For Christ Room Hosts, Guests Can Become Like Family
Plus: A visit to JPII CW; graphic novel book trailer; San Antonio CW gets a new home; Columbia, MO, CW sells St. Francis house; and Dorothy on the importance of onions.
A Christ Room in Every House
A Day to Pray for Peace
As part of the work I do for one of my regular freelance writing clients, I create a monthly calendar for Catholic families. It has all the feast days, of course, as well as links to the Sunday scriptures, suggestions for how to connect with one another (“Ask yourself: How can I make someone’s day a little bit better today?”), and those fun, quirky “holidays” that seem to have proliferated in the past few years (e.g., June 1 is National Go Barefoot Day and Say Something Nice to Someone Day—so, On June 1 be sure to compliment someone’s bare feet).
As I was preparing the calendar for May, I dutifully made note of Memorial Day on Monday, May 27. Now, I tend to be a little wary of these civic religious observances, at least to the extent that they ritualize and reinforce the myth of the necessity of redemptive violence (see Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers).
I was surprised, then, to discover that the official Memorial Day proclamation designates Memorial Day “as a day of prayer for permanent peace.” That’s pretty much it—none of the usual language cloaking the horror and tragedy of war in the gauzy trappings of virtue and honor.
How did praying for “permanent peace” get added to the Memorial Day tradition of honoring the nation’s war dead? Harry Truman, it turns out, made the innovation in his 1949 Memorial Day Proclamation:
This sacred day is a fitting occasion on which the people of our Nation, all of whom, directly or indirectly, have been bereft by war’s terrible toll, may appeal to Almighty God for help in turning the steps of the world to the paths of permanent peace.
These paths are long and tortuous, and thus far mankind has not had the wisdom to find the way to an enduring peace.
We are humbly aware that only through divine guidance can we hope to attain the understanding necessary for averting wars and achieving a peaceful world.
Now, Therefore, I, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States of America, pursuant to a resolution of the Congress approved May 26, 1949, do hereby call upon the people of the United States to observe Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 1949, by praying, each in accordance with his religious faith, for a permanent peace. And I designate the hour beginning at eleven o'clock in the morning of that day, Eastern Daylight Saving Time, as a period in which all our people may unite in prayer for a permanent peace, and for the bestowal of wisdom and patience, to the end that we may be instruments of God in achieving and preserving harmony on earth.
“Since war is the world’s most terrible scourge, we should do all in our power to prevent its recurrence,” he added in his 1950 proclamation. (More recent proclamations are considerably watered down, perfunctorily calling on the nation to simply pray for peace without so much reference to God.)
Of course, the next month—June 30, 1950, to be exact—Truman ordered American military forces to liberate South Korea without first obtaining a declaration of war from Congress, initiating the Korean War and further escalating the Cold War.
I haven’t so much as read a popular biography of the man, so I won’t attempt to explain the discrepancy between Truman’s words and actions. As a writer, though, I believe that the words we put out into the world have the power to shape it, in the long run. This Memorial Day, then, I’ll be honoring his request by praying that, by little and by little, our nation may one day acquire the wisdom to be God’s instrument of peace.
Jerry
FEATURED
When Guests Become Like Family
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Here’s part two of our series on Christ room hospitality. See part one here.
Out of work, out of money, and with two days before he lost his apartment, Peter was desperate for help. An immigrant from India, he had recently lost his job in Charlottesville, Virginia, and didn’t know where to turn.
A devout Catholic, he went to the Church of the Incarnation for the Saturday evening Mass. After Mass, he approached Laura Brown, co-founder of Casa Alma Catholic Worker, and explained his situation.
That’s when her longtime friends, Al and Tif Reynolds, walked up.
“There was this Indian fellow standing with (Laura),” Al recalled later. “And she said, ‘Now I'd like to introduce you to Peter. In two days, Peter's not going to have any place to live.”
The Reynolds went home and talked about it briefly before deciding to take him into their home. Heavy snow was forecast for the next two days, so Al called Peter and arranged to move him that very evening.
“I said, ‘Wow,’” Peter recalled years later for a video Casa Alma made. “I praised God, I thanked God.”
Peter stayed with the Reynolds for nearly three years. He got a new job at Chick-fil-A and saved his money before leaving to work at a different Chick-fil-A in Richmond.
After Peter, the Reynolds continued to welcome guests into their home as part of Casa Alma’s experimental Christ Room Network: single women with children, a man sleeping in his car, a young woman who later went on to become a nun. Over the past ten years, they’ve taken in nearly twenty guests—and they keep in touch with many of them.
“They become members of the family,” Al Reynolds said. “They know our kids and our grandkids, the kids know them…. When Peter comes in to visit, he'll generally always stop in and spend some time with us.”
The Reynolds have even had guests who returned the favor by hosting them in their own homes.
That was the case with Irene Amphonsa and her son, Kwame, who came to the United States from Cape Coast, Ghana, to seek specialized treatment for his cerebral palsy.
“We met her through our neighbor who was Kwame's physical therapist,” Al Reynolds said. “She was living in a room in a house rented by another Ghanaian family and was not being treated very well.”
Amphonsa and her son lived with the Reynolds for four months during the year they were in Charlottesville, and the Reynolds later visited her in Ghana.
“For the most part, everybody we've gotten has just become another member of our family,” Al said.
Houses of hospitality are such a defining feature of the Catholic Worker Movement—often, its most public face—that it is easy to forget that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the movements’ cofounders, envisioned something more: that every Catholic parish would have its own house of hospitality, and that every Christian home with space would have a “Christ room,” a room set aside to house those in need of shelter.
“People with homes should have a room of hospitality so as to give shelter to the needy members of the parish,” Peter wrote (“Parish Houses of Hospitality”), undoubtedly using the term “parish” according to the canonical definition that encompasses all the people within a parish’s boundaries, not just the Catholics. “The remaining needy members of the parish should be given shelter in a Parish Home.”
Despite this repeated call, though, the idea was never widely implemented.
At least one Catholic Worker community set out to change that. In the early 2010s, Casa Alma Catholic Worker (Charlottesville, Virginia) began investigating ways to promote Christ rooms within their extended community. After several years of research and reflection, Casa Alma launched its Christ Room Network in 2016, a support system for individuals and couples willing to open their homes to those in need. By 2019, four hosts had provided Christ Rooms to five guests, offering them a safe and stable environment to heal, save funds, and prepare for the next stage of their lives.
The initiative was shelved during COVID, but the community decided to collect the fruits of its experience, research, and reflection into a 28-page guide that other communities could use to launch their own Christ room networks. That guide is now available on CatholicWorker.org.
What would it be like if even a fraction of Christian households adopted the practice of opening up a room to someone in need? Generally, people object to the idea on practical grounds. And it’s true that there are risks and sacrifices involved, which is why Peter always used to emphasize that such doing the works of mercy must come at a personal sacrifice.
And yet, some people have taken the leap and found the experience to be deeply enriching and rewarding, if not always without its stresses and problems. Their stories provide a glimpse of what it might look like to realize Peter and Dorothy’s original vision in which hospitality was a habit of every Christian community.
Charles Carney and his wife, Donna Constantino, opened a Christ room in their new home after spending an intense 10 months in 2004 providing daily meal hospitality to dozens of people at Holy Family Catholic Worker in Kansas City, Missouri (now closed), with Brother Louis Rodeman.
“It was tough duty,” Carney recalled, even though it was transformative for him. A professional social worker, he had come to Holy Family Catholic Worker with lots of stereotypes about the people he would be serving. At some point, he realized that, other than his access to greater social capital, he was no different than the people he was serving.
“All my stereotypes went out the window,” he said. “It was a pretty life-changing, I might even say holy, kind of experience.”
Still, after 10 months, the couple were burnt out. They decided to buy their own home, but they wanted to continue doing hospitality, if on a much smaller scale.
Every day that winter, several unhoused men were sleeping on the porch at Holy Family House; the couple passed them whenever they entered or left the house.
“We would see them sleeping on the cardboard, trying to stay warm,” Carney recalled. “It was wintertime, and it bothered our consciences.”
Constantino insisted that they purchase a home with room to do hospitality. After closing on their home, they invited two of the men on the porch, Bob and Ricky, to move in with them. The two men moved into the house the same day as Carney and Constantino did.
That was the beginning of 18 years of Christ room hospitality in their home, which they called the St. Lawrence Catholic Worker.
“We had two bedrooms, and one bedroom was for Donna and (me), and the other was a good space for another person,” Carney explained. “But we also had an unfinished basement and a utility room that wasn't even insulated. One of our guests, Bob, he loved that place because it was a step up from the front porch. It was warmer, and he could take his extension cords and plug them into the power and have TV, and he could plug in heaters.”
There was a soup kitchen two blocks down the street, as well as other resources for low-income people in the neighborhood.
“Sometimes we ate together, but we never said, ‘We’re gonna provide food for you’ or anything because these guys were pretty resourceful,” Carney said. “They were getting food when they were on the streets. They knew what to do and how to do it.
“We wanted to help them continue to have as much autonomy as possible but have some sense of community around that.”
Over 18 years, the couple opened their home to dozens of people. Most of the people they knew from their connections with the Kansas City Catholic Worker houses, although they also took in people they didn’t know that well. During all that time, they never felt in danger.
“it was just kind of like living in community,” Carney said. “Everybody contributed as they could.” One man who was a skilled handyman fixed the house’s plumbing, saving the couple perhaps $10,000 in repairs. “It was this great joint venture: like, we’re all in this together, using our talents to cope with life and get by and be the best people we can be.”
Sometimes the people they lived with moved on to a more stable housing situation, and sometimes they didn’t.
“It was inspiring sometimes to see people get on their feet and get their own place,” Carney said. “But that was not necessarily our goal. Like, ‘We’re gonna fix you or we’re gonna make it so you get out of (our) community so somebody else can come along.’ But a lot of times that's what happened.”
Like the Reynolds, they developed close connections with many of the people who stayed with them. “You become friends, and then you do whatever you can to help a friend,” he said.
Next week, in part three of our series on Christ room hospitality: Hospitality is not all sweetness and light. How do people cope with the ups and downs? We’ll return to the Reynolds, Carney, Constatino, and other Christ room hosts to hear more about their experiences.
A Visit to JPII Catholic Worker Farm in Kansas City
Earlier this month, Roundtable contributor Renée Roden visited John Paul II Catholic Worker Farm in Kansas City, Missouri.
JPII Catholic Worker farms two and a half empty city lots of fresh land that was never developed. Three houses and one converted bus provide shelter for the four human farmers. A small shed provides shelter for the ruminants, Babette and her lamb Social Justice (Social Justice’s twin, Catholic Action, has moved on to greener pastures), and the goat, Puddles. A basement has been converted into a chicken coop for a healthy flock of chickens and their loving guard dog, Warden.
Although their farm is in the thick of the urban jungle—just a 12-minute drive from Kansas City’s downtown—it is quiet and surrounded by green space. While weeding the garlic rows, it is quite easy to forget the land is in a metropolitan expanse with a population of 2.5 million. Interested visitors can join in JPII’s Communio reading circle, participate in a Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies online event, or volunteer in person at a Saturday workday on the farm. Their newly renovated guest room in one of the houses features a literal water closet: a closet transformed into a commode.
Spencer Hess, one of JPII’s founders, said two of the most influential books in his decade of training in regenerative agriculture were Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America and Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: a Gardener’s Education.
Catholic Worker Continues Support of Notre Dame Protesters
In South Bend, the Catholic Worker has continued to support students who were arrested for protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza on May 2. The University of Notre Dame charged 16 students and one staff member with criminal trespassing, and their hearing is set for June 28. The coalition of students and Notre Dame affiliates organizing the protests, Occupation Free ND, has created a list of demands for the University to bring its investments and business practices in line with Catholic Social Teaching. The coalition organized one other protest—outside of university property—on May 5.
One of the students who was arrested on May 2 said that, since then, there have been no on-campus protests. “Realistically, after [graduation], most of the students are going to be gone for the summer,” he said. This student, a rising third-year doctoral student, asked that his name not be used because of the charges pending against him.
Other student groups have been organizing protest actions. During Notre Dame’s commencement on Sunday, May 19, the outgoing president, John Jenkins, CSC, was the class speaker. “Do not dismiss dissenters,” Jenkins said during his remarks. Students waved Palestinian flags during the ceremony. A group of alumni has been organizing in support of the protestors, asking alumni to sign a petition to withhold donations until the University divests and drops the charges against students. So far, they have around 500 signatures.
Much of the focus of the organizing since the arrests has been providing for the legal fees of the students arrested and pressuring the university to drop the charges. A GoFundMe that Occupation FreeND started gathered more than $4,000 in donations in two days.
“The arrests were extremely aggressive,” the doctoral student said. He said there were 2-4 officers arresting some students, some officers put their knees on students’ necks, one student was laid on top of a bag that looked like a body bag and carried to the police van. “There were several students who were thrown on the ground.” This student was the last to get arrested and recorded the arrests on his phone. “It was really hard to watch my friends get assaulted,” he said.
A doctoral student in theology said around 300 faculty signed a letter asking for the university to allow protests and drop the charges. The president, John Jenkins, responded with a statement on May 14.
“The University of Notre Dame is committed to freedom of expression and the right to protest, but it is equally committed to enforcing restrictions of time, place and manner of demonstrations to ensure a peaceful and orderly campus,” he wrote. “To attend to the former and neglect the latter would be to fail to respect the rights of others who live and work on this campus.”
Jenkins noted that it was a study day and that the protest in front of the Main Building was near two residence halls.
“I add, in conclusion, that I hope the current challenging moment stimulates more vigorous study, thought and discussion of the complex moral, social, geopolitical and human realities of the Middle East war,” Jenkins wrote. “A university’s primary priority should be the contest of ideas, not of disruptive protests; it should be about informed, rational conversations, not chants.”
The doctoral student who was arrested noted that the gathering of students was quiet, studying for finals, and did not begin their chanting until after the students and faculty finished their brief conversation in “a rain-soaked summit,” as one professor called it. One of the Occupation Free ND members wrote an article in the South Bend Tribune noting that the protests were peaceful and not disruptive.
The St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend asks for continued prayers for the students and the end to the genocide in Gaza, Casey Mullaney said. She said the Catholic Peace Fellowship has been offering pastoral care and support to students and protesters as well.
San Antonio CW Finds New Home in Housing-First Village
The San Antonio Catholic Worker served its first breakfast in a brand-new home on Wednesday. The facility was built in Towne Twin Village, a housing-first community of tiny homes and RVs developed and managed by the Housing First Community Coalition, of which San Antonio Catholic Worker is a partner. People began moving into the village within the past year, and it will eventually support 200 individuals, according to a report by KENS5, a local television station. The village is named after a drive-in movie theater that once occupied the site.
TTV aims to foster a supportive environment with plans for community activities, including Friday night movies. The organization provides essential supplies to guests, relying entirely on donations.
“We’ve been planning this for years and finally it happened,” Anthony Franks told the television station on Wednesday. “And now we have the newest, biggest most modern Catholic Worker house in probably the entire world.”
For more about the housing-first Towne Twin Village, including a video outlining its development, see the organization’s website.
Former Chicago Catholic Worker Alum Speaks on Founders
Rick Becker, who lived at St. Francis House Catholic Worker in Uptown, Chicago in the 1980’s, spoke on Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin last month at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, where he is a member of the nursing faculty.
“My Catholic link and life landmark, is Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement almost 100 years ago,” he said. “Dorothy was a rabble-rouser and an agitator, a bohemian socialist who wanted to make the world a better place.”
In a phone call with Roundtable, Becker said that he was an Evangelical Christian when he arrived in Chicago in 1984. He moved into St. Francis House that summer, and, within a year, he entered the Catholic Church. “I came to the Worker for the worker part but when I was in it it became clear the Catholic part wasn’t just an add-on,” Becker said.
Becker felt that, to do the work of hospitality, he needed the grace and the communion he saw in the Catholic faith of Dorothy Day and other saints committed to doing away with slavery rather than simply ministering to the slaves.
“With Peter Maurin, Dorothy started the Catholic Worker in New York as a dynamic epicenter for living a radical Gospel vision of lay charitable enterprise and activism — and affiliated Catholic Worker communities have been popping up ever since (including one here in South Bend),” Becker said in his April 4 speech. “Pope Francis singled out Dorothy’s influence on the Church when he spoke to Congress in 2015. ‘Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed,’ said the Holy Father, ‘were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.’”
Becker spoke about three women—Day, Rose Hawthorne, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, and former president of St. Mary’s College, Sr. Madaleva Wolff—who are not formally recognized as saints by the Vatican but whose holiness of life encourages him and many other Catholics, Christians, and people of goodwill of all faith traditions.
Read Becker’s full speech online at the National Catholic Register.
THE ROUNDUP
The St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Columbia, Missouri, is up for sale and will close once the building is sold, according to local media reports. Ruth O'Neill, trustee of the St. Francis Catholic Worker Community and director of Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen, stated that the house has served as an overnight homeless shelter since 1984. The decision to sell is due to decreased need, as other local services have reduced demand for the shelter. The house has nine bedrooms and accommodates 12 guests nightly. Recently, it has only hosted an average of two men per night. The organization plans to continue its mission through its William Street property, currently housing a refugee family, and may consider overnight hospitality there in the future. The Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen serves between 80 and 125 meals daily. Read more: Homeless shelter in Columbia to close after sale of property.
The Houston Catholic Worker is appealing for volunteers to help as the Texas Law, SB.4, allows a “Texas peace officer” to arrest and initiate deportation proceedings for anyone unable to show proof of citizenship. They call for potential volunteers who would be able to offer help answering the door (U.S. citizenship required, ideally bilingual in Spanish and English or French and English) or in continuing their work of providing food, drink, shelter, and clothing to the poor (all citizenships welcome). They are hoping to compile a list of interested potential volunteers. If you would like to be included in their email updates about this situation and are interested in volunteering, reach out to help@cjd.org.
The book trailer for Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion was released last week. The new graphic novel, authored by Jeffry Odell Korgen and illustrated by Christopher Cárdinale, a seasoned graphic novelist and community muralist, is set to be released by Paulist Press on Labor Day. Get more information on the book and watch the trailer here.
The efforts of the Iowa City Catholic Worker to help immigrants despite a new law enabling Iowa law enforcement to arrest them for being in the state illegally was profiled in the French Catholic newspaper La Croix (free registration required): Americans practice Catholic social teaching with immigrants in U.S. heartland | La Croix International.
“After centuries of relative marginalization, nonviolence has reemerged during the 20th and 21st centuries as a key plank of Christian discipleship,” writes Nicholas Hayes-Mota, a Doctoral Candidate in Theological Ethics at Boston College, in the June issue of U.S. Catholic. His essay traces the history of Catholic teaching on war and nonviolence from its early Christian roots through its re-emergence with Pope Benedict XV in the early twentieth century. Hayes-Mota highlights the integrated development of Catholic social doctrine on nonviolence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with Catholic peace activism such as seen in the Catholic Worker movement. Read the article here: We need to reclaim the legacy of Christian nonviolence | U.S. Catholic.
The London Catholic Worker is calling for writers to contribute articles “relating to the interests of the Catholic Worker - broadly, community, hospitality and resistance; the politics of the Gospel; active nonviolent resistance to power” for publication on its blog, with promotion on their social media channels. Writers interested in sharing their work can contact The Catholic Worker by email at londoncatholicworker@yahoo.co.uk.
CALENDAR
June 3 - June 7 | Cuba City, Wisconsin
Stories of the Land: Decolonization, Earth Regeneration, & Spiritual Ecology
June 24 | Virtual event, Maurin Academy
Eating Up Easter Film Screening
September 12-15 | Sugar Creek, Iowa
Midwest Catholic Worker Gathering
A FEW GOOD WORDS
Dorothy on the Importance of Onions
Excerpted from an interview with Dorothy Day conducted by Jeff Dietrich and Susan Pollack, originally published in the December 1971 Catholic Agitator, the newspaper of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker.
CATHOLIC AGITATOR: I’d like first to ask you, are you an anarchist? And what does that mean to you in terms of your daily action?
DOROTHY DAY: Do you want me to go back into history? When I came from college, I was a socialist. I had joined the socialist party in Urbana Illinois and I wasn’t much thrilled by it. I joined because I had read Jack London—his essays, The Iron Heel, and his description of the London slums. I also read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. All of these made a deep impression on me. So when I was sixteen years old and in my first year of college, I joined the Socialist Party. But I found most of them “petty bourgeois.” You know the kind. They were good people, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—mostly of German descent—very settled family people. And it was very theoretical. It had no religious connotations, none of the religious enthusiasm for the poor that you’ve got shining through a great deal of radical literature.
Then there was the IWW moving in, which was the typically American movement. Eugene Debs was a man of Alsace-Lorraine background. A religious man, he received his inspiration from reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. That started him off because he could have been a well-to-do bourgeois, comfortable man. But, here you have this whole American movement. The IWW has this motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” That appealed to me tremendously because I felt that we were all one body. I had read scripture, but I don’t think I’d ever really recognized that teaching of the “Mystical Body”—that were are all one body, we are all one.
AGITATOR: Was this more of a political than a spiritual outlook at this point?
DOROTHY: No, I think it was a spiritual outlook too. As a child I came across the Bible, but nobody in my family had anything to do with religion. I just felt a profound truth there that appealed to me. What I read in the Bible seemed to me to be very much a part of daily life. The idea that when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered is a teaching of Saint Paul which is timeless. So I joined the IWW. I felt that it was far nearer my whole philosophy and that basically it was an anarchist movement—though they wouldn’t call themselves anarchists.
AGITATOR: Would you be more specific about what it means to be an anarchist?
DOROTHY: The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from men. It seems to me so human a philosophy.
Every Marxist group that I’ve known has had their theoreticians. The theoretician of the Marxist revolution in Cuba certainly wasn’t Castro. It was Don Carlos Rafaelo Rodriguez. He was the theoretician and very often people say he will take over. But I don’t believe it. I think that it’s a very good combination, the Catholic man working together with a man like that who has everything pretty well planned.
The Communists in Cuba didn’t assist Castro in his revolution. They weren’t on the side of the students. They didn’t do anything to help in the invasion or the long continuing struggle from Oriente province down. It wasn’t until Castro marched triumphantly into Cuba that you might say the whole thing grew into a Marxist revolution.
Castro wasn’t a Marxist. He was a Catholic educated by the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. But fundamentally I’m not talking about practicing Catholics, but rather about something which is inbred, that is a part of your country, your heritage, your life.
. . . . .
AGITATOR: Does the Catholic Worker offer any sort of alternative existence to the poor other than a bowl of soup and a bed to sleep in at night?
DOROTHY: It offers them community too—although we fail every time. That’s also life. How can you not fail? That’s the human condition. I think that at the Catholic Worker we have high aims. But how much mingling is there, really, between the worker and the scholar? You get acquainted with some and they become very dear to you, like Hans and John Filligar. They become so much a part of the family that you get mad at them. There’s so much you have to endure in community. It’s like parents with their children. You just have to forgive them seventy times seven. There is nothing logical in all this. It’s very hard to talk about. That’s why I dread any kind of interviewing. Because, how can you express these tangible things that the Catholic Worker is doing? You can sit down and add up how many people we fed yesterday afternoon, how many people were served each morning at the jail, how many cups of coffee are distributed—that kind of turnstile routing. It’s impossible to measure the real value of these things.
People, wherever they are, can make a community. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” The sense is always that community is natural to people. Man is not meant to live alone. That’s in the first or second chapter of Genesis. There is something so horrifying and so sad when people are living alone. That is why the old and lonely come to us.
Communities are made up of the unlovable as well as the lovable. Dostoevsky said that it’s godlike to love man—even in his sin—merely because he’s man. We’re under the obligation to love—that’s the commandment. The Oxford edition of the New Testament says: “A new commandment I give you that you love one another as I have loved you.” But a newer translation written for high school students puts it succinctly: “I command you to love” There’s enough hate in the world. I command you to love. And you have to make an effort.
I got one of the best directives from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in the story of Krushenka. Have you read it? Krushenka’s a prostitute who’s been thrown over my her Polish lover and lives with a rich merchant. Both the father and the son in the Karamazov family are in love with her. And she’s generally considered a bad woman. But she says of herself: “I’ve given away an onion, perhaps I’ve given away an onion.” She’s referring to an old Russian legend about a woman who’s thrown into Hell and cries out to her guardian angel to save her. The angel says: “Have you ever done one good deed in your whole life?” And she thinks awhile and says, “Well, I’ve given away an onion.” So the guardian angel takes out a long green topped onion and holds it out to her and says: “Hold on, I’ll pull you out of this lake of brimming fire.” She grabs hold of the onion and then everybody else around her begins grabbing hold of her in order to be saved, too. And she kicks and screams and throws them off. So the onion breaks and she goes back into the lake of brimming fire. But she had given away an onion.
I often think of that with people we can’t stand. One woman acts like a tyrant on our third floor. Behind my back she will try to get rid of all the young girls in the place. And she fights with the older women (but they’re a match for her because they’re used to fighting. So there is bedlam sometimes.) But I remember that once this woman gave away an onion whenever I feel like throwing her down the stairs. She went to visit an old woman who is a neighbor of ours and senile. And she found this woman covered with lice and lying in her own excrement. Instead of coming over to tell me this sad tale, she cleaned up the old woman herself. Then she came over and told me so that I could get in touch with the family. So she gave away an onion, a very large onion. And I’ll forgive her anything now.
AGITATOR: Voluntary Poverty is an essential part of the Catholic Worker movement. Would you explain what Voluntary Poverty means?
DOROTHY: Voluntary Poverty isn’t going around with some burlap bag around you and imitating the poor. It means being indifferent to the material, doing as Christ said. He went and sat down with the rich and Zacchaeus and publicans and sinners. Some can go further than others. Some have more capacity. Some proceed a few steps along the way. But Christ seemed to love all men. He desired all men to be saved. I think one of the things we must constantly keep in mind is: “If anybody takes your coat, give him your cloak too.” “If anybody asks you to walk a mile, go two.” “If anybody hits you on one cheek, turn the other.” In other words, be close enough to people so that you are indifferent to the material. And also have faith. Just as the birds of the air are fed, we’ll continue to be fed.
Read the full interview here: Dorothy Day Holds Forth.
Thanks to Renee Roden (see her Substack, Sweet Unrest), Zak Sather, and Rosalie Riegle for their help with this week’s newsletter. Thanks also to the National Catholic Worker E-mail List team, whose work provides the leads for many of our items.