I asked our friend John what he was giving up for Lent.
John is homeless.
So you’d be right in saying I was asking a stupid question.
But even stupid questions can be graced with good answers.
John said that he wasn’t so much giving anything up for Lent as making an effort to give more.
You might ask: what could John possibly have to give? Aren’t we the ones who should be giving to him?
John has given us so much: mostly-fresh baguettes, air fresheners for the over-visited bathroom basement, Ann Sather cinnamon rolls, a Louis Vuitton (paper) bag, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and, most recently, a copy of The Real Deal.
I thought of John when reading what St. Leo the Great says in his sermon in today’s Office of Readings:
“Do not fear a lack of means. A generous spirit is itself great wealth. There can be no shortage of material for generosity where it is Christ who feeds and Christ who is fed. In all this activity there is present the hand of him who multiplies the bread by breaking it and increases it by giving it away.
The giver of alms should be free from anxiety and full of joy. His gain will be greatest when he keeps back least for himself.”
I couldn’t have written a better description of John.
But I also thought of this small house of so many good people that has given so much to so many people over the past fifty years, the past fifty days, and even the past fifty hours.
“Let us now extend to the poor and those afflicted in different ways a more open-handed generosity, so that God may be thanked through many voices and the relief of the needy supported by our fasting. No act of devotion on the part of the faithful gives God more pleasure than that which is lavished on God’s poor. Where he finds charity with its loving concern, there he recognizes the reflection of his own fatherly care.”
I think of how everyone in the house treats with patience the screams of one of our guests. I think of how graciously everyone opens the doors over and over again each day, just as the Father opens his arms to the Prodigal Sons over and over. It really is the father who is prodigal in hospitality, and we strive to imitate this love in our own impoverished way.
Each day of Lent has passed by in a hurricane of activity. We have kept ourselves busy doing good, as Paul commands the Corinthians. I feel myself struggling to snatch onto moments of peace and quiet, which are so necessary in order to drink in fully the richness of each day.
The past weekend, three of us made breakfast, served a crowd of twenty, and then hosted a discussion on Dorothy Day’s clarification of thought in the form of her pacifism. Peace may seem like a daunting task—world peace has certainly become the pageant queen of social justice clichés—but, as one wise man pointed out, perhaps even for Jesus’ disciples, the command to spread his message to the ends of the earth certainly seemed impossible. Two thousand short years later, who has not heard the name Jesus of Nazareth nor remembers his death on the cross? We say so much is impossible, but we forget God tells us to think in terms of neighbors, rather than crowds. He is not where a million are gathered in his name, but only two or three.
Sunday brings a house guest from Australia, community dinner, and sung compline, which fills my entire body with a peace that I have only previously experienced when receiving a professional massage. Dinner is interrupted by delivering groceries and Advil to a neighbor in a bleak SRO room. Later that evening, as a housemate shares his burdens with me, his eyes spring a leak; but our peace is disrupted by the boiler leaking water at such a rate the basement is soon the sixth Great Lake. A pipe on the boil gushes water like Old Faithful. We spend the next two hours cutting off the water, rigging up a hose system to drain the unexpected geyser into the shower, mopping up the water, and setting up fans and towels.
I think of Dorothy Day’s refrain: “This, then, is perfect joy.”
And it is. The next day, I laugh at the image of the basement underwater and three small people trying to keep it dry. What seems an insurmountable emergency at 11 pm seems like a humorous story by 11 am.
And then by noon, we are preparing for Persian New Year, a Nowruz feast for a friend, because we are all homeless, and it is up to us to become home for each other while on pilgrimage. I find that, during all this exterior activity, my interior life has not been fallow. The field of my own heart has been tilled, boulders cleared. Love is not simply an interior state or exterior action—it is also an exterior disposition and interior action. Love is made of many small conversions, the same ones every year.
I am, for a moment, right now, writing this, at peace. My phone has stopped ringing, I am in a café the next neighborhood over. The pages due for writer’s group tonight are turned in, I have no responsibilities for the moment—but they will begin again in just a few hours. This is a short reprieve.
But thinking of this weekend, this week, my mind has often pondered, with actual appreciation for the first time, the line of Dostoevsky’s that Dorothy was so fond of quoting. It’s a funny line for a saint’s motto, but I think I’ve begun to understand it in a new way this Lent:
“For love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
But our dreams know nothing of love, even though we think they do. Love in action draws from deeper wells than dreams. And, even when—especially when—you think it impossible, there is always more to give. Not at the expense of one’s self, but as a gift of more self you didn’t know was there. And perhaps wasn’t, before you began to love. Love makes us, rather than depletes us. But to be made, to be created—to create— is an awe-ful miracle.
This, then, is perfect joy.