What Use Is Religion to a Hungry Man

What use is your religion to the man in front of you who has not eaten?

He came back to that question all his life. And he did not treat it as rhetorical.

Where the question came from

Not from a book. From five years of walking.

Between 1888 and 1893, Vivekananda crossed India on foot as a wandering monk, carrying a water pot, a staff and two books. He went through villages. Through famine districts. Through the ordinary rural poverty of the late nineteenth century.

And he stayed in whatever house would have him.

What he took from it was not compassion in the general sense. It was a specific, and rather angry, conclusion.

That the religion he had been trained in had become entirely beside the point. For most of the people who professed it. Beside the point of the conditions they actually lived in.