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Pendle Hill Pamphlets
Functional Poverty
The three papers in this pamphlet derive vitality and validity from the unusual experiences of the author and from her spontaneous response to those experiences. Mildred Young, as well as her husband, Wilmer Young, was born into the Society of Friends. For a number of years they lived and taught at Westtown School. They have engaged in relief work in post-war Poland, in rehabilitation projects in the mining regions of Kentucky, in both rural and urban experiments in Pennsylvania, and in the work of the Delta Cooperative Farm in the sharecropper region of the South. Even more significant has been their connection with the Work Camp program of the American Friends Service Committee. Each summer for the past five years and again this season they have been intimately associated with at least one camp. This experience, both with the young people involved and the communities touched, was decisive for the development of the thesis of this pamphlet.
34 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 12, 2017
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January 21, 2021
Written in 1940, Ms Young outlines a path toward functional poverty and simplicity, differentiating this from actual poverty forced on the individual by a lack of resources. Simplicity is one of the core testimonies of the Society of Friends.
“My thesis is that some of the means for freeing our lives lie in drastic limiting of material possessions and processes, in a discipline which paradoxically has its rewards in extension of our facilities and of our strength and insight to use them to the full. But we cannot grasp these means for freeing our lives until the necessity is made plain in our own hearts and we want it completely." (p. 5)
“Functional poverty means an adjustment of the mechanics of living by clearing off the rubble. This is a clearing off that opens the way for new growth in wisdom, love and function. it means a discipline that tempers the tools by which we work, and scours clean the glass of self through we see at best but darkly.” (p. 20)
Her closing seems relevant in 2021 as we struggle with so many crises simultaneously: “The demands of need are so many, the disasters to which our civilization has brought us are on such a scale, that we cannot again know joy and freedom except through complete shedding of personal ambition, through achievement in ourselves the inalienable security of freedom from fear of loss, through earmarking for our fellow-humanity not one percent or a tithe, but the whole, of our resource.” (p. 37)
“My thesis is that some of the means for freeing our lives lie in drastic limiting of material possessions and processes, in a discipline which paradoxically has its rewards in extension of our facilities and of our strength and insight to use them to the full. But we cannot grasp these means for freeing our lives until the necessity is made plain in our own hearts and we want it completely." (p. 5)
“Functional poverty means an adjustment of the mechanics of living by clearing off the rubble. This is a clearing off that opens the way for new growth in wisdom, love and function. it means a discipline that tempers the tools by which we work, and scours clean the glass of self through we see at best but darkly.” (p. 20)
Her closing seems relevant in 2021 as we struggle with so many crises simultaneously: “The demands of need are so many, the disasters to which our civilization has brought us are on such a scale, that we cannot again know joy and freedom except through complete shedding of personal ambition, through achievement in ourselves the inalienable security of freedom from fear of loss, through earmarking for our fellow-humanity not one percent or a tithe, but the whole, of our resource.” (p. 37)
Displaying 1 of 1 review