There were fifteen families in the Clydeside tenement in Scotland where I spent my boyhood. All were poor, but we were about the poorest, living in a single room. For part of the time my father (an honest, sober, hard-working shipyard laborer) was unemployed, for those were the Depression years. Our income was twenty-three shillings a week ($5 then), and that was before the rent was paid. We never had jam on our table till I was fourteen. Yet never once did I go to bed hungry.
It was many years before I met really hungry people. To see the hungry you have to go out of your way. When I did, there was something ironic about it. A village in a remote part of eastern Turkey had been devastated by an earthquake. When I got there, emergency relief supplies were beginning to arrive, but the destitute and illiterate survivors were bewildered by the labels on canned meat from kind people in one Western European country. With more heart than sense they had mixed in cans of pork, not realizing that this was a Muslim community.
In Haiti soon afterwards I saw hungry people in the waterfront shantytown at Port-au-Prince. Hungry people provoke unlikely reactions: their predicament I was to contrast most unfavorably with the ascetic but orderly economy of neighboring Cuba.
Not long ago in England a young couple, moved by the plight of the world’s hungriest, auctioned all their furniture and gave the proceeds for relief work. This was their response to what is called “active involvement in the world hunger crisis”—a standard euphemism for the millions of people who are starving to death one by one. But of course “it is a lot easier emotionally to handle the fact that millions of people are starving if we don’t see them as individuals.”
That sentence is from W. Stanley Mooneyham’s newly published book, What Do You Say to a Hungry World? (Word, $6.95). Mooneyham, president of World Vision International, admits that he does not have all the answers to his question, but he manifestly agrees with the Epistle of James on what not to say: “If a fellow man or woman has no clothes to wear and nothing to eat, and one of you say, ‘Good luck to you, I hope you’ll keep warm and find enough to eat,’ and yet give them nothing to meet their physical needs, what on earth is the good of that?” (Phillips).
Mooneyham is greatly troubled that a quarter of the world’s population—one thousand million people—are trying to exist on an average of twenty-seven cents a day. His intention is that you and I shall be made clearly and uncomfortably aware of their misery. His is no academic dissertation: he tells us simply but grippingly what he has seen in Ethiopia and Latin America, among the Middle East’s two million displaced Palestinians, the homeless hordes of Calcutta, the people uprooted in recent Asian wars, and millions more. No political implications, but a steady look at things as they are and what can be done about the situation.
He dismisses some myths that have come into vogue; among them: that it is impossible to produce enough food to feed the present world population, much less any increase; that the starving masses are about to revolt; that the United States is generous in actual grant assistance to poor countries.
He reminds us that the food crisis does not stand in isolation from the rest of the world’s problems but is exacerbated by climatic conditions, an uncontrolled population, ecological factors, deficient medical services, inadequate educational programs, discriminatory distribution systems, global economic inequity, and repressive political regimes. Mooneyham could doubtless have spelled out these latter factors and increased the impact of his case, but one can assume that in the interests of the ongoing work the half may not be told.
Confronted by disaster, he nevertheless rejects the view that would take refuge in apocalyptic and a withdrawal from the world until the imminent Crowning Day. That would be a denial of the dual citizenship that obliges us to care for physical as well as spiritual deprivation. Because he believes this passionately, Mooneyham has ranged the world to find the nature of the need and where it is greatest so that he and his colleagues can help to meet that need in the name of Christ.
His work has taken him into desolate and dangerous places. He has seen harrowing destitution as few of us have. He has been not only a planner and an administrator but of necessity a diplomat as well, for frustrating man-made obstacles are put in the way of meeting man’s need. National pride is one. Incompetence and corruption in high places are others. Not least, sometimes at home there seems to have been sheer ignorance and almost deliberate misunderstanding, not only of his mission but of his basic thesis that world hunger calls for a moral and ethical approach to the use and misuse of world resources. (That last sentence is mine more than Mooneyham’s.)
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It must have been a constant temptation in this most complex subject to take off on diversions around the periphery, but Mooneyham has stuck to his task with an admirable singlemindedness. He never lets us off the hook for long. He keeps confronting us with uncomfortable, irrefutable facts that people don’t much care for, and that will keep his book off the best-seller lists. Those who do expose themselves to it are buying 272 pages worth of trouble, including some 130 footnotes that should forestall any charge that this is all just one man’s hobbyhorse.
Mooneyham’s whole thesis presupposes a truth of which we should not but do need to be reminded: that Christian living calls for Christian caring. Not that many of us are in the slightest danger of lovelessly bestowing all our goods to feed the poor; perhaps, more insidiously, our imbalance may be found in the area of angelic tongues-speaking, which requires an expenditure of energy that only the well-fed can afford. Even more likely, however, we will stumble because of a failure of the imagination even more terrible than the example I cited earlier, a failure summed up in those most blankly uncomprehending words, “Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty …?”
With his unique capacity for the vivid illustration, Mooneyham tells that during an international conference of world Jewry in Brussels, the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union loomed large, provoking the expression of strong opinions. At two o’clock in the morning, one of the delegates was awakened by the ringing of his telephone. “Why are you calling me at this hour?” he demanded irritably. “Because,” came the inexorable response, “you were sleeping.”
Stan Mooneyham rings a strident alarm all through these pages. He is a troublemaker who places inordinate demands on our compassion. Why couldn’t he have stuck to quiet talks on personal holiness?
J. D. DOUG’AS
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