A Strange And Elusive Thing

Loaves and Fishes sketches the history and the vision of The Catholic Worker, the radical Catholic newspaper founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day in 1933. The book, written by Dorothy Day in the 1960s, has since gone out of print. The following article is taken from three chapters of Part II on "Poverty and Precarity." Reprinted with permission from Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. --The Editors

Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. I have tried to write about it, its joys and sorrows, for thirty years now; and I could probably write about it for another thirty without conveying what I feel about it as well as I would like. I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one.

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. So many good souls who visit us tell us how they were brought up in poverty, but how, through hard work and cooperation, their parents managed to educate all the children--even raise up priests and nuns for the Church. They contend that healthful habits and a stable family situation enable people to escape from the poverty class, no matter how mean the slum they may once have been forced to live in. The argument runs, so why can't everybody do it? No, these people don't know about the poor. Their concept of poverty is of something as neat and well ordered as a nun's cell.

Yes, the poor will always be with us--Our Lord told us that--and there will always be a need for our sharing, for stripping ourselves to help others. It is--and always will be--a lifetime job. But I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class struggle is of our making and by our consent, not His, and we must do what we can to change it. This is why we at the Worker urge such measures as credit unions and cooperatives, leagues for mutual aid, voluntary land reforms and farming communes.

So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radio, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the deterioration of the family. Whatever we can do to combat these widespread social evils by combating their causes we must do. But above all the responsibility is a personal one. The message we have been given comes from the Cross.

In our country, we have revolted against the poverty and hunger of the world. Our response has been characteristically American: we have tried to clean up everything, build bigger and better shelters and hospitals. Here, hopefully, misery was to be cared for in an efficient and orderly way. Yes, we have tried to do much, with Holy Mother the State taking over more and more responsibility for the poor. But charity is only as warm as those who administer it. When bedspreads may not be ruffled by the crooked limbs of age and bedside tables will not hold the clutter of those who try to make a home around them with little possessions, we know that we are falling short in our care for others.

"A baby is always born with a loaf of bread under its arm." This was the consoling remark my brother's Spanish mother-in-law used to make when a new baby was about to arrive. It is this philosophy which makes it possible for people to endure a life of poverty.

"Just give me a chance," I hear people say. "Just let me get my debts paid. Just let me get a few of the things I need and then I'll begin to think of poverty and its rewards. Meanwhile, I've had nothing but." But these people do not understand the difference between inflicted poverty and voluntary poverty; between being the victims and the champions of poverty. I prefer to call the one kind destitution, reserving the word poverty for what St. Francis called "Lady Poverty."

We know the misery being poor can cause. St. Francis was "the little poor man" and none was more joyful than he; yet Francis began with tears, in fear and trembling, hiding out in a cave from his irate father. He appropriated some of his father's goods (which he considered his rightful inheritance) in order to repair a church and rectory where he meant to live. It was only later that he came to love Lady Poverty. Perhaps kissing the leper was the great step that freed him not only from fastidiousness and a fear of disease but from attachment to worldly goods as well.

It is hard to advocate poverty when a visitor tells you how he and his family lived in a basement room and did sweatshop work at night to make ends meet, then how the landlord came in and abused them for not paying promptly his exorbitant rent.

It is hard to advocate poverty when the back yard at Chrystie Street still has the furniture piled to one side that was put out on the street in a recent eviction from a tenement next door.

How can we say to such people, "Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in Heaven," especially when we are living comfortably in a warm house and sitting down to a good table, and are clothed warmly? I had occasion to visit the City Shelter last month, where homeless families are cared for. I sat there for a couple of hours contemplating poverty and destitution in a family. Two of the children were asleep in the parents' arms and four others were sprawling against them. Another young couple were also waiting, the mother pregnant. I did not want to appear to be spying, since all I was there for was the latest news on apartment-finding possibilities for homeless families. So I made myself known to the young man in charge. He apologized for having let me sit there; he'd thought, he explained, that I was "just one of the clients."

Sometimes, as in St. Francis' case, freedom from fastidiousness and detachment from worldly things can be attained in only one step. We would like to think this is often so. And yet the older I get the more I see that life is made up of many steps, and they are very small ones, not giant strides. I have "kissed a leper" not once but twice--consciously--yet I cannot say I am much the better for it.

The first time was early one morning on the steps of Precious Blood Church. A woman with cancer of the face was begging (beggars are allowed only in slums), and when I gave her money--which was no sacrifice on my part but merely passing on alms someone had given me--she tried to kiss my hand. The only thing I could do was to kiss her dirty old face with the gaping hole in it where an eye and a nose had been. It sounds like a heroic deed, but it was not. We get used to ugliness so quickly. What we avert our eyes from today can be borne tomorrow when we have learned a little more about love. Nurses know this, and so do mothers.

The second time I was refusing a bed to a drunken prostitute with a huge, toothless, rouged mouth, a nightmare of a mouth. She had been raising a disturbance in the house. I kept remembering how St. Therese of Lisieux said that when you had to say no, when you had to refuse anyone anything, you could at least do it so that the person went away a bit happier. I had to deny this woman a bed, and when she asked me to kiss her I did, and it was a loathsome thing, the way she did it. It was scarcely a mark of normal human affection.

We suffer these things and they fade from memory. But daily, hourly, to give up our own possessions and especially to subordinate our own impulses and wishes to others--these are hard, hard things; and I don't think they ever get any easier.

You can strip yourself, you can be stripped, but still you will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, your untroubled time, your ease, your refreshment. It may mean books or music--the gratification of the inner senses--or it may mean food and drink, coffee and cigarettes. The one kind of giving up is no easier than the other.

Occasionally--often after reading the life of such a saint as Benedict Joseph Labre--we start thinking about poverty, about going out alone, living with the destitute, sleeping on park benches or in the city shelter, living in churches, sitting before the Blessed Sacrament as we see so many doing who come from the municipal lodging house or the Salvation Army around the corner. And when such thoughts come on warm spring days, when children are playing in the park and it is good to be out on the city streets, we know that we are only deceiving ourselves: for we are only dreaming of a form of luxury. What we want is the warm sun, and rest, and time to think and read, and freedom from the people who press in on us from early morning until late at night. No, it is not simple, this business of poverty.

Over and over again in the history of the Church the saints have emphasized voluntary poverty. Every religious community, begun in poverty and incredible hardship, but with a joyful acceptance of hardship by the rank-and-file priests, brothers, monks, or nuns who gave their youth and energy to good works, soon began to "thrive." Property was extended until holdings and buildings accumulated; and, although there is still individual poverty in the community, there is corporate wealth. It is hard to remain poor.

One way to keep poor is not to accept money which comes from defrauding the poor. A great Catholic layman, a worker for social justice, F.P. Kenkel, editor of Social Justice Review in St. Louis (and always a friend of Peter Maurin's) once commented that the universal crisis in the world today was created by love of money. "The Far East and the Near East [and he might have said all Latin America and Africa also] together constitute a great sack from which blood is oozing. The flow will not stop as long as our interests in these people are dominated largely by financial and economic considerations."

This and other facts seem to me to point more strongly than ever to the importance of voluntary poverty today. At least we can avoid being comfortable through the exploitation of others. And at least we can avoid physical wealth as the result of a war economy. There may be ever-improving standards of living in the United States, with every worker eventually owning his own home and driving his own car; but our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war, and this surely is one of the great arguments for poverty in our time. If the comfort one achieves results in the death of millions in the future, then that comfort shall be duly paid for. Indeed, to be literal, contributing to the war (misnamed "defense") effort is very difficult to avoid. If you work in a textile mill making cloth, or in a factory making dungarees or blankets, your work is still tied up with war. If you raise food or irrigate the land to raise food, you may be feeding troops or liberating others to serve as troops. If you ride a bus you are paying taxes. Whatever you buy is taxed, so that you are, in effect, helping to support the state's preparations for war exactly to the extent of your attachment to worldly things of whatever kind.

The act and spirit of giving are the best counter to the evil forces in the world today, and giving liberates the individual not only spiritually but materially. For, in a world of enslavement through installment buying and mortgages, the only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.

And in a world of hates and fears, we can look to Peter Maurin's words for the liberation that love brings: "Voluntary poverty is the answer. We cannot see our brother in need without stripping ourselves. It is the only way we have of showing our love."

"Precarity," or precariousness, is an essential element in a true voluntary poverty, a saintly French Canadian priest from Martinique has written us. "True poverty is rare," he writes. "Nowadays religious communities are good, I am sure, but they are mistaken about poverty. They accept, they admit, poverty on principle, but everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof. Precarity is everywhere rejected, and precarity is an essential element of poverty. This has been forgotten. Here in our monastery we have precarity in everything except the Church.

"These last days our refectory was near collapsing. We have put several supplementary beams in place and thus it will last maybe two or three years more. Some day it will fall on our heads and that will be funny. Precarity enables us better to help the poor. When a community is always building and enlarging and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do so as long as there are slums and breadlines everywhere."

People ask, How does property fit in? Does one have a right to private property? St. Thomas Aquinas said that a certain amount of goods is necessary to live a good life. Eric Gill said that property is "proper" to man. Recent Popes have written at length how justice rather than charity should be sought for the worker. Unions still fight for better wages and hours, though I have come more and more to feel that that in itself is not the answer, in view of such factors as the steadily rising cost of living and dependence on war production.

Our experiences at The Catholic Worker have taught us much about the workings of poverty, precarity, and destitution. We go from day to day on these principles. After thirty years we still have our poverty, but very little destitution.

I can remember how, when we were first starting to publish our paper, in an effort to achieve a little of the destitution of our neighbors we gave away our furniture and sat on boxes. But as fast as we gave things away people brought more. We gave blankets to needy families, and when we started our first house of hospitality people gathered together all the blankets we needed. We gave away food, and more food came in: exotic food, some of it--a haunch of venison from the Canadian Northwest, a can of oysters from Maryland, a container of honey from Illinois. Even now it comes in. We've even had salmon from Seattle, flown across the continent. No one working at The Catholic Worker gets a salary, so our readers feel called upon to give, and to help us keep the work going. We experience a poverty, of another kind, a poverty of reputation. It is often said, with some scorn, "Why don't they get jobs and help the poor that way? Why are they begging and living off others?"

All I can say to such critics is that it would complicate things to give a salary to Charles or Ed or Arthur for working fourteen hours a day in the kitchen, clothes room, and office; to pay Deane or Jean or Dianne for running the women's house, for writing articles and answering letters all day and helping with the sick and the poor; and then have them all turn the money right back to support the work. Or, if we wanted to make the situation even more complicated, they might all go out and get jobs, and bring the money home to pay for their board and room and the salaries of others to run the house. It is simpler just to be poor. It is simpler to beg. The thing is not to hold on to anything.

The tragedy is, however, that we do, we all do hold on. We hold on to our books, radios, our tools such as typewriters, our clothes; and instead of rejoicing when they are taken from us, we lament. We protest when people take our time or our privacy. We are holding on to these "goods," also.

Attempting to live in the spirit of poverty certainly does not relieve us of the headaches of practical problems. Feeding hundreds of people every day is no easy task, and just how to pay for the supply of food we need is an exercise of faith and hope.

The location of the house makes a difference, for one thing. In some cities the houses of hospitality got a great deal of food from restaurants and even hospitals. In New York City it is against the law to pick up such leftovers, however. This regulation goes pretty far, I sometimes think. A friend of ours, an airline hostess, marched in indignantly one day. "Our flight was canceled and here were a hundred chicken pies going to waste and when I asked for them for The Catholic Worker, they said no, it was against the law to give them away. They were all thrown out--to be fed to the pigs over in New Jersey! I guess the farmers must have the garbage can concession."

In the New York house we buy a great deal of coffee, sugar, milk, tea, and oleo. Our butcher is a friend who gives us meat at a very cheap price. We get free fish from the market--the tails and heads from swordfish after the steaks have been cut off. Every Friday we have chowder or baked fish. Sometimes there is enough for two days, Saturday as well as Friday. Occasionally, someone hands us sacks of rice, and then we have boiled rice for breakfast, which we serve like a cereal with sugar and skim milk.

But our problem is not just one of food. For the rents we must have cash. This comes to more than a thousand dollars a month, not to speak of taxes on the Staten Island farm, which are now fifteen hundred a year and going up all the time. Gas and electricity for a dozen apartments, as well as the houses of hospitality, are especially heavy in winter.

We do not ask church or state for help, but we ask individuals, those who have subscribed to The Catholic Worker and so are evidently interested in what we are doing, presumably willing and able to help. Many a priest and bishop sends help year after year. Somehow the dollars that come in cover current bills, help us to catch up with payments on back debts, and make it possible for us to keep on going. There is never anything left over, and we always have a few debts to keep us worrying, to make us more like the very poor we are trying to help. The wolf is not at the door, but he is trotting along beside us. We make friends with him, too, as St. Francis did. We pray for the help we need, and it comes.

Once we overdrew our account by $200. On the way home from the printers, where we had been putting the paper to bed, we stopped in Chinatown at the little Church of the Transfiguration and said a prayer to St. Joseph. When we got to the office a woman was waiting to visit with us. We served her tea and toast and presently she went on her way, leaving us with a check for the exact amount of the overdraft. We had not mentioned our need.

What we pray for we receive, but of course many times when we ask help from our fellows we are refused. This is hard to take but we go on asking. Once, when an old journalist who had been staying with us was dying after a stroke, I asked a mutual acquaintance if he could give us money for sheets and find a bathrobe for the old man. He was the sick man's friend, but he told us, "He is no responsibility of mine."

But such experiences are balanced by heartening contrasts. On another occasion I told Michael Grace (I might as well mention his name) about a family which was in need; and he took care of that family for over a year, until the man of the house could have a painful but not too serious operation and so regain his strength to work again. I like to recall this because it did away with much of my class-war attitude.

St. John the Baptist, when asked what was to be done, said, "He that hath two coats let him give to him who hath none." And we must ask for greater things than immediate necessities. I believe that we should ask the rich to help the poor, as Vinoba Bhave does in India, but this is hard to do; we can only make it easier by practice. "Let your abundance supply their want," St. Paul says.

Easiest of all is to have so little, to have given away so much, that there is nothing left to give. But is this ever true? This point of view leads to endless discussions; but the principle remains the same. We are our brother's keeper. Whatever we have beyond our own needs belongs to the poor. If we sow sparingly we will reap sparingly. And it is sad but true that we must give far more than bread, than shelter.

If you are the weaker one in substance, in mental or physical health, then you must receive, too, with humility and a sense of brotherhood. I always admired that simplicity of Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov which led him to accept quite simply the support he needed from the benefactors who took him in.

If we do give in this way, then the increase comes. There will be enough. Somehow we will survive; "The pot of meal shall not waste, nor the cruze of oil be diminished," for all our giving away the last bit of substance we have.

At the same time we must often be settling down happily to the cornmeal cakes, the last bit of food in the house, before the miracle of the increase comes about. Any large family knows these things--that somehow everything works out. It works out naturally and it works out religiously.

Copyright © 1963 by Dorothy Day.