Kate Hawley: In the Metro section of Tuesday’s New York Times, David Gonzales writes artfully about “urban gleaner” Charles Kelly, who for 21 years has made his living redeeming cans and bottles for a five cent deposit. But, as Gonzales points out, Kelly isn’t just redeeming the detritus of our consumer society for money. According to his pastor, Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, he’s part of a “moral economy of redemption.”
Implicit in the story is a powerful idea: that our work, however humble, can have moral dimensions. And it’s rare to see journalism about religion interwoven with the fabric of everyday life. Still, what Gonzales is doing is not new. He is, as the Times takes care to remind us especially often at holiday time, remembering the neediest, in the Protestant progressive tradition of the press.
Kelly, a churchgoer, a member of the choir, and a volunteer in a soup kitchen, makes an excellent subject for this kind of story. He’s one of the virtuous poor, to whom our sympathies can flow unabated. And Kooperkamp says that Kelly is living off society’s abundance, making money by cleaning up the streets. There are environmental benefits, too. What a nifty solution to the problem of poverty.
An even niftier solution would be a system where people don’t have to make a living collecting cans. In this sense, redemption doesn’t just have a double meaning, it’s double edged. It can help those suffering to feel saved. But it can also give poverty a whiff of sanctity. At the end of the story, Kelly heads out to the work in the streets, fortified by his beliefs. “He did not feel alone,” Gonzales writes. Still, he only gets five cents a can.