Searching for Love while Down and Out in Paris and London

My grandparents lived through the Great Depression. I once heard a story from my grandmother about the time she retraced her steps for over an hour while walking along an arid pasture near Clyde, Texas because she thought she might have walked by a nickel. When I was in college and long labeled a “career student” by my grandfather he was always asking if I needed money. Sometimes I did, but most of the time I did not. I always worked part-time and even some full-time jobs while in college, but my grandfather worried anyways. He would often say, “I just don’t want to see you get destitute.”
Destitute is a word forgotten by people my age. My grandparents’ generation lived it. They had stretches where they could not take for granted the basic necessities of life. There was no easy credit. There was no governmental safety net. When you were broke, you were broke, and you might be without a place to live, decent clothes to wear, and basic hygiene, all of which would make finding any job difficult. I used to have no idea what that would be like until I recently read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
Orwell never says how or why he ended up broke in Paris, but he writes of his experiences living in a run-down apartment and trying hard to make it through daily life. There is a friendship with a Russian waiter, a cat-and-mouse game with their landlords, pawn shop exploits, run-ins with cagey socialists (who were more likely con men acting as socialists), and vivid descriptions of what life as a busboy was like in the late 1920s. Orwell then follows the lead of supposedly steady work across the channel to London, but the job doesn’t pan out and he fares even worse while there.
In England laws were different than in Paris, so charity houses were set up to keep “tramps” on the move. They would spend each day traveling to a new hostel in which they could only stay one night and then move on again the next day. It was obviously a short-term “solution” to a long-term problem, but whoever considered politicians to be any good at tackling something even just one second longer than their current term in office?
Orwell also writes of his experiences with church soup kitchens, and as a pastor it was painful to read his descriptions from the other side of the exchange. The whole bait and switch seemed apparent. Come for free tea and toast, but then stay through our worship service in which we have a special message just for the “unsaved sinners” among us today. When Orwell describes one such church service he concludes, “A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.”
Of course, not every run-in with Christians was negative for Orwell. One clergyman simply gave meal tickets to those who needed it without preaching at anyone, and Orwell noticed how there was genuine gratitude felt toward that clergyman instead of contempt. Of course, the consensus among the tramps receiving their tickets was that such a good clergyman would never become a bishop!
Orwell finishes his book by sharing what he learned from being destitute in two of the largest cities on earth: “I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”
What I learned from Orwell is confirmation of what McGill identifies as the difference between love and mere charity. Inasmuch as love is self-giving, opens us up to neediness, and brings us back to the God who loves us, charity received is as cold and callous as charity given. This is not to say that charity is pure evil, after all, Orwell and the crowd he ran with utilized it begrudgingly. But charity is not the same as love. Charity talks, while love listens. Giving charity is painless, but love requires you to enter someone else’s pain. Few people want to do that because, as John Savage argues, “you can enter the pain of another only at the level you can enter your own.”
We have strong and creative ways of protecting ourselves from our own pain, and might our preference of charity over love be another mode of protection? Jesus did not say that the world will know his people by their charity. He said we would be known by our love. What are you known for?