As a general rule, a sick goat is a dead goat. They tend to maintain the appearance of perfect health until they cannot, at which point they are usually dying. And yet, the farm manager here at Trinity Hills, the Catholic Worker House and Farm of the Catholic Church of Southern Missouri, is going all out to save the life of a little three-week-old goat kid, using the full range of extraordinary means, including glucose injections and special formula feedings around the clock.
It is an exhausting routine for an animal that is probably going to die. And so I put Catherine “to the test,” with the goat beside her, and asked if it is worth it.
The animals perform a kind of ministry or service just by their very being: they give much consolation to our guests, create an atmosphere of peace, maintain the property, produce income, and feed the hungry. Most importantly, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Animals are God's creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory.”
And yet there is plenty of suffering and death on any farm; such is the way of the world after The Fall. There is great beauty, but also sickness and disease no amount of effort and expense can prevent. It would seem eminently practical to ask, “Is it worth it?” And not just about the goat or the other animals, but our attempt to house homeless families, shelter those escaping from domestic violence, and provide food for the hungry.
Our Best Efforts Fail
This reality, that our best efforts will often enough fail, with sad and tragic results, is of course not limited to animal husbandry. Some of our guests decide to return to their abuser. A few depart suddenly, carrying off our sheets, towels, and pillows.
And others, sharing our home and eating at our table for months, will, after receiving a “no” from us when they wanted a “yes,” declare to all our shortcomings regarding the practices of Mercy to all who will listen. One guest told us, “Now I know that God has truly abandoned me,” which is more than a little discouraging.
These sort of tales are not unique to us. Dorothy Day, co-founder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement, shared many such situations in her journals. Given these experiences, common to most who actually spend their time with the poor, a very human doubt arises: “Is it worth it? Am I making a difference?”
But asking this question is to judge the poor, and judging the poor is demoralizing. It makes you an adversary of the very people you want to help and, unsurprisingly, leads to resenting them for their need. Quoting from, and adding to, a book she was reading, Dorothy Day contrasted the treatment of the poor by medieval monasteries to the actions of government agencies in her own day:
The poor did not have to sit, as they do today, for endless hours on the benches of some welfare agency to be subjected to a third degree on their personal lives, treated as crooks and investigated to the point of criminal persecution. We have often deplored this treatment of our poor and advocated means grounded on the seven ways in which Christ was treated by His disciples. [Matthew 25:35-40.]
An Exhausting Judgment
Constantly judging the worth of your own efforts by placing under judgement the persons you are serving is an exhausting endeavor. It also discourages us and tempts us, as Pope Francis said, to “yield to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil offers us every day." It marks us as clever, but takes away our joy.
The “failures” of the poor are imputed to ourselves as helpers of the poor. We want them to succeed, in part, because their success vindicates our efforts and thus ourselves. Their lack of success threatens our delicate egos and the value of our work in our own minds. And as part of this mentality, a resentment builds since they are wasting our “generous” efforts.
It sounds eminently responsible to ask “is it worth it,” but behind the veneer of being practical, isn’t the real question nakedly self-centered: “Is it worth it to me?” Am I at least being paid back with gratitude and success in the eyes of all?
Knowing this tendency in those of us who claim to serve the poor, Dorothy Day frequently quoted from Dostoevsky’s description of true Christian charity in contrast to a common counterfeit found in “dreams”:
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
Unmerited Charity
“We love because he first loved us,” 1 John tells us. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”
We are intrinsically unworthy of God’s love and cannot earn it by being good or by any other human effort. We can only accept or reject the free unmerited gift of the person and love of Jesus. There is no Christian charity without Christ. It is with the undeserved loved that we have received from him that we love others — particularly those in need amongst us.
True acts of Christian Charity must be freely given and unmerited to be worthy of the name. Since they cannot be earned, Christians are liberated from the need to judge the poor. There is no injustice in serving on a first-come, first-served basis. No need for eligibility requirements or an interrogation regarding someone’s income or assets. No one can take advantage of you when you are giving to anyone who is hungry or homeless. What is being given away unconditionally in Christian charity cannot be stolen.
No one is worthy of God’s love, so no one is unworthy of Christian charity. Unworthily we have received and so we dare not judge any person in need as undeserving. In the realm of the practice of Christian charity there is no such thing as "the undeserving poor."
And if the liberation from judging others and living in the freedom and glory of God is not sufficient motivation, should we insist on putting the poor to a judgement that we were forgiven and demanding that they earn what we were given for free, the Gospel of St. Matthew should frighten us to repent:
“You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?” Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt.
Postscript: The goat kid died in the night. And, by the unmerited Grace of God, everyone here is able to answer, “Yes, it is worth it.”
Nicholas Lund-Molfese is director of Trinity Hills, the Catholic Worker House and Farm of the Catholic Church of Southern Missouri. Before starting the farm, he taught at Salve Regina University and served the archdiocese of Chicago as director of the Office for Peace and Justice and director of the Integritas Institute for Ethics at the University of Illinois.
For Further Reading
Pope Francis’s March 2013 Address to the College of Cardinals
Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Ideas On Hospitality
Nicholas Lund-Molfese’s The Christian is to the World What the Soul is to the Body
His articles for The Mirror, the diocesan newspaper
David Mills’s Speaking for the Poor, Especially When You’re Not
Kathleen Hunker’s Outsourcing Charity
Mattias Caro’s Solidarity Begins in Sympathy