NEWSLETTER
FALL 2015
AUTUMNAL AWE
I am delighting in these not-too-warm fall days even though I
know they are the spurious gift of global warming. I feel grateful
to Pope Francis for the gift of Laudato Si and a whirlwind trip
including his speech to Congress which lifted up a couple of our
Catholic heroes Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Probably a few folks
went to Google to see what the Catholic Worker movement is about,
and if Catholic Workers were plugged into the capitalist system we
would use such an opportunity to expand our donor base but we
arent!
Recently I have had two wonderful experiences which I expect
will reside in my memory for some time to come. The first was the
opportunity to attend the Womens Ordination Worldwide conference in
Philadelphia, and it truly was a WOW. There were women and men from
twenty different countries with individual and panel presentations
which ranged from quite academic to heart-rending, telling of
personal experiences. There were 500 in attendance, which is
considerably less than the 2,000 who attended the first WOC meeting
in 1976. On the other hand, there were no Roman Catholic woman
priests at that time. Now there are 123 worldwide and 14 bishops
who will continue to ordain women on into the future. Granted, the
institutional church is still not comfortable with this movement,
and a priest participant in the conference returned home to find a
letter from his archbishop announcing the cessation of his priestly
faculties. Do we wonder how many priests have experienced the same
sanctions due to having sexually abused children? One thing for
sure is that this Roman Catholic woman priest movement is vital and
growing and will not likely be stopped.
My second autumnal awe was the baptism of my God-daughter
Maggie. She is the child of Theresa Miller and Joe Goodner (two
former CW volunteers). It was truly a wonder to see the eyes and
hearts of the believing community at St. Elizabeths all focused on
little Margaret Ruth. I loved thinking about how the love of God,
Joe, and Theresa (and many others) will shape this little life into
a strong, caring woman who will make a contribution to bringing
about a better world. Fr. Chrys gave a wonderful homily clarifying
that we are all part of that category of being rich and like that
camel who cannot make it through the eye of the needle. The Good
News is that the Gospel ends with the statement that with God
everything is possible. So for Maggie we must keep our hope up,
love mightily, and walk with her and God into the future.
Anna
ONE BODY
In July, Kristen and I moved out of the Worker, where we had
both lived for years, into our own Tiny Home. It was a healthy, but
very hard step.
The Worker certainly let me live a privileged life of not having
to subject myself to wage slavery and letting me focus on work that
I found meaningful living in community, meeting people's real
needs, and organizing politically with people experiencing
homelessness to help make things a little more equitable. Denver
Homeless Out Loud, the advocacy group I work with, started as a
group of concerned citizens organizing to give homeless people an
opportunity to influence policy decisions on a local government
level, with little to no success. Three years later, however, we
have made some major strides. We are now leading the fight for a
Homeless Bill of Rights in Colorado, and organizing nationally,
with the Right to Rest Act running in Colorado, California, and
Oregon, to set a national human rights agenda to end the
criminalization of homelessness and poverty.
Naturally, as we first started talking about living outside the
house, I was concerned that I might have to give up some of the
work I've been invested in, in order to pay rent and sustain a
different way of living. Could I still be as committed? It seemed
like such a crucial time. I didn't want to lose focus.
Having been around service-oriented communities for a while, I'm
all too familiar with seeing people come to serve others, only to
leave because they have to get a real job. Perhaps it's
practicality (student loans, etc) that drives this trend. Or,
probably, it's more often driven by compassion fatigue the
experience of being worn down because a person gives and gives to
others, only to see conditions get worse. Whatever the reason,
people come and go, and things stay the same as they leave.
This pattern is understandable, but I for one didn't want to
join the ranks ... but I knew that Kris and I needed to live alone
for a while if we were going to prioritize our relationship. I knew
it was the right thing to do, but my ego made it a very hard
choice. It felt like we were putting our own personal wishes for
privacy or whatever in front of the call to hospitality. My guilty
conscience tried to convince me that Kristen's as well as my own
personal needs were really just selfish desires.
And what would I do without my community? Isn't that what I'm
called to? And what kind of work would I do? How many compromises
would I have to make in order to pay rent? It was a question of
vocation as well as practicality.
A few months into this experiment of living on our own, I have
no clear answers on how to live genuinely according to conscience
within our modern economy. But I have one hope one which comes from
my experience of living with poor and homeless people. It is that
over the past few years I have become more and more aware that we
all belong to one another. Not only are we not all that different,
but we are one body. Interdependent. My own well-being wound up
with that of others. It is that which I hope will guide my actions
into the future.
It is easy to fall in line with the typical charity model of
service work: I serve others. I'm good, they are needy. And
inversely, I fail if I can't meet the needs of others on my own. It
is self-fulfillment, and it perpetuates the polarity between rich
and poor the isolation of modern capitalism. It feeds on the
patriarchal dualism that says we are isolated self-made people,
whose needs are separate from those of others. It is the reason why
compassion fatigue and the common response are so common. I help
others, but they never get better, so I guess I'll take care of my
own needs. It's what keeps this system from changing.
Throughout history, I cannot find a single example of any social
movement which did not create meaningful positive change to
people's objective conditions that did not require people directly
affected by injustice to organize themselves and lead in the
struggle for freedom and equity. The Women's Suffrage Movement, the
Slavery Abolitionist Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, you name
it all were made possible only because people who were being
oppressed stood up and organized for change themselves. Only then
did people with privilege (namely white men like myself) come to
realize the inherent dignity of the people they were (actively or
passively) oppressing and join them in the struggle, realizing the
interests of others were interwoven with their own. And only then
did our legal, political, and economic systems change to better
reflect the inherent dignity and equality of all people.
Living with people who experience homelessness has caused me to
realize just how paternalistic my own attitudes toward charity and
service work have been. The guests at the Catholic Worker House
have challenged my presumptions that I can fix things, or make
things better for them. They have gently demanded that I see them
as people worthy of dignity and respect, not charity cases, and
I've been challenged to practice mutual aid rather than service; to
work alongside people, rather than to do things for them; to
recognize that we all have various needs and interests, and that
those are interwoven, rather than competing forces. It is through
knowing them that I've come to see part of the sacramental mystery
that we're in this together. And that's not something I can walk
away from whatever I happen to be doing, and wherever I happen to
live.
We all have needs, but we're in this together. Wherever we might
be, we are one body.
Marcus
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
Im more than a year late to be reflecting on Vincent Hardings
memorial service, but it was such an important experience for me
that it keeps flooding into my awareness. I keep remembering how,
in that room full of mostly strangers, the more people shared, the
more i knew that i had come home, come to the place where my heart
could rest, where i belonged.
The name of that place is love. Not only Vincent Harding, when
he was alive, but everyone who stood up to talk about him after his
death was so steeped in love that the whole universe seemed to me
to shine with a warmer light, grounded and renewed in that
community of love. Its faith was a living, transforming reality,
and its hope stirred up my own.
Im sure the same realities pervaded the early church, still on
fire from the Resurrection. Saints through the ages have kept the
fire alive in their own lived experience of God. But the world
drags us down, we get caught up in all the limitations of our
humanness, and we fall far short of our glory as children of God.
Perhaps the problem, for me anyway, is that ive always been too
privileged and too sure of myself. Maybe only an oppressed people
leans hard enough on God to be lifted up into the power of Gods
life. But not all oppressed people find that freedom of
self-surrender and self-sacrifice. Certainly, everything in our
countrys culture works against it. Perhaps the beloved community is
a miracle of a faithful few in each generation. These few are so
saturated in love that they never doubt its the only way forward,
the driving force of the universe, and the purpose of all human
activity. They love in all they do, in big ways and little ways.
They care about individuals, affirming and empowering them. They
see no one as an enemy. Their lives are inclusive and the circles
of their caring ever-expanding. They lift up others, never
themselves, and communities of service and transformation grow up
around them.
Vincent was an educator, a writer, and a life-long activist for
African-American dignity and rights. He was a speechwriter for
Martin Luther King, Jr. He taught at Spelman College in Atlanta; at
the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Swarthmore
College, and the Pendle Hill Study Center in Pennsylvania; and at
the Iliff School of Theology here in Denver. With his wife
Rosemarie he founded Mennonite House in Atlanta. He was the first
director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, and he
established and directed the Institute of the Black World, also in
Atlanta. He and Rosemarie were consultants for the Eyes on the
Prize documentary film project, and they co-founded the Veterans of
Hope Project while at Iliff. After Rosemaries death, Vincent and
his second wife Aljosie helped launch the National Council of
Elders to mentor upcoming generations. In his later years he loved
to meet with school children. He visited with us at the Catholic
Worker house. His whole life radiated warmth, love, and
affirmation.
The reminiscences i particularly remember from the memorial
service include that of the person who followed Vincent as Director
of the Institute of the Black World, whom Vincent had to persuade
to step up to the responsibility, who found in it his lifes
calling, and for whom Vincents support never waned. A young woman
spoke who was close to Vincent as one of his nieces in his huge
family of intimates, who grew up strong in her identity with his
affirmation and became a leader in her own field of social justice
activism. And there was the father who simply came to Vincent for
counsel and encouragement in a family crisis and continued to rely
on his personal support ever after. No matter how famous Vincent
became, he always had time for whomever he was with, always making
you feel, in his gentle, empathetic way, special and important to
him. I suspect he had thousands of personal friends.
Drawn into this circle, i am more whole than i was before, more
myself, more the child of God whom God created me to be from the
beginning. Indeed, i believe i meet God in the love of the beloved
community, where God is more real than anything else in the
universe and everything is possible.
Jennifer
REMEMBERING HUMAN DIGNITY
I had the honor of being ordained as a Baptist Minister by my
home church in Waco, TX this past August. In some ways, the
ordination service was a culmination of a long process that began
in me about 10 years ago when I preached my first sermon in Leon,
Nicaragua. In other ways, it was the beginning of something new, a
newfound sense of support and calling to take into my daily work in
social action, service, community building, and faith.
The ordination service was like nothing I had ever before
experienced in a church setting. It was an extraordinarily physical
and sacred moment in my life. In the Baptist tradition, a minister
is ordained by the congregation rather than by an order of clergy.
For Baptists, Apostolic blessing is imparted bottom up, by the
hands of the community. During the service, I was invited to take
vows of fidelity to the church and to the gospel ministry, and then
I was invited to kneel while the congregation came forward, one by
one, to lay hands on my shoulders on my head to embrace me fully
with arms that wrapped around my body like the arms of God to adorn
me with tears kisses colorful stoles and words of blessing that I
will always carry with me. It was a strong and sweet moment
indeed.
The ordination that I requested from the church was an
ordination to an ecumenical ministry within the church and within
the world. Since the ordination, I have had the privilege of
serving daily bread to persons at SAME Caf, speaking and leading at
my Mennonite congregation in south Denver, guiding the liturgy that
we share on Thursday nights at the Catholic worker, and presiding
over a memorial service that Denver Homeless Out Loud led to draw
attention to the lack of public access to bathrooms in our beloved
yet troubled city.
For the memorial service, we dressed in black, carried a casket
from the back of a hearse across Park Avenue where we adorned it
with flowers and shared a liturgy together. During the liturgy, I
gave a eulogy to remember the life that human dignity led. In honor
of the lives of those who have lost their dignity because of
sweeping laws that criminalize those who spend their lives in
public space, I would like to share that eulogy below:
Human Dignity led a wonderful life. It was the kind of life that
many of us would have hoped to live: a life of deep conviction,
commitment, and community. The maturation process for Human Dignity
was quite a long one. It took thousands of years of human history
before Human Dignity reached its fullness under Gandhis leadership
in the Indian independence movement in the 1920s through 1930s.
Sometimes it takes much longer for humankind to reach deep down
towards what is intrinsic and eternal rather than to grasp for what
is fleeting and on the surface.
Through equal parts of conviction, commitment, and community
Gandhi led the resurrection of a nation and a people that had far
too long been divided, and been dependent upon a system that
thrived at the expense of the misery of the lowly. Through
non-violent demonstration Gandhi inspired the lowly to stand up,
and their willingness to stand awakened the consciousness of those
who had been denying their dignity and equality for far too
long.
Human Dignity reached its height in those days under the
alternative leadership of Gandhi, and its momentum carried it over
to our American shores under the leadership of Martin Luther King
Jr. in the 1960s when King led a non-violent revolution that sought
to do more than de-segregate the south, but integrate and reconcile
the south to the beloved community that King dreamed of.
Human Dignity reached its glory days in the 20th century. It
inspired an awakening to the deep truth of complete and utter
equality which humankind has always tried to deny. Human Dignitys
glory days led liberation movements that sought to restore equality
and reconcile broken systems for the betterment of all members of
society. It was the kind of life that we would dream of, indeed.
But today we declare Human Dignity is dead. Would you say that with
me? Human Dignity is Dead.
In a world where the love of money destroys community Human
Dignity is dead. In a world where rich and poor are afraid to look
at one another and acknowledge their interdependence Human Dignity
is dead. In a world where grown men and women are forced to go to
the bathroom on themselves to avoid being criminalized Human
Dignity is definitely dead.
In the 13th chapter of Corinthians, the Apostle Paul remembers
his own maturation process. A slow process, certainly, but not one
that spanned thousands of years like the maturation process of
Human Dignity. Paul remembers what it was like to think like a
child, and then to awaken and put away his childish ways. If we
think back on our own lives, we can recognize this movement as
well.
The crowning achievement of my childhood was the day that I was
potty-trained. I will never forget that day it was like sudden
liberation no longer would I have to fill my pants with filth that
oozed down my legs as I ran around on the playground. I could use a
toilet! The day we were potty trained is a day that we ought to
remember with great pride. We put away our childish ways, and were
not going back there!
Once you have experienced the sweetness of indoor plumbing, who
wants to revert to a pile of filth in their pants? No one! But the
decision makers in our city have decided that this is our plight.
Potty training, it seems, is the glory of the richnot to be enjoyed
by those whose life is spent in public space.
And so we are left to identify, it seems, with a first century
homeless man from Palestine, wandering the streets in a world where
the foxes certainly have homes but we have no place to lay our
heads much less our bodily waste.
Human dignity is dead. Would you say that with me? Human Dignity
is Dead. It is a solemn day indeed.
Cole
DIRTY WORDS, DIRTY DEEDS
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten
system. Dorothy Day
Since returning to live in Denver after twenty years, Ive again
been feeling like Rip Van Winkle waking from a long sleep, or even
the twin in the relativity paradox landing back on earth after
light years of touring the universe. The world has changed so much
during my lifetime as to be disturbingly strange to my memory,
which itself has been changing as Ive tried to understand better my
own life journey through physical, social, economic, political, and
cultural landscapes constantly being changed as well.
The devil in this case is not in the details but the development
of a way of organizing human society and life altogether which has
grown more total. Go virtually anywhere in the US and you can find
technological surplus of machinery and gadgetry, for example, which
didnt exist only a few generations ago. But the restructuring of
relations and realities among us as a result of the predominant
purposes to which these artifacts have been put, above all by those
who own and control them, has been both more profound and subtle,
as we seem to move along with dramatic changes in our ways of
being, and being human, in the most matter-of-fact ways just the
way things are.
Those traffic snarls one can stumble upon always somewhere in
Denver nowadays mean more than the sheer excess of private
automobiles, and accompanying road rage, which have arrived with
the spike in population. With more cars than people in the US now,
they signify the triumph of a corporate state campaign to enforce
upon all of us a mad system of transportation which wreaks carnage
in innumerable ways, from daily death and severe injury to us and
other living beings, to destruction of communal habitats, village
life and other spatial and temporal scales conducive to people
rather than profit, to their industries contribution to climate
change and driving us and alarmingly massive numbers of others into
species oblivion.
The destructive productivity of industrial capitalism is more
than the sum of its parts, and includes qualitative changes within
and among us. So along with all the ubiquitous presence of screens,
cameras, and other instruments and techniques for monitoring,
measuring, and manipulating our movement through the economic
machinery supposedly propelling the American Dream forward, its
that were enmeshed as never before in a web of watching and being
watched, a kind of spectator and surveillance society functioning
24/7, even if were not (though what worth and while we find in
living apart from functioning remains obscured). Along with the
proliferation of police and private security, we now move in more
militarized spaces subject to fear and terror, as these servants of
law and order take marching orders from a steadily enhancedpower of
the corporate state to rule by martial law. Along with the
increased presence of conspicuous consumption and crushing poverty
and glaringly insane inequality generated by what prosaically is
referred to as consumerism (or more aptly, following Marx,
commodity fetishism), there is the increased absence of genuinely
public contexts beyond the gilded grip of the free market where
people meet freely to deliberate and act upon our own powers over
our own lives, the essence of democracy.
Here in Five Points, where the CW is located, there are all the
enterprising signs of gentrification (or gentrifukation as some of
its victims prefer):signs for some of urban zones making a
comeback, propelled in large part by those with purchasing power
coming back from former flights to suburbs to the inner environs of
cities, which have exported their manufacturing working class base
to cheaper opportunities for exploitation of labor and other
resources in more remote and hidden elsewheres, and evolved into
professional districts pampering to a FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real
Estate) economy in the citadels of neoliberal America; signs or
rather warnings for others that the inherent logic of accumulation
at the origins of capitalism, from extermination and forcible
relocation of European peasantry from land under contrived rights
of enclosure to the genocidal and ecocidal colonization of peoples
and lands elsewhere, is once more extending both its legal arm and
lethal force of arms to re-zone the planet for the unholy trinity
of property, production, and profit.
But all that appears obscene here for champions and cheerleaders
of Progress is the word gentrifukation, while scrubbing streets
clean of human refuse. That the entire earth in its organic
foundations has become dangerously, apocalyptically subordinate to
the rule of Capital, converting living beings into dead objects for
the sake of abstract monetary exchange value, is, for all its
radical profanity, hardly halting the death march of our
civilization.
People in our society are given official identities by
technocratic authorities. The scientific expertise, or Orwellian
newspeak, with which they legitimate political, economic, and
cultural agenda from assigning these identities conceal actually
un-scientific fraud, as with race and sex. And the frauds, when
successfully propagandized, legislated, and marketed, become lies
repeated consistently enough to become truths.
When we walk or, more likely, drive along city streets we have
been educated to see the demographic the homeless as we come across
different individuals from different circumstances with different
life journeys who have been adversely affected by a social system
made for property, productivity, and profit, not people. They might
belong in turn to the larger category of the poor. But the poor
almost never belong to the 80% or even 99% of us who work as
wage-slaves in a pyramid scheme where all of us occupy, and are
occupied by, different levels of participation in its maintenance,
and where we might just have more in common, because more at stake
with, those at the bottom than at the top. (Becoming expendable
nowadays seems not so strange after all.)
I often think of what it meant, even beyond their own
intentions, when Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the Catholic
Worker during the dark days of one of the most destructive of the
recurrent crises of capitalism. I think that very much at the heart
of the meanings involved and implied is that we simply are not
meant to endure such suffering, that we have within and among us
untapped, unimagined potentials for re-making the conditions of our
own existence, from elemental acts of care and compassion to
revolutionary action to make such humanity the cornerstone of
society, carrying on the example of Jesus which might yet reach us
after millennia of something called Christianity and religion.
The recurring crises of our social order continue, threatening
on unprecedented scales destruction of people and planet beyond
whats already occurred. They keep telling us that this social order
itself is the crisis. And that what we can do is what must be done
to restore in myriad ways a society where its easier to be good, to
enjoy our common humanity, rather than suffer a way of living so
profane as to challenge us to awake from the nightmare of history
(James Joyce).
2
John
The following article is reprinted, with gratitude, from The
Catholic Radical.
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let Jennifer know at [email protected]
HOUSE NEWS
Marcus and Kristen moved out of the Worker in July, but were
glad to say they havent left. Theyre living in their tiny home in
the back yard of the house Sarah and Peter bought not very far from
us, and they both still do weekly house shifts. Sarah still cooks
for us one day a week, as do Cole and Kaylanne, whove recently
bought a house even less far away, with a room we can use for
respite space and occasional hospitality for our family and
friends. Sharing with this extended family feels like the heart of
our life together when we gather in our living room on Thursday
nights for prayer. (Its rarely Mass these days, as the priests
whove worshiped with us have health and other issues.)
Gaps between live-in workers were covered over the summer by
Sarah, a wonderful intern from Notre Dame with endless positive
energy, and Tim, a deeply spiritual person exploring a calling to
service after a career and raising a family. Our new live-in
worker, joining Anna and Kevin, is John Baker, whos a great cook
and brings a passion for networking among other folks committed to
building a better world. Long-time volunteers Sue Gomez and Doug
Cramer each continue to do two house shifts a week. Claire has had
to step back because of health issues, and Caroline has just
come.
Life in Denver is changing very rapidly. The apartment building
going up a few feet from our north wall now towers over us, and
another one is well under way a few houses to the south. Were
struggling with how best to help our guests in an economy where a
full-time, minimum-wage job no longer supports any kind of
market-rate housing, and where the amount of subsidized housing is
so far below the need that only the most vulnerable of those
eligible ever get in. What can we do? We hang in there, trying to
be faithful. Thank you for all your support, hanging in there with
us all these years.
Catholic Worker House
2420 Welton Street
Denver, Colorado 80205
(303)296-6390
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