Spontaneous and Systematic Works of Mercy
From "Do Not Neglect Hospitality": Harry Murray on the sheltering the homeless and clothing the naked at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in New York City
We continue our serialization of a chapter from Harry Murray’s “Do Not Neglect Hospitality” with his observations about how the St. Joseph House community practiced the works of mercy in the early 1980s.
You can read part one of Murray’s chapter on St. Joseph’s House in New York City here and part two here.
In his chapter, Murray illustrates how “personal responsibility” is lived out at Catholic Worker communities. He notes the challenges of personalist hospitality gracefully and graciously. Although he wouldn’t say it, as I read it, some of the processes or reasonings behind offering or withholding asked-for help almost appeared more hostile than hospitable at times (Some Catholic Workers jokingly refer to houses of hospitality as “houses of hostility”).
But a Catholic Worker house is not for the saintly—just us sinners. When we attempt to live out our principles and our commitment to justice, our personal blind spots and hypocrisies often rise to the surface pretty quickly. To step into the light of truth is to be revealed for who you are—and it’s not always an entirely flattering angle.
While the disorganization of organized anarchism can lead to a great deal of friction or miscommunication, Murray writes;
The cost in terms of personalist style to achieve [efficiency] was simply too high. Moreover, the current system gave the guests the maximum number of avenues to get what they need. Unlike most bureaucratic social services, if the guest didn't receive satisfaction from one Worker, she or he could simply try the next Worker, who probably wouldn't even know about the first attempt. This maximized the guest's chances of getting what she or he wanted, and may have been part of the unconscious logic behind the "system."
I had to chuckle. I thought of our friend K who told James last night that, “Renée told me I could store some of my bags at the house.” James, a seasoned Catholic Worker, said: “Let me talk to Renée.” I had, of course, said no such thing.
It underlined Murray’s point that personalist hospitality is messy and can often lead to triangulation or manipulation of weak links. But it reminds us that the hospitality we offer to others is only as good as the community and communication we share with one another.
peace,
Renée
“Do You Want the House Now?”
From the Chapter, “The Flagship,” in “Do Not Neglect Hospitality” by Harry Murray
Shelter
Shelter at St. Joseph's was a rather unstructured affair. There was no space reserved for "shelter guests." Rather, guests were given whatever bed was available, whether that be a bed in which guests usually slept or the bed of a Worker who was gone for the night.
The upper three floors were sleeping quarters. Each floor contained a dormitory with about half a dozen beds, two private or semiprivate rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The fourth floor was for women, the third and fifth for men. Private and semiprivate rooms appeared to be assigned largely by seniority, regardless of one's status as Worker or resident. The most recently arrived Workers lived in the dormitories.
There was also one long-time resident who lived in the basement. He came to the house over a decade ago and lived in an upstairs dorm. After his habit of collecting, repairing, and playing TV's made him persona non grata in the dorm, he was moved to the dining room, where he lived for a few years on top of a desk surrounded by his TV equipment. When this proved unsatisfactory, his desk was thrown into the basement, which then became his kingdom.
The person on the house decided who would be admitted into shelter. There were no rules as such about accepting or rejecting persons, although there were some unwritten and largely unspoken norms. The most important of these was that shelter should be given only to someone who could convince you that they had only a temporary need for shelter. Generally, guests were limited to one or two nights, although they could stay for a week or even a month if they could convince Workers that they had a plan that they could implement in that time.
Two types of negotiations for shelter occurred: negotiation for the initial offer of shelter and negotiation for extension of the stay. Both types of negotiation occurred between those wanting to stay and whoever was on the house at the time. Generally, the initial offer of shelter included a time limit, but many guests treated this as negotiable once they had achieved entry, and Workers often did negotiate extensions.
Negotiations could occur over the phone, at the door, or inside the dining room. A person was most likely to be rejected over the phone, particularly if an agency was calling for the person. This was because it was easier to reject a person over the phone and because it was felt that the house does not exist to help agencies "pass the buck" for someone with whom they didn't want to deal.
Whether or not a person was accepted for shelter depended on a number of factors: if any beds were available, the "psychic space" in the house (i.e., whether Workers felt overburdened by the guests already there), the weather, and the self-presentation of the potential guest. If no beds were available, the person was usually turned away.
There were two exceptions. First, mattresses could be laid out in the front half of the second floor in an emergency. This had to be cleared, however, with Robert, who was in charge of mailing out the paper, because he had to wake them up early so that he could begin work there. On two bitterly cold nights when two men asked to stay after all the beds had been filled. I asked Robert about using the second floor, and he replied quickly, "On a night like tonight, I say let as many come in as can fit. It’s too cold for people to be sleeping out. Just tell him that I'll wake him up at seven, so I can get to work.”
This space is not used often, however— less than seven nights in the two months I was there. It was treated as an emergency alternative because it disrupted the work of putting out the paper.
A Worker who had a private room could also allow someone to sleep on the floor there. The night after I arrived, a well-dressed white man appeared, claiming that he had just arrived from Texas for a job interview at Gimbel's but had been mugged, losing all his money. All the beds were full, so George, who was on the house, told him he could stay on a mattress in his room until a bed opened up. "Gimbel's Irv" stayed there for several days, then moved into a bed in the dorm, remaining with us until just after Christmas, when he left under less than auspicious circumstances.
On the other hand, a person could be told that "the house is full" even though beds were empty. When tensions in the house were running high and Workers felt they couldn't deal with the additional psychic burdens usually brought by a "wounded person" from the streets, the house was deemed full. This was usually done informally by discussions among several Workers rather than at the initiative of the person on the house.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the negotiation was affected by the way in which the guest presented himself or herself. The operative rule was "we already have enough permanent residents." The person most likely to gain shelter was someone who presented himself or herself as in need of shelter for only a limited time because he or she had a realistic plan for getting shelter elsewhere. Persons who were regulars at the soupline were not likely to be offered shelter, except perhaps for one night in an emergency. Those selected as guests tended to exhibit more middle-class attributes than "men on the line." Andy's story illustrates the negotiation process.
It had been raining off and on all day, and I was on the house for the evening. A short, bedraggled white man in his early thirties came to the door wearing two ragged, filthy sweaters in place of a coat. Andy said, "I talked to a priest. He told me to come here—that this was a community that practiced nonviolence and peace. I'd like to join. I'm a fallen away Catholic, but maybe I could join the order or something." I invited him inside and asked him if he stayed at the shelters. "I don't go there. I don't have anything against them, you know. They're nice places, but it gets violent there, so I mostly live on the streets."
I offered him tea and a sandwich. He seemed like a meek, harmless guy, albeit a bit befuddled. I told him we had no space; however, since this was one of my first evenings on the house, I decided to check with one of the other Workers. George came down and talked to Andy awhile, then said to me, "It's clearly no. He's been coming around for a while. Some guys just want to join to get the benefits. He's expecting more than a night or two." He gave Andy a list of emergency shelters and went back upstairs. Andy finished his meal, wrote down a few numbers from the list, and asked if he could use the phone to call his brother. I told him I would give him change to use a pay phone. (Persons off the street are not allowed to use the phone.) He left, but returned occasionally for meals.
The other type of negotiation was for extension of one's stay. In most cases, a length of stay was agreed upon when the person first arrived, and this agreement was adhered to. However, some experienced street persons could exploit the on-the-house system to extend their stay far beyond the original agreement. Trapper Bill was an expert at this. He was a muscular white man in his thirties, balding but with longish brown hair and a scar above one eye. He was given shelter one night by Don, who left shortly thereafter for a brief vacation.
After two days, I asked Bill if Don had told him that he had to leave. He replied, "Oh, yeah, they told me I had to check every night to see if there was an empty bed. Is there one tonight?" I said I would check with Peter, who was on the house. Peter said he didn't know anything about Bill's situation, but that there was an extra bed so he may as well spend the night.
After Bill left the room, Gimbel's Irv came over and told me that he was sure Don had told Bill that he couldn't stay beyond last night. On hearing this, George said he was upset with Bill because he was exploiting the house. "This is his last night. He's trying to stay indefinitely. He's already stayed longer than we let most people."
Over the next week, Bill was repeatedly told by the person on the house that "tonight is your last night." However, he was able to utilize the gaping holes in the on-the-house authority structure to extend his stay far beyond the initial agreement. He would simply wait until the next evening and ask the person then on the house whether he could stay just one more night. This person would usually know that Bill was reaching the end of his stay, but would not have been informed that the person on the house the night before had given him "one last night." Thus, Bill was able to prolong his stay for a considerable length of time.
Bill was not the first, nor, I'm sure, was he the last, to negotiate the on-the-house system this way. All Workers knew its flaw that the lack of communication let people get things from one Worker that another had already denied. However, they didn't see this weakness as grounds for instituting the type of ordered system necessary to prevent such situations. The cost in terms of personalist style to achieve such efficiency was simply too high. Moreover, the current system gave the guests the maximum number of avenues to get what they need. Unlike most bureaucratic social services, if the guest didn't receive satisfaction from one Worker, she or he could simply try the next Worker, who probably wouldn't even know about the first attempt. This maximized the guest's chances of getting what she or he wanted, and may have been part of the unconscious logic behind the "system."
The real burden of giving shelter was not the filling of an extra bed, but the extra social effort required to accommodate a new guest, particularly one with psychological or alcohol problems. Even without emergency-shelter guests, the house was committed to providing hospitality for the residents, many of whom needed little care from the Workers and indeed contributed greatly to the work of the house.
A few, however, required a substantial amount of assistance from the Workers. One man who lived at the house for years had to be bathed and shaved by the Workers. One woman regularly came in drunk, screaming racist slurs at any blacks who happened to be present. She also had to be taken to the hospital whenever she fell down and hurt herself. These were persons to whom the house had made a commitment over the years, and who were not likely to be asked to leave in the foreseeable future. Their care had to be balanced with the needs of emergency guests.
Clothing
There were actually two clothing distribution systems at St. Joseph's— one run by the Workers and one run by Mother. Mother was a powerful-looking woman with two black beauty marks on her cheeks, a gruff, commanding voice, and a heart of gold—a combination that could be both exasperating and an oasis of cheer and goodwill in a desert of despair. Mother would scour the streets and trash bins for cast-off articles of clothing for "my boys," bring them to the house, and place them in a heap on the front windowsill for "her boys" to pick through. People would come in and look through the pile, occasionally taking an article, although the more discriminating guests wouldn't go near it. If there was a particularly loathsome stench emanating from the pile, an intrepid Worker might risk Mother's wrath by surreptitiously disposing of the offending article or perhaps the whole pile. If Mother caught him or her, she would most likely roar out, "What are ya doin? That's for my boys. That's good stuff!" But the Worker usually prevailed and some of the clothes would be removed. This alternative clothing distribution system was apparently a tradition at the Worker, and no one made a serious attempt to interfere with it.
"Officially," clothing was distributed at 2:00 P.M., Monday through Thursday—the days the soupline was closed. Unofficially, clothing could be distributed at any time by the person on the house at his or her discretion, although the norm was that this should be done only in "emergencies" (a term deliberately left ambiguous).
What happened during the official clothing distribution time depended largely on the discretion of the person on the house, but the procedure was usually as follows. Whoever was on the house would bring piles of clothing upstairs from the clothing room in the basement and lay them out on the tables. At 2:00, people would be let in to pick through whatever was on the tables and take whatever they wished. Items that were in short supply and great demand-under-wear, socks, shoes, and winter coats—were not brought up. Instead, guests had to ask the Worker to go down and get them. Coats and shoes were especially hoarded in the winter, and sometimes the person requesting such items would be asked to trade in what he was wearing.
An incident that illustrates the Worker approach happened while I was being apprenticed with Ken, a young Worker who had been there a few months. A half dozen men were inside looking through the clothes. A sharp looking man asked me to go down and get him a red coat that he had seen someone trying on. It sounded suspicious to me because I had seen this man talking to Ken just a bit earlier and it had sounded like he had been asking for a coat. I asked Ken,
"Where did you put that red coat? This guy wants it." Ken said to me, "Don't get him a coat. That guy sells clothes. He has a good coat. He took it off." I told the man I couldn't get him the coat and he began to complain, "Why not? You get coats for other guys." "You already have a coat." "So do other guys," he grumbled as he left.
Afterward, Ken told me, "He comes in here and cleans us out all the time. I saw him selling clothes on the street once. It's good that he cleans us out sometimes—we've got to get rid of the stuff. But things like coats are in short supply." Thus, there were two categories of clothes. Those in abundant supply were freely given to whoever wanted them, short of clearing out the whole supply. Those in limited supply were rationed to preserve them for people in real need. Even this rationing, however, was not very systematic.
Workers did not follow the official schedule for clothing distribution too strictly. If the day was too hectic and it didn't look like there would be time between lunch and supper to do the clothing, guests simply were told to come back the next day. On the other hand, one volunteer who regularly was on the house Sunday afternoon always gave out clothes on his shift, despite the fact that it wasn't an "official" clothing day.
At times, giving out clothes could be extremely frustrating. You gave a pair of dry socks to someone, simply to send them back into the rain with leaky shoes. Other times, however, it appeared that a set of clothes could make a difference. One evening when I was on the house, a young black man came to the door asking for clothes. He said he had just been told by his sister that his boss wanted him to come back to work. He had been laid off from a job in the garment district seven months earlier and was living on the street. He wanted the change of clothes to wear to work tomorrow. His elation at this turn of fate seemed too genuine for me to doubt the story: "Another week and no more living in the streets for me. I'll get my paycheck and get a room. This is fantastic." He thanked me profusely for the change of clothes. As much as the Worker ideal is not to expect thanks, occasional incidents like this made the work much easier.
Informal Hospitality
Food, clothing, and shelter were distributed in a somewhat organized fashion. Other aspects of hospitality, however, were not organized at all. Individuals could choose to visit guests who were in hospitals or prisons. Ideologically committed Workers were not the only ones to do so. Some "residents" had people who they visited regularly. Visiting guests in hospital or prison had a different character than visiting a stranger. For the hospitalized guest, such a visit was a sign that the Workers really cared about him or her as a person. They were not coming to visit him as "someone who is sick," but as Bob, their old friend. And this was a rather accurate perception of how such visiting occurred. There was no listing of persons in jail or hospital and no organized system to make sure they are visited. Rather, the onus was on the individual Worker to go and visit someone. Guests treasured these visits. In perhaps the most lucid conversation I ever had with Harvey, he said to me:
When I was in a New York City hospital, two people came to visit me, and one of them was that woman [pointing to one of the Workers with a look that revealed the great esteem in which he held her]. The other was Father Gregory. Father Gregory got mugged one day. I have no use for those muggers.
Harvey seemed to have trouble at times remembering where he was. He was quite clear, however, about who came to visit him when he had been in the hospital some time ago. For the homeless person, cut off from past social ties, receiving a hospital or prison visit from a Worker he or she knows can be a crucially important affirmation of his or her worth as a person. These visits may be the most hospitable acts performed by the Worker.
Hospitality also entailed advocating for guests with welfare and health bureaucracies. While I was there, several Workers were doing a great deal of advocacy with the Department of Social Services for two former guests, a woman and her teenage son. Unable to find an apartment for the amount welfare would pay, they lived in a welfare hotel for months at a cost to the city of $63 per night for a dingy room that, for the first few days, had no lock on the door. A Worker accompanied the woman on each trip to the welfare office, mainly to keep her from giving up. I went with her once and found out why she was near despair. We arrived before 8:00 A.M. on the day she was told to pick up her check. We sat in a waiting room with about thirty other people, many of whom knew each other quite well from whole days spent together previously in this same waiting room. Although we had come in as soon as the office opened and she had been one of the first to sign the list, she was not even called until 11:30, when a social worker told her that her regular worker was out but that she would try to see her before lunch. She didn't. If I had not been there to go out and buy her a cup of soup, she would have had no lunch; if she had left the waiting room and they called her name, she would have been moved to the end of the list and probably would not have received a check at all. The people were trapped in the waiting room just as surely as if a barred door had been locked behind them. We did not receive the check until after 4:00; a total of eight hours waiting for a check she had been scheduled to pick up that day. (It appeared that no checks were issued until after the banks had closed, so that everyone had to go to a check cashing place and pay a few dollars from their check just to get it cashed.)
Workers often took guests to hospitals to help them get service from emergency-room personnel who were sometimes reluctant to serve drunken alcoholics. Our Christmas party was delayed while the two coeditors of the paper took one of the female residents to the hospital after she had come home dead drunk with a gash on her knee and refused to let the ambulance drivers do anything for her. Upon their return they were jubilant that they had had to wait only two hours.
This type of unscheduled response to situations that might occur at any time of the day or night were the soul of hospitality at St. Joseph's. Food and clothing were regarded as a matter of right, not to be denied to anyone if they were available. Shelter, too, was a matter of right, although it was rationed. The other acts of hospitality were more spontaneous and responded to the situation and the person involved. As such, they seemed to be the most often remembered and cherished by the recipient.
Harry Murray is a professor emeritus of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. He spent two years at Unity Kitchen in Syracuse in the late 1970s. He ran the Saturday meal and St. Joseph House in Rochester for over thirty years and was incarcerated in the Salvation Army with Peter DeMott for three months for protesting the Gulf War.
Coming up next week: Harry Murray on the many “types” of people who live at and visit a Catholic Worker.
Read the previous sections in Murray’s chapter here:
