This is the fifth in a series of articles exploring each of our core values: Community, Hospitality, Faith, Voluntary Poverty, Nonviolence, and Stewardship
Stewardship is our way of life in Catholic Worker communities. We’re all about living simply and being aware throughout our everyday tasks of how we are called to use resources wisely.
The living out of stewardship is one of the ways that initially attracted me to the Winona Catholic Worker Community. So much of the day-to-day routines and decisions made here are rooted in the belief that we are called to live simply and responsibly. In my childhood years, I grew up on a small family farm in Iowa in the 1960’s. We had neither a lot of money nor possessions, so living simply was the norm out of necessity. We took good care of what we had because replacements were not readily available. Things were expected to last a long time. We got our money’s worth from everything, purchasing replacements only when what we had could no longer be mended, repaired, or improvised upon one more time. We valued what we had rather than desiring something new. And ours was not a culture of “disposables”—no disposable diapers, paper towels, or Kleenex.
Here at the Winona Catholic Worker community we value that same lifestyle. We use and reuse rags instead of paper towels. We save gray water (dirty mop bucket water) to flush the toilet. We buy used household items from the ReStore, if available. We recycle whatever we can and are frugal in our purchases. One of our never-ending tasks is washing and reusing plastic Ziploc bags!
Obviously, one of our motivations for living simply stems from necessity. We rely on the generosity of others for 100 percent of our living expenses. We are blessed to be recipients of money, food, and other donated items for the house and personal items for the guests. That leads to a deeper motivation for our community to embrace stewardship. We see that all we have is a gift.
This idea of gift is especially clear in the life of the houses of hospitality, where everything is literally, a gift. Every meal, every morsel, every comfortable chair, every cup of coffee, each and every hot shower and restful night in a warm, safe bed is literally a gift…from you. The connections between giver and gift are just more obvious in a house of hospitality, where we rely on donations and trust in providence to provide for the needs of our guests.
In a broader sense, we also recognize all creation as a gift from the Creator. We have a responsibility to care for God’s creation because it has been entrusted to all of us to use for our own good—and for the good of others, including future generations. Taking care of our earth and its natural resources—the green revolution—isn’t anything new to Catholic Workers. We conserve energy by hanging clothes on the line to dry, using bicycles or walking instead of driving whenever possible, going without air conditioning, keeping our thermostats set lower in the winter months. We live this way because we recognize that our lives are immersed in gift. Our culture teaches us about individual ownership; we think we “own” things. But really, everything we have comes to us as a gift. Our presence on this earth is transitory. That awareness prompts us to respect and maintain what we have for future generations.
Stewardship calls us to be in right relationship with our environment and with others. Our lives are a cycle of constant giving and taking. It’s so easy to see ourselves outside of nature’s circle as we take from our environment, outside the cycle of mutualism.
Likewise, our relationships with our guests need to be balanced with our desire to live in a right relationship with the earth. We don’t insist that guests completely embrace simple ways of being good stewards. For example, we do have a clothes dryer for our guests. We recognize that it’s easier to live out a simple lifestyle in community with support from one another. The practice of stewardship also grows out of our other core values: hospitality, non-violence, and faith. This connection between our treatment of our resources and our moral character is something Wendell Berry writes about in his book, “The Unsettling of America” from which there is an excerpt in this newsletter.
Living in the Catholic Worker makes it easier to see all of these connections, and helps us to practice stewardship in a community of forgiveness and hope.