October 17

St. John the Dwarf, Jeannine Deckers, and the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Author

David Barnhart
October 17, 2025

Fig leaves, 2016. Own photo.

Today is the Roman Catholic feast day of St. John the Dwarf of Egypt, who died in 405. The story goes that his spiritual director, St. Pambo, gave him a dry piece of wood and told him to plant it water it daily. After three years it produced fruit. He founded a monastery around “The Tree of Obedience.” John was a vegetarian for his whole monastic life.  

Today is the birthday, in 1933, of “The Singing Nun,” Jeannine Deckers, a Belgian nun whose songwriting and singing became internationally famous in the 1960’s. Unfortunately, her record label treated her terribly. She left her order, struggled with her faith, and she and her partner completed suicide in 1985. 

Today marks the death, in 1993, of Helmut Gollwitzer, a German pastor who was part of the Confessing Church movement that opposed Nazism.

Reflection: 

Helmut Gollwitzer wrote that the word “grace” could be faithfully rendered as “solidarity”:: 

“’God is solidarity with us’… We are surrounded, carried, ruled and expected by an eternal Solidarity that stands on our side, suffers with us, fights for us, sacrifices itself of us, and wins the future for us. That is our reality, this is the source of our life. This Solidarity gives us guidance for our life, and at the same time promises to stand in for us when, through following its guidance, as is to be expected, we meet hostility and the gravest affliction. This is the confidence of those who hear and receive this Solidarity. … And when we treat in an opposite manner the man who at our side is downtrodden and oppressed and hungry, and ourselves tread others down and oppress them, then we are unsolidary with the God who is solidary with this fellow-man, and whose solidarity is the source of our own life.”

According to the U.N. website, 

“Over 690 million people live in extreme income poverty (under $2.15 per day), and nearly half the world lives below $6.85 per day, leaving many just one shock away from hardship.”

It is difficult to talk about “the eradication of poverty” in the United States, even in the church. We have been conditioned to believe that poverty is a natural state, an inevitable fact of human existence that exists because some people are lazy or unfortunate. 

There is nothing “natural” about poverty. Poverty is manufactured. The four wealthiest men in the United States have more wealth than the bottom half of our population combined. “Wealth” in this context is not dollars or material goods — it is political power and the ability to horde or distribute tangible goods. We have more empty housing than homeless people, and we produce more food than the world can consume. Poverty is a political invention, and it exists because it remains useful to those in power. 

We in the church have an obligation to state this reality loudly, repeatedly, and emphatically. Policy change can only happen if people of faith tell the truth about poverty. 

Prayer: God of abundance, make us discontent with the existence of poverty. Amen.