It might be said that The View From Down in Poordom is a long meditation on my mother and her story of childhood abandonment and poverty, as the book begins and ends with her story.
My book The View From Down in Poordom is dedicated to the memory of my beloved parents Goldie and Deanie McKay.
Many years before my mom died in 1995, I interviewed her for a family history. She had always been reluctant to talk about her story and why she hated her father so much that she had to leave forgiveness of him to God.
Before I prodded her into sitting down and talking about her growing-up years and how she and my grandmother and aunt and uncle were abandoned, she used to simply say of my grandfather that “he was a dandy little son of a bitch who wore a derby hat and carried a cane.” That’s about all she had to say and that was that.
Her memory of her father wasn’t warm and fuzzy for sure. But then, all those family tales in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, aren’t warm and fuzzy either. Read the stories of deception, betrayal, abandonment and hatred in the patriarchal stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their many wives and children.
Read about His Greatness King David’s god-awful family life in the books of Samuel and Chronicles–especially the end of the old king’s life.
The Bible is not the stuff of a Happy Day Hallmark Card, not all of it anyway. Those awful biblical stories are the stories of us, today and forever, as sin-sick, broken individuals, families and communities.
We’re all trying to get along in a messy, violent world and all in need of the healing power of God’s extravagant grace.
But as for my mother’s story, what I always remembered so distinctly in my interview with her was her saying something about her poverty that became part of the book and the book’s very title.
“We were pretty far down in Poordom for a while,” she told me.
Poordom. Being the language and word lover that I am, I was struck by that word she coined. It was years later, in seminary, that I connected the word to my study of the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God is very much the Poordom of God, for God so loved the poor, as evidenced on almost every page of the Bible, that we read in the Bible that God said “to know me, know the poor.” (See Jeremiah 22:33-37 and also see my book: I have a whole chapter about that quote.)
My mother survived poverty and lived a good long and happy and healthy life of 84 years, including 40 years with my dad before his sudden death of a heart attack in his sleep at age 70.
But her time in Poordom left marks on her–so much so that she couldn’t stand to see a child go hungry. Her whole 84 years she worried about whether all her family members had eaten, so much so that to this day I and my firstborn daughter and her granddaughter Amy Rodriguez joke when we see or call each other: “Yeaten yet?”
This woman who grew up knowing the pain of hunger and malnourishment constantly had to be reassured that no McKay blood was hungry.
As the old joke goes, I picked great parents.
Happy Mothers Day and may God’s grace be shed upon those grieving sons and daughters and grandchildren mourning the loss of a mom or dad today–it’s always a painful day for many among us who’ve lost a family member in recent weeks, months or years.
Leave a Reply