Here are a couple of excerpts from letters from John Wesley to a Miss March, a woman of "wealth and education". When Miss March admitted her struggles with the fact that associating with Methodists also meant she came into contact with the poor, Wesley wrote to her:
"Go and see the poor and sick in their own poor little hovels. Take up your cross, woman! Remember the faith! Jesus went before you, and will go with you. Put off the gentlewoman; you bear an higher character. You are an heir of God and joint-heir with Christ! Are you not going to meet Him in the air with ten thousand of His saints? O be ready!"
She complains of associating with people of poor taste and low character..., and Wesley replies:
"I want you to converse more, abundantly more, with the poorest of the people, who, if they have not taste, have souls, which you may forward in their way to heaven. And they have (many of them) faith and the love of God in a larger measure than any persons I know."
To her continued protest he writes:
"What I advise you to is, not to contract a friendship or even acquaintance with poor, inelegant, uneducated persons, but frequently, nay constantly, to visit the poor, the widow, the sick, the fatherless in their affliction; and this, although they should have nothing to recommend them but that they are bought with the blood of Christ. It is true this is not pleasing to flesh and blood. There are a thousand circumstances usually attending it which shock the delicacy of our nature, or rather of our education. But yet the blessing which follows this labour of love will more than balance the cross."
Miss March replies saying to this exhortation to "constantly" visit the poor that she is already a busy woman and that some time must necessarily be put aside for seclusion and prayer in the maintenance of her spiritual life. To this, Wesley:
"Yet I find time to visit the sick and the poor; and I must do it, if I believe the Bible, if I believe these are the marks whereby the Shepherd of Israel will know and judge His sheep at the great day...
... and I am concerned for you; I am sorry you should be content with lower degrees of usefulness and holiness than you are called to."
-selections taken from the essay "Visit the Poor: John Wesley, the Poor, and the Sanctification of Believers" in The Poor and the People Called Methodists, ed. Richard Heitzenrater.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
John Wesley to Miss J.C. March
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
On Grace
Unless I am convinced otherwise by my Augustinian friends, this reading from St. Chrysostom, appointed in Celebrating the Saints on the Feast of Ss. Timothy and Titus, goes for me.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Chrysostom on the Practicality of Prayer
"Do you not know that if you come and worship God and take part in the work which goes on here, the business you have on hand is made much easier for you? Have you worldly anxieties? Come here on that account that by the time you spend here you may win for yourself the favour of God, and so depart with a sense of security; that you may have Him for your ally, that you may become invincible to the dæmons because you are assisted by the heavenly hand. If you have the benefit of prayers uttered by the fathers, if you take part in common prayer, if you listen to the divine oracles, if you win for yourself the aid of God, if, armed with these weapons, you then go forth, not even the devil himself will be able henceforth to look you in the face, much less wicked men who are eager to insult and malign you. But if you go from your house to the market place, and are found destitute of these weapons, you will be easily mastered by all who insult you. This is the reason why both in public and private affairs, many things occur contrary to our expectation, because we have not been diligent about spiritual things in the first place, and secondarily about the secular, but have inverted the order. For this reason also the proper sequence and right arrangement of things has been upset, and all our affairs are full of much confusion." - St. John Chrysostom, from the homily on "If thy enemy hunger, feed him."
Friday, January 23, 2009
Love and the Poor: A Personal Reflection
I have said elsewhere that the only positive thing that we do at St. Joseph's is decline the temptation to exclude the homeless from fellowship. In that sense we have only made the most basic step toward community, which is not to preclude its possibility. Now we have, in a way, moved on. We have long since invited the poor among us, or perhaps we have responded to their invitations - after all, they have been there longer than most of us. But having avoided the first temptation to undermine community, moving ever toward the eucharistic ideal, we are faced with new challenges.
The challenges, I have thought at times, are those of discerning the deserving from the undeserving, or perhaps of convincing my new friends that I am not to be conned, or to establish a level of understanding with them concerning what I can and cannot give, or will and will not. These challenges, it turns out, are all the challenges of maintaining control. The first is to control the reception of my charity, that it not be taken for granted or squandered when others could use it more. The second is control of my dignity. The third is control over the claims that the poor might make of me, as if to say, "I'll give you anything as long as you don't ask for this, or that."
The fear of losing control is at once a fear of "enabling" or perpetuating sin (by giving money to an alcoholic in search of a drink), of being made a fool in a con, or of the slippery slope that one seems to occupy when one starts giving freely to those who ask (because so few exercise proper restraint in asking!). It is clear that these are fears that I face. And yet the fear of enabling rests on a conviction that I am a more responsible steward than the alcoholic, perhaps that spending that money on my own dining-out habits, on coffee for a meeting with a colleague, is somehow more faithful than this man's indulgence in a destructive habit born of who knows what hardship. The fear of being made a fool is a fear of losing the esteem of others, and ultimately a fear of being made lowly, even if it be for the sake of Christ. The fear of the slippery slope is ultimately a fear of becoming poor. And the fear of becoming poor is the fear that God will not provide what I need. The belief that through charity one might be left with too little is fundamentally a failure of faith.
Once I realize that what I thought were the challenges are really no more than my own habits to distance myself from the poor, or even from others generally, I begin to have some idea of greater challenges. The greater challenge as I see it is to see Christ in the undeserving, the needy, the down-trodden. To see a man or woman who is so battered to the point of self-loathing is to see an immensely unattractive person. But Isaiah gave a foretaste of this:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not…
He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Christ lives among us, as the least of these, the despised, those of little esteem, perhaps as those who have not even their own esteem. Not only is it hard to see Christ in this suffering person - for it is hard, really, to fathom that He went not up to joy but first He suffered pain - but we turn our heads from this pitiful creature perhaps because it makes a fool of us just to see it: the image of God found self-loathing and alone. It is repulsive to see the pearls cast before swine, the beloved of Christ trodden by sin, and we turn our heads in shame and disgust, and distance ourselves from the sacrilege.
But is this not the view of God from the beginning of time, to see sin mingled with his image, the goodness of creation soiled by sin? His response was not to lift himself higher, distancing himself from that which conceived in love and goodness had become tainted, but instead he lowered himself to come among us, to sit in fellowship with sinners, to have himself lifted high on a cross. The perfect image of God became incarnate, first as salvation from the power of death, but also as an example to man of the perfection of the very image in which he was created.
So then in these encounters we recognize that Christ is on both sides. We find him in the least of these, and we find him as our victory over the threats of sin and death. We no longer have anything to fear by encountering Christ in this person, and love of God demands that we raise this Christ-like figure to his proper glory, out of the muck and offal of anonymity and scorn, and into the love of Christ.
The challenges, I have decided, are not challenges intrinsic to the poor. The challenge is no more particular than learning to love another person as Christ loved us. Perhaps he gave us the poor to love in part to convince us how much deeper could be our love even for those to whom we acknowledge our closeness, our spouses and family. This is the sacramental presence of the poor, a vehicle of grace and instrument of Divine Love.
It is a challenge to love the poor not because of their poverty or their faults - not because of smells or impropriety or disease - but because we know so little of how to love in the first place, poor or otherwise.
Use of Force
Christ our Lord came and took upon Himself our humanity. He became the Son of Man. He suffered hunger and thirst and hard toil and temptation. All power was His but He wished the free love and service of men. He did not force anyone to believe. St. Paul talks of the liberty of Christ. He did not coerce anyone. He emptied Himself and became a servant. He showed the way to true leadership by coming to minister, not to be ministered unto. He set the example and we are supposed to imitate Him. We are taught that His kingdom was not of this earth. He did not need pomp and circumstance to prove Himself the Son of God. His were hard sayings, so that even His own followers did not know what he was saying, did not understand Him. It was not until after He died on the cross, it was not until He had suffered utter defeat, it would seem, and they thought their cause was lost entirely; it was not until they had persevered and prayed with all the fervor and desperation of their poor loving hearts, that they were enlightened by the Holy Spirit and knew the truth with a strength that enabled them to suffer defeat and martyrdom in their turn. They knew then that not by force of arms, by the bullet or the ballot, they would conquer. They knew and were ready to suffer defeat--to show that great love which enabled them to lay down their lives for their friends. And now the whole world is turning to "force" to conquer. Fascist and Communist alike believe that only by the shedding of blood can they achieve victory. Catholics, too, believe that suffering and the shedding of blood "must needs be" as Our Lord said to the disciples at Emmaeus. But their teaching, their hard saying is, that they must be willing to shed every drop of their own blood, and not take the blood of their brothers. They are willing to die for their faith, believing that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. Our Lord said, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." And do not His words apply not only to Him as Head of his Church but to His members? How can the Head be separated from the members? The Catholic Church cannot be destroyed in Spain or in Mexico. But we do not believe that force of arms can save it. We believe that if Our Lord were alive today he would say as He said to St. Peter, "Put up thy sword." Christians when they are seeking to defend their faith by arms, by force and violence, are like those who said to our Lord, "Come down from the Cross. If you are the Son of God, save Yourself." But Christ did not come down from the Cross. He drank to the last drop the agony of His suffering and was not part of the agony the hopelessness, the unbelief of His own disciples? Christ is being crucified today, every day. Shall we ask Him with the unbelieving world to come down from the cross? Or shall we joyfully, as His brothers, "Complete the sufferings of Christ"? And are the people to stand by and see their priests killed? That is the question that will be asked. Let them defend them with their lives, but not by taking up the sword. At a meeting of the opposition last week, when a Spanish delegate of the Loyalists told of unarmed men flinging themselves, not from principle but because they had no arms, into the teeth of the enemy to hold them back, the twenty thousand present cheered as one. In their small way, the unarmed masses, those "littlest ones" of Christ, have known what it was to lay down their lives for principle, for their fellows. In the history of the world there have been untold numbers who have laid down their lives for our Lord and His Brothers. And now the Communist is teaching that only by the use of force, only by killing our enemies, not by loving them and giving ourselves up to death, giving ourselves up to the Cross, will we conquer. If two thousand have suffered martyrdom in Spain, is that suffering atoned for by the death of the 90,000 in the Civil War? Would not those martyrs themselves have cried out against more shedding of blood? Prince of Peace, Christ our King, Christ our Brother, Christ the Son of Man, have mercy on us and give us the courage to suffer. Help us to make ourselves "a spectacle to the world and to angels and to men." Help your priests and people in Spain to share in your suffering, and in seeming defeat, giving up their lives, without doubt there will be those like the centurion, standing at the foot of the cross who will say, "Indeed these men are the sons of God." [By Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, November 1936; From catholicworker.org]
Entertaining Angels
Mick told me a story yesterday. Last Saturday, Gail was up at the church and a cab pulled up. Out stepped a man with some papers in his hand, and he was a wreck. Sobbing, he told her that he had just been released from the mental health facility in Butner. His papers verified this, and it was apparent, and he agreed, that he was in no shape to be released. At any rate, somehow either he or the cab driver had heard about our little church, and he had been dropped off “for us.” Gail made him a sandwich and said he was welcome to hang around. I’ve not seen this man, but this is not the first time people released from Butner have made St. Joe’s their first stop. I have no idea how they find out about us or what they expect to find when they get here. Most of the time we are singularly unprepared for them and unable to do anything other than feed them and offer them the church grounds for a place to lay their head. But it appears there is some word on the street that you can always go to This is anything but a pat on our back. If anything, it should make us aware that God is often sending his outcast our way. And I think he intends for us to care for them all. Lord, have mercy.
Love Is the Measure
We confess to being fools and wish that we were more so. In the face of the approaching atom bomb test (and discussion of widespread radioactivity is giving people more and more of an excuse to get away from the philosophy of personalism and the doctrine of free will); in the face of an approaching maritime strike; in the face of bread shortages and housing shortages; in the face of the passing of the draft extension, teen-agers included, we face the situation that there is nothing we can do for people except to love them. If the maritime strike goes on there will be no shipping of food or medicine or clothes to Europe or the far east, so there is nothing to do again but to love. We continue in our fourteenth year of feeding our brother and clothing him and sheltering him and the more we do it the more we realize that the most important thing is to love. There are several families with us, destitute families, destitute to an unbelievable extent and there, too, is nothing to do but to love. What I mean is that there is no chance of rehabilitation, no chance, so far as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance of adjusting them to this abominable world about them, and who wants them adjusted anyway? What we would like to do is change the world–make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute–the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and dear God–please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend. This is the month of the Sacred Heart, the symbol of Christ’s love for man. We are supposed to love as Christ loved, to the extent of laying down our lives for our brothers. That was the New commandment. To love to the extent of laying down our lives, dying to ourselves. To accept the least place, to sit back, to ask nothing for ourselves, to serve each other, to lay down our lives for our brothers, this is the strange upside-down teaching of the Gospel. We knew a priest once, a most lovable soul, and a perfect fool for Christ. Many of his fellow priests laughed at him and said, "Why, he lines up even the insane and baptizes them. He has no judgment!" He used to visit the Negro hospital in St. Louis, and night and day found him wandering through the wards. One old Negro said to me, "Whenever I opens my eyes, there is Father!" He was forever hovering over his children to dispense the sacraments. It was all he had to give. He couldn’t change the rickety old hospital, he couldn’t provide them with decent housing, he could not see that they got better jobs. He couldn’t even seem to do much about making them give up liquor and women and gambling–but he could love them, and love them all, he did. And he gave them Everything he had. He gave them Christ. Some of his friends used to add, "whether they wanted Him or not!" But assuredly they wanted his love and they saw Christ in him when they saw his love for them. Many times I have been reminded of this old priest of St. Louis, this old Jesuit, when I have visited prisons and hospitals for the insane. It’s hard to visit the chaplains and ask their help very often. They have thousands to take care of, and too often they take the view that "it’s no use." "What’s the use of going to that ward–or to that jail? They won’t listen to you." If one loves enough one is importunate, one repeats his love as he repeats his Hail Marys on his rosary. Yes, we go on talking about love. St. Paul writes about it in 1 Corinthians 13. In The Following of Christ there is a chapter in Book III, Chapter Five. And there are Father Zossima’s unforgettable words in The Brothers Karamazov–"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." What does the modern world know of love, with its divorces, with its light touching of the surface of love. It has never reached down into the depths, to the misery and pain and glory of love which endures to death and beyond it. We have not yet begun to learn about love. Now is the time to begin, to start afresh, to use this divine weapon.
