We said goodbye to Barbara and Jim Allaire this spring; they are moving to Boston to be closer to their two sons and four grandsons. The Allaires have been involved in the life of the Catholic Worker community here in Winona since the very beginning (nearly twenty years ago!), so saying goodbye hasn’t been easy. But there have been blessings alongside the sadness of their departure: the blessing of many happy memories, and with those memories, a realization of the many gifts the Allaires have given us over the years.
The most obvious of these is the Winona Catholic Worker itself; we probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. When Mary Farrell was trying to decide whether to join the Catholic Worker community in Duluth or begin a new community in Winona, the Allaires tipped the balance by offering their help if she chose the Winona option. That was back in the spring of 1991. Within a few months, a very eclectic group of about twenty people was meeting regularly in the Allaires’ living room to lay plans for buying a house. Within a year, that same group was making repairs and painting walls and moving furniture at 802 West Broadway, which would become the Dan Corcoran House.
For more than a decade, Jim and Barbara were part of the “core” of the Winona Catholic Worker community. They offered input on key decisions, cooked food, welcomed guests, fixed broken doors and pipes, organized retreats, edited newsletters, shared prayers, scrubbed floors, did overnight hospitality, and managed to find room in overcrowded refrigerators for one more bucket of potato salad. When it was time to open a second house for single men, they were down at the bank and—once again—moving furniture and painting walls down at 832 West Broadway, which became Bethany House. When it was time to press part of the garage into more useful service as a prayer room, they came with hammers in hand to help Brother Jerome tear down old walls and put up new ones. And once that work was done, they gathered in the prayer room every Monday evening with other faithful friends to pray and sing and break bread together.
All of which is a long way of saying that they really believed in the vision of the Catholic Worker movement: that we are called to extend the warm hand of friendship to every woman, every man, and every child, because God has done the same through Christ. They each shared that vision widely; Barbara often worked the Catholic Worker into the high schoolreligion textbooks she edited for Saint Mary’s Press, and Jim co-authored a book with Rosemary Broughton (Praying with Dorothy Day) and created a website for the Catholic Worker (catholicworker.org) that has reached millions of people. More importantly, they lived that vision, concretely, by engaging our guests in a spirit of friendship. Often that meant simply sharing conversation over a meal or a sink full of dirty dishes and soapy water. Sometimes, they forged lasting friendships that extended beyond the walls of our houses of hospitality.
“That’s what I will really miss,” Barbara told me as she and Jim reminisced. “The prayer and the meals, and meeting people of all kinds and sharing life with them, and all of us feeling so at home. There was so much fun and laughter and joy.”
“It was day after day of blessed work,” Jim said, recalling the early days when the Dan Corcoran House was just getting going. “There was so much involvement and commitment by so many people, it was exhilarating. And there was such a sense of the miraculous.”
“Just when we needed something, it would show up,” Barbara added. “Or just when we needed a particular skill that none of us had, someone would show up and offer it. It was truly amazing. It seemed like every day there would be some wondrous development, some gift, some graced experience.”
That eye for the graced and the miraculous, that ability to see God’s hand at work even amid hard work and sorrows, is also a gift, one they have brought to the Winona Catholic Worker community repeatedly over the years. And it is one that we know will serve them well in Boston—not only as they spend time with their children and grandchildren, but also as they continue to extend the hand of friendship to those who need it most.
As they prepared to leave, the Allaires offered a blessing for the Winona Catholic Worker.“My wish would be that the wider community—everyone who brings food, everyone who stops over and gets to know someone there, everyone who shares in the hospitality—that all those people who really own the Catholic Worker would see it as their way of witnessing to the love of God,” Barbara said.
“And it would be my hope, too,” Jim added, “that each person who participates in the work would be changed for life—that it would leave a trace on their soul.”
Thank you, Jim and Barbara—thank you for everything.