I am grateful to be here. I’m living, along with Becky, at the Dan Corcoran House and getting it ready to reopen. It’s been a long and winding road to this delicious Mississippi River Valley bluff country and the Winona Catholic Worker from my birthplace in Pennsylvania.
As a boy, I witnessed my Mom perform works of mercy for marginalized folks in our blue-collar neighborhood on the lower east side of Erie. And I recall my Dad, a World War II vet (European theater), speak of the horror and senselessness of war. He showed my brothers and me album after album of black-and-white photos to make his point. Dad still has those photos today.
My Mom used to sit us four boys down by the radio (we had no television then) to listen to the 15-minute “St. Francis Hour” almost every Saturday morning. My sisters, both younger than the boys, missed this weekly ritual. Mom told us stories about Gandhi and King, who was alive at the time, and of course lots about Jesus, the Peacemaker.
I was raised in a pre-Vatican II Catholic tradition and served the Latin Mass. Leonard and Mary Ann were very clear with their progeny: everybody deserves respect; it’s always wrong to kill; don’t punch back and never lie—ever. They didn’t buy us war toys.
When in adult life I became a Quaker, my parents grieved. Yet to this day, Dad and I go to Liturgy together, and sometimes church dinners, on my semiannual visits to Erie.
I was introduced to Dorothy Day’s story—not in 12 years of parochial education but in an introduction to sociology class at Pennsylvania’s Slippery Rock State College. (Dorothy has been called Catholicism’s best kept secret.)
After a number of years wandering through public service jobs in the mainstream, in my late 20’s I finally broke free. The childhood lessons of my parents came boomeranging back—the works of mercy and justice. My new teachers were the “poor,” and their classrooms included the streets, shelters, houses of hospitality, and jails along the eastern seaboard and now in the heartland. Most of what I know about war and resistance to it comes from veterans and survivors.
Over the past two decades my peregrine journey has taken me from community to community, mostly within the Catholic Worker tradition. In 1990 I moved from West Virginia to Loaves and Fishes CW, Duluth, Minnesota, and a decade later to Anathoth Community Farm in Luck, Wisconsin.
From a distance I’ve witnessed the Spirit with which workers from Winona enflesh the Catholic Worker tradition. Their living out of the “aims and means” has quietly spoken to me for some time—drawing me subconsciously ... subversively. The verve. The youthful energy and insight has invigorated me across the miles. As I’ve watched this bunch I’ve smiled.
In January I participated in the Christian Peacemaker Teams training program (the same session as Eileen Hanson). While Eileen is a full time CPTer in Palestine, working with the projects in Hebron and At-Tuwani, I am a reservist working on the Borderlands project. In this capacity I will be working with other CPTers on human rights issues along the U.S./Mexican border for two months this coming summer.
I believe that I was drawn here to the Winona Catholic Worker to learn, to grow, to heal. The Spirit’s Grace makes all this possible. When I breathe deeply I know that I am home … and I am so very grateful to be here.
