by Susan Windley-Daoust
This is the first in a series of articles exploring each of our core values; Community, Hospitality, Faith, Voluntary Poverty, Nonviolence and Stewardship
One of the pieces that is often hard for people new to the Catholic Worker to understand is how central the value of community is to the life and work of the Catholic Worker. For example, we don’t “hire workers” to run the houses; we live in community in order to do hospitality and tell the truth, and invite others to join us in doing that work. Many people have read the lines from Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” The phrase “the only solution is love” is on our masthead of the newsletter, and community both comes from that and facilitates that love for each other.
Of course, the question “how do I love my neighbor?”—a version of how do I live in community with others?—is as old as the Hebrew prophets and Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man. And the biblical answers are instructive: care for the widow and orphan (that is, the most vulnerable in society), sell what you own, take a “risk,” and follow the Way. Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities and a substantial influence on Christian intentional communities in our time, also highlights the joy and energy of living in community: “A community is not simply a group of people who live together and love each other. It is a place of resurrection, a current of life…It is people, very different from one another, who love each other and are reaching toward the same hope.” (Vanier, Community and Growth). As a core community, we met a couple of weeks ago and reflected about what community meant to us.
• Community is “a network of relationships; being a presence to people in despair.”
• Community is embracing simple living:
“It seems like you’re going to have less, but in reality, you have more
…it’s a mystical dynamic, a hidden gain.”
• Community life is a “means of letting go—learning to give and receive—reaching out.”
• Community is a fragile enterprise, in that it requires intentionality and work to help it flourish. There is nothing accidental about healthy community.
• Community energy is “outwardly focused, always going out—one of the true signs of community is that you have so much, you want to give it away.”
•Community is anchored in a spirituality of solidarity; we’re created in this “sibling relationship” to the rest of humanity.
•Community involves bearing each other’s burdens, and sharing happiness and joy.
•Community is less about intimacy, and more about being with people wherever they’re at: more intentional than friendship.
• Community, at its heart, is life-giving. Our open community meals are special, and a highlight of the day (even when they are hard to pull off).
They re-energize us.
Community is less about what we do—although our actions surely shape the health of the community—and more about who we are. People agreed that living out of the works of mercy (listed in Matthew 25) is just too difficult to do on your own—we were created for community in order to love, to live out hospitality and truth-telling. In a way, community is about coming to your truest self, together. We do that at the Winona CW by sharing the works of mercy together, praying together, coming to roundtables for “clarification of thought” together, playing together, and supporting each other in truth-telling actions with each other and to the world at large. This is one of the reasons that our community has a discernment period for becoming a live-in volunteer: one of the questions is, do you really want to live in this kind of community? 24-7? Because our experience over the years is that intentional community is a necessity. But it is also a somewhat unexpected joy. Of all the things we do, living in community may be the most counter-cultural. But it is an essential element of Dorothy Day’s “solution”: love.