The Option for the Poor: Whatsoever You Do

One Sunday after Mass, my mother went to her room to lie down after feeding dinner to me and my sisters. A few years earlier, my fireman father had died in a firetruck accident. His death had left my mother alone with a 2 year old, a 1 year old, and a baby born the month after his death. My mother’s family was far away, and she was alienated from my father’s family. We were scraping by on a small fireman’s pension. We lived in a big city housing project in Jamaica Plain, an incorporated township in Boston, Massachusetts. My mother got up alarmed to find me gone from the apartment.

She discovered me sitting on a bench in the concrete yard in the hot summer sun giving away money from her purse. A small crowd had gathered around me when word got around what I was doing. Since my mother had given me small coins every Sunday to put into the collection plate, I knew coins were money by then. I’m not sure how old I was, maybe four. I think I was young enough not to know that dollars were money, because I wasn’t giving the dollars away. I told everyone, “Jesus said to give all you have to the poor. They said that in church today.” My mother quickly checked her wallet and found the dollars were still there. Their loss would have been a big setback for our meager finances. She smiled at me and said Jesus didn’t mean I should give away all her money. She didn’t state the obvious to me, that by objective measurements, we were the poor.

At around 18 years of age, I left the Catholic Church, and then I came back to belief in Christianity at around 31 after a divorce. At the time I was living in Minneapolis. Because my husband was unable to support two households after we had broken up, I applied for welfare to support me and our two children and took advantage of some generous social programs that paid for my child care and enabled me to finish my degree. (Those programs have long ago been cut.) In spite of the help I got from the government, things were tight, and like my mother had been, I was all alone.

After I paid my rent and bought food stamps, I had only about $40 a month to pay for everything else: clothing, soap, transportation, my children’s school supplies . . .. And I was impoverished without the help that true faith can give because I didn’t have any faith in anything except the principles of secular humanism.

Providentially, during this hard time, I was helped back to faith in Christ because I was invited by and prayed for by fundamentalist Christians. They took literally Christ’s instructions at the end of the gospel of Mark to go out and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. The current biblical critics’ opinions that the “great commission” ending was tacked on by Mark’s community, and that those words may not be reliably attributed to Jesus would have left them at a loss. If they did take these opinions seriously, those Christians probably would not have been able to muster much enthusiasm for sharing their faith with others. Without their belief in the words of Christ, I would not have been drawn back to faith by their eagerness to follow what they personally felt they had been instructed to do by Him. And so it happened that because of literal mindedness, the poor (me and my two children) and many others had the gospel preached to them.

I joined an evangelical Free Church and in my experience there and at other Bible-believing churches, I found they took almost all of the words in the Bible pretty literally. So I was surprised at how they reacted one Saturday morning when a homeless man wandered into the church. I was there for a women’s Bible study. The older women and men, deaconesses and deacons, were preparing for an elders’ lunch meeting. A big unkempt stranger, American Indian from the looks of him, probably Ojibway because they are the largest local tribe in the area, came into the kitchen. The deacons and deaconesses were cutting up slabs of Jello embedded with canned pear halves and setting the jiggling green squares out for serving on iceberg-lettuce lined salad plates. Chicken pieces were roasting in a sauce of cream of mushroom soup. The strange man asked for money for food. To my shock, one of the deacons slipped away to the phone in the pastor’s office, called the police and had the stranger taken away. Let me show what I think they should have done instead and why.

The pastor got up every Sunday irrespective of the season of the year and preached from the Bible, starting each time where he had stopped the week before. Not too many weeks previously, we had all heard him talk on these words from the letter of James about how to treat a poor man in filthy clothing:

My brothers, don’t hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory with partiality. 2:2 For if a man with a gold ring, in fine clothing, comes into your synagogue, and a poor man in filthy clothing also comes in; 2:3 and you pay special attention to him who wears the fine clothing, and say, “Sit here in a good place;” and you tell the poor man, “Stand there,” or “Sit by my footstool;” 2:4 haven’t you shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 2:5 Listen, my beloved brothers. Didn’t God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which he promised to those who love him? 2:6 But you have dishonored the poor man. . . . 2:7 However, if you fulfill the royal law, according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,”* you do well. 2:9 . . . [If] you show partiality, you commit sin, . . . . 2:10 Rom. 2: 11

Taking the words of James literally, I would have expected the evangelicals to invite the poor man to lunch. This would not be easy. There would be dangers. To do something like that is foolishness, but our faith as a whole is foolish, as St. Paul said.

After I was safely back in the Catholic Church, I remembered that incident where the evangelicals had not fed the Indian man when I went to a Seder supper sponsored by a parish in Milpitas about 10 years ago. Sun Microsystems had paid to move me from Minneapolis to work in Milpitas. I had joined the local parish church but I had not been welcomed. I was used to not finding community in the Church by then. But it was still hard because I wanted it so badly. And it didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to expect when I read about how the members of the early church shared everything with one another, and how we are all equals, brothers and sisters in Christ. I couldn’t help but be a little jealous at the Seder supper that the pastor only talked to the mayor and his wife. Nobody was interested in talking to me.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta has spoken extensively about how there is a unique kind of poverty in our society, the poverty of loneliness. [See http://www.priestsforlife.org/brochures/mtspeech.html and http://www.priestsforlife.org/spanish/mtspeechspan.htm for a speech she gave to the National Prayer Breakfast on February 3, 1994 on this topic.] Making Silicon Valley wages as a technical writer, I was no longer financially poor. But I had the kind of poverty Mother Teresa described. Still do.

Somewhere along the line I’ve learned from the Lord that my job is not to worry about whether other people are practicing His teachings about how to love others or about any other matters. My job is to do everything that I can to do the right thing myself—with His help. And more and more it becomes obvious to me that, like the evangelicals, I’ve got my own set of blind spots, great big logs in my own eye. I keep on doing what I can to befriend the friendless and welcome others and be generous and forgiving, and with all my shortcomings, I take comfort in the saying from 1 Peter that love covers a multitude of sins.

As Bill Spohn said when he taught the very first social justice class this year, not all of us are called to live the radical poverty of Christ the way St. Francis of Assisi and others like Dorothy Day have done. But we all have to take what He taught seriously and find ways to become true disciples. We have to be ready to answer Him at the last judgment when He asks us, not if we were Church goers or Church leaders, but whether we clothed Him, fed him, visited Him when He was in prison, cared for Him when He was sick, buried Him when He died.

I want to add that I believe that social justice includes a essential element of personal justice. I don’t believe that holiness or even effective works are possible without chastity. And personal justice includes following the traditional teachings about how we honor our commitments and take care of others around us. Did we keep our marriage promises? Did we give selfless love to our spouses? Do we make sure that we give all the attention and guidance our children need? Do we take care of our parents and honor them? None of these commandments have a clause that we should do these things only if the other person is pleasant or attractive. Jesus just said that whatever we do to the least of His children we do unto Him. He didn’t say, do these things unless they don’t deserve it.

This piece was written as a paper for a class on the Catholic Church's social justice teachings at the San Jose Institute for Leadership in Ministry.