Loaves and Fishes

Dorothy Day

Ours is a great place for nicknames.

In the Catholic Church one never needs any money to start a good work, Peter replied. People are what are important. If you have the people and they are willing to give their work--that is the thing. God is not to be outdone in generosity. The funds will come in somehow or other.

But there are no wages. Well, people do not need to work for wages. They can offer their services as a gift.

I explained that we were not a community of saints but rather a slipshod group of individuals who were trying to work out certain principles--the chief of which was an analysis of man's freedom and what it implied. We could not put people out on the street, I said, because they acted irrationally and hatefully. We were trying to overcome hatred with love, to understand the forces that made men what they are, to learn something of their backgrounds, their education to change them, if possible from lions into lambs. It was a practice in loving, a learning to love, a paying of the cost of love.

On the other hand, to continue examining these subtleties: What about this business of letting the other fellow get away with things? Isn't there something awfully smug about such piety--building up your own sanctimoniousness at the expense of the increased guilt of someone else? This turning the other cheek, this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace--how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I'd rather be the striker than the meek one struck. One would almost rather be a sinner than a saint at the expense of the sinner. No, somehow we must be saved together.

It just happened. It is the living from day to day, taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, trying literally to follow the Gospel, that resulted in this work.
"Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not away....Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and calumniate you."

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.

Even then, deep within, I would be sure; even though I said to myself, "I believe because I want to believe, I hope because I want to hope, I love because I want to love." These very desires would be regarded by God as He regarded those of Daniel, who was called a man of desires, and whom He rewarded.

Use your common sense as far as it will take you, Father Roy used to say, and, when you realize you can do nothing, bow your head to the storm and pray--pray without ceasing. If that fails, rejoice that you, too, are accounted worthy to suffer and to realize your weakness and keep on praying like the importunate widow.

The city, the state--we have nicknamed them Holy Mother the City, Holy Mother the State--have taken on a large role in sheltering the homeless: But the ideal is for every family to have a Christ room, as the early fathers of the Church called it. The prophets of Israel certainly emphasized hospitality. It seems to me that in the future the family--the ideal family--will always try to care for one more. If every family that professed to follow Scriptural teaching whether Jew, Protestant, or Catholic, were to do this, there would be no need for huge institutions, houses of dead storage where human beings waste away in loneliness and despair. Responsibility must return to the parish with a hospice and a center for mutual aid, to the group, to the family, to the individual.

I am afraid that nature may become similarly enraged at our own waste here in our too blessed America. You see it on every hand: in the Army, in the jails, in all public institutions. Even the school lunch system gives evidence of it. Corporations hire efficiency engineers to eliminate waste motions and thus help them save a few pennies; unions fight and strike to get a few cents an hour wage increase for their workers. At the same time there is wanton waste everywhere, on the part of every man, woman, and child.

You wonder: how did they do it? Was the world so different that you could take in pretty much everyone off the streets, offer them a bed, and sleep safely? Have perceptions of the homeless, the down and out, so incredibly altered that we cannot even fathom this? Where has this dream gone?

I turned to Loaves and Fishes looking for some kind of explanation that could be my hope. I didn't really find any explanations other than a very hard one: just do it, but I did find some hope. It seems that they didn't have so much better an idea of what they were doing than I.

I envy the Catholic Workers their lack of institution, their abundance of energy and right-timing-ness, their faith, and their freedom. It seems that not so much of this is possible in this day. I feel pathetic even in writing it, because I have not tried, so perhaps the writing is my way of purging this poison so that I can try, but aren't there so many new hurdles? Liability. A different sort of person living in poverty. Sex crimes that seem to be more common (although, I'm not actually convinced this one is true). But how could one open up a building and say, come live with me?

As always Grace. I don't know that there is too much more to say on the subject than that where God requires, God supplies. I wonder if the old truth doesn't remain the big truth: pray. The Catholic Workers spent quite a lot of time in prayer. They went to daily mass. They prayed at the noon time. They prayed Vespers. And they opened their doors wide and feared no evil.

Perhaps one of the greatest aspects of reading Loaves and Fishes is that you get a sense of a life, a world, a set of rules entirely different from those commonly accepted as in force. The Kingdom has a different set of laws and often they don't seem to be possibilities to the world, much less make sense.

As a note. I have been reading quite a few books written in the earlier half of the Twentieth Century and one thing that has poked me in the mind a good deal, has been their asides on the subject of garbage. From Steinbeck to Dorothy Day to Edward Bellamy, people were noticing that garbage was piling up, that we live lifestyles of a particularly wasteful sort, and that it can't go on. It has gone on. Is that ominous?