Don’t drink the poison

Five years ago, I had cancer. We caught it early and had it removed. The margins were clean so we sighed with relief and went on with living, knowing it might come back. It did.

Again, we caught it extremely early, but this time, we were more aggressive in treatment. We had hoped that by having major surgery — removing all the cancer and then some — that I might be able to avoid chemotherapy. But medicine is sometimes more an art than a science and once they got a good look at that stinking tumor under a microscope, it was determined that I would probably benefit from a few rounds of chemical therapeutics coursing through my veins.

Filled with dread, I made the appointment with the oncologist, images of a balding, nauseated me running through my head.

As I was hanging up the phone, my husband walked in the door, returning from work, and announced, “I just got laid off.”

You can’t make up moments like these.

Though it would be tempting to entertain it, one thing I know with absolute certainty: Self-pity is poison. I fear it at least as much as I fear cancer. With good reason. When I was young, I was a highly acclaimed, black belt master practitioner of self-pity. If you needed an expert witness in the effects of self-pity, you could have called me to testify. I’m not quite sure how I developed this corrosive expertise, but thank the Lord, in my 30s it lost its death grip on my heart. I experienced a definitive healing around the issue and knew, for the first time, real freedom from it.

But I still have to be on guard. It bears repeating: Self-pity is poison. It’s also the devil’s playground. If you find yourself poised to fall into the burning cauldron of self-pity, though you might have good reason to, I’d highly advise against it. Far too much of my life was given over to it and I can assure you, it

In my last column, I began introducing the Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. The movement is best known for its Houses of Hospitality, which, in widely various forms, offer food and shelter to the poor.

It’s easy to see these houses as a form of social services, just one more instance of our society’s efforts to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. And indeed, who can find fault with feeding and sheltering people?

But Day and Maurin’s vision for the houses was a fully Catholic vision. Meaning, although there may be some similarities, the true nature of a Catholic Worker house is quite different from institutionalized charities. I’ll unpack some of these differences here and in upcoming columns.

The first difference is that Day and Maurin envisioned “agenda-less” hospitality. In other words, everyone is worthy of food and shelter just by virtue of being a human being. You don’t have to first attain certain moral qualifications, or be “clean” or sober, or be trying to better yourself, or be looking proffers naught but death.

A few distinctions I learned along the way might be helpful. Self-pity, according to the Oxford dictionary, is: “excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness over one’s own troubles.” (Even reading the definition gives me an interior “yuck.”) This means, mourning is not self-pity, sorrow is not self-pity, even anxiety or dread — these are not self-pity. Let’s recall that the Lord’s anxiety was so great in his agony that he sweat tears of blood. His Garden of Gethsemane moment can teach us a great deal about holy anxiety and fear. These emotions can help us to move through life’s more serious challenges. You can embrace grief, loss, anxiety, even fear in sanctity knowing that these may be steppingstones to acceptance and assent, to “not my will but yours be done.”

If Jesus can feel anxiety and dread, you can, too. But he didn’t stay locked in them. You don’t have to, either. We do not have to enjoy our crosses, but for a job, or anything like that. And the reason is that you don’t have to do those things to deserve food, shelter and clothing. You deserve those things because you are a human being. And agenda-less hospitality simply offers them on that basis.

There are limitations, of course, to what any house can offer. No house can take in everybody, and many, including the one that I help run, are simply not able to take in particular kinds of folks. In our case, for instance, it’s because we have lots of children running around, which limits both the attention we can give each guest and the sorts of lifestyles that we can accommodate. So, we have to be selective. But this is not because a person who struggles with anger or addiction doesn’t deserve our hospitality; it’s just because certain behaviors are not a good fit for us right now.

You might think the idea that everybody — without qualification — deserves food and shelter is uncontroversial. But our culture so often combines a sort of moral puritanism with a certain work ethic that even the most tolerant of us might find ourselves quietly outraged by the thought of a person not living “responsibly” having the necessities of life doled out to them.

You’d be surprised how many times the first questions I’m asked when someone learns about our little hospitality house are: What do we require of the guests? And do we help them get jobs? It’s not about that, I explain. It’s about answering the question, as an old friend once put it to me, “Is that a person?”

Even the guests themselves feel the need to prove to us that they are “good people” or “not lazy.” We we are asked to heroically carry them and there’s no room for self-pity in any kind of heroics, spiritual or otherwise.

God has not given me cancer or crashed the economy, but in his wisdom, he allows these trials and I pray mightily that the greatest possible good will come from every minute of them. And that he will protect me from even an ounce of yucky “excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness.”

Lord of mercy, when the cup does not pass, when the cross feels too heavy, help us to remember that one day you will “turn my mourning into dancing” (Ps 30:11) — even if, at the moment, we’re nauseated, losing our hair, and falling behind on the bills. Amen.

Kelly Stanchina is the award-winning author of 12 books, including “Jesus Approaches,” “Love Like a Saint,” and “A Place Called Golgotha.” Her website can be found at lizk org don’t mind, of course, if people want to get jobs or just see our hospitality house as a way to get back on their feet. But what we tell them is that they can stay as long as they like, that they don’t have to prove anything to us, and that we hope for friendship more than anything else. It’s a measure of our culture that those sentiments are usually hard for them to believe.

Agenda-less hospitality is more controversial than you’d think. There is still, deep in our culture, a desire to distinguish between “us” and “them.” It’s an unspoken piece of popular American morality that because I have a job and a house I am “better,” in most cases, than those who live on the street.

This is one of our pet prejudices that the Gospel explodes. We are all sinners, none of us deserves God’s hospitality, his welcome. And yet, in Christ, we receive it, unworthy as we are. None of us receives what we deserve, and if we judge others, we are only asking God to judge us with the same harshness (Mt 7:1). If anything, riches and comfort — if our Lord’s words are any indication (Lk 6:24) — are what we ought to be concerned about; not addictions, lack of work or laziness. The Gospel, Day would often say, forever takes away our right to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

And that’s just the first difference.

Miller is director of pastoral care and outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Worker community in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin miller1@protonmail com

Being Catholic is the most important thing in my life. I cherish my faith in Jesus as he is the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through him. I long to join him in heaven, and what better way than to belong to the Church that he established, that traces its origins back to Peter, the rock upon whom the Church was built?

I have many people to thank in the formation of my faith. From the time I was baptized, I had two strong Catholic role models in my godparents, Uncle John and Aunt Janet. I had the Benedictine nuns of Holy Redeemer school in Evansville, Indiana, who taught me discipline and devotion to Mary. They were the ones who prepared me for my first holy Communion and chose me to crown Mary in our May crowning ceremony. Then, as my family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, I had the Dominican Sisters of Our Lady Queen of Peace who helped prepare me with the Baltimore Catechism to possibly answer a question from our bishop on the day I was confirmed. My parents sacrificed to pay for a parochial education for my siblings and me, all five of us.

As I entered high school, I became active in the Catholic Youth Organization and learned about many service activities, such as taking food to the poor when we lived in Indianapolis. And there were the social activities, like the CYO dances that I loved.

As I became an adult, all these things functioned as a firm basis for my faith, even in times when I went astray with other activities. My faith was always there, a firm rock, my fortress.

Currently, I am involved in the Council of Catholic Women. This is a wonderful organization. I have had the opportunity to meet and