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.