Here is a letter we received today: “I took a gentleman seemingly in need of spiritual and temporal guidance into my home on Sunday afternoon. Let him have a nap on my bed, went through the want ads with him, made coffee and sandwiches for him, and when he left, I found my wallet gone also.”
I can only say that the saints would only bow their heads and not try to understand or judge. They received no thanks – well, then, God had to repay them. They forbore to judge, and it was as though they took off their cloak besides their coat to give away. This is expecting heroic charity, of course. But these things happen for our discouragement, for our testing. We are sowing the seed of love, and we are not living in the harvest time. We must love to the point of folly, and we are indeed fools, as Our Lord Himself was who died for such a one as this. We lay down our lives, too, when we have performed so painfully thankless an act, for our correspondent is poor in this world’s goods. It is agony to go through such bitter experiences, because we all want to love, we desire with a great longing to love our fellows, and our hearts are often crushed at such rejections. But, as a Carmelite nun said to me last week, “It is the crushed heart which is the soft heart, the tender heart.”
Source: Adapted from “The Scandal of the Works of Mercy,” Commonweal, 1949, as found in Michael Leach, et al., (eds.), The Way of Kindness: Readings for a Graceful Life, pp.104-105.
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