Poverty Is the Pearl of Great Price

Maritain, speaking at a Catholic Worker meeting a few years ago urged us to read the Gospels. Therese Martin, the little saint of our day, carried it next to her heart. Even if we read only the Gospel for Sunday, several times—God sends us a special message for our need. I thought of that a few Sundays ago as I read the parable about the lost sheep. Certainly the men around the Bowery are lost sheep. They are our brothers in Jesus. He died for each of them. What respect we should feel for them. But while working as we do at St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality, we first thought of it as a headquarters for the paper, a place for round-table discussions, for learning crafts as well as books, for studying ways of building up a new social order, new institutions of communal family villages, agronomic universities, studying what is being done all over the world by others, God has made it much more than all this. He has made it a place for the poor. They come early in the morning from their beds in cheap flophouses, from the benches in the park across the street, from the holes and corners of the city. They are the most destitute, the most abandoned.

It is easy for people to see Jesus in the children of the slums. “Let us start with the young ones. There is some hope there,” and institutions and schools are built to help them. It is a vocation in itself. But these hopeless and abandoned grown men are looked upon as hopeless. No good will come of it. We are contributing to laziness. We are feeding people who won’t work. These are the accusations made. God help us, we give them so little. Bread and coffee in the morning, soup and bread at one o’clock in the afternoon. Two scant meals.

We are a family at 223 Chrystie Street, a family of forty or 50. We keep emphasizing that. But we are also a house of hospitality. There are so many that come, that it is impossible to give personal attention to each one; we can only give what we have, in the name of Jesus. Thank God for directing our vocation. We did not choose this work. He sent it to us. We will always, please God, be clambering around the rocks and briars, the barrenness, the fruitlessness of city life, in search of lost sheep.

Even Our Farms

Even our fams take on this aspect of hospitality. There is a reproach again. “Peter Maurin wanted agronomic universities and farming communes. You have houses of hospitality on the land.” “Why are you not self supporting? With all those people about, you ought to be able to get more done.”

I am writing this moment at Maryfarm, Newburgh. There is a most beautiful scene out the window, of a field full of mounds of fresh cut hay, and John Filliger, Louis, Joe and Rockie with pitchforks piling a truck to fill our barn. Helen Isvolsky was just visiting us and she wanted to take a hay fork too, but there were not enough to go around. Neighbors coming this good haying weather and beg for help and the men go out in all directions, helping others. (One reason why we do not get much done.) We need rain, the vegetables are coming on apace but the ground is gry and the tomatoes look wilted at the top. Down in a far field crows are making havoc of the green tomatoes. They eat out all the inside

But to go on with my mediation about the Gospel, and the men who are all about us. We are told to put on Christ and we think of him in his private life, his life of work, his public life, his teaching, and his suffering life. But we do not think enough of his life as a little child, as a baby. His helplessness, his powerlessness. We have to be content to be in that state too. Not to be able to do anything, to accomplish anything. One thing children certainly accomplish and that is they love and wonder at the people and the universe around them. They live in the midst of squalor and confusion and see it not. They see people at the moment and love them and admire them. They forgive and they go on loving. They may look on the most vicious person, and if he is at that moment good and kind and doing something which they can be interested in or admire, there they are, pouring out their hearts to him.

Oh yes, I can write with authority. I have my own little grandchildren with me right now, and they see only the beauty and the joy of the Catholic Worker and its activities. There is no criticism in their minds and hearts, of others around them. It is easy to see Jesus in them. And there was my daughter, too, raised among the poor and the most abandoned of human beings. She was only seven when the Catholic Worker started, and now she has a daughter of seven and four others besides. And they are growing up, in a way, with The Catholic Worker. So we will always have children about. (There is our much loved Smith family at Peter Maurin farm with their eight children too.)

It is good to be able to write with authority about the family, about poverty in our day, the involuntary poverty which all families must endure, about insecurity and unemployment. A few years ago, visiting my daughter, I was lying awake at two a.m., that hour when one worries about leukemia, polio and rheumatic fever and other terrible ills which afflict the children of our groups all over the country, and praying for them all. On this special occasion I was worrying because David had just lost his job and Tamar was about to have her fifth child and the former boss, who also owned the house they lived in had come bearing oranges for the children, but also to tell them to move at once. What a strange, ghastly juxtaposition of gestures! And I was torn between wrath and the necessity to train oneself in loving one’s enemies, hating the sin but loving the sinner.

But then I though, “Thank God I have this suffering of joblessness and insecurity and homelessness together with others. This day, for the sake of the family there are so many compromises. People give their assent to a Mussolini, a Hitler, a Malenkoff for the sake of their families. But we must learn to accept the hardest of all sufferings, the sufferings of those nearest and dearest to us. Thank God for this training in suffering. To accept makes it easier at the time to go back to sleep. Since then there has been more of the same. Thank God for everything.

One delightful thing that happened this month has also to do with the family and with responsibility and hospitality. Jack Thornton, who wrote a rather doleful letter in the CW a few months ago which brought forth a burst of responses, came by to see us a few weeks ago. He is not at all a doleful person. “He underestimates his own accomplishments,” one of my friends said, on reading the letter. Anyway, he is a graduate of Fordham, worked with us at Easton, Maryfarm, and Newburgh, Maryfarm, married one of the girls who was working with us and now has a farm, a job and four children. They are both beautiful young people, John and Mary, and in spite of many moves and many trials, are scattering seeds as well as trying to build up a life for themselves on the land. They are one of those families I referred to in the May Catholic Worker who are on their own, rather than in a group of families which would make it easier for everyone. Right now, at Springboro, Pa., the priest is friendly and cooperative, Mary sings in the choir, Jack works with a construction gang and they farm as they can.

He was paying us a flying visit with a friend from Minnesota who had read his letter in the paper and came to help him. His visit at Maryfarm was announced by the barking of King, our dog, at midnight, which also served to summon one of the men who dispensed hospitality, so I did not see him until the next morning. Then he stayed only an hour after Mass and went on to New York. I had a sudden inspiration while he was here. We had a young boy with us who had been inexplicably cast out by his family and was staying with us, one of a group of twenty or so, and not having it too easy. So I asked Jack to give hospitality for awhile, and his response was immediate. May God bless him a hundred fold. I hope Charlie will not only earn his keep in helping Jack, but more too. He should be with young people. If every family had a Christ room, as the Fathers of the Church said, there would be little destitution but plenty of holy poverty.

It was not the New Testament I was reading last month, but the old, that gave me light on the importance of hospitality. Aaron was ready to sacrifice his daughters to the men of the city, rather than give up the strangers in their midst to the hostility of the mob at his door. It doesn’t speak much for the status of women at the time, but it does speak for the importance in which hospitality was held. It is a a part of that theology of hospitality which Fr. Danielou wrote of in the article which we printed in a former number of the The Catholic Worker. The journalists in those days wrote in extremes too. But it is evident that God considers hospitality of the utmost importance.

Community

The fundamental means of the Catholic Worker are voluntary poverty and manual labor, a spirit of detachment from all things, a sense of the primacy of the spiritual which makes the rest easy. “His praise should be ever in our mouth.”

The reason for our existence is to praise God, to love him and serve him and we can do this only by loving our brothers. “All men are brothers.” This is the great truth that makes us realize God. Great crimes have been committed in the name of brotherhood of man, that may serve to obscure the truth but we must keep on saying it. We must keep on saying it because Love is the reason for our existence. It is what we all live for, whether we are the hanger on in Times Square or the most pious member of a community. We are seeking what we think at the time to be the good for us. If we don’t know any better, often it is because radio, newspapers, press and pulpit have neglected so to inform us. We love what is presented to us to love, and God is not much presented. It is as hard to see Jesus in the respectable Christian today as in the man on the Bowery. And so, “the masses have been lost to the Church.”

Someone said once that the needs of the day were liturgy and community, and truly there is not much of either in the form that reaches the masses. There is a great groping for new forms and new institutions (meanwhile hanging on to the best of the old lest we throw out the baby with the bath water) among people like the worker-priests, the little Sisters of Charles de Foucauld, the communities of work. Great things have come to us from France, including Peter Maurin, our own leader, who was a French peasant. All of these new groups emphasize poverty. There are two Benedictine communities in India. There is the Family of Jesus (not Catholic), in China, there is a Christian community in Nigeria, there is the Bruderhoff in Paraguay and Uraguay and England, there is Abbe Crenier and his monastery in St. Pierre, Martinique, there are all these movements to be studied and written about, to be ready for. We who stay in this country cannot be as poor as those who go out to other countries. This is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate who was taken into Abraham’s bosom. The Gospel doesn’t tell us anything about Lazarus’ virtues. He just sat there, and let the dogs lick his sores. He would be classed by any social worker of today as a mental case. But again, poverty, and in this case destitution, like hospitality, is so esteemed by God, it is something to be sought after, worked for, the pearl of great price.

Charlie Smith

I write about the family, about liturgy and community, about poverty and manual labor, and before sending this article to the printer, I am forced from the depth of my heart to write of more suffering too—much a part of our lives. A week after writing the above article, little Charlie Smith, six years old, who also had gone on vacation to Maryfarm, was drowned in the swimming pool at Friendship House, Martin de Porres Farm. It was on the feast of the commemoration of St. Benedict, and Charlies’ father, a Benedictine oblate, from the depths of his grief, recalled that St. Benedict had saved the life of a little pupil from drowning, and he added, “If God wanted my Charlie to live, he would have saved him for me too. God wante dhim, and He took him. He gave me eight children, and another is on the way, and He has taken one away. I give him to Him willingly.

The funeral was on the feast of St. Bonaventure, and the child is buried in St. Joseph’s cemetery, Rossville, a little cemetery near the Peter Maurin farm, in a plot which we had obtained, hoping to transfer the body of Peter Maurin to that resting place some day. We all sand the Mass of the Angels, the parents singing too. Our Lord might well say to them, “I have not seen such faith in all Israel.” They know their child is in Heaven, waiting for them there. He has brought heaven closer to them, so that in spite of their great and unutterable sorrow, they can say, “The Lord gave and the Lord took away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

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