I WATCHED THE OCCUPY PROTESTS A COUPLE YEARS AGO WITH INTEREST, and for a while I was extremely gratified at their success. They succeeded in changing the subject from “we must cut the deficit immediately and at all costs” (which is economic idiocy — the short-term problem is a lack of demand; the long-term problem is debt) to “what are we going to do about unemployment and Robber Baron Era levels of wealth inequality?”

Finally, the national conversation was beginning to be about inequality and its beneficiaries — an unaccountable, reckless and arrogant oligarchy — which is the root cause of the financial and economic crisis consuming the West.

Dr. Robert Reich, secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, has noted correctly that the root cause of our economic malaise is a “larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.

“And as long as this trend continues, we can’t get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

“America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.

“Each of America’s two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society, expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928 — with 23.5 percent of the total.”

That’s the most concise summary of our economic predicament as I’ve seen.

Less often mentioned is this: If prodigal Wall Street could walk with truly open eyes among their estranged brethren in those cities of cloth and nylon that sprang up during Occupy, their hearts would be broken. Not by the deprivation and primitive material circumstances, but by the realization that in a very real way, the people there have infinitely more riches than the Wall Streeters do.

Because the residents of those tent cities realize and enjoy the fundamental mutuality that is the very essence of being children of God. They know that they are truly brothers and sisters, and share what they have with one another not by writing a check, but by making room at their camp stove for a stranger who has it worse than them.

I have known people in my personal life who “came from money.” Some have been generous and warmhearted to a fault. But a story I keep hearing is of entire families where whole generations of children sit and wait for someone to die so they can come into their money. I hear of such circumstances and feel both revulsion and pity at the spiritual desolation this represents, and also a metaphysical dread for a society that considers this as unremarkable as the fact that millions of its children live in poverty.

I believe the spiritual desolation that is all too common in our rich, and the material deprivation of our poor, are inseparably related. They are both symptoms of greed — and not just at a personal level. They are deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society.

Lest anyone think I’m pointing fingers from some summit of wisdom and holiness, I’ll hasten to add that the greed and desolation I describe lives very much in me, too.

On many Wednesday evenings, I have fed the homeless of Berkeley at a Lutheran Church near the Cal campus. I started doing this a couple years ago when a friend of mine, who was then just back into Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and sobriety after many years out, recommended the experience.

Doing this has changed me. At first, it took some getting used to, in particular the smells of people who sleep rough in the streets, who have no dental care, no medical care, their faces and bodies begrimed by the doorways that are their pillows every night, and from some the odor of whatever chemical they use to ease the pain of being forgotten.

There are as many stories in the meal hall as there are diners.

One guy bought a house and, because he was naive, was cheated of thousands of dollars. In the end he had no house and had lost his job and was on the streets.

That’s the thing about dealing one on one with homeless people: You hear their stories, and they become just people.

They stop being a category — a mental abstraction, a “them” — and become richly complex individuals with stories as filled with vice and divine grace as my own.

When I started going to the meal hall in Berkeley, I thought I was bringing Christ’s compassion to the people there — but I realized as time went on that they were really bringing Christ to me. In those weary faces at the tables, I saw Christ staring back at me, asking me where I’d been all this time.

He had been out there, in doorways, shivering in cold rain and stumbling in rags, waiting for me to show up.

I feed Him in His homeless, and in return, in an act of astounding and tender mercy, He has shown me the depths of my own brokenness.

Most of all He has shown me that we need to somehow tear down the walls that separate us from one another.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.