Poverty, Suffering and Graced Solidarity

Abstract

Suffering and enforced poverty have multiple causes: natural calamities and/or human volition. This essay reflects theologically on human-willed suffering and the attendant impoverishment. For the sake of brevity, the essay draws on episodes of suffering encountered by refugees in the Great Lakes region of Africa (mainly Rwanda and Burundi) by comparing and contrasting their experience with those passionately and vividly described by Elie Wiesel on the holocaust. The essay demonstrates how even in the worst forms of human suffering God uplifts, saves, encourages and brings life to the fore. It is an attempt to respond to the question: Where is God in the face of atrocious human tragedies and abject poverty? Since the kind of suffering being dealt with is structural and human-willed, this essay calls into question not so much God’s seeming aloofness but human responsibility or irresponsibility when 
faced with human inflicted suffering and grinding poverty