving their fate through some fundamental defect as humans, that is, they are taken to be accursed and abandoned by God. What drives this sort of stigmatization, theologically expressed, is at bottom an anxiety about one’s own possible abandonment by God....

In the end, the most powerful negation of stigmatization is our direct engagement with those who are stigmatized in which we discover and respond to life – Christ in the person of the poor – rather than death. Indeed, St. John Chrysostom’s identification of the poor as the Altar of Christ urges and, for him, requires us to enter into that engagement. For we do not partake of the mysteries of the Eucharist at a distance; we must come forward and make physical contact with them. So, too often in the profaned world in which we live, it is there in the 'alleys' – marginalized social worlds – that we find the Altar of Christ in the poor and are bid to render hospitality.

Thus ought we ever to exercise hospitality by our own personal exertions, that we may be sanctified, and our hands be blessed. And if you give to the poor, disdain not yourself to give it, for it is not to the poor that it is given, but to Christ; and who is so wretched, as to disdain to stretch out his own hand to Christ? This is hospitality, this is truly to do it for God’s sake."