There is one week of the year, sometime around now, when all the flowering shrubs go nuts at once: lilac, honeysuckle, spirea - any woody shrub that can flower does so, spectacularly. Right now they're all going full blast. The spireas along the driveway, where it's sunny, are so loaded with blossom that their branches are bowed down.

The last few years, they hadn't been blooming much, but I didn't take much notice - until this spring. A month or so ago, it occurred to me to wonder why they hadn't been flowering the way they used to. And then it occurred to me: I hadn't given them any fertilizer in, oh, about 10 years.

Well, *duh*!

So I gave them a liberal dose of what the garden centre says is the right stuff, plus some bone meal, and the results have been spectacular. Funny, the lawn's doing better too, after I put some fertilizer on it. Makes all the difference.

I was greatly admiring my spireas, as well they deserve, and kicking myself for being such an idiot. Yes, I have great admiration for the tough plants that look after themselves - dandelions, camomile, wild flowers in general. But spirea isn't a wild thing; it's a domesticated shrub. Of course it needs fertilizer if I want it to bloom worth a damn.

And then I got to thinking . . . a few weeks ago, I had a project to work on, a series of workshop reports on the well-being of Canadian children. These papers were based on a major longitudinal survey of children and youth, the largest and most in-depth survey ever carried out in this country. The survey's results are clear and straightforward: even correcting for all sorts of factors like family type, working parents, and the like, children in poverty do much less well, and have more serious and long-term problems, than children who are not in poverty.

Well, *duh*!

We're so quick to admire the hardy plants, the jack pines that manage to make a bare living on barren mountain crags in the Rockies. We admire so much the people who have pulled themselves up from appalling backgrounds, earning double doctorates in nuclear physics and classical Greek, as well as being champion decathletes and talented amateur cellists. Obviously if people like that can make it, then anyone can make it with a little grit and hard work. "Nothing's impossible to an engine with determination," as the kid's book said.

But my spirea can't bloom unless I give it fertilizer. Some plants, like sundews, can grow and flower in nutrient-deficient soils; sundews make up the difference by being carnivorous. They eat butterflies. My spireas aren't carnivorous. Should I regard them as less than sundews because they can't flower unless they're fed?

We stack the decks so thoroughly against the poor: we expect them to be clever and optimistic and to cope beautifully with circumstances that none of the rest of us could live with without losing our marbles. At the same time, we suspect them, on principle, of being lazy spongers. We say that they clearly have no get-up-and-go. Otherwise, they'd be successful. A small part of us always believe that the good will be rewarded and the bad punished, so if people aren't rewarded, we can't help fetching up with the obvious conclusion.

Poverty puts enormous stress on families; the struggle to make ends meet, the additional time and energy needed to for groceries, laundry, and errands, frequent moves in search of affordable housing - which keep ripping people loose from their support systems and kids loose from their friends and schools... It takes a toll. Parents under intense stress are less effective parents: surprise! Enough stress, and the brain's circuitry starts to fry. The studies find that chronic depression is endemic among the poor, especially single mothers. Guess what depression does to the old get-up-and-go?

Well, *duh*!

We talk about the cycle of poverty, but I we don't make the basic connections: how can the poor break loose of the cycle without better, cheaper day care, without help with transportation costs, without training programs? No; we see that as "encouraging dependence". None of this "give a man a net and teach him to fish, and he can feed himself." It's more "point him in the general direction of the river, and if he doesn't drown, maybe he can catch enough fish with his bare hands, assuming there are any."

We are so quick to judge others as failures, without any feeling for how they may have fetched up where they now are, without any understanding of how it feels to live that kind of life. We assume that people could be efficiently middle-class, just like us, if they just tried harder. And it doesn't really occur to us that they can feel our judgment, that it goes into their souls and tells them that they're no good. Just what the doctor ordered, on top of everything else. And who suffers the most as the result? The kids. As though they had anything at all to do with where they'd fetched up in the scheme of things....

I don't romanticize the poor. They are no more or less likely than the rest of us to be cruel or stupid, to try to beat the system (acceptable when it's fudging your taxes, unacceptable when it's scamming welfare). They are neither saints nor sinners, but ordinary souls. Some are exceptionally strong and hardy, like Arctic willow, finding a foothold where no mere southern herb could survive, and yes, that is admirable. But most people are like my spireas. Starve them, and they cannot flower or prosper.

What I do know about the poor is that I don't know what it is to live as they have to live. I can't walk a yard in their moccasins. They are faced, day by day, with situations and decisions that I don't have to live with. I do know enough about single motherhood to wonder how any woman does this without a sufficient income and some stability. It is, as the studies note, astonishing how well many of these parents do, and how often their kids turn out well. That's something the poor need to hear, instead of having their failures rubbed into their faces.

What I also know about the poor is that I wrong them profoundly by lumping them all together as "the poor". They are God's souls, each and every one of them, no two alike. If we generalized about the rich this way, they'd be howling.

People need to be fed. More than food alone, they need to be fed with hope, with a sense of purpose, with some notion that they matter - that they aren't disposable, that they are understood, that people can understand where they come from. Truly, we do need both bread and roses - more than the minimum to keep body and soul together. Souls need feeding as well as bodies. If we fail in this, we lay up trouble for ourselves. The survey has only been going for 6 years or so, but already there are preliminary results on violence among schoolchildren, and guess which group is at the highest risk?

Jesus lays out the ultimate judgment - THE criterion by which God will sort us out, sheep to this side, goats to that, at the end of Matthew 25. That's the one that counts. Go look it up.