Why is most of the West , including the US not more civilized in response to the needs of the rest of the world? Why not more Christian in its attitude to strangers? How does each Christian deal with this contradiction?
D. H Larence's novel, The Rainbow, helps with his story of a young woman about 1900 who goes to church and has to think through what she hears and what she thinks. We can assume that many young people go through this trial.
I have often asked when will we include novels as legitimate empirical evidence about human beings and how they live?
“Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor," she heard on Sunday morning. That was plain enough, plain enough for Monday morning too. As she went “down the hill to the station, going to school, she took the saying with her.
"Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor."
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys: the unlovely uncombed Wherrys, who were the "poor" to her? She did not.
She walked this Monday morning on the verge of misery. For she did want to do what was right. And she didn't want to do what the gospels said “She didn't want to be poor-really poor. The thought was a horror to her: to live like the Wherrys, so ugly, to be at the mercy of everybody.
"Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor."
One could not do it in real life. How dreary and hopeless it made her!”