Catholics love to disagree about all sorts of things. But when it comes to the Church’s engagement with the poor, we all seem to agree on one thing: the little word “for.”
“Christians help the poor by doing things for them” is a sentiment few disagree with, and it’s hard to overstate the difference this makes for our whole way of being Church, from personal discipleship to diocesan initiatives to the training of priests. So, we volunteer at the soup kitchen, we give to charities, we build schools in Africa, and we carry granola bars in our car for the guy on the corner. There is nothing wrong with this, and we do all these things “for” the poor because we want to do them “for” Jesus.
And yet, I’m convinced, “for” is missing the heart of the Gospel. “For” accomplishes some good things, but it doesn’t build community, it doesn’t ask the poor what they want, it doesn’t make new friends, and it doesn’t overcome the isolation and loneliness that is often the cause of our problems in the first place. “For” makes those with resources the benefactors and saviors. It has a hard time knowing what Pope Francis could mean in desiring “a Church of the poor.” Perhaps most worryingly, making those with means the heroes, “for” doesn’t transform us, doesn’t allow us to see our own poverty, because the lack is always somewhere else.
The Gospel’s word is not “for,” but “with.” “With” is the way that God chooses to relate to us, and so the way that we should relate to the poor. “The Word was made flesh,” we read at Christmas, “and dwelt with us.” “They called him Emmanuel, which means God with us.” God himself spent 33 years walking the earth, and for most of those years — at least 30 of them — he did very little “for” us, except to be “with” us. When Christ gives us the Church he promises “I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.” And at the end of those ages, he will return so that “the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God…and God himself will be with them.”
We have stumbled on the most important word in the Bible. The point is not that God never did anything “for” us, nor that we should never do anything “for” others, but that our “for,” like God’s, can only ever come based on a prior, unalterable, utterly unswerving “with.” The Gospel’s challenge, in other words, is to make our ministry incarnational, just like Christ’s was, by coming alongside others in the flesh. I recently had dinner with a group of Catholics who had become involved with the poor in their hometown of Kansas City. “It’s fine to serve food at the homeless shelter,” one woman said. “But we like to go through the line and eat with them, just to be with them and get to know them. To be one of them.”
To turn a “them” into an “us” is the challenge of being “with.”
But, you might object, “with” seems much harder than “for.” It takes time, it might be uncomfortable, and it might require that we change. Indeed. That’s one way to know it’s the Gospel. But also, because it’s the Gospel, none of us will start by being good at it — it’s baby steps for all of us, and we are simply invited to begin wherever we are. And the first step toward being “with,” for many of us, might simply be to do something small to put ourselves closer to the poor than we usually are. That might be serving a meal at the shelter, talking to the guy on the corner, or walking home through a different neighborhood. But whatever it is, in whatever small way, the promise is that, in being with the poor, we discover another way that Christ has chosen to be with us.
Miller is director of Pastoral Care and Outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Worker community in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin.miller1@protonmail.com.
