The congregation at Grace Lutheran Church built a pyramid of cardboard
blocks, reading off statistics about children in poverty as they did.
Each cube represented an essential building block of life, the poverty
statistics printed on the side. The information was grim - every 43
seconds a child is born into poverty in the United States, more than
2,000 babies every year - the cubes stacked in a five level pyramid.
Take away one of the essentials, Pastor Joanne Fitzgerald asked, and
does the pyramid fall?
"If I take away clothing, how do children go to school? How do they
play with other children? How do they exist?" she asked
To illustrate her point, Fitzgerald inched a cube out from the pyramid
one at a time. On the third time, the pyramid collapsed.
The lesson completed, the congregation settled in to watch a video
about children and poverty. The lights turned off, the gray overcast
day filtering into the church basement through half-drawn blinds.
People fell silent, the only sounds coming from the movie and the tick
of rain against the windows.
-Chris LaFortune
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