Exodus From Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger by David Beckmann

Exodus From Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger by David Beckmann

Author:David Beckmann [Beckmann, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: United States, Religion; Politics & State, Christian Life, Missions, Christian Ministry, Church and social problems, Religious aspects, Christianity and politics, Social Issues, Christianity, Religion, Hunger, Economic assistance; American
ISBN: 9780664236847
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 2010-10-20T05:55:35+00:00


JOE MARTINGALE, A BALANCED LIFE

Joe Martingale grew up in Brooklyn, New York, one of nine children in a Catholic working-class family. His father was a longshoreman, and although they weren’t exactly poor, they “didn’t have anything extra.”

Joe benefited from a good education. He attended Catholic schools and, after four years in the navy, graduated from St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. Joe earned his law degree at Columbia University.

He went on to have a successful career. He was a lawyer on Wall Street, then an executive for JC Penney, and ended up spending most of his working life as a healthcare consultant.

He was surrounded by ambitious New Yorkers. To most of the people he worked with, “Billable time was everything,” says Joe. “The pressure to have a lot of billable time and develop new business pushes people over the edge in how they run their lives.”

But Joe always knew there was more to life than the bottom line. He remembered the working-class people from his boyhood neighborhood, those who were sometimes barely keeping food on the table. He also remembered the lessons he learned about “what was important” from his mother and his Catholic education—namely, caring for others, especially hungry and poor people.

Joe and his wife, Mary, have consistently given away a large percentage of their income. Some years they have donated as much as 50 percent of their income, and never less than 25 percent, to Bread for the World and other organizations that help hungry and poor people. Joe insists that because he was lucky enough to earn a good salary, “the sacrifice was never great.”

Joe also dedicated as much of his time to serving hungry and poor people as he did to his high-paying, high-pressure career. Mary and Joe volunteered at an overnight shelter for homeless women run by a local Methodist church. He was inspired by how his fellow volunteers, who he describes as “salt-of-the-earth working people, veterans, marines,” kept the ministry running, although many of them were struggling to make ends meet themselves.

For more than twenty years, Joe and Mary spent several nights a month staffing the twelve-bed facility. He would serve a meal and sleep at the shelter, then rush home to shower and change, and hurry off to catch a plane for a business trip or get to a downtown meeting.

One night at the shelter, he watched an old woman struggle down the steep stairs to the church basement. She had been living on the streets for many years and, like the others at the shelter, came looking for a hot meal and a safe place to sleep for the night.

“She was eighty-nine years old,” Joe recounted with emotion in his voice. “I looked at her, and she reminded me of my own mother, who was of the same generation. I thought, ‘What is wrong with our country?’ I just couldn’t imagine that with all our wealth, this eighty-nine-year-old woman could be left to scramble for a bed at night.”

For Joe, the question “What is wrong with our country?” wasn’t just rhetorical.



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