The Poverty Of Enough

A number of years ago, by a process I can neither explain nor retrace, I chose to be poor. That decision has both puzzled and exalted me, given me hope and borne despair, inspired me and left me cold. I have never been really poor, never destitute, or hopeless, or utterly marginal. I have come no closer to starvation than the average American and have no real fear that I will come any closer. And what I now live cannot be called "poverty" in any sense the really poor would recognize. When I chose poverty, I knew St. Francis, and I had had some contact with the poverty of the world around me. But there the puzzle starts. No enthusiasm for the Poverello ("Little Poor Man") of Assisi could make me want the stinking slums and running sores, the dark humor and darkened lives of St. Louis' ghettos. Poverty stank. It stank of urine and human feces in the alleyways, of cheap red wine and garbage in the halls, of molding plaster and rotting wood, of human sweat and cheap perfume in the homes of the poor.

A stench rose up to heaven from the slums of St. Louis, and I grew up sniffing it as it wafted by. This poverty I could not choose. It burned my eyes and dinned in my ears with the cries of sick children and the clatter of breaking glass. Surely the poverty of St. Francis was sweeter than that.

St. Louis in the '50s was a nightmare of liberal reformism. The liberal dream of urban renewal had gutted the city, which by 1960 looked like post-war Berlin. Where Berlin was building, my home town was desperately tearing down. The liberal promise of better housing for all had recreated the urban slum in spanking-new high-rises like Pruitt-Igoe, a housing project that became proverbial for what was wrong with urban renewal. I grew up a reformer with the gravest doubts. Poverty must go, but the liberal dream and the liberal promise of the '50s would never do it. Liberalism was the latest god to fail, and I began to look elsewhere.

Elsewhere led to the Catholic Worker, where the poverty of St. Francis and a more radical reformism seemed to meld. But in fact the tensions were only heightened: poverty had become a value and a fear, a friend and an enemy. I became, if anything, less able to cope with its imperious demands than I had been 10 years previously. The closer I came to the poverty of the poor, the more I clung to what I had; the more I saw of poverty in the world, the more I needed my "due measure" of the world's goods and services. "Everything in due measure." The old axiom has served me well. I have always taken my poverty "in due measure."

But "due measure" does not really settle the matter for Christians. Poverty is no mere quantity, not a simple more or less of the world's goods and services. Poverty is at once a great evil and the greatest good, something to be abolished and a value to be embraced, a moral obligation and a cause for communal repentance. The poor cry out to heaven for justice, but the poor are the blessed of God. I had not yet untangled this knot when I chose poverty, but some of its dimensions I could appreciate. I both valued and hated poverty.

There was reason for my fear and loathing. Poverty is ugly. It is peeling paint and beat-up cars, scrubby yards and secondhand clothing, cheap goods and a cramped taste. Poverty, as Dorothy Day put it, is "precarity" - mitigated or unmitigated captivity to circumstances, utter dependence on the check that never comes on time, utter servitude to the employer who never calls back, the daily frustrations of the stove that won't work, the heater that's broken, the tools that don't quite do the job.

Poverty is indignity. There are none more defensive of their dignity than the poor, none more abject in its surrender than the poor. Poverty is insult added to injury in the emergency wards, the missions, the welfare offices of our cities and counties.

Poverty means living on the edge - or over it. No one wants the tension, the uncertainty, the precarious hold on life (on God's good gifts) that poverty represents. Yet such precariousness is also God's good gift, a spiritual value which Christians neglect to their loss. The precariousness of poverty is equivalent to the life of faith. Stripped down to essentials, longing for a something more that rarely appears, our utter dependence on God becomes evident: we accept it or rebel, in great ways or in small. The chronicle of God's saints is the story of their ever-slipping grasp on the things of this world.

A profound spiritual truth lay within Dorothy Day's concern that she continued to cling to books and typewriter, bed and board, privacy and fresh air. All that shall one day, perhaps this very night, be required of us. Dorothy had life, and abundant life at that, precisely to the degree to which she found it possible to renounce her life, a thousand times and in a thousand ways, painfully, doggedly, with fear and trembling.

But there are deaths none of us can survive, and there are the countless deaths most of us will have to refuse - be it for lack of faith or another calling. The struggle of faith is a battle between generosity and survival. For most of us most of the time, the war goes on battle by battle, each side conceding a point here or there.

There are limits to the stripping down, limits each and all must determine for themselves. Those who "lay down their lives" for their brothers and sisters do not return to tell the tale. Few of us will follow in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi, who feasted on crumbs and wrapped himself in burlap. Few of us will imitate the humility of Charles de Foucauld, who longed to be hidden in the "hidden life of Nazareth" and who followed his master to an obscure death in an empty corner of the North African desert.

It is not just that we are selfish (though we are) or that the Lord has put us elsewhere (though the Lord has) or that we are burdened with the cares of the world (though St. Paul was certainly right). It is also so, distressingly so, consolingly so, that one cannot run a family along the path of St. Francis, nor an institution, nor a state.

Francis' way is no way to run a family. You can only uproot children so many times at the behest of some spirit or other, you can only give their and your beds so often to the stranger at the door, you can only show the children so much precarity before their emotional life is permanently, perhaps eternally (who knows?) crippled. What I cannot do to my children, who have a precarious enough hold on the world, I cannot really do to myself, standing here with one foot in this world, one foot in the next, and, often enough, my head neither here nor there. My head is as important to them as a regular home life.

The absolute self-giving of the ideal (from which none return) and the absolute precarity of spiritual poverty (which few achieve) cannot yet claim us. They must step aside and bide their time, only to spring them selves upon us at apocalyptic moments, at times of conversion, at the moment of death. But that does not exhaust the question of poverty. We cannot escape the spiritual truth: those who would save their lives must first lose them, bit by bit if not in one rending blow.

There is also the moral call. Here we are on firmer ground; here the boundaries between the real and the ideal do not slip and slide so; here the hidden circumstances of each individual calling do not hide the universal truth: the utter injustice of poverty in our day forces poverty upon us all. To put it otherwise: in a world where six per cent of the population consumes 40 per cent of the world's wealth, where starvation and deprivation are endemic, we six per cent are obliged to surrender our monopoly on wealth, health, and the good things of life.

The rationalization of "vocation" has always been a tempting out, where poverty is understood as a spiritual value without moral weight. Some are called to fasting, we have liked to think, others to amassing millions; some to laying down their lives for their brothers and sisters, others to taking lives for their brothers and sisters. Scientists, engineers, generals, presidents, thinkers, and factory hands all are called, generously blessed, and in these United States at least, given leave to enjoy the good life.

It is frightfully easy to slip away, out of the net of the fisherman, to squirm free in the fluid realm of personal callings and private understandings between me and God. But the spiritual ideal, so easily defused, was not given without concrete moral directives.

Poverty is a moral, not just a spiritual, obligation. It has motives and forms specific to our times. Like the reluctant son of the gospel, we may grumble at the command, but end by doing it nevertheless. The state of our inner lives, if not irrelevant, is at least marginal to the moral issue: do we or do we not consume more than our share?

The poverty of St. Francis, the poverty of self-giving to the God who has given us all we have, is an absolute and endless demand. The poverty of the moral order, of justice in the light of the kingdom, is strictly limited and carefully tailored to human need. One word summarizes it: enough. Between these two demands the Christian will have to arrange some sort of honest truce.

Little by little we may allow God to strip us of possessiveness of the little we have, or all at one blow, in one great leap of faith. The choice is usually not fully ours. But we must choose poverty; in our day poverty has become a moral obligation.

That poverty is not the destitution we see all around us. We need not, to do justice, submit to the filth and frustration, the utter hopelessness of the poorest of the poor.

There is little question of being literally "one with the poor." In what? Illiteracy and abasement, rage and powerlessness?

No, we entertain an educated hope and a sense of power, the balance and the possibility of escape that only voluntary poverty bestows. The poverty to which we are morally obliged is something less demanding and therefore less heroic than that. It is the poverty of God's poor, of the ordinary people of millennia of human history - the poverty of enough.

What We Need
What is "enough"? For the peasant in times past there was enough if the rhythm of life went uninterrupted, if winter food and spring seed were guaranteed, if there could indeed always be room for one more at the table. Today we want more. We want literacy and culture, participation in the decisions that shape our lives and hope for a better world.

But what is "enough"? Enough is food, shelter, clothing - and some minimal security in the possession of these. Enough is dependence for that security on friends, relatives, neighbors, and church community rather than on insurance companies and bank accounts and government programs that strip the poor to feed the rich.

In a society where the automobile is god and gasoline stokes the fires for the next world war, enough is no car rather than one, or one rather than two, or two rather than three. Enough is education and the freedom to participate in decisions at home, at the workplace, in the community. Enough is leisure and culture to suit each one's needs. And, yes, enough is always room for one more.

Obviously, there are millions who do not know "enough," who are physically, mentally, socially, culturally deprived of enough by the circumstances of their lives and the structures of their world. Those who have enough are not "one with the poor" of the modern world.

But equally obviously, most of us have enough and more than enough. Our wants are measured not against basic human needs but against standards set in the pages of Better Homes and Gardens and Outdoor Living. Our problem with poverty is not so much a fear of false economy as our own false expectations. It is not that we value quality but that we worship fashion. Above all, we exalt economic abundance above both our own freedom and the needs of others.

"Enough" is no rallying cry. It is a simple personal standard, a first step in the hard walk toward justice. It is not the spiritual poverty of St. Francis; it may house quite another spirit. It is not extraordinary virtue or puritanical other-worldliness but simple, dull duty. It is not easy but not particularly hard, either.

We shall not remake the world, or ourselves, with an "ethic of enough." But we shall make a beginning. We shall not achieve a righteous fusion with the poorest of the poor nor a self-righteous assurance that ours is the kingdom of heaven. But we can do our duty. We will not be laying down our lives for our brothers and sisters. But we may manage to be good stewards and faithful servants. That is not all the Lord asks of us, but it is a beginning.

Poverty has too many meanings, the call of Christians too many dimensions to be captured by a simple "more" or "less." The poverty of the modern world, the powerlessness and hopelessness, the destitution and the mental anguish of the poor of our times cry out to be redressed. We are called to heal the brokenhearted and bring the structures of this world to account.

We are also called to poverty - ultimately to a spiritual poverty, but to a material poverty, a poverty of "enough," as a first step. Once that step was a spiritual imperative for a few; today it has become a moral duty for all. We have more than our share; it is time we settled for only enough.

Michael Foley was living at the Catholic Worker Farm in Sheepranch, California, when this article appeared.