The Most Precious Temple Of All

This evening after Mass, on the 100th anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady of Fatima appearing to three shepherd children in Portugal, a poor man made his into the sanctuary as we were getting ready to leave to go home. He stood around waiting for someone to speak to him.

"Does anyone here speak Spanish?" one of the bustling busy church women asked in passing. Our au pair did. She conversed with him as we looked on uncomfortably. What did he want? Why was he here? "He is asking if anyone has work," she told us. "He just came here two weeks ago, he said. His parents were killed in the earthquake in Mexico City. He has a place to sleep, but is looking for work."

It had been a fruitful but long, hot, intense and stressful Mass with our melting down kids in a sea of childless older parishioners. After Mass was finished, the Eucharist consumed, the blessing given, the relics venerated, the closing hymn sung, I just wanted to leave, and I had to proverbially step over this man smelling like unwashed underpants asking about work at 8 o'clock at night in the back of the church while I'm trying to get my family home. The man was quiet and demure, and seemed ashamed to be there among all the churchy stuff going on, like he didn't belong in his t-shirt with the stretched out collar, and his leathery skin and stubble and dark quiet eyes.

Now, I am a rich man. I travel in wealthy and upper-class circles. Most of my associates are well off people of similar stature. I've never known want in my life, even for a day. I pay my bills off each month and funnel the excess to accounts. I never have to think twice about choosing one thing over another, gas over food, medications over heat; all my needs have been provided for, and my storehouses are full of grain.

So in those rare instances in which I get up from my table and notice someone there, someone I almost stub my toe on on the way out the door who is in some degree of want, it's unnerving. It is a glaring reminder that I royally misread the Gospel, consistently, when I ignore the poor and see them as 'irrelevant' to the act of solemn worship.

The Gospel is a hair shirt that itches and scratches, and the poor are the sanctifying fibers. The dialectic tension of sublime liturgical worship--Transfigurations on the heights of spiritual mountaintops--buttresses up the pungent presence of flesh and bones in want at the base down below. When Christ pays us a visit in the distressing guise of the poor, we must be ready to genuflect, bow, and receive him on our knees as we do in the Eucharist in which He is also hidden. Yet most of the time, I am simply put off and put out. I receive him sloppily and without thought, consumed quickly, something to get through in order to move on to the next thing.

It's a tough tension and a challenging dialectic to walk consciously among the two camps--the liturgical and the charitable--while neglecting neither. At the risk of idolizing, the poor man in our midst, in the back of the church or the places we intentionally separate and insulate ourselves from, is the living, breathing, uncomfortable reality of the Emmaus Christ. On a spiritual high, his companions cannot see the Christ among them, walking and talking.

Dorothy Day recognized that the way to embody a lived spirituality of recognizing Christ in every moment in every face of the poor encountered was to not quarantine oneself from Christ and his poor, but surround oneself with it, with all its uncomfortable and smelly, needy, humanness. Can our spirituality of divine and proper worship and right justice in charity be a both/and, not an either/or? Can we be equally cut to the heart by Christ sacrificed on the altar during Mass as we are when we recognize our hidden contempt for the poor, the Lazarus at our feet? Can we wash our hands before receiving the Host, and dirty our hands by washing the feet of the man who walks in to the sanctuary? Is the choice really between being the pejorative "bleeding heart SJW" and "radtrad" classifications...or is there a secret in embracing both the Liturgy and the poor in one embrace?

When I'm tempted with neglect and a calloused heart, and the self-righteous indignation of justifying myself before God by my worship, I remember the words of St. John Chrysostom, the great and holy golden mouth synthesizer of right worship and right justice. We neglect the poor at our own peril and profane our offerings at the alter when we do so:

"Apply this also to Christ when he comes along the roads as a pilgrim, looking for shelter. You do not take him in as your guest, but you decorate floor and walls and the capitals of the pillars. You provide silver chains for the lamps, but you cannot bear even to look at him as he lies chained in prison.  

Once again, I am not forbidding you to supply these adornments; I am urging you to provide these other things as well, and indeed to provide them first. No one has ever been accused for not providing ornaments, but for those who neglect their neighbor a hell awaits with an inextinguishable fire and torment in the company of the demons. Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all." (Hom. 50, 3-4, PG 58, 508-509)

My futile offering of alms to the man I encountered tonight after Mass in the form of ten dollars, a squeeze of his hand, and a word of encouragement, pales to the justice owed to him on account of what I have been loaned by God. I do not think it was an accident he visited us tonight after such a sublime mountaintop experience of worship, since the lived reality of the Christian faith is dependent not only on our holy Sunday oblations, but on the poor themselves--we simply cannot be Christian without them, and let's pray they will pull up a chair for us when we encounter them at the heavenly banquet after we die.