The Eye of a Needle

THE EYE OF A NEEDLE

Once a rich man managed to squeeze through the eye of a needle, followed by another rich man, and another after that.
It was easier for them than for a camel to do the same thing, apparently. But this fact alone couldn’t explain their success. Nor could the rewriting of ancient tax codes so the rich could take their enormous fortunes with them when they entered the kingdom of God. Many could barely crawl they were so burdened with this added blessing.
No, the rich couldn’t have hoped to squeeze through the needle’s eye without the unanticipated help of certain men and women of the cloth. These men and women of the cloth weren’t so numerous, but their followers were legion. And the force of those multitudes was what finally made the difference: the dutiful bending of all those backs of the poor to the task of pushing a wealthy few through the eye of that needle.
Without direction from the pulpit, even these efforts might not have sufficed, however. The poor will always be with us, the appeal from these certain men and women of the cloth noted, so they could afford to be patient. Their time would eventually come. Surely there were other concerns they could be focusing on in the meantime. Values, for one. “What would it profit the poor to gain the whole world if the values of that world continued to decline?”
Values were like money in the bank, were they not? It followed, then, that the poor would be wise to entrust their values to those who knew how to get the most out of them: powerful friends of their spiritual leaders who promised the greatest returns if you just invested for the long run and waited patiently for the benefits to trickle down to you.
Turning over one’s precious values to those who’d already demonstrated such deftness in leveraging them in the past made plenty of sense. The rich and powerful could only help the poor and powerless if the poor and powerless first trusted their prospects to the rich and powerful. That made the same amount of sense in the end.
Almost as much sense as bending one’s back in service to the blessedly well-heeled in this business of the eye of a certain needle.