by making known their need to be loved. For a long time,
my response was instant and reflexive, born of the "oughts"
I had absorbed: "Of course you need to be loved. Everyone
does. And I love you."
It took me a long time to understand that although
everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that
gift to everyone who asks me for it. There are some relations
in which I am capable of love and others in which I am not.
To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am
unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of
the person in need-all in the name of love.
Here is another example of violating one's nature in the
name of nobility, an example that shows the larger dangers
of false love. Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak.
Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term
commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower
East Side-not just serving them but sharing their condition-
had made her one of my heroes. So it carne as a great shock
when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate
about the "ungrateful poor."
I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could
come from the lips of a saint-until it hit me with the force of
a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the
poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel
good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and
short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only
impoverish them further. Give only if you have something