A Guest Post From Jack Seney

My friend, Jack, discusses the difference between Christian Charity, a virtue, and Folly, or wilful stupidity, a sin. 

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So I read on Quora an apparently true story of a well-to-do woman who volunteered at a homeless shelter. This religious lady's heart was "moved with compassion" for a homeless family of a couple and four kids who lived there. So she decided to take them all home with her!

Any sober homeless guy would have told this woman not to do it. I, who was street homeless for months at one time, would have told her not to do it. But she was determined in her righteousness by golly, and to her big house all six people went.

In no time at all, the parents of the family had dirtied up the room she gave them, thrown clothes all over the place, smoked inside the house and stunk everything up, only pretended to look for work, and drank ALL of the contents of the lady's heavily stocked liquor cabinets (why she had such liquor cabinets is another question and perhaps she was tipsy while deciding to take strangers home).

Before long, rich-lady did what would have been the better thing in the first place - she put the family up in a motel and worked with a Catholic charity to find them housing.

A lady like this would cite Jesus and the gospels "compelling" her to take people in. So, Christ compels her to take in folks about whom she knows nothing and who might well be dangerous to an older woman who lives alone? I think not. The motel idea was the right one and it seems to me that Christ would bless it just fine.

Some people like to cite the story of a homeless guy who morally lectures the fellow who wanted to give him church food leftovers. "If you really cared, you would invite me home to live with you," this fellow pontificates. Never mind that he no doubt looks like Charles Manson - they should take him home to live with them!

When I was homeless I would have happily accepted what edible leftovers someone offered me, with only good feelings. The "homeless guy outside church" story is stupid and the homeless guy in it is himself highly judgmental of others.

Some talk of the accounts of Christ in disguise as a poor person that have come down through the ages. But I don't recall Christ as a poor person ever demanding to live with people and condemning them if they decline!

Folly - that is, willful stupidity - is listed as a sin by Christ Himself (Gospel of Mark 7: 20-22). It is nought but folly to "help the homeless" in a half-cocked manner that accomplishes little or nothing. People should do so in a fully thoughtful way, or otherwise simply donate money to good charities for the homeless and leave it at that. Assuaging their rich-person conscience by taking in bums will not accomplish anything. But God will see whatever simple thing they do to help in a thoughtful way, and He will not be tricky or demanding about it like flawed humans will.

God gave people a brain that they can use to realize that suddenly taking weird people home is probably not a good idea. I am reminded of the case of the New England liberals who took a "reformed" child molester into their home upon his release from prison. He promptly raped their young son, no doubt thinking like the scorpion who stung the animal carrying him across a river: "You fools! You knew I was a scorpion, didn't you?!" The lady in the Quora story is fortunate that it did not go similarly worse for her.