COMMENTARY: The deepest and most transformative kind of charity is kenotic and cruciform wherein an encounter with a real face and a real name lays a claim upon us.
When I was a young seminarian, I spent a summer working at a homeless shelter and soup kitchen run by Catholic Charities in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the regular visitors there was an elderly man, very poor, named Sylvester Triplett, who was in declining health and lived in a small row home near the shelter. I remember he would sit on a chair just outside the shelter and greet everyone who came in. He looked and sounded like Louis Armstrong; with a raspy voice you could easily recognize as he came walking down the street with his cane, talking to people.
To the world, he was just a faceless nobody. To the government, he was a statistic and a name on a spreadsheet filled with other names. But to us, he was “Sylvester,” the de facto mayor of King Street and a real person with a real history.
Slyvester died of a heart attack that summer. I know not where the money came from, but he did end up at a local funeral home in a nice casket. The staff of the shelter went to his viewing, and, sadly, we were the only ones there. Sylvester had no surviving family, and none of the homeless who frequented the shelter came to his viewing. And so we kept vigil by his body and prayed for his soul. He may have died in worldly anonymity, but he went to Our Lord accompanied by our prayers.
For the past 44 years, I have remembered Sylvester and prayed for his soul at every Mass I attend. I reckon he is in heaven at this point, and so I also now routinely ask Sylvester to pray for me. Such is the beauty of the Catholic faith wherein the bonds of charity embraced freely transformed an old man I barely knew, and with whom I shared very little in common, into a lifelong spiritual companion who I hope to meet again someday.
I begin with this personal story to highlight a truth often spoken of by Servant of God Dorothy Day: Even though justice is important — and Sylvester deserved more justice in this life than he got — charity is the more fundamental Christian category, since it is the personalism of charity that breathes fire into the equations of justice.
Charity in the sense that the Sermon on the Mount demands costs us something on a personal level. It requires sacrifice, and it often beckons us to reach out in love even to those we do not like. It beckons us as well to love our enemies, since they too have faces and names. Charity is always personal in the sense Dorothy Day insisted upon, and therefore when we give money to a “charity,” it is an act, though laudable and good, that can be without much cost (as we give from our largesse rather than our substance) and that is done with only a vague sense of who the money is helping.
By contrast, the deepest and most transformative kind of charity is kenotic and cruciform wherein an encounter with a real face and a real name lays a claim upon us. This charity demands that we divest ourselves of all presumed privilege, of all of our precious “rights,” and turn ourselves over unreservedly to the needs of a real person standing in front of us. Often, this is with strangers, but the reality is that the biggest strangers in our midst are often those with whom we are bonded in family ties and social friendship and who we allegedly “know well.” But this kind of “knowing” can be the most deceptive of all, and it can create frictions born of misunderstanding and ingrained grievances over time that require healing.
It is easy to say, “I am sorry” to a stranger. There is no history there and no baggage. There are no hanging chads of unresolved grievance, smoldering in the depths, which only arise among those we know. This is the hardest charity, and it reminds us that transformation in Christ is no mere sentimentalism or romanticism about some abstraction we call “the poor.”
This is the “personalism” of Dorothy Day, who made the point that on the level of Christian discipleship, the path of charity toward neighbors is the superior one since it is local and immediate and on my doorstep rather than somebody else’s. It is this personal element that is critical since it alone grips our souls and forges sanctification. Therefore, it is charity alone, as Dorothy said, that turns duty into delight.
Justice is often exercised by governmental authorities; and for that reason, it can be bureaucratic, distant, anonymous, impersonal, and even a bit frightening. It is necessary of course for the government to care for the least among us and the most vulnerable, but the presence of government programs, good in themselves, can also tend to absolve us of our own obligations to those in need. We can begin to think that the poor and the oppressed are “the government’s problem” and not our own as well.
This is why Dorothy Day actually had serious reservations in her time about the newly enacted Social Security program. She was not totally opposed to it in principle but worried that it would rob Christians of their motivation to perform the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
She followed the personalistic philosophy and theology of Catholic thinkers like Emmanuel Mounier, himself influenced by the Catholic Charles Péguy, whose small book The Personalist Manifesto greatly influenced Dorothy Day and the co-founder of her movement, the French intellectual Peter Maurin. The focus of Mounier’s thought went beyond a mere affirmation of the dignity of every person made in God’s image. He teased out the full implications of this theological assertion for our own time by pointing out that it gives us a vision of the human person that is spiritual in its essence and not reducible to the material conditions upon which it is based.
This is important because there is a tendency in the modern world to affirm the “rights” and dignity of every individual but to stop there and proceed no further into the foundational metaphysical reasons why all people have rights and dignity. And this failure to press on into the spiritual depths of personhood short-circuits our analysis of what a human being is and eventually leads instead to a utilitarian and functionalist account of human personhood.
Because the anti-personalist social trends of her time are now even more pronounced, Dorothy Day — and others of her kind, like the founder of Madonna House Catherine Doherty, who met Day — are of immense ongoing relevance for today. Recent violent events in our country serve to remind us that when true charity is absent, then the concept of “the justice owed to me and my kind” is easily perverted into a mandate to “take what is ours” by violent force. Justice thus becomes its opposite (balkanized self-interest) and is reduced to a mere word for legitimating the most heinous acts of murderous hatred.
We need justice, of course. And we need government programs to aid the poor. But from a Christian perspective, what we need today more than ever are saints whose lives of radical charity can act as a social provocation. And not the saints of sentimentalism, but those of real flesh-and-blood divestment of their self-interest, in a cruciform witness to the love of God — a love that descended into the wretchedness of our condition, in order to heal and retrieve us from the self-inflicted wounds of our own morally culpable spiritual blindness and stupidity.
