you will become prayer

"We must strive for hospitality of the heart"

Jun 27, 2025

We in the developed countries have sinned. Lost in our affluent society, we have given generously of our surplus, but scantily of our necessity. Because we have sinned against our brothers and sisters, we have sinned against ourselves. It is said that faith and hope will pass away, but charity will remain. But I wonder, will there be any charity left? What will we find, we who have hated our Negro brother, disliked our Indian sister, and often despised anyone different from ourselves? — Catherine de Hueck Doherty

It’s Rose of Sharon and Catherine Doherty Season

When we don’t answer our door—which often rings persistently (that is good praying, cf Luke 18) and repeatedly at St. Martin de Porres House—we often say: Jesus just knocked.

On one hand, a neighbor told me that Naed (a former Worker here in Harrisburg who died by suicide six years ago) was exhausted by the constant bell-ringing. On this particular hand, we must remember that even the Son of God drew boundaries: do you think you have fewer needs than he? We remember that Jesus went away to deserted places to pray. We remember that we are but human flesh, and so was he, our humble and kenotic savior, and so sometimes, when the crowd pressed upon him, he fled. Ignore such a simple example at your peril: the tempter in the desert often pushes you past your limits.

On the other hand, we remind ourselves of who the urgent petitioner leaning (often literally) on the bell is: it is Jesus. It is the honored guest we have been waiting for our whole lives. It is a blessing to have a guest, and all guests—even rude ones who leave a lot of granola bar wrappers and chocolate crumbs on the floor—have made their journey to us from the father.

This is a paradox I am not wise enough to resolve. When people say Christianity is a paradox, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. “Paradox” isn’t a tool for sanding down our questions or ironing away the tensions. Paradox means we live in the grasp of contradictions, if we were guided by a physical compass, true north would vacillate between opposite magnetic poles.

So we must reach down for a deeper logic than that that keeps our compass spinning. There is no resolving these contradictions without the great paradox himself, our Christ, the great contingency. We cannot navigate the paradox without the love that made all and breathes in all and pushes us onward; the love that stills us to rest at its feet. Not without the love that appears in the eyes of the man drooping into his lunch from the drugs pouring through his veins; in the smile of the woman who is high as a kite, assuring you the bus pass is for her trip to work (even though you see her regularly picking up and dropping off drugs in the back alley during your morning prayer); or in the fifth person today who has asked for toilet paper. If you do not see the love that made you in those faces, then you will never resolve the paradox.

I was editing the following essays last night, and as I fact-checked, I found that Kenyatta Booze, the man whose struggle to be admitted to a court-ordered rehab was lovingly and fiercely chronicled in an essay below, had died. Just a month or so after his story had been written.

Roundtable

Sentenced to Death in Georgia

9 hours ago · 2 likes · 1 comment

At 58, he died far too young. But he beat the average life expectancy of a person experiencing homelessness, which is between 48 and 52. We sentence so many of our neighbors to death.

John Vodicka tells Kenyatta’s story:

Back in September 2023, Mr. Booze committed his most serious misdemeanor crime, shoplifting, after he went into Walmart and attempted to walk out with “Payday candy bars, a package of Snickers, Blow-Pops, a Coke Zero, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a pair of socks, blue jeans and earbuds.”
Kenyatta Booze has been in jail more than out over the past several years. When he’s out, I’ve managed to spend time with him whenever I provide transportation to his courthouse hearings, or visit with him on the streets
of Athens. He has two adult children. He played football in high school. He drove 18-wheelers for a living. I’ve also gotten to know Mr. Booze’s 83-year-old mother, Dorothy Griffin, who lives an hour away in Lawrenceville but still has managed to get to Athens to attend some of his court hearings.
“My son is not a criminal,” Ms. Griffin told me. “Something happened to him several years ago, and he’s not right anymore. He’s never been like this.” Dorothy Griffin is convinced that her son needs neurological treatment in an appropriate care facility. “Just to look at him and to hear him speak should be obvious to anyone that Kenyatta isn’t right,” she said. “He has a hard time putting a sentence together now. He stumbles when he walks, and his hands and arms are always flailing about. When he’s sitting, his head jerks back and forth.”

A court ordered Kenyatta should serve a prison sentence at a sobriety rehab facility. Two facilities, upon meeting him, turned him away, since he did not meet their physical requirements needed to work in order to offset the cost of his stay.

Reading his story, I wondered how many of my guests and neighbors could be in his shoes: the predicaments they find themselves in being resolved in death rather than a solution, a chapter of new life. I thought of the bells I hadn’t answered. In Roundtable, we’ve also been excerpting Harry Murray’s “Do Not Neglect Hospitality,” which is a fabulous sociological study of what happens at a “Catholic Worker House” or “House of Hospitality.”

I think one of Harry’s insights is that sometimes living in a house of hospitality can make it very hard to keep a soft heart toward the many people pressing in on the hospitality. But hospitality, unlike other social service models, is not a one-way street. It is not simply a waterfall of giving into a vacuum of need. It is a relationship, it is a meeting of Is and Thous. But, simply because of the number of guests who come, a house of hospitality will draw as many bad guests as good guests—wheats and tares. There is nothing that sours you on the experience of hosting like a bad houseguest; it is a commonplace that has been honored with an adage: we do not wish to overstay our welcome. Just like any bad relationship, a bad guest can burn us, make us more reticent to try again.

Welcome is a renewable resource, but it is not unlimited. Bad guests can sap away at our welcome; they drain the tank, like driving at 90 on the highway with the air conditioner running. We are human, and we have limited capacity to give. When welcome is running low—or the tank is empty—we dip into the host who has welcomed us into this world.

When I enter this pool of silence, I become more charitable. Is there any limit to charity? The only limit is death. I die for the other out of love for him. This was the only limit that Christ himself knew.

Sitting on the back porch, watching the sketchy comings and goings of the alley during prayer, I have been reading Catherine Doherty. She reads like an Eastern Dorothy Day. Day is every inch imbued in the Russians and the Romantics as Doherty, but she writes more like a journalist; Doherty like a hieromonk.

Catherine Doherty reminds me—in chapter eleven—that really, without God we can do nothing. Nothing at all. Dorothy Day says this often: the work is God’s—“In the history of the saints,” Peter Maurin tells her, “capital is raised by prayer. God sends you what you need when you need it.”

Dorothy Day is always reminding us of the dignity of our own work, of the sacredness of our own minds and the inherent dignity of our conscience, our person, our divine ability to choose and act in the world—and to choose and act for the right thing, for the good thing, for the just thing—it is sometimes easy to miss that underlying all she does not believe that we can do anything without God. A Love far wider than our own is the root and fruit of all this work.

Our hearts must be open to all hearts, Doherty writes. Our motive must be charity, for that is God’s motive.

Dorothy loved St. John of the Cross’ gentle commandment: Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love. I thought of my past year in Allison Hill: how dry and rocky the soil has seemed at times, barren, stripped of all the richness that fosters good growth. Are any of these seeds going to take? I have thought multiple times, trying to scatter the seed in good ground, not among the thorns, but casting plenty of pearls before swine along the way. Do I have more welcome where this came from? I wonder.

But love really does grow wherever you commit to sowing it. Not because we love, but because God loves us. Thank God ahead of time, Solanus Casey was fond of saying. Do I have that kind of faith—do I have that love?

Walking through the garden in the evening, when the fireflies float like little sparks up through the grass, listening to the bees hum in their box, seeing the chard sway in the light wind, I see that there is beauty here where once there wasn’t. If there is no beauty, put beauty, and you will find beauty, I think, admiring the rose of sharon bushes and St. Francis under them.

Truly the measure we measure out will be measured out to us. Each time I have thought: I don’t have enough of this, I can’t give this, I am proved wrong: most of the times you don’t miss whatever you’ve given when it’s gone, and the other times, God really does provide to fill in the gaps.

God provides as God rings the doorbell yet again. Because it is guests who bring us the love we did not know we needed. When I welcome the honored guest, she and I both might think that they have come to get something from me. But really, they are bringing me what I have been seeking. And love is now sown in me.