Contemplating for Change
Inside: Catholic Worker reflections on joining a house of hospitality, Julian Assange, and silence, prayer, and clarity of thought in the midst of the symphony of the everyday.
Contemplation in Action
One week ago, members of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker in South Bend hosted a Catholic Peace Fellowship retreat for 15 University of Notre Dame students who appeared in court for their sentencing Friday.
These students were facing potentially up to one year in jail for their protest for Gaza on Notre Dame’s campus on May 2. The protest consisted, one student said, of 50 people sitting on blankets. Roundtable covered the story of the demonstration and these arrests in the May 5, May 6, and May 12 issues of Roundtable.
Catholic Peace Fellowship is, you could say, one of the Catholic Worker’s sister movements. One of the Fellowship’s founders, Jim Forrest, began this work of creating a Catholic pacifist organization while living at the Catholic Worker in New York City. The Catholic Peace Fellowship supports conscientious objectors and offers many resources for cultivating the consciences of men and women dedicated to peace—Dan Berrigan might call them makers of peace. And making peace, Dan Berrigan writes in No Bars to Manhood, is just as costly as the waging of war: “at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
The Catholic Peace Fellowship took the time to offer these 15 wagers of peace spiritual grounding—a day of contemplation and spiritual accompaniment—as they were learning in real time the liabilities of peace-making. It reminded me of the 1964 retreat that Thomas Merton offered at his home—Abbey of Gethsemani—for Jim Forrest, Tom Cornell, the Berrigan brothers and their collaborators as they were forming the Catholic Peace Fellowship. The Abbey of Gethsemani is a beautiful, serene place of woodsy beauty. The founder’s ideas and plans must have been shaped and inspired by the spirit of peace there.
It is often difficult for all of us: peace-makers, Catholic Workers, mothers, fathers (and journalists!) to practice the necessary discipline of sitting in silence; to practice staring at mountains, trees, or streams instead of computer screens; to practice looking up from our phones and into our surroundings and up from our own lives and into the eyes of our neighbors. Dorothy Day cultivated her own disposition as a peace-maker by pairing her morning cup of coffee with reading the Psalms.
Earlier this week, the Office of Readings for the day included a sermon of St. Gregory of Nyssa—a contemplative’s contemplative. Nyssa emphasizes the importance of deeds, words, and thoughts in the life of a Christian, but particularly our thoughts. “If you draw from [Christ] the thoughts in your mind and the inclinations of your heart, you will show a likeness to Christ, your source and origin,” he says. Our lives, he writes, will be “stamped with the beauty of his thought.”
There’s a reason Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day emphasized clarification of thought and made it the first step of the Worker’s original “program of action.” Time to think and pray and dream uninterrupted can be all too rare. That’s a poverty many of us are suffering from in the United States: that lack of time and space to encounter our own minds deprives us of time to contemplate “how things would be if they were as they should be,” as Peter Maurin would say. To have lives stamped with the beauty of good thoughts—thoughts of peace, of mercy, of hospitality, of justice—we have to actually have the time and space to think them!
I recently spent six months in a house in the woods finishing up a book, and while I missed the rhythms and relationships of a house of hospitality and community-building, a season of contemplation and extended (uninterrupted!) periods of thinking and reading helped me re-commit to carving out time for contemplation in the midst of action—and deadlines.
We hope you enjoy this issue of Roundtable, which includes the first part of Tone Lanzillo’s testimony about his arrival at the Loaves and Fishes community in Duluth, Minnesota, and his journey to becoming a committed climate activist—the action that results from contemplation!
And Herman Melville says (I paraphrase) that meditation is a natural soulmate of water—who does not sink deep into thought when sitting by a lake or an ocean? With apologies to Melville, we might say that meditation and art are also “wedded forever.” To that end, we’re delighted to share Monica Welch’s lovely line drawings in Roundtable for you to contemplate. If you’re an artist interested in sharing your work in the next issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Jerry at: jerry@catholicworker.org.
Warmly,
Renée
FEATURED
Finding My Footing
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Tone Lanzillo shared the story of how he moved into the Loaves and Fishes Community after the age of 60, and how he learned to stop worrying and reduce his carbon emissions.
On the evening of November 7th, 2017, I had just gotten off the Jefferson Lines bus in Duluth, Minnesota, where I was planning to spend two weeks with the Loaves and Fishes community.
About eleven months before arriving in Duluth, I had been laid off from my job as a case manager with an adult partial care program. After twenty-nine years living in Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, working in the mental field, and newly 62, I figured–at first–I would look for one last job before retiring. But, four weeks after the layoff, something told me it was time for a real change.
Read the full story on catholicworker.org.
After 14-Year Campaign, one Catholic Worker Celebrates Assange’s Release
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Catholic Worker Ciaron O'Reilly shared his thoughts on Julian Assange’s release earlier this week, after 14 years of detention in the United Kingdom.
“Julian Assange has pled guilty to a crime he never committed,” O'Reilly told Roundtable in an email from London, noting that “horse trading” is a typical feature of the U.S. justice system. "It's been 14 years of Julian's life, detained without charge in England. It's been 14 years of my life trying to earn the release of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. I'm emotionally, physically and mentally exhausted.”
Read more from O’Reilly about Assange at catholicworker.org
THE ROUNDUP
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld the right of cities to ban sleeping outdoors in a 6-3 decision. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker was among 68 parties that filed a “friend of the court” brief in the case, City of Grants Pass v. Gloria Johnson, et al., arguing that “in the face of daily criminalization of essential life activities, unhoused individuals will continue to pay the repercussions for circumstances that are beyond their control, meaning they will have to weigh survival or a restriction of their freedom.” Writing for the court’s liberal minority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the majority’s decision “unconscionable and unconstitutional.” You can read more background on the case in the April 28 issue of Roundtable.
The Jeannette Noël House in Amsterdam, Netherlands hosted an “ecotage” picnic on June 22, according to the community’s latest newsletter. An article by Nikki Apeldoorn and Frits ter Kuile explains the origins of the practice: “With the ecotage picnic, we aim to transform something destructive into something that flourishes, somewhat following Isaiah's call to turn swords into plowshares.” The community’s first ecotage picnic involved creating a monument to the end of the fossil fuel era built out of pebbles removed from rail tracks used by coal trains. The second picnic, held on Palm Sunday, involved cleaning up the harbor area by picking up litter and planting shoreline plants while poems were read and songs were sung. The June 22 picnic was planned to continue the transformation of the harbor. Read the article in the newsletter.
St. John the Compassionate Mission, a co-operation of churches in Greater Toronto, recently hosted Fr. Demetrius Nicoloudakas who is a pastor at St. Matthew’s Greek Orthodox parish in Blandon, Pennsylvania. During this visit, Fr. Demetrius, who has experience in prison ministry, engaged with various members of the Mission community about his work. With this long-delayed visit being a success, there is hope for future visits in a growing partnership between communities. More information about the community, such as other summer events, can be found on their website.
Martha Hennessy will be reading excerpts from Dorothy Day’s writings on the Eucharist on July 19 during a short session at the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. Her presentation is tentatively titled, “Dorothy Day’s Radical Devotion to the Eucharist.” Day, who is Hennessy’s grandmother, spoke at the 41st International Eucharistic Congress in 1976 in Philadelphia. (See the event at catholicworker.org for more details.)
Colin Miller, of Maurin House (Columbia Heights, Minnesota), wrote about the formative nature of technology, the challenges for Gospel-based living in the age of the screen and the automobile, and hope for how to change: “We can look at screens as little as possible. We can leave our phones at home or at least turn them off for some of the day. We can close our social media accounts and call people or visit them in person. We can walk or bike or ride the bus as often as possible. We can listen to the birds instead of a podcast or music when we go for our jog.” Read the full article at Church Life Journal.
The National Catholic Reporter published the remarks of Jeff Dietrich of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker from the Berrigan-McAllister Award Ceremony last month at DePaul University. “I had never been introduced to folks who had lived their entire lives in an ethical and righteous manner. Unbeknownst to me, I was meeting a group of Catholic Workers who would change my life,” said Dietrich of his first encounter with the movement. Read the full speech in the National Catholic Reporter.
The St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago is celebrating 50 years of service with a Catholic Worker National Gathering from October 4-6, 2024, at St. Gertrude Church Social Center. The event will bring together Catholic Workers and friends from across the country to reflect on the legacy of St. Francis House, discuss the future of the Catholic Worker movement, and celebrate 50 years of community and activism. Online registration will open in early July; check the community’s website for updates.
CALENDAR
July 7 | Staten Island Catholic Worker, Staten Island, NY
Monthly Community Meal
July 19 | National Eucharistic Congress, Indianapolis
Martha Hennessy: “Dorothy Day’s Radical Devotion to the Eucharist”
August 7 | Virtual event
The Long Loneliness Virtual Study Group
August 10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California
CW Memorial & Action at Vandenberg Space Force Base
September 6-7 | Chicago
Peter Maurin Conference
September 12-15 | Sugar Creek, Iowa
Midwest Catholic Worker Gathering
A FEW GOOD WORDS
“On Pilgrimage,” The Catholic Worker, September 1974
A beautiful, calm, quiet day. How beautiful silence is. How beautiful all nature around us, as the Queen Anne’s lace in a brown vase on my window sill, made from a beer bottle by my grand-son-in-law, John Houghton.
This morning my Scripture reading was interrupted by Tommy Turner bringing a large jar with something fascinating to show to Joshua, the small boy who has the room next to mine, with his mother. Joshua was already out and around, so his father, who was bringing me the New York Times, brought Tommy and his find into me. It was the tiniest little snake I have ever seen, all curled up, not more than two or three inches long. A beautiful, perfect, little bit of life.
The world will be saved by beauty, Dostoevsky wrote, and Solzhenitsyn quoted it in his Nobel talk. I look back on my childhood and remember beauty. The smell of sweet clover in a vacant lot, a hopeful clump of grass growing up through the cracks of a city pavement. A feather dropped from some pigeon. A stalking cat Ruskin wrote of “the duty of delight” end told us to lift up our heads and see the cloud formations in the sky. I have, seen sunrises at the foot of a New York street, coming up over the East River. I have always found a strange beauty in the suffering faces which surround us in the city. Black, brown and grey heads bent over those bowls of food, that so necessary food which is always there at St. Joseph’s House on First St., prepared each morning by Ed Forand or some of the young volunteers. We all enter into this act of hospitality, one way or another. So many of those who come in to eat return to serve, to become part of the “family.” '
…
In cleaning my room this morning I found an old diary in which I had written down bits from things I was reading at the time. Here are the lines I had copied from a book by Father Van Zeller, a Benedictine monk who wrote a series of small volumes on the prophets, and this was Daniel, Man of Desires. The sentence ran, “To say sad things cheerfully, was so absolutely necessary to the age in which he lived. . . His message, unlike Jeremias, Job, or Hosea, was clothed in words of joy.” St. Thomas said once he learned more by prayer than he did by study, and it is only prayer that will give us a full life of joy, a word which Bernanos and C. S. Lewis alike took as meaning more than happiness. A deep, abiding joy can only be ours if we emphasize the “primacy of the spiritual,” a phrase which Peter Maurin loved. We must grow in faith, in our spiritual capacity to “do all things in Him who strengthens us,” even change the social order so that wars will cease and it will be easier to be good, to keep our sanity, be whole men, holy men, and truly love one another. If men can walk on the moon, why not? If we were followers of Jesus, we too could multiply loaves and fishes and save the world.
— Dorothy Day
Roundtable covers the Catholic Worker Movement. This week’s Roundtable was produced by Renée Roden, Rosalie Riegle, Scarlett Rose Ford, Joan Bromberek, Monica Welch, and Jerry Windley-Daoust.
Roundtable is an independent publication not associated with the New York Catholic Worker or The Catholic Worker newspaper.