Two months back, I wrote about the Catholic Worker Movement founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day and their vision for agenda-less hospitality. I wrote that this was just the first difference between their Catholic vision of hospitality and more conventional visions of social service. This month, I want to reflect on another difference.
Most of the time, when we think of the poor, or the works of mercy, we think about helping someone. And we think about it primarily in terms of providing some physical need: food, shelter, socks or whatever. In this way of viewing things, whether it be at a hospitality house or giving five bucks to the guy holding the sign on the street corner, the equation is simple. There is some sort of lack, which my abundant resources supply, and that is how I help people. Fair enough.
The Catholic Worker vision goes deeper than that. It starts, indeed, with an emphasis on the works of mercy: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, giving alms, offering a drink to the thirsty and the rest. Dorothy and Peter’s emphasis on these was so strong that they advocated works of mercy as a daily practice, not just something we do sometimes. It was to become a routine habit of our lives.
The primary reason for the daily practice of the works of mercy, however, is not that there is so much lack in the world, but that there is so much lack in us. In the Catholic tradition, for instance, almsgiving is not just important because otherwise the poor would go without, though that’s a consideration. Rather, almsgiving is good for the giver. It “washes away all sins,” as the Book of Tobit says. It’s not so much us helping, as us being helped. In it we are not the benefactor, deserving a pat on the back; we are the receiver and Christ is the benefactor. As we do it, we acknowledge our own sinfulness and ask that as we extend mercy to someone else, Christ will extend mercy to us.
As with almsgiving, so too with the rest of the works of mercy. In Jesus’ famous parable where, you might say, he institutes the works of mercy, he says that “in as much as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, in other words, are primarily places where we meet Christ. In this sense, they are not in the first instance for others, they are primarily for us. Every encounter with another person, especially the poor, in this perspective, is an encounter with our Lord himself.
Peter Maurin called this approach “personalism.” It emphasizes that people are not mere instances of sociological laws, statistical probabilities, or predictable products of psychological development. We should not approach them from the posture of a social engineer — trying to figure out what input will lead to the best social outcome — or calculating what will be the best way to make this person more nearly middle class.
Rather, hospitality houses are where we learn what Maurin called “the art of human contacts.” That is, receiving each person for who they are, and what they bring to me right now, in that moment — not worrying about where they come from or where I think they should get.
So, yes, Catholic Worker hospitality houses are places where the poor are fed, clothed and housed. But they are also places where I might slowly learn to release my need for control, my desire to have all the answers and my love of being the good guy. I learn to receive the person in front of me, not as if she was Christ, but as Christ, as the “Rule of St. Benedict” says. With Christ in front of my eyes, I am not asking how I can help that person, but what Christ wants to do with me, right then and there.
Hospitality houses, in other words, are schools of virtue. They are not about us transforming others, they are about Christ transforming 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.
