When my wife and I first started dating, she needed to pick up something from the store. "Why don't we just walk to the Save-a-Lot on 4th Street?" She looked at me like I had two heads but was so in love (ha!) that she said ok. This was probably one of the worst parts of Wilmington, though when we first got married it was only a few blocks from where we lived. She always made a point to drive to the suburbs to go to the supermarket. We did make the walk, picked up some instant pudding for a batch of friendship bread, and walked back. She had lived in Wilmington her whole life, and that was a first for her. I guess I didn't really think about it.
After college, I had moved to one of the roughest areas of Harrisburg, Allison Hill, to run a house of hospitality for men in recovery and to serve the poor of the neighborhood. Drug dealing, prostitution, and gun violence was a common occurrence, just part of the fabric of the neighborhood. Of course, I came from a more or less upper-middle-class background, so I innately knew I was a temporary sojourner-outsider, and that was fine. But again, this experience of living among the poor and those in need, and doing our best to live a life of voluntary poverty and simple living in community made it not so...foreign. I ate my meals in the soup kitchen, and if we cooked it was with donated food. Someone gifted me a car--a 1988 Celica stick with 230,000 miles and no A/C which I would use to shuttle guys to AA and NA meetings. Some people cut checks, but since I didn't have checks to write, I served with my time, talent, and treasure.
I live in the suburbs now, in a more-or-less upper middle class area, just like I was raised in. I'm more or less insulated from the 14th & Derry life now, but it's not completely foreign or uncomfortable.
A good-hearted friend who was studying for the priesthood asked me a couple years ago if I wanted to visit the tent cities in Center City to hand out bottles of water and pray and talk with the homeless. We parked in the cathedral lot and set out on foot. We would sit on the ground and listen to people's stories, pray with them outside their tents, and offer words of encouragement and stories from the Gospel.
I think that's one thing that was lacking for me this Lent as I cut checks and upped my poor-box contributions--I wasn't getting my hands dirty. Almsgiving is one of the pillars of Lent, along with prayer and fasting, but it's hard to love the poor from a distance. It's not uncomfortable or foreign, it's just--an afterthought. Probably because we're so insulated from it.
I want to raise my kids in a safe and relatively comfortable environment, but I also want them to not be so sheltered that they become callous to the needs of others, including the destitute. We named our daughter after Mother Teresa (her middle name) because she is a dirty-handed saint close to my heart. Mother deliberately set out to serve the poorest of the poor as her calling and inspired other sisters in the MoC to do the same.
This isn't my calling, but it serves a need in the world, this service to the poor. For the poor, yes, but mostly for those like myself and my family who live without knowing need and have little exposure to their plight. Christian charity is essential to our religion, a non-negotiable. That doesn't mean you have to be a SJW, and cutting checks is important for capital campaigns and things like that. But we learn in the school of love by doing. And doing, building a kingdom, sometimes necessitates getting your hands dirty. It benefits us, because it acclimates us outside of our sphere.
Anyone who has been on a "mission trip" knows it's not as much about what you do for the poor, but what they do for you. St. John Chrysostom knew this intimately: “The rich exist for the sake of the poor. The poor exist for the salvation of the rich.” Symbiotic.
In all honesty, though, the drugs and violence is not something I want my kids exposed to. And so often, poverty and drugs/violence are intertwined. I may have felt fine biking through Kensington at night during my single twenties, but not in the family minivan today. We need to use prudence. And honestly, if you've ever worked with drug addicts or maybe had them in your family, you know how tiresome the cycle gets, and you don't want to be an enabler.
But that doesn't mean we should harden our hearts to the poor. This is the constant challenge, because that is the seminal temptation: to become callous. Loving can be dirty at times--whether its washing the bottom of a disabled family member you are caretaking for, or being lied to and betrayed. "After all I've done for you," we may find ourselves saying. And then we remember our Lord, who died for men--you and I--who continue to do just that to him.
We can only love the destitute because we have known destitution and the poverty and abandonment of being dead in our sin. Someway we must tap into that in order to love the unlovable. Because we ourselves have felt unloveable, trapped in our own cycles of sin, and the Lord never abandoned us. The streets are a school of hard knocks, but the Gospel is a school of hard love, and we have a lot of learning to do still.
As a visual of what this work and school of love looks like, here is one of my all-time favorite trailers from the documentary film about the CFRs (whom I visited at St. Crispan's Friary in the Bronx years ago). A worthwhile meditation on the dirty work of loving in an imperfect world.
Great blog! I know because I donate to charity automatically, I almost never think about it. They appreciate the steady stream of predictable income, I'm sure, but my hands are certainly not getting dirty! Yikes. I must change this. Also, do you know how one might see that movie Outcasts?
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