As one living or working in the Catholic Worker houses, what does this season call us to?
When we first considered answering this as a group, we decided to keep the “season” open, since there is such a confluence of seasons this time of year. Advent and Christmas, certainly, but also the reality of working in a house of hospitality to the homeless where the temperature is well below freezing, a season that people on the margins (and not) tend to find unusually lonely, a season where we see how the economic fallout has hurt our guests the most, a season where we are still fighting two wars. The following is a snapshot of where we are at.—SusanWindley-Daoust
Mary: The Catholic Worker is an Advent place for me, a place where Jesus is welcomed each day into the life and work of hospitality and peacemaking. Every night a meal is served to dozens of people who share in the delight of a home-cooked meal and need a place to gather together to talk about the day. I believe Jesus is present with us, helping us to connect with each other, helping us to build a community of people who care about one another. I believe the Catholic Worker fulfills the Advent call when it lights the candles around the wreath each week, bringing the light of Jesus into a darkened world, making the world a little more at peace with itself. To make peace with myself at this time of the year, I feel called to help support our brothers and sisters in the developing countries so I host a fair trade sale, trying to bring about change for people who are struggling to make a living half way around the world. For these Advent callings, I am grateful.
Eileen: This season seems to me one increasing of uncertainty. Today, our only guest that had stable employment was laid off. As so many know, hard times are not just coming, they are upon us. In this season of economic ‘down-turn’, recession, depression or collapse (however you see it), I feel a renewed call to the vision of the Catholic Worker movement to build a new society within the shell of the old.
Creating a world where everyone’s needs are met is possible, and can’t wait until the “right” person or party is in office. This is our work, and our responsibility. By practicing mutual aid and cooperation, sharing and collaboration we can provide for everyone’s needs. The miracle of the Loaves and Fishes isn’t a magic trick. The miracle is the reality of abundance, revealed. There is enough for everyone, if only we had the eyes to see it. I am challenged by this to live more by providence, trusting that together we can meet one another’s needs, and to continue to build a society where it is easier to do that.
A Radical Change
The order of the day
is to talk about the social order.
Conservatives would like
To keep it from changing
But they don’t know how.
Liberals try to patch it
And call it a New Deal.
…
I want a change,
And a radical change.
I want a change from an acquisitive society
to a functional society,
from a society of go-getters
to a society of go-givers.
Peter Maurin
Susan: This season calls me to sing one of my favorite songs: “I Wonder As I Wander”: “I wonder as I wander, out under the sky, why Jesus the savior had come for to die, for poor ord’nry people like you and like I, I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.” It is a simple, haunting tune on its own. But the story behind it is no less haunting: a folklorist named John Jacob Niles was collecting Appalachian music in North Carolina in 1933, and met this young woman at an evangelical gathering outside town, in his words “her clothes … unbelievably dirty and ragged…she too was unwashed.” But she had a beautiful voice. And she kept singing that one line for anyone who wanted to hear it, for 25 cents.
I know some people think the song is bleak. But bleakness comes from emptiness. And this song is not empty, this is mystery. Through the poverty and darkness of this song, we hear someone trusting enough to ask: God, why did you become human for people like me? I’m a poor, hungry, dirty woman in one of the most abjectly poor regions of the United States in the Great Depression. But I do matter. I count. And I know this because you were born, poor like me, and you will die, like me and for me. At the Catholic Worker, we try to recognize the same thing this young woman did: because of Christ’s birth, we know, everyone counts.
I think the song cuts through the ubiquitous “Jingle Bell Rock” like a knife. –SWD
Diane: This season calls me to fill the bird feeders and bake some bread. I will light candles and read books. I will anxiously await the four o’clock hour when the house fills with warm bodies again and warms up a few degrees. I will listen to the bluffs when they call me to put on my hiking boots and follow the footprints of the deer into the woods. I will seek the quiet moments that winter brings, the long, dark evenings and slow moving mornings. I will be constantly aware of our brothers and sisters, both those we know and those we don’t, that will be spending their days and nights outdoors. I will fall asleep worrying about them. During this season of winter weather, I will seek light and warmth and know that I am blessed to be able to find such basic comforts each day.
Jerry: Folks on the lookout for miracles should take up gardening. Every spring I push dry seeds into dry soil, which I make wet; a few months later, I am holding bright red peppers, sweet orange tomatoes, plump cucumbers and fragrant bunches of basil in my hands. And every year, there is a moment—perhaps when I taste the first strawberry the squirrels didn’t get—when I stop short in amazement. Because if turning water into wine counts as a miracle, then surely turning plain brown soil into the stuff of salads and spaghetti sauce must be a miracle too. It is no mistake, I think, that God set the first human beings to work tending a garden; it is no mere coincidence that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene as a gardener.
Winter is a season of frozen death and long darknesses, a fact we forget all too easily with our electric lights and central heat and reliable grocery stores. We have been expelled from the garden; the tomb is still sealed. It is a time to wait and watch for signs of hope. It is a time to look for a seed, some small and unlikely source of life.
Last winter, my two-year-old daughter would not believe my stories of the harvest when I showed her the seed of a tomato. Do you smile at her incredulity? This is the season in which we are told another story—one of God stooping low to plant a child, nothing more than a pinch of dust, on this dry earth. We are told stories about the abundance of the harvest to come. Do you believe these stories?
Well. After the Christmas tree comes down (in late January, I confess), I will get out the grow lights, and some soil, and I will plant some seeds. I will put them in a south-facing window to catch the ever-strengthening light, and I will wait once again to see what happens.
John:
You darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
That fence in the world,
For the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
And then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
Shapes and fires, animals and myself,
How easily it gathers them-
Powers and people-
And it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
Rainer Marie Rilke
Darkness. There are two distinct species. One is fecund, womblike and star-glittered. The other is a void. Vast, vacuous and voracious. The soul’s night.
This season reminds me that we are pilgrims of the first darkness and en-lighteners of the second.
At the Worker we witness both kinds of darkness. Short days and bitter nights grind folks on the margins. Street life goes from painful to lethal. Our nation’s dark soul is exposed in the reality of poverty.
In the shadow of the birth of Light, lies the crime of Holy Innocents. Things turn bloody when the quintessential symbol of dark empire is threatened by Light, however child-like, its flowering.
“For all the boots tramped in battle and all the cloaks rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire. For a child is born to us…” (Is. 4-5a)
This is the Light we live in, the one that “now sleeps in your paper flesh, like dynamite.” (Thomas Merton)
This season summons me to grow roots deep within the sod, even as my paper flesh lives into the Light.