(Reflection) Food of Angels, Food for Men; All You Lowly, Come and Eat.

"Hey, One Eye." They call him so because he has one eye —one eye and a lid, creased with age and spattered with melanin, sunken over an empty socket.

            Darla's eyes, circled with bright blue liner, leak from the corners so I cannot be sure whether her soul or her ducts are broken or which would be sadder.

            Dawn holds her jaw in pain, leaving half of a warm pastry abandoned on her paper plate until she can get a job to get benefits to get to the dentist.

            I ask Greg to consider produce: "Imagine you can have anything you want, what would it be?" "Anything?" he asks, eyeing me in way that makes my skin crawl with an unseen colony of ants. "To eat." I say. "Within reason."

            When I get close, they smell like cigarettes and jelly donuts. When I get close, I can see the browned nubs of teeth lodged in gummy smiles. The guests at the Monroe Community Center are a motley crew, and to deny it would be a disservice —to romanticize poverty and to romanticize their lives in a way that they do not ask for them to be romanticized.

            These eyes, these teeth, these faces, these bodies – among many tobacco-scented others – take their place in the single file line shuffling toward the personal items pantry.

***

            Heads of long, conditioned hair and neatly kept beards; stockings and khakis peeking out from the hems of down-filled jackets; hands clasped and fingers interlaced; feet adorned with Sorrel snow boots on this below-freezing day moving forward, forward. They move toward a man dressed in a green robe, doling out thin discs of bread.

This gathering seems composed: perfectly pressed and put together. But they are a motley crew in their own right. Professors, students, staff, locals —all take their place in the single file line shuffling toward the body of Christ. 

***

            Two hours passed between my morning at the Monroe Community Center and mass at Notre Dame's Basilica —not enough time for the afterimage of the pantry line to fade from my retinas. The similarities, then, strike me: two lines, held taught by a shared humanity, filing toward a source of nourishment; two groups standing in naked necessity before that which can robe it.

Upon first glance, they appear so different —and smell so different, too. But they share a bond of poverty: one spiritual and one material. The two types are intimately linked, reminding me that all of us are intimately linked by our shared Father.

St. Francis acknowledges this truth with the words, "the truly pure of heart are those who despise the things of earth and seek the things of heaven" (Francis and Clare. The Complete Works). He knows that to lift our hearts to God, they cannot be laden with weights of the world. Saint Clare similarly said, "You know, I am sure, that the kingdom of heaven is promised and given by the Lord only to the poor: for he who loves temporal things loses the fruit of love" (The First Letter of St. Clare to St. Agnes of Prague). Love can be found in God alone — in a God who is love. Love for the temporal goods of the Earth, rather than for the eternal God within them, is a perversion of love’s intended state.

The link between material and spiritual poverty was not known only to saints of centuries past, but also to the holy of today. Dorothy Day prayed "for an increase in the love of poverty, which goes with love of our brothers and sisters" (On Poverty) because she felt that "we cannot even see our brothers in need without first stripping ourselves". This is the empathy of the incarnate Christ, who entered physically into our human suffering.

***

Three days later I find myself at the Catholic Worker. The room is filled with people gathered for mass. It is filled with workers, guests, children, visitors, the materially poor, the spiritually poor, the hungry, the tired, and the joyful. But in their act of gathering, the distinctions between them disappear. The bonds are reaffirmed. The margins are scuffed by those who tread over them together in procession toward God.

By Mary-Kate Burns
(Thank you for this beautiful reflection)