Mutuality vs inequality

The relationship issue that vexes me the most

Growing up in Kenya, we had a steady stream of visitors to our house—pastors stopping in for tea to discuss the progress of their churches, church members who were in the vicinity, friends or friends of friends looking for a job or school fees or assistance with a medical problem or a ride to a wedding.  Most everyone needed help of some kind, and they'd be a fool not to ask the "rich" American missionaries.  They came at all hours of the day, mostly unexpected, occasionally staying for meals, or rarely, overnight, depending on the timing of their visit.

Everyone was poor, on a level unseen in the developed world.  Our town was not a big city, and many of our visitors lived in its rural hinterlands, in mud huts or wooden shacks without electricity or running water.  I watched the eyes of our first-time visitors widen as they took in our house, filled with all my parents’ worldly possessions that the US army had kindly moved to Kenya for us upon my father’s retirement. Most missionary houses were nice but sparsely furnished, but not ours.

I remember one young man named Albert looking around our house, with all its knick-knacks and superfluousness, in bewilderment, then asking my mother, "When you move, do you take all of this with you?"  

My mother was rather amused by his query, as it showed zero understanding of the clear, indisputable value of a Hummel collection, but I thought he had a point.  Now that I have my own impressive collection of knick knacks that I have had the misfortune of packing and moving several times, I think Albert was a freaking genius.

I grew accustomed to seeing poverty everywhere I looked.  In most cases, in the rural areas around our home, it didn't appear to be the kind that necessarily ran counter to a happy life. People had basic food, clothing, shelter, and security.  Children laughed and played, kicking homemade soccer balls across grassy fields without an apparent care in the world.  Physically overburdened women carried firewood on their backs and babies on their chests, but chatted with the effortlessness of suburban moms at Starbucks.  Neatly dressed families walked miles to church, where they sang with a weightless joy, giving no hint of the labor it must have taken to get all their bodies and clothes clean without a convenient supply of water.  In the words of Tanzania's founding president, Julius Nyerere, people were "all poor together."  Poverty was so commonplace, it carried with it no shame or immediate threat.

Except by comparison. Which we provided with our presence.

There was also the tragic sort of poverty, of people whose lives teetered on the brink, some of them born on the cliff's edge and some having arrived via one small stroke of bad luck, a father dying of cancer, a young woman raped and impregnated, an old woman abandoned, a farm stolen, a job lost, a cow felled by disease.  There were the street boys, orphans and runaways, their faces encrusted with neglect and self-preservation, their eyes vacant and milky from sniffing glue.  There were the polio survivors, their legs like tangled barbed wire beneath bodies they dragged around on knuckles.  Some fashioned small carts on wheels, just barely off the ground, to aid their mobility. 

Most Kenyans were high-wire acrobats with no safety net.  Most of the time, they made it look easy, but one slipped grip could mean total devastation.

I always felt a strange mix of pride and embarrassment over our comparably opulent lifestyle.  On the one hand, the immature part of me puffed up at the gaping mouths of our visitors, as if our relative wealth and the appointment of our home was of some credit to me or even our family.  It takes maturity to understand that one's station in life is owed much more to luck than effort, talent, or virtue.  And only a child, or morally flawed adult, gleefully revels in having so much more than another human being.

At the same time, it was unsettling in a way I could not articulate to live on an island of such garish privilege.  In hindsight, I wonder what people must have felt to see these Americans, supposedly called by God to serve them, living so high above them.  Perhaps there was some envy, some anger, probably some confusion, and even ridicule. But I never sensed a negative emotion from anyone. They were too busy making their way in a difficult world.  Stopping to ponder why they had little and we had much might mean missing an opportunity that could make all the difference.  Why question why someone had money when they might give you some of it?

Just as the poor can easily be dehumanized into a category, a problem, or in the best case, a charitable undertaking, the privileged, particularly the visible, foreign privileged, can be refashioned into a commodity.  In either direction, though, it is an arrangement that can make it difficult to form mutual relationships between equals, even within the bonds of a shared faith.  The natural flow of human interaction across such inequalities tends toward condescension and exploitation.

In my dozens of interviews with other missionary kids, the word “awkward” came up a lot in discussing their families’ relationships with local communities, which usually lived at a lower station than missionary families. Or even when the socioeconomic chasm wasn’t so great, there were other dynamics that put missionary families in a position of greater power or influence or separated them from others. Sometimes it was just by virtue of being “in ministry,” a relationship model that can preclude mutuality, an equal, balanced relationship between peers, where one party doesn’t consistently or drastically need the other one more or expect from them much more.

These missionary kids recalled what I remember from my childhood, living in the midst of people who weren’t the same as you, feeling like you should have relationships of mutuality with them but not knowing how to do that. Watching your parents trying, too, mostly unsuccessfully, if they were honest. Regardless of the setting, most of our parents’ relationships, formed primarily through ministry, struggled to attain true mutuality.

In my American life, I remain acutely sensitive to inequalities in my relationships. There seems to always be one person who is richer, better educated, more attractive, more talented, more popular, and more successful, and has more connections, better things, better health, and fewer problems.

In general, especially these days, I chafe less when I am in the inferior position, although there have been some cases where my jealousy of someone else has become a major impediment. But more often, due to my ridiculous, undeserved, random privilege, I find myself on upper rungs of various ladders. And I still don’t know what to do with that. I still don’t know how to be.

I believe much more so than when I was a child that human connection and belonging requires mutuality and that every person I encounter offers that to me and deserves that approach.

And, yes, that’s true even in—especially in—contexts of charity. When a homeless person talks to me on the street, it is my moral obligation to see them as a mutual, a fellow human being, a person worth knowing, even if for a moment.

If I have a friend who is struggling in some way, it is my responsibility both to do what I can to support her AND to do it in a way that does not diminish her or make her feel less than. Even if by some objective measure of this cruel and variable life—not with regard to her inherent worth, but by other lesser, worldly standards—she is.

But where does generosity end and condescension begin? How do you prevent that slide, either in your own heart or the other person’s perception?

I lost a good friend of many years a few years ago. There’s an interpretation of our falling out in which it was mostly her fault. But that version of events has no bearing on me. My responsibility is to try to understand what was my fault. And I think, at bottom, it was because I failed to do my part to achieve mutuality between us.

There were very few, if any, obvious inequalities between us. Maybe because they weren’t obvious, I didn’t compensate for them. I didn’t try to remove them. There was always something “off” between us, a sort of tension I couldn’t quite locate. I repeatedly handled it without grace or wisdom.

It turns out that, despite 15 years of trying, we were never mutual friends, even though we were in a relationship that seemingly offered that in spades. In which we each expected it.

So how do you pursue mutuality in your relationships? I don’t know. I just know it does not result from simply ignoring or pretending there are no inequalities. Inequality is a glaringly obvious fact of life. And true belonging is not simply finding commonality and glossing over difference. It’s inviting difference in, welcoming it as it is.

And I’ve yet to master that. Because it’s hard.

I’d love to hear from you. Here’s a scenario for you—a real one I’ve been part of. You’re at a friend’s party, mainly members of her church. Everyone there is middle-to-upper class, well educated, successful. Except for one man, who is pretty obviously poor, uneducated, struggling. What is your approach? How do you achieve mutuality with this guest? (and obviously, the friend who hosted him is way ahead of me on this issue).