Recently, a relative called: “You have an empty house and there’s this family with five children sleeping in their car. Everything they own is stacked up in the driveway around it. They’re calling for rain. Can you let them move in to your empty house?”
I did. Disaster followed. The seven people were crammed into a small, older three bedroom house. One of the older boys was able to talk someone into letting him move in with them, avoiding the insanity and overcrowding of his own family.
Then, the oldest boy was thrown out. He is a heroin addict and was stealing from them. That left the mother, who works in retail thirty miles away. The father, on disability and suffering from cancer, drives her to work in the morning and picks her up in the evening. With her salary and his disability payments, they tell me that they’re bringing in about $70,000/year. The younger children, who appear to be augmenting the family’s income by bringing in Social Security payments, rarely go to school. The number of children living in the small house now appears to be increasing in number. Two or three cars have appeared that come and go. One does not have license plates.
The father made one partial rent payment, a couple of months ago. He has not paid any more, but did give me a check he asked me not to cash. Someone in our HR Department ran a background check on them to see if they were guilty of any past criminal activity. The parents have long records of check-bouncing and truancy charges. If I put the check in the bank and it bounces, his record is such that he will be sent to jail. It’s iffy as to whether or not the County’s criminal justice system would accept him, since he has cancer and his incarceration would be accompanied by medical bills and the need to be transported to medical treatment with some frequency, but I don’t feel comfortable taking the risk that he could end up in jail and put the family in even worse shape.
He lies consistently to me, and rarely returns telephone calls. He does not do much of anything, and is quick to tell people the moment he meets them, “I have cancer.”. By some miracle of our current age, where depressed real estate values meet an unaccustomed eagerness, if not desperation, to finance unqualified mortgage applicants, he and his wife are in the process of buying a $150,000.00 house with six bedrooms. I spoke with their real estate agent, who confirmed that the process was “coming along”.
My real estate attorney had a constable serve papers to let them know that they could be forcibly evicted by constables or deputies upon my making a request from the local Judge. I cannot bring myself to make that request. A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday reading was The Good Samaritan. A reading before or after concerned what happened to the rich man after not sharing with Lazarus. Another recent reading concerned “providing shelter to the poor”. Through Church teaching, I am frequently reminded that “Whatsoever you do to the least of My people, that, you do unto Me.”
Happily, I realized that whether or not I made the request for immediate and forcible eviction was a test of my faith. It would determine whether or not I loved a neighbor enough to actually do something for them. It was possible to assume a greater purpose to my travail. I could feel that I was, in actual fact, being examined to see if I actually loved my neighbor enough to be the reasonably good Catholic I may have prematurely assumed myself to be.
Loving one’s neighbor can be difficult. The man is such a blatant liar that I actually raised my voice to him on two different occasions, telling him that he had to stop lying and start doing what he said he would do. Neither conversation seemed to have done any lasting good. Although, after the last time I forcibly expressed my opinion that he did have the ability to do what he said he was going to do, and that he should force himself to do so, he did actually call me when he said he would. I congratulated him, with real and genuine sincerity, on having kept his word. I could feel that he was happy to be praised for having done what he said he’d do, quite probably the first time in his life that had happened. He promised to call the next day with an update, even to let me know if nothing happened. He did not call. He is so incompetent, so helpless, so utterly dishonest, so immensely sad inside that I simply can’t urge him to do more than he’s doing. Taking advantage of others, it seems, is nearly all that he can do.
A friend asked “Why didn’t you make up some excuse not to let them in?” I explained, smiling at an opportunity for Catholic evangelism, “Well, maybe you could do that because you’re a Methodist. We can’t do that.” I’m sure, though didn’t say so, that lots of Methodists would have done the same thing, and maybe more quickly.
