In the three weeks I have been busy working on my Katrina posts, things have been afoot in our corner of the web. It seems that a young woman, pretending to be much older and a doctor to boot, made several posts suggesting that she had been traumatically raped in the past. A number of bloggers believed her story, and this person’s ersatz confession induced other people to admit that they too had been similarly abused in the past. Then the miscreant was exposed and there have been some hurt feelings. People feel they were lied to, that their trust was betrayed.
I don’t want to get into specifics, but I want to tell a story that was once told to me about trust. The story is about Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist who started a number of soup kitchens in the New York area during the Great Depression and later became a passionate advocate for the poor. She is currently being considered for sainthood. This story may be apocryphal – I have never located its source – but its lesson is not.
The story goes that Ms. Day was giving a tour of her home for the poor to a wealthy New York woman. After seeing the entire operation the woman was so overwhelmed that she impulsively took a diamond ring off her finger and handed it to Day, telling her to use it as she saw fit.
Later that day, a desperate mother came to the home. “I have no money for my rent, or for food for my children. I cannot even heat my home!” Ms. Day reached in her pocket and pulled out the diamond ring. “Take this and go,” she said.
Some of the volunteers at the home were surprised at the act. “Why did you give her that priceless ring? We could have sold it and used it to help so many people. That woman may waste the money.”
Ms. Day said, “She can do whatever she wants with it. She can sell it and feed her children, or use it to educate herself for a better life. Or she can sit at home and just look at it. I trust her to do what is best just as the woman who gave it to me trusted me to do what was best.”
Charity and trust mean allowing other people to act of their own free will. We trust others, but then it is up to those people to live up to that trust. If they do, they will be better people. If they do not, the guilt of their betrayal lies with them, not with us for trusting. To trust another person is to treat that person as an adult, and to respect their dignity. We should treat people with dignity, and if they prove they are not dignified, it is their loss, not ours.
But no matter what, we should keep trusting – we have to – because not to trust is to deny another person dignity. And that is not what good people are all about.