Chopping Carrots and Resisting Evil
Two essays from the New York City Catholic Worker community's January-February newsletter.
Two Essays from The Catholic Worker
“What is your day like?” people often ask Catholic Workers. There’s really no good answer, because no two days are alike, and, inevitably, whatever you have planned is bound to be interrupted or molded to the unique needs of the Christ you encounter that day. “What is your day like?” Often, the best answer is: “Come and see.”
At the Peter Maurin Conference in Chicago last September, Jon Sozek described the personalism “of the streets” that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin practiced as “a lightning bolt.”
I think of Catholic Workers as lightning rods. They make themselves open, regularly, for the lightning to strike. Sometimes, these electric encounters can leave your hair standing on end, other times, they can restart the heart you hadn’t realized had stopped beating inside your chest.
As Br. Roger says in his essay, encounter with our neighbor demands a real risk—the lightning bolt strikes, your mind and heart might truly be transformed—and demands trust. But these encounters where we practice trust, we practice the risk of loving our neighbor—or even our enemy—foster the creative imagination that can lead “wagers of peace” to imagine more just, more loving, and more fruitful possibilities for our world.
These two essays—reprinted with permission from the New York City Catholic Worker—by two high school students and one seasoned contemplative bottle up some of hospitality’s lightning and deliver a small glimpse of what they’ve witnessed to us.
peace,
Renée
From Chopping Carrots to Radical Welcome: Two High School Seniors Learn Hospitality at the Catholic Worker
By Joe Kaecker and Dylan McGinty
We were first introduced to the Catholic Worker two years ago through the Chris-tian service club at Regis, our high school. “OPPORTUNITY: The Catholic Worker,” the weekly email read. “Tuesday evenings 4-5. Contact Ms. Badi for more info.” We decided to give it a try.
Little did we know what we were about to walk into. We managed the stroll from Bleecker St. station to St. Joseph House despite Apple Maps’ insistence that St. Joe’s was Maryhouse and vice versa. A
fter meeting Carmen and Lyn, we were given our first task—chopping carrots for the evening soup, a skill we’re sure our mothers are glad we’ve mastered. We were struck by our surroundings—posters of Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dan Berrigan stared down at us—and the people of the Catholic Worker were eager to educate us on the history of their movement. The stories we heard on this first encounter and the welcome we received galvanized us to return the next week, and the week after.
From our first experiences at St. Joe’s, to our more recent task of newspaper prep at Maryhouse, to leading Regis’ Catholic Worker Initiative and encouraging underclassmen to join us in our work, the Catholic Worker has become fundamental to our high school experience.
Now, as seniors, Regis gives us an opportunity to re-engage with the community that has welcomed us like family. On Wednesdays, our morning classes are canceled for our Senior Service, allowing us to be at St. Joseph House for the soupline.
The structure on Wednesdays stays relatively similar week by week: arrive at 9:00; greet Carmen, Bud, Rocco, Natasha, Hideko, Gregory, Gerry, both Anthonys and any of the other friends we have made up to this point; open our doors and hearts to those needing a meal by 9:30; and from that point on, it’s coffee and soup until “gettin’ outta here time” at 11:00.
But through our experiences, this baseline routine of pouring coffee and serving soup seems to be the only constant at St. Joseph House. We come every week expecting to meet a new face, engage in a new debate, or hear a new story of hardships success or humor. Each interaction brings with it tidbits of character and care to color our experiences with the Catholic Worker.
With Bud, we hear why he, as a Yankees fan, occasionally sports a Red Sox cap, or how we remind him of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. With Mohammed, a regular at St. Joe’s on Wednesday mornings, we switch from English to French to Spanish to even a little Arabic to discuss recent developments in Gaza. With Rocco, we hear about his traditional Italian childhood on Mulberry St. and his connections to the San Gennaro Festival. At the Catholic Worker, you’d be hard-pressed to find two people discussing the same topic twice.
The soup is the heart of the meal—having seen it prepared in years prior, we understand the labor and skill required for this task. When our guests praise the rich broth and vegetables, we make sure to pass on compliments to the chef. Often, we’ll have a sweet treat to compliment the meal, such as donuts or pie.
Despite the reliable nature of the Catholic Worker soupline, no day is the same—in recent weeks, we have enjoyed the company not only of the volunteers who live at St. Joe’s, but of a number of college students who have, like us, fallen in love with the Catholic Worker and its mission. Every volunteer at St. Joe’s serves a crucial role in executing the soupline seamlessly, and the litany of tasks always seems to get done. The team, made up of all ages and backgrounds, is equally committed to the task.
The buzz of the soupline ends at 11 am, but the hospitality of the Catholic Worker continues. A clothing distribution is routinely organized following the soupline—after a thirty-minute intermission to sort through this week’s donations and take names for the clothing list. During this time, the chairs are flipped and the floor is mopped as the volunteers transform the dining room into a free shop for shirts, pants and items of all shapes and sizes.
Returning to school via the 6 train, we remark how the Catholic Worker will always be there to lecture us in ways we least expect. We often pick up Spanish colloquialisms or learn how Coach Thibodeau’s habit of overworking his Knicks’ starters will hurt them in the playoffs, all by listening to conversations leap around the tables.
One morning, we were catching up with Bud when he gave us an anecdote of his own. At closing time, a Catholic Worker regular was seemingly only beginning his meal, and was forced to battle with the bustle of the clean-up process. The lights signaled the kitchen was closed, and volunteers shuttled stragglers out to the sidewalk promptly.
The man, thoroughly engaged with his soup, questioned, “Why is no one smiling? I come here to be filled with joy.” Bud explained to us how this put things in perspective for him, and how this taught him one of his most valuable lessons at the Catholic Worker: that we must constantly adjust how we interact with others to be sensitive to their needs. Just as one cannot leave the Catholic Worker without engaging with someone new and interesting, one also cannot leave without learning a lesson or two.
From a distance, the soupline seems like a chaotic symphony—people running back and forth in constant movement, shouts over the blaring music, yet the kitchen runs like clockwork.
Last week, we took a seat on the radiator for a brief moment to take it all in. This vantage point gave us a perspective from the front of the house all the way into the kitchen. We saw conversations taking place, smiles, laughs, a lot of eating. But the most important observation was that everyone was welcomed and given the opportunity to get a good meal. The Catholic Worker is nourishing for both body and soul.
Since the day Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started offering hospitality in the midst of the Great Depression, Catholic Workers have come and gone, but the commitment to its local community has been unwavering. As we have both loved and been loved at the Catholic Worker, it provides a truly unique definition of a “House of Hospitality.”
Taizé: Trust & Imagination
From Br. Émile’s Friday Night Meeting on October 21, 2024 at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City
By Brother Émile of Taizé
In the small village of Taizé where I live in Burgundy, France, we welcome young adults week after week, as many as two thousand a week in the summer months.
This year, the anxiety and anguish fostered by armed conflict in several parts of the world was almost palpable among the visitors. We welcomed several groups coming directly from Ukraine. It was a joy to see their buses climb the hill of Taizé, but heart-wrenching when the time came to say goodbye and see them head back to their war-torn country. In the summer months, with no less emotion, we welcomed people from Israel and Palestine.
One young woman, whose entire family lives in Gaza and has lost everything, spoke to us about her daily inner struggle against hatred: “I pray every day that hatred not enter my heart, but I don’t always win that battle.” An Israeli Jewish woman, who has many Christian friends told me: “I force myself every evening to watch Al Jazeera to find out what’s happening in Gaza.” But she also knows personally some of the hostages and their families, and she too is torn within. Both of these women are trying, painstakingly, to make room for the suffering of those “on the other side,” but the suffering of their own people is so overwhelming that empathy for the suffering of others seems to require an almost superhuman effort.
But there is something more. When evil and suffering are intensely experienced it becomes difficult to imagine the good. Evil alone is considered to be real. Even for us who may only see these dramatic conflicts on our computer screens or television sets, we may be led to believe that evil is everywhere, and a certain fatalism with regard to evil insidiously seeps in.
When Jesus said happy or blessed are the peacemakers, he was not only talking about people who appreciate calm, absence of conflict, and tranquility. The emphasis on making and doing stands out. But the making and the doing, such an important part of the Gospels, are preceded by something perhaps far more powerful than we realize.
What helps to resist the seeming fatalism of evil is the power of the imagination. Imagining a different way of living in the world, of living out human relationships, can be a first act of resistance. The great French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, who lectured for many years at the University of Chicago, who was also a man of prayer, hope and profound faith once asked: “Why is it that we think that the Gospel first appeals to our will, why don’t we see that it is first appealing to our imagination?”
The good, the building of the good, requires our imagination if it is to be conceived and then take shape, be embodied, become reality. As the imagination of what is good unfolds, our appetite and desire for good are awakened, stimulated—beckoning our will to transform what is only an intimation into reality. The rightly famous words of Emily Dickinson need to be recalled today, perhaps more than ever. “The Possible’s slow fuse is lit by the Imagination!”
However there are obstacles, often many obstacles, that can obstruct the passage from an intuition of what could be to the actual undertaking of a project to build, to the transformation of an idea into a visible reality, in a word to initiative.
One of these obstacles that Brother Roger, the founder of the Taizé community, was particularly aware of is the lack of or even the almost complete absence of trust. Living in community with Br. Roger for the last thirty years of his life, I understood that trust had become the most important reality he hoped visitors to Taizé might gain.
Without a doubt, Brother Roger was a man of imagination. People sometimes forget that the beginnings of our community go back to the Second World War. At the age of twenty-five, Brother Roger left Switzerland to go to live in France. So he left a country that chose to be neutral during the war, to go to the village of Taizé where he could welcome refugees, many of them Jewish. When Germany had been defeated, Brother Roger began welcoming German prisoners of war. Less than two decades later, when the village church could no longer hold all those coming to pray at Taizé, a larger church was built and Br Roger chose to call it the Church of Reconciliation.
In countries ravaged by war, any use of the word reconciliation may seem wildly unrealistic. And that is why imagination is required to broaden the sense of the possible. Several years ago, as we gathered for our European Meeting of young people in Geneva, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, sent us the following message, hoping, I believe, that the forty thousand young adults who gathered might be able to see a connection between their search and the life of Etty Hillesum, a young twenty-seven-year-old Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz in 1943. Rowan Williams shared this with us:
“As she faced the likelihood of deportation and death, she wrote that she felt her task was to ‘bear witness that God lived’ in the terrible circumstances around her. She had to live so as to persuade people that God was real, even in the midst of the horror and insanity of the Nazi era. These words still haunt me, because they offer what is surely one of the most authentic and demanding definitions of faith in the modern age. To have faith is to be willing to live so as to show that God is alive. And that means to live in ways which show that there are more possibilities than the world recognizes—the possibility of forgiveness, the possibility of reconciliation, the possibility of hope, the possibility of forgetting yourself and being absorbed in the needs of another... the possibility of human beings living so fully in intimacy with God through their friendship with Jesus that they come to share something of His own freedom.”
The key sentence for me in this fabulous message is: “To have faith is to be willing to live so as to show that God is alive. And that means to live in ways which show that there are more possibilities than the world recognizes.”
To show that there are more possibilities than the world recognizes means going beyond what is obvious. A creator, an artist, always wants to go beyond—to go beyond existing forms, beyond what has been done in the past, beyond what others have done. The artist is never content with imitation, reproducing or copying. We know that certain political leaders were capable of such imagination after World War II and built something that would have seemed totally outrageous a year or two earlier.
When I mentioned the role of trust, I was thinking not so much of the beginnings of Taizé, but more about what happened in the late sixties when the community began welcoming young adults. Brother Roger constantly wished to express his trust in young people. Often this happened in one-on-one conversations. Young adults were noticeably frustrated and angry because of what they were seeing in their societies and more broadly in many parts of the world. Brother Roger felt it was possible to channel some of that anger, believing that it could fuel a project to build. He wanted those he met to understand that their gut feeling that things should be different was not unrelated to God’s plan. Did not the prophets in our Scriptures have such experiences?
Earlier I was alluding to the fact that when trust wanes, when trust is no longer part of the picture, initiative and creativity are stifled. Is our creativity, our sense of initiative, not impeded today by our persistent demands for guaranteed success before we undertake anything? When everything has to be risk-free, our capacity to take initiatives is inhibited. When every decision needs to buffered by promises of total protection, our capacity to begin something new is thwarted.
An overprotective culture is a culture that lacks trust. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” like all the other Beatitudes of Jesus, is an invitation to risk. Risk is an irreplaceable component in the life of the followers of Jesus. If peacemakers are to be called “children of God,” as the beatitude tells us, it means not only that God recognizes them as God’s own, but that God’s presence can be seen in such people. They become a reflection of God in the world.
Imagination, trusting and risk go hand in hand. Brother Roger was not reckless. He weighed decisions carefully. He knew that when the Gospel calls us to risk our lives it is not a call to act irresponsibly. He encouraged people to resist being impulsive and to let decisions ripen, grow out of a patient and tenacious prayer involving discernment, a discernment that may require time, reflection, searching with others. But, when all is said and done, he referred to trust as the fundamental reality for being creative. For making of our lives a creation with Christ. This he called the greatest of all adventures.
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