Whatever You Do for the Least of My Brethren: Social Justice Starts at Home, and at Church

I’m not sure how old I was, maybe four.  One Sunday after my mother and my two sisters and I walked back from Mass, my mother made dinner and ate with us, then she went to her room to lie down. She had to lie down a lot. Two years earlier, my fireman father had been killed in a firetruck accident. His death had left my mother alone in the world, as the saying goes, with three little girls: a two year old, a one year old, and a baby born the month after he died. I was the oldest.  I understand now that my mother was barely getting by on a small pension.

We lived in a housing project in Jamaica Plain, an incorporated township in Boston, Massachusetts. My mother’s family lived far away in Ohio and Indiana, and she was alienated from them and from my father’s family, who only lived three miles away in Hyde Park, another township incorporated into the city of Boston.

I understood my mother was in hiding from my Aunt Peggy and Uncle Ray and Grandma Sullivan, who had been caring for my sisters and me for some years until my mother came back from somewhere and spirited us away to live with her again, but I didn’t understand why. Nobody I knew explained things to kids in those days.

When my mother woke up, she saw my sisters were sitting on the living room rug happily playing together without me, as usual, but I was not in the apartment.

She rushed downstairs and found me outside sitting on a bench in the concrete yard in the hot summer sun. I was giving away money from her purse. A small crowd had gathered around when word got around what I was doing. Since she had given me small coins every Sunday to put into the collection plate, I knew coins were money by then.  I think I was young enough not to know that dollars were money, because I wasn’t giving the dollars away. 

I told everyone, “Jesus said to give all you have to the poor. They said that in church today.” My mother quickly checked her wallet and found to her relief the dollars were still there. She explained to the beneficiaries of my largesse that I had made a mistake, and people started giving her back the change I'd given them.

She smiled at me and told me Jesus told that to the young man and that didn’t mean I should give away all her money. She didn’t state the obvious to me, that by objective measurements, we were the poor. 

At around eighteen years of age, I left the Catholic Church, and, after marriage, two children, and a divorce, I came back to belief in Christianity at around thirty-one and then later to Catholicism at around thirty-five.

During the few years before I came back to the Faith, I was living in Minneapolis. Because my ex-husband stopped paying child support and didn't pay alimony, I applied for welfare to support myself and our two children and took advantage of some generous social programs that paid for child care and financial aid that all combined made it possible for me to finish my college degree. (Those programs have long ago been cut.)

In spite of the help I got from the government, things were tight, and like my mother had been, I was all alone in the world with my children, who were only two and four years old then. Sad to say, my sisters were divorced also, living in the Boston area, and they raised their children by themselves too.

After I paid the rent for our Section 8 subsidized apartment and bought food stamps, I had only about $40 a month left to pay for everything else: clothing, detergent, transportation, my children’s school supplies .  .  ..  If one of my children lost a pair of winter gloves, it was a small crisis. I couldn’t afford to buy new ones. I could maybe find another pair in a thrift store if I had the time. To keep my financial aid, I had to be a full time student besides being the sole caregiver for my children—so I was short of both money and time.

I was also impoverished without the help and guidance that Catholic faith can give.

Providentially, during this hard time, I was helped back to faith in Christ because I was invited and prayed for by fundamentalist Christians. First I met a fellow student, a young woman. I don’t remember her name so I’ll call her Jane Peterson. Jane was one of three daughters of a former mayor of Minneapolis and a zealous member of an evangelical organization called Campus Crusade for Christ. Jane began to meet with me weekly for Bible study, and in spite of how I thought I won all the arguments we had, afterwards, somehow, probably by the work of the Holy Spirit, I came to believe what she had told me about the Christian faith. I could feel her praying for me.

People like Jane take literally Christ’s instructions at the end of the gospel of Mark to go out and preach the Gospel to the whole creation, which has been called “The Great Commission.”

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. —Matthew 28:18–20

These days, many Catholics, even missionaries and even members of the hierarchy, reject evangelization, which some scornfully call proselytism. Evangelization is associated in many minds with a lack of respect for what some erroneously believe is the equally valid religious faith of others.

To the contrary, evangelization is an outpouring of love for others and an offering of the good news of the Gospel to those who need the salvation brought to us by the Truth that is found in Jesus Christ and His Church.

The opinion of some biblical critics—that the “great commission” ending was tacked on by the community that supposedly wrote St. Mark's Gospel, and that those words cannot be reliably attributed to Jesus—would have left my evangelical friends at a loss. Without their faith in the words of Christ in the Gospel, I would not have been helped back to Christian faith by their eagerness to share the Gospel and thereby to follow what they personally felt they had been instructed to do by Him. 

And so it happened that because of blessed literal mindedness of these dear Christians, the poor (me and my two children and many others) had the gospel preached to them.

Soon after that, a team of young men and women who were part of a “busing ministry” from a denomination called First Free Church (originally Swedish Evangelical Church) showed up one day at the door to our subsidized apartment on the fifteen floor of the hi-rise where we lived, and a young man handed me a flyer with an invitation to ride their bus to Sunday Services.

Left image: From Wikipedia. By August Schwerdfeger - Own work, CC BY 4.0.

I joined First Free, and we began to take part in all their activities. In my experience there and at other fundamentalist churches, I found, naturally enough, that they took almost all of the words in the Bible literally. 

So I was surprised at how church members reacted one Saturday morning when a homeless man wandered into the building.  I was on my way to a women’s Bible study, and when I walked by the kitchen, I saw a group of older women and men, deaconesses and deacons, were preparing food for an elders’ lunch meeting.

A big strange man with unkempt black hair and a ripped olive green Army jacket, American Indian from the looks of him, probably Ojibway because they are the largest local tribe, stumbled into the church basement and suddenly filled the doorway to the kitchen. 

The deacons and deaconesses looked up from the stainless steel counters where they were cutting up slabs of Jello embedded with canned pear halves and setting the jiggling green squares out for serving on iceberg-lettuce-lined salad plates. Chicken pieces were roasting in other big pans in the oven in a sauce of cream of mushroom soup. The strange man did not do anything that would make anyone think he was dangerous. He simply asked for money for food.  

I was shocked at their response: one of the deacons slipped away to the phone in the pastor’s office, called the police, and within a few minutes, the police had taken the stranger away.  

Let me tell you what I think they should have done instead and why.

Evangelicals don't follow the liturgical year. The pastor would stand up at the podium every Sunday irrespective of the season of the year and preach from the Bible, starting each time where he had stopped the week before. Not too many weeks previously, we had all heard him talk on these words from the letter of James about how to treat a poor man in filthy clothing:

My brothers, don’t hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory with partiality. For if a man with a gold ring, in fine clothing, comes into your synagogue, and a poor man in filthy clothing also comes in; and you pay special attention to him who wears the fine clothing, and say, “Sit here in a good place;” and you tell the poor man, “Stand there,” or “Sit by my footstool;”  haven’t you shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?  Listen, my beloved brothers. Didn’t God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which he promised to those who love him?  But you have dishonored the poor man. . . .  However, if you fulfill the royal law, according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well. . . . [If] you show partiality, you commit sin.—James 2:1-3, 5-6a, 7-9.

If they took the words of St. James literally, I would have expected the evangelicals to invite the poor man to join them for lunch. This would not be comfortable. There would be dangers. 

To do something like that is foolish, but in my way of thinking, the wisdom of God is foolishness to man. Our faith as a whole is foolish, as St. Paul said.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.—1 Corinthians 1:18

Fifteen years or so later, after I was safely back in the Catholic Church for more than a decade, I remembered that incident where the evangelicals had cold-shouldered the stranger, when I went to a pseudo-Seder supper—which I now realize is as disrespectful to the Jews as a pseudo-Mass would be. The dinner was sponsored during Holy Week by a Catholic parish I attended in Milpitas, California. I was living in Milpitas in the South San Francisco Bay by then because, after I had finished my education, I eventually became a technical writer. I had been recruited by Sun Microsystems, and the company had relocated me and my teenaged children from Minneapolis after hiring me to work in one of their Silicon Valley divisions.

This is also sad to say, but within months after the move, my sixteen year old daughter had run away, and then my son left a few months later to join a girlfriend in Minneapolis. And that was the end of my family life. Now I was really alone at the age of 44, in a new part of the country where I had no friends or family members near me any more. And I was finding that making new friends was painfully difficult. 

I had joined the local parish church, but I had not been welcomed. I especially missed family life. People have told me over and over again that you can make your friends into your family. But I wasn’t able to make friends, never mind be able to share the intimate companionship of family life with anyone. I was used to not finding community in the Church by then. But it was still hard because I needed it so badly, especially at that time.

I was a stranger, and nobody took me in. 

Being welcomed didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to hope for when I thought about how the members of the early Church shared everything with one another, and how we are all equals, brothers and sisters in Christ.

During the pseudo-Seder supper, I couldn’t help but notice that the pastor only talked to the mayor and his wife (favoring the rich important guest over others of lesser importance).  As usual in my experience, not one of the parish members at the table at which I sat was even polite enough to pretend any interest in me. I tried to engage them in conversation, and I finally stopped after they only gave me one word answers and looked away.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa) spoke often about how we have a unique kind of poverty in our society, the poverty of loneliness. Making Silicon Valley wages as a technical writer, I was no longer financially poor. But I had the kind of poverty Mother Teresa described here. 

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.”― Mother Teresa, A Simple Path

Maybe not all of us are called to live the radical poverty or radical emulation of Christ as St. Francis of Assisi and others like Dorothy Day have done. But, like the evangelicals, and perhaps even more than they do, we all have to take what He taught seriously and seek out ways to become his true followers. We have to be ready to answer Him at the Last Judgment when He asks us, not if we were weekly Mass goers, but whether we clothed Him, fed him, visited Him when He was in prison, cared for Him when He was sick, buried Him when He died.

Even though He didn't mention keeping the commandments, that was clearly understood, since He said elsewhere, "If you love me, keep my commandments." Of course, without chastity, neither holiness or even effective works are possible. Also of course, we need to worship God at least on Sundays, receive the Eucharist as often as we can, pray every day, and frequently confess our sins in the Sacrament of Penance. We need to be in a state of grace in order to perform works of love for others.

Jesus also said, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. —John 13:35 

Social justice has to start with personal justice. Personal justice must include following traditional teachings about how we honor our commitments and take care of others around us. Do we keep our marriage promises? Did we give selfless love to our spouses? Do we make sure that we give all the attention and guidance our children need? Do we take care of our parents and honor them? Do we care for the needs of members of our extended families and in our neighborhoods?

Neediness is a social sin in our society, treated as if it was leprosy. But Christians are supposed to give sacrificially to those in need. 

Taxpayer-funded programs to help the needy would be much less needed if we all gave Christian love and care to the ones God has given us to love in our daily lives.

And shouldn't we be doing whatever we can to make sure nobody feels left out? Perhaps we should give sacrificially of our time and concern and friendship too?

Do we include and befriend fellow Catholics in our social groups even when we have no use for them or they don't appeal to us?  Do we not want to please Our Lord by being kind and loving? We don't have to like people to love them. And we may find that we do like them if we love them enough to get to know them.  

Saint Teresa of Calcutta  often told people who wanted to come and help her in Calcutta:  

Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely, right where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in homes and in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by society — completely forgotten, completely left alone.

None of Jesus' commandments have an exception clause saying that we should do these things only if the other person is pleasant or attractive or useful to us or doesn’t deserve it because of lifestyle choices.

Jesus merely said that whatever we do to the least of His children we do unto Him.