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Afterword ˜ 345
Son as an offering for our sins. Beloved, if God has loved us so, we must have
the same love for one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet if we love one another
God dwells in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us. ... One
who has no love for the brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen”
(1 John 4:10–12, 20). The sacramental vision sees God in other persons, no matter
how sinful or poor or contemptible, and the response to which Christians are
called is love, just as Christians continue to experience God’s love in Jesus Christ
and his sacramental presence.
The fourth characteristic of the Catholic Worker found in the Open Door
is voluntary poverty. From its beginnings the Open Door has sought to live simply,
eschewing a surfeit of goods. The community shares goods, relying on a
common purse that depends on donations. By this practice of standing in solidarity
with the poor whom they seek to serve, community members hope to be
freed from the drive for possessions, and also to learn from their sharing, in some
small way, the needs and neediness of the poor. In affirming the gospel call to
simplicity of life, the Open Door urges that when we share the goods of this
earth there is enough for all in the plenty of God’s creation. The problem is that
our economic system encourages people to judge human worth by accumulated
possessions, and people are goaded to hoard goods in a fearful competitiveness.
For the Open Door the results of this system and its values are particularly manifest
in the existence of homelessness in the United States. As Ed Loring, in “Entering
the World of the Homeless, Hungry and Angry,” states, “It is absolutely
stupid that in the United States of America there are men and women, boys and
girls who sleep outside. It is unconscionable that there is hunger—even a
famine—that stalks this land in the midst of good, nutritious, happy food.” This
famine in the midst of plenty comes from the desire for more and more, which
makes people fearful of losing what they have; the fear creates barriers between
those who have and those in need. Voluntary poverty disciplines the desire for
more, and brings into one’s experience the needs of those excluded from the
basic goods necessary for human survival and dignity. Reflecting this view, Ed
Loring brings together personalism and voluntary poverty when he writes in the
same article, “We must involve ourselves with homeless people as the way to respond
to homelessness. We must be involved with hungry people as the way to
respond to hunger. When you come to know hungry people, fasting is a powerful
discipline. When you come to know homeless people, sleeping outside on a
piece of cardboard is a wonderful practice. In the quest for solidarity, we can
bring hunger and suffering into our flesh.” The voluntary poverty of the Open
Door thus seeks both to show how those who have much can and ought to live
with less, and that, if persons and economic structures were committed to sharing
God’s bounty, all people would have enough and none would be driven into
a life of destitution.