Better Off

Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus, Hendrick Ter Brugghen

The world would be better off

if people tried to be better.

And people would become better

if they stopped trying to be better off.

For when everybody tries to become better off, nobody is better off.

But when everybody tries to become better, everybody is better off.

Everybody would be rich

if nobody tried to become richer.

And nobody would be poor

if everybody tried to be poorest.

And everybody would be what we ought to be

if everybody tried to be what we want the other one to be!

Poverty and Riches

The first time I ever picked up a copy of “The Catholic Worker” newspaper from New York, it was two of Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays that struck me. One of them contained the words:

“Everybody would be rich

Marriage of St Francis of Assisi and Lady Poverty, Fra Angelico

if nobody tried

to be richer.

And nobody would be poor

if everybody tried

to be the poorest.”

The Catholic Worker commitment to the practice of voluntary poverty was one of the first things that jumped out at me, that drew me to this movement. Not many people understand it. Voluntary poverty seems one of the least understood of the Christian virtues.

Peter’s words seem to me to sum up what Dorothy Day was trying to say when she wrote, “Poverty is a strange and elusive Marriage of St Francis of Assisi and Lady Poverty, Print, c. 1930 thing. … I condemn poverty and I advocate it… We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it” (from “Loaves and Fishes”).

There is a lot said about poverty, and rightly so. Most of it is about poverty as a problem, something to be condemned or eradicated. On the other hand, Peter Maurin also wrote:

“For a Christian,

voluntary poverty is the ideal

as exemplified by Saint Francis of Assisi.”

Jesus after all “became poor… so that we might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).St Paul exhorts us to “have the mindset of Christ… who made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phillipians 2). That is to say, we are called to follow the example of Jesus, for the good of others. And St Francis spoke of “Lady Poverty”.

On the other hand, it seems to me that Jesus spoke more about the problem of riches. He said “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven!” (Matthew 19: 23) Jesus worried about the rich. He said “alas for the rich, for they have had their reward” (Luke 6:24). He spoke of “the rich fool” who stored up his wealth and lost sight of eternal truths of justice and love (Luke 12:13-21). And he talked of how the rich are separated from God by a chasm, while the God is close to the poor (Luke 16:19-31).

It is clear that Jesus viewed riches as a problem. In this age of climate and environmental emergency, we are re-learning that riches are not only a spiritual problem, but also a practical problem. It is the rich nations, and the richest people, who have caused and are causing a vastly greater part of the climate emissions and other environmental problems. They – we – have literally been consuming the life of God’s Earth, on which we depend for our own life.

There was a time – very recently – when it could be thought (and Alastair Campbell more or less said) “why worry about how much the rich have got as long as the poor (and the rest of us) get better off”. But the limits to growth are reasserting themselves. We are re-learning that for the rich to have more, the poor must have less. Only now the poorer countries have the power to assert themselves.

If Europe and the USA and others are not prepared to make sacrifices to protect our Common Home, then China, India and others will not either. They are prepared to play a global game of environmental chicken and see who, if anyone, blinks first. It is a high stakes game. The poor are waiting for the rich to act first. The rich includes most of us in industrialised countries like the UK, but the responsibility of the super[1]mega-rich multibillionaires is as outsized as their asset base. We need to speak more of the problem of riches. It is a spiritual problem, a human problem, a justice problem, an environmental problem. It is no good being “detached” from riches. The Second Letter of St Peter says “if anyone has the enough of the world's goods and sees his brother or sister in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?”

And globalisation has reminded us that we are all brothers and sisters in the one family of God, the human family. In relation to some of these questions of poverty and riches, Austin Smith, my brother Passionist, said “there is a world of a difference between being detached from your Rolls Royce and not having a car at all.” In the world as it is with so much need, if we love our neighbour – including all the creatures of God’s crucified Creation – and are detached from our money or possessions or pleasures – then we will actively give them away. When we fail to do so, we are falling into sin. And the evil consequences are plain for all to see. We need to live by this truth. As much as we participate in this sin, we need to do penance, seek repentance, trust in God’s mercy, and call others to do likewise. We need to speak and write this truth, and communicate it by all means possible. Including protest and direct action. This is the path our Christian faith calls us to at this point in salvation history, the history of God’s Creation and of the human family.

Room For Christ

No Room at the Inn, Engraving

It is no use to say that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.

But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.

We can do now what those who knew Him in the days of His flesh did. I’m sure that the shepherds did not adore and then go away to leave Mary and her Child in the stable, but somehow found them room, even though what they had to offer might have been primitive enough. All that the friends of Christ did in His life-time for Him we can do. Peter’s mother-in-law hastened to cook a meal for Him, and if anything in the Gospels can be inferred, it is surely that she gave the very best she had, with no thought of extravagance. Matthew made a feast for Him and invited the whole town, so that the house was in an uproar of enjoyment, and the straight-laced Pharisees–the good people–were scandalized. So did Zaccheus, only this time Christ invited Himself and sent Zaccheus home to get things ready. The people of Samaria, despised and isolated, were overjoyed to give Him hospitality, and for days He walked and ate and slept among them. And the loveliest of all relationships in Christ’s life, after His relationship with his Mother, is His friendship with Martha, Mary and Lazarus and the continual hospitality He found with them–for there was always a bed for Him there, always a welcome, always a meal. It is a staggering thought that there were once two sisters and a brother whom Jesus looked on almost as His family and where He found a second home, where Martha got on with her work, bustling round in her house-proud way, and Mary simply sat in silence with Him.

If we hadn’t got Christ’s own words for it, it would seem raving lunacy to believe that if I offer a bed and food and hospitality for Christmas–or any other time, for that matter–to some man, woman or child, I am replaying the part of Lazarus or Martha or Mary and that my guest is Christ. There is nothing to show it, perhaps. There are no haloes already glowing round their heads–at least none that human eyes can see. It is not likely that I shall be vouchsafed the vision of Elizabeth of Hungary, who put the leper in her bed and later, going to tend him, saw no longer the leper’s stricken face, but the face of Christ. The part of a Peter Claver, who gave a stricken Negro his bed and slept on the floor at his side, is more likely to be ours. For Peter Claver never saw anything with his bodily eyes except the exhausted black faces of the Negroes; He had only faith in Christ’s own words that these people were Christ. And when the Negroes he had induced to help him once ran from the room, panic-stricken before the disgusting sight of some sickness, he was astonished. “You mustn’t go,” he said, and you can still hear his surprise that anyone could forget such a truth; “You mustn’t leave him–it is Christ.”

Some time ago I saw the death notice of a sergeant-pilot who had been killed on active service. After the usual information, a message was added which, I imagine, is likely to be imitated. It said that anyone who had ever known the dead boy would always be sure of a welcome at his parents’ home. So, even now that the war is over, the father and mother will go on taking in strangers for the simple reason that they will be reminded of their dead son by the friends he made.

That is rather like the custom that existed among the first generations of Christians, when faith was a bright fire that warmed more than those who kept it burning. In every house then a room was kept ready for any stranger who might ask for shelter; it was even called “the strangers’ room”: and this not because these people, like the parents of the dead airman, thought they could trace something of someone they loved in the stranger who used it, not because the man or woman to whom they gave shelter reminded them of Christ, but because–plain and simple and stupendous fact–he was Christ.

It would be foolish to pretend that it is easy always to remember this. If everyone were holy and handsome, with “alter Christus” shining in neon lighting from them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her nor is it Christ’s way for Himself now when He is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.

To see how far one realizes this, it is a good thing to ask honestly what you would do, or have done, when a beggar asked at your house for food. Would you–or did you–give it on an old cracked plate, thinking that was good enough? Do you think that Martha and Mary thought that the old and chipped dish was good for their guest?

In Christ’s human life there were always a few who made up for the neglect of the crowd.

The shepherds did it, their hurrying to the crib atoned for the people who would flee from Christ.

The wise men did it; their journey across the world made up for those who refused to stir one hand’s breadth from the routine of their lives to go to Christ. Even the gifts that the wise men brought have in themselves an obscure recompense and atonement for what would follow later in this Child’s life. For they brought gold, the king’s emblem, to make up for the crown of thorns that He would wear; they offered incense, the symbol of praise, to make up for the mockery and the spitting; they gave Him myrrh, to heal and soothe, and He was wounded from head to foot and no one bathed his wounds. The women at the foot of the cross did it too, making up for the crowd who stood by and sneered.

We can do it too, exactly as they did. We are not born too late. We do it by seeing Christ and serving Christ in friends and strangers, in everyone we come in contact with. While almost no one is unable to give some hospitality or help to others, those for whom it is really impossible are not debarred from giving room to Christ, because, to take the simplest of examples, in those they live with or work with is Christ disguised. All our life is bound up with other people; for almost all of us happiness and unhappiness are conditioned by our relationship with other people. What a simplification of life it would be if we forced ourselves to see that everywhere we go is Christ, wearing out socks we have to darn, eating the food we have to cook, laughing with us, silent with us, sleeping with us.

All this can be proved, if proof is needed, by the doctrines of the Church. We can talk about Christ’s Mystical Body, about the vine and the branches, about the Communion of Saints. But Christ Himself has proved it for us, and no one has to go further than that. For He said that a glass of water given to a beggar was given to Him. He made heaven hinge on the way we act towards Him in his disguise of commonplace, frail and ordinary human beings.

Did you give me food when I was hungry? Did you give me something to drink when I was thirsty? Did you take me in when I was homeless and a stranger? Did you give me clothes when my own were all rags? Did you come to see me when I was sick or in prison or in trouble?

And to those who say, aghast, that they never had a chance to do such a thing, that they lived two thousand years too late, he will say again what they had the chance of knowing all their lives, that if these things were done for the very least of his brethren they were done for Him.

For a total Christian the goad of duty is not needed–always prodding him to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege. Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was expected of them–is it likely that Peter’s mother-in-law grudgingly served the chicken she had meant to keep till Sunday because she thought it was “her duty”? She did it gladly: she would have served ten chickens if she had them.

If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ it is certain that is the way it should still be given. Not for the sake of humanity. Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time. Not because these people remind us of Christ, as those soldiers and airmen remind the parents of their son, but because they are Christ, asking us to find room for Him exactly as He did at the first Christmas.