Life Together Can Be Better Than This
Once upon a time, Colin Miller writes, life was more local, personal, and communal...and more satisfying, too. We can get that back, he says, and the Catholic Worker may show the way.
In last week’s CW Reads, we featured two essays about Peter Maurin’s vision for rebuilding a “society in which it is easier for people to be good.” This week, we introduce you to Colin Miller, a Catholic Worker who is trying to bring that vision to a wider audience—and living it out, too, at the Peter Maurin House Catholic Worker in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. There, he and his wife join with another family and a wider extended community to pray, do hospitality, and share meals together. The Millers and the Hambleys have eight children between them, making those open meals a lively affair. (“In the summer, they play outside; in the winter, they destroy houses,” Miller deadpans.)
If you’ve heard his name before, it was probably attached to his new book, We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. In it, he tells his own remarkable Catholic Worker story, and makes the case for how even the harder demands of the Gospel are made possible, even joyful, when we take them on together in local, personal communities.
Today’s newsletter comes in two parts:
At Peter Maurin House, Community Makes Even the ‘Hard’ Parts of the Gospel Joyful: In mid-December, the Millers led a roundtable discussion at the Winona (Minnesota) Catholic Worker. They talked about their Catholic Worker story, Colin’s book, and life at the Peter Maurin CW. I took notes, and wrote up this report.
What’s Wrong with the Way We Work? Besides his new book, Miller writes a regular column for The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, in which he breaks down the implications of Catholic social teaching and the Catholic Worker tradition for a popular audience. Here, we’ve rounded up five of those columns focused on the Catholic Worker’s critique of the economic systems that are hollowing out our communities and our work.
Unfortunately, that second piece ends on a cliffhanger; after thoroughly critiquing modern economies and ways of working, we’re going to have to wait until late February to read Miller’s pivot to a remedy. In any case, we’ll run that piece in a future edition of this newsletter.
—Jerry
P.S. Stay tuned for a special extra edition of CW Reads tomorrow, when we’ll have an update from Catholic Worker Cassandra Dixon on deteriorating conditions in the West Bank.
At Peter Maurin House, Community Makes Even the ‘Hard’ Parts of the Gospel Joyful
The aims and means of the Catholic Worker movement shouldn’t be a niche calling, says Colin Miller; in fact, they can be the basis for a more joyful, satisfying communal life for all Christians. And at the Peter Maurin House CW, two families are trying to live out that vision.
The more radical demands of the Gospel—love of enemies, unrestricted generosity to the poor—can seem intimidating, even impossible.
That’s especially likely, says Colin Miller, if we try to live out the Gospel as isolated individuals. But if we do it together as part of a deeply rooted Christian community—the kind of community whose members are “strongly and deeply involved in each other’s lives”—then the challenge of discipleship suddenly becomes easier, joyful, life-giving…even “fun.”
That claim is central to Miller’s new book, We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which served as the starting point for a roundtable discussion that he and his wife, Leigh, led in mid-December at the Winona (Minnesota) Catholic Worker. The book isn’t a history of the movement’s ideas, he said; instead, it’s an invitation for everyday Christians to embrace a Catholic Worker lifestyle, doing works of mercy and justice as part of a strong community.
Although Miller has an academic background—he has a doctorate in theology from Duke University—much of the inspiration for the book comes from his lived experience at two Catholic Worker communities: one that he co-founded in Durham, North Carolina, with fellow Duke University graduate students, and one that he and Leigh co-founded with another couple, Tyler and Crystal Hambley, in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, where they now reside with their four young children.
“It has always been the most exhilarating and compelling way of doing Christianity for me,” he said. He tried teaching at the university level for a couple years, he said, but ended up leaving. “It was revealing to me because there are some people that do a great job of that and are able to find a sort of vitality in Christian life at the level of Christian ideas…but I needed something more. I needed something on the ground.”
Miller grew up in a Twin Cities suburb playing video games and participating in sports; issues of poverty and justice weren’t on his radar. He attended the University of Minnesota, then Yale University, where he picked up a Master of Arts in religion. But it was at Duke University, under the influence of theologian Stanley Hauerwas and a group of unhoused people, that he discovered the Catholic Worker.
The unhoused people had made their home base on a street corner near the Episcopal parish where Miller and several classmates attended morning prayer. Over the course of several months, the students began forming personal, more committed relationships with their unhoused friends. Looking for a theological framework for understanding their experience, they turned to the university’s theology library, where they quickly discovered Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. That, in turn, led them to investigate the writing of the intellectuals, saints, movements, and ordinary people who informed Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day.
Before long, the group had moved into a house with their formerly unhoused companions. Miller was ordained an Episcopal priest, allowing him to say Mass at the house.
He met Leigh, who was part of another intentional community in Durham, and the two were married in 2014. They moved to Pennsylvania, where Miller briefly taught theology. He continued to investigate the Catholic intellectual tradition, and was received into the Catholic Church in 2016.
The Millers moved back to Minnesota, where Colin Miller took a position with the Church of the Assumption in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he founded the Center for Catholic Social Thought, an initiative by which Miller educates local Catholics about the Catholic social tradition. He launched a small publication, The Catholic Citizen, and began writing columns for the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, The Catholic Spirit.
Their friends from Durham, Tyler and Crystal, purchased the home behind theirs. They didn’t intend to start a new Catholic Worker, at least not at first, but “one thing led to another,” as Colin puts it, and before long, they had “accidentally” formed another Catholic Worker community—but on a scale that would be more manageable for two families with fulltime jobs and a bunch of small children.
In 2022, they purchased a third home adjacent to their properties and christened the whole enterprise the Peter Maurin House.
The property is a modest bungalow in a working-class neighborhood in Columbia Heights; a small sign on the front of the property indicates that the chapel is around the back. The community prays together five days a week and gathers with extended community for “open dinners” on Mondays and Fridays, inviting anyone in need of food or fellowship.
“If you ever come for community meals, especially on Fridays, it will not be relaxing and it will not be quiet,” Miller warns. The two resident families have nine young children between them, and on open meal nights, as many as ten more children under the age of twelve are present.
The Miller and Hambley families practice a blend of formal and informal financial interdependence. They collectively funded the purchase of the hospitality house, with one couple holding the mortgage and the other effectively renting from them; both share the costs (and work) of home maintenance. A communal vehicle is available to any member of the community.
Beyond these structured arrangements, they embrace an ethos of mutual generosity—covering each other’s expenses without keeping accounts, sharing financial gifts in times of need, and contributing to the needs of guests.
“We do our best to take care of one another and to make the word ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ less applicable,” Miller wrote in a follow-up email after the roundtable. “This has taken the form of financial gifts from one family to another in tough circumstances (and it has, in fact, gone both directions), or in joint gifts to, or from, guests at the house. And in general, we make it a principle not to keep accounts. We put gas in each others’ cars, or pay for dinner, or pick up groceries, and there’s no ‘I’ll pay you back.’”
Their approach seeks to foster a shared life of trust and solidarity. Recently, they have begun exploring deeper resource-sharing with a broader network of friends, drawing inspiration from the “public household” model practiced by Portland’s Simon Weil House.
Miller describes their setup as a “mom and pop” Catholic Worker. While the Millers are quick to say that their community doesn’t do as much as some other Catholic Worker communities do, the Peter Maurin House may provide a more do-able model for people who want intentional community without the intensity of a larger urban house of hospitality.
“You can read The Long Loneliness and you can think, ‘I’m not going to do what Dorothy did, I can’t do that—I’ve got five kids at home and I’m married,’” Leigh Miller said. Setting the bar too high can reinforce the perception that the more challenging aspects of the Gospel are for people who have received a special call. Keeping things low-key has allowed a wide variety of people to participate in the open dinners or another aspect of their community.
One visitor told her, jokingly, that he “didn’t like” the experience “because if you can do some of this stuff then I have to be able to, too.”
The Millers said they have plenty of friends who do “way more” hospitality than they do; some call themselves Catholic Workers, even though they aren’t listed on the Catholic Worker directory. Others, such as a couple who do Christ room hospitality in their basement, don’t use the Catholic Worker label but are still living out the essential principles of the movement.
The idea that being part of an intentional community committed to living out the Gospel isn’t a niche thing, but a calling for all Christians, has been central to Colin Miller’s work across the various hats he wears. The Catholic Worker offers a living model to show what that kind of radical commitment to the Gospel and community life might look like today, he says.
“The church is just filled with lonely people, and we need things to do together,” Miller said. “Peter and Dorothy’s model is a way of finding truly Christian Catholic things to do together.”
The community aspect of the Catholic Worker program is key, Miller says. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of the pre-conciliar Church, he points to a time when U.S. Catholics formed communities strengthened by financial interdependence, cooperative businesses, shared childcare, neighborhood associations, and other communal structures. He envisions some form of such “deep community” as critical to the revitalization of the Church today.
“One of the reasons I think that the hard sayings of the gospel don’t get a lot of airtime is that we imagine Christianity being something that we do as individuals,” Miller said. “But that’s not what we’re called to. We’re called to voluntary poverty and hospitality to the poor and agronomic universities and all the rest of the stuff as communities. The only reason that I’ve done it and still do it is because it’s so much fun, because I get to do it with my friends, and I’ve made the best friends of my life doing it. “
What’s Wrong with the Way We Work?
What happened to personally satisfying, holistic work that connected us to our local community and our local environment? In a series of columns for The Catholic Spirit newspaper, Colin Miller draws on Catholic social teaching and the Catholic Worker tradition to explore what went wrong with work.
Last month, I made the point that making a better world requires people with virtues that the world demands, and that the Church is meant to be this type of community.
It’s important to keep in mind that the Church is the center of God’s new world, as we turn to some of the Catholic Worker’s main critiques of our society. With critique, it is easy to start thinking mainly in terms of institutional reform, politics, advocacy, and the like. But being the Church is the primary way that we make a just world. The Worker’s trenchant social critiques are made in the service of identifying forms of life that make it difficult to be that alternative community.
One place to begin these critiques is where Catholic social teaching itself began, in the fundamental changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. I am no medieval romantic, and I’m thankful for many modern inventions. But it remains simply a fact that there has never been a more momentous change, probably in the history of the world, than the transition to the industrial society that we have experienced in the last 250 years. Writer Wendell Berry calls it “the one truly revolutionary revolution, probably in the history of the human race.”
One of the most vital aspects of this change concerns the nature of work. In a pre-industrial world — a land-and-craft society — most people were either farmers or tradesmen, work was personal, and it made life personal. You literally made or raised your own house, furniture, fields, food, animals, and the rest — or at least your friends or someone you knew did. This meant that you literally lived surrounded by your own creative work, or that of your family and community. Your life’s efforts were reflected to you in very tangible ways — you were touching, seeing, smelling and tasting it all the time.
Life was maximally personal, and so maximally satisfying. It was also profoundly communal.
I recently met a man who had given up working in finance and has now become the butcher in a town of small farmers. He remarked on the palpable difference in working for people who you are good friends with. The job takes on a completely different character, for not only are you accomplishing a task, but you are also working within friendships. You are, therefore, creating the bonds of a strong local community and a healthy local economy at the same time.
I have often heard from those who grew up on farms around St. Paul 50 or 75 years ago that life was cooperative. Each season, farmers would help each other: breaking ground or planting in the spring; harvesting in fall; building a barn in the summer; haying, slaughtering, or any number of other jobs that are close to impossible to do solo. Often, tools were owned by one household but used by the whole community. Songs, stories, best practices and traditions were passed on while working. And it was not just work; the day’s meals were served by the family being helped.
There was a unity to life brought about by its rootedness in the soil. Tradition and history were essential, because how to make a living out of the earth was a local matter passed down anew to each generation — you couldn’t learn it from a textbook. Much of what we now call education and morality was simply part of living in that environment. Work was both art and entertainment, and this made a local culture. Religion, then, was not a separate compartment of life, as it is today, but that aspect of the whole that grounded it in its source and directed it to its summit.
Work under such conditions is not just a job; it’s a vocation. To live is to work, and to work is to live.
Next month, we’ll see how all this starts to change with the advent of industrialism.
The Death of Personally Satisfying, Creative Work
Last month, I began to introduce the Catholic Worker’s main critiques of our modern social order.
I noted the way that, in agrarian cultures, life tends to form one organic whole of work, tradition, religion, education, morality, care for the land, community and local economy. Under such conditions of holism, it is difficult to develop a “throw away culture,” as Pope Francis has called it, because each person has an interest in maintaining health in the local environment, local people and local communities.
Under industrial conditions, however, things begin to change. In a factory, or sitting in front of a spreadsheet today, to work is no longer to live, and to live is no longer to work. We come to see work as a sacrifice of our life rather than its unifying bond. Work becomes a necessary evil required to make money. We come to dread going to work, and real life begins after work ends.
Most work in our industrial society tends to have a factory character to it, even if we’re not in factories. Like in a factory, we perform tasks that anyone standing at our station (or computer) could perform, and the range of our tasks is strictly limited to ensure maximum efficiency.
Fredrick Taylor is famous for pioneering the scientific management of workflow in factories to assure maximum output. His idea was to quantify and regulate each motion with the strictest precision, knowing what each worker was doing at each moment, and incentivizing compliance. Universal surveillance mechanisms insure against deviance, and constant data collection is always laying the groundwork for the next efficiency innovation.
Each smallest move in Taylor’s factory is quantified, analyzed, evaluated and then manipulated to maximize profitability. The factory is thus one always-evolving machine, and the workers are just one part of it. Personal creativity and intelligence are minimized, and only allowed as they serve the ever-tightening canons of efficiency, defined by the bottom line.
Today, we have not moved beyond Taylorism, we have just totalized it. Our computer-based industrial economy is Taylorism beyond Taylor’s wildest dreams. Precision, calculation and surveillance are now possible at a level increasingly coextensive with society itself.
Yet just like in a factory, the first casualty is the personally-satisfying character of work itself. The standardization required for mass production — of services and information as much as wares — still means that laborers become extensions of the machines and systems they serve. We are rarely free to be truly creative, because our goals are always defined by efficiency, defined by maximum profitability. Intelligence is reduced to mere calculation. Such present day “factory work” — even when it is done at home on our laptops — rarely calls for the full engagement of our God-given personal genius.
The farmer or craftsman is always in large part artist, impressing the stamp of her personality, and therefore the very image of God which she bears, on her work. She can look upon her garden, a table, or the shirt she made, and with deep satisfaction say, “Ah! I did that. And it’s beautiful.” Industrial products, on the other hand, are impersonal. They would turn out that way whether you were there or not.
But the farmer or craftsman also lives from what she has made. She, in part, sustains her own life and that of her family and community by her own two hands. She is surrounded each day by a personal world. Not only is this satisfying and comforting, but it creates a lively sense of independence and competence. It actively develops the virtue of prudence and creates a people capable of ordering their lives and becoming masters of the art of living well.
We, however, rarely touch anything we have personally made. We are dependent upon the standardized outputs of a system, and our life becomes passive consumption of these goods and services. We lose the ability, Peter Maurin said, of organizing ourselves, and learn to demand that institutions manage our lives for us. Our applied intelligence and creativity — work — should be the unifying center of our lives. But today, to make money, we are forced to devote it to causes that have nothing much to do with the things that really matter to us.
We spend most of our lives getting ready to live them.
Next month we’ll see why this division of work from life is at the root of much of the social fragmentation we experience today.
How ‘Radical Monopolies’ Destroy Our Communities and Local Economies
In recent columns, we’ve been looking at the Catholic Worker’s critique of our consumer society. One of the main features of that society, I wrote back in August, is that the production of basic necessities ceases to be internal to local communities and is taken over by large impersonal institutions. This amounts to the destruction of the strong community bonds of local economies, and results in the social fragmentation we see around us.
I mentioned that these corporations and institutions “radically monopolize” the production of the things we need for daily living. Let me explain what I mean by that phrase.
We all know what a monopoly is: the dominance of the market by exclusion of all competitors. A “radical monopoly” goes even further: it’s the dominance of an aspect of life by the exclusion of the ability to provide it from the local community.
For example, if Microsoft were the only brand in town, that would be a monopoly. When you need a smartphone to have a social life, that is a radical monopoly. If Aldi were the only place for groceries, that would be a monopoly. When you can only get your food from grocery stores, that is a radical monopoly.
And this has, in fact, happened in virtually every aspect of our lives. A few more examples are below.
Care for our bodies: From time immemorial, local cultures have made use of traditional arts of treating illness, much of which they could utilize skillfully even before modern medicine. Today, however, we have a hard time knowing what to do with a cold without recourse to a health care professional.
Transportation: Our bodies are naturally mobile. For much of history, people have gotten around on foot, horse or bicycle. But for the last 100 years, our infrastructure has been constructed so that it can be difficult to move without paved roads, cars, oil and the jungle of institutions that stand behind them.
Insurance: People used to be secured against the vicissitudes of life and financial catastrophe, as they still are today in many non-Western cultures, by virtues of neighborliness, norms of solidarity, family obligations and traditions of hospitality. Today, even the closest of relations take care of each other only when recourse to insurance companies fails.
And let me again underline the significant examples with which we started. Human beings — rich and poor — have always procured most of their food locally, and with significant amounts of neighborly cooperation. Today, this can be done only with great effort, and only by those well-off enough to afford the additional expense, time and travel necessary.
And last but not least: It is increasingly difficult to be part of any community of friends, much less function in society, without a smartphone. Our “social” life now depends on it. This is a radical monopoly, and it is also a redefinition of the word “social,” partly in response to other radical monopolies.
Now consider the cumulative practical difference the introduction of these radical monopolies has made in daily community life. Perhaps one way to put it is that, without commercial and institutional support, it is increasingly difficult to be sick, secure, eat, talk or move.
The situation we’re in, then, is that we are permanently atomized and fragmented from one another by the very systems that make our practical lives possible. Because our productive lives are external to local communities, we have only the thinnest common goods holding us together. At the same time, our almost exclusive dependence on these external systems makes it extremely hard for us to re-form any alternative, internal, local social bonds, and thus such institutions assure their own indispensability and continued dominance. They are the current social fabric, and their hegemony keeps us fragmented.
It’s probably worth remarking that I do not think anyone intended things to turn out like this. To be sure, there is plenty of sin, greed and opportunism in the equation. But I would, in fact, argue that one of the key characteristics of our society is that no one is ultimately in control, and that no one could be in control.
But all this is not, for the Christian, a council of despair. As we’ll start to see next time, it’s an opportunity to reimagine the way we do Church, and to rediscover the importance of doing it together.
How the Totalized Economy Commodifies Even Social Life
In the November column, I wrote about how, under the pressure of making every aspect of life as efficient as possible — what I’ve been calling Taylorism — our world becomes increasingly quantified and commodified.
Totalized Taylorism thus results in a totalized economy: there is little left in the world that is not for sale. And this fits hand in hand with the external systems I’ve been suggesting today radically monopolize the sources of production and make it very difficult to cultivate any true local community with strong internal social bonds. A world of commodified things is a world in which our lives can be managed for us by expert strangers. This state of affairs had already largely become a reality by the close of the 20th century.
But, as it’s turned out, Taylorism wasn’t as total as it could be. In a factory 100 years ago, or working on a spreadsheet 25 years ago, there was still an outside — a part of life that wasn’t subjected to standardized measurement, a domain that was not commodified. Today that outside is dwindling fast, especially as digital technologies penetrate deeper into the corners of our lives, and as radical monopolies make use of these technologies, making us dependent on an increasingly vast institutional apparatus.
At the time of the first factories 250 years ago, it was often pointed out that the newly emerging economy tended to make human labor into a commodity. That itself was bad enough, as the popes pointed out, because it meant that your life depended upon selling your God-given abilities. But again, at that point there was still an outside — plenty left of life that couldn’t yet be subsumed into the market.
Today we’re confronted with something else. Increasingly, our entire lives are bought and sold.
This happens in a variety of ways. Everything that we do online is, of course, tracked and subsequently sold as data. And to the extent that our lives are not only expressed, but actually take place online, ever more of what we do, think and feel — more of who we are — gets sold to the highest bidder. We even pay for the devices that will sell us most efficiently and totally — watches for our bodies and Alexa for our homes.
The so-called gig economy means that employment is increasingly broken up into odd jobs or one-time gigs: pick up someone’s dry cleaning or McDonald’s, do their laundry, babysit, create a website, mow the lawn. And this means that ever more of our actions become marketable: driving becomes Uber, thinking goes on social media or our Substack, we sell our apartment on Airbnb when we’re away. All of life is a potential commodity. And with most of this economy run through digital platforms, apps or websites, we become even more dependent upon these external systems and the web of institutions that supports them.
At the same time, the internet-based nature of this economy makes it increasingly hard to find work at all that does not require us to maintain a second digital self — our online profile — which we have to be constantly curating and optimizing. This means making a living is to be always producing our very selves online. We make ourselves part of the totalized economy, an extension of the factory society has become. In social media, business profiles, or commercial platforms, I now optimize and Taylorize not machines or other people on an assembly line, but myself. I become the product that I produce and sell.
I often do this to make a living, but today there are even more compelling enticements to be constantly selling ourselves online than simply making money. We all desire friendship and community, and today these — or what currently passes for them — increasingly take place online. But this means that there’s no limit to the time and energy we spend selling ourselves to our online constituencies. Social life takes place digitally, and so if to be human is to be social (as we humans instinctually know), this adds even more pressure to constantly manage our image. If we don’t do this, our so-called friends will just go on without us. Sell yourself or be alone. So, never-endingly self-optimizing simply is the fabric of life.
We treat ourselves like a factory just to have a social life. That’s Taylorism totalized.
Next month, we’ll draw some conclusions from all of this and take a look at the toll this way of life is taking on us.
Our Way of Life Is Spiritually Killing Us
Last month, I wrapped up an arc of analysis of our fragmented, lonely society. We saw how, especially with the digital revolution, our whole lives end up being commodities, not just so that we can make money, but so that we can have (what we have come to call) “community” or “friends.” For this column, I want to draw some conclusions from this and point us toward how to live in the face of it.
One of the more confusing parts of the pressure to commodify ourselves is that it doesn’t feel like pressure. This is because I usually experience the production of my “self” — my online identity — as something I positively want to do. Every click to optimize myself appears as freedom to me. And yet this is just another way that our lives are deeply monopolized by the external systems that make them possible. When turning ourselves into a commodity is the way we express our “freedom,” we have come close to defining the human being by the logic of the factory. To find our joy in selling ourselves amounts to a paradoxical kind of self-exploitation. Workers used to complain about being exploited by people like Taylor; today we Taylorize ourselves and call it self-actualization.
Healthy communities, I wrote several months back, are characterized by internal means of production — shared work — which produces a tangible sense of the common good, durable friendships, confident independence and sense of belonging that undergirds general psychological well-being.
If this is true, it’s no wonder that frenzied production of ourselves as part of a way of life dominated by impersonal external systems is taking a high psychological toll on us. Anxiety and depression are at an all-time high, with growing numbers of our young people affected (see Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, for instance). We feel frustrated in our attempts to live creative, satisfying lives that express our unique personalities. We feel helpless and passive, and paradoxically exhausted and burned-out at the same time.
Much of this malaise, it seems to me, is the fairly predictable result of the cultural dynamics we’ve been describing.
We feel helpless because we are helpless. We can do almost nothing essential to our existence for ourselves. Helplessness is frightening, and so a large proportion of us are anxious much of the time. But we’re also anxious because we are always Taylorizing ourselves, extracting one more thing, getting one more thing done. So, we are always in a hurry. There is never enough. That is not a recipe for peace of soul.
We are depressed because our way of life stunts even the basic development of our God-given human potential. We are made for heroism, creative expression, and active engagement with nature and face-to-face community. Yet we spend most of our lives pushing buttons: on our phones, on our keyboards and interfacing with programs whose pre-set parameters limit our creativity. Being socialized, as we all are, in consumer society, we get used to uncritically receiving standardized packages of goods and services. Whatever the grocery store sells, we eat. Whatever Netflix is showing, we watch. Whatever the doctors recommend, we do.
We never learn real initiative, the ability to be confident shapers of the world we find ourselves in. Our human development is literally pressed down — “de-pressed” — and we feel that way. In place of real human development with others and nature we spend most of our time curating our own identities online, which is to say, thinking about ourselves. This compounds the feeling of depression, as we fall deeper into ourselves. Christian wisdom and psychological insight agree on this point: such narcissism is not the path to happiness.
Finally, this way of life not only makes us anxious and depressed, but, perhaps paradoxically, exhausted. Though in one sense we are passive, in another we are constantly overdone and burned-out from constantly selling ourselves. There are fewer and fewer times when we are not “on” — responding to posts, keeping up with our followers, “liking” and being “liked.” We never get to rest.
This is the world in which we live. And it is spiritually killing us.
But, you say, to live differently would take a whole new economy, a new society, a regime change, a totally alternative way of life. It would take a miracle. Yes, indeed. Thankfully, the kingdom of God Jesus came preaching is nothing short of that. That’s the good news we’ll start in on next month.
Miller will continue his series in February’s issue of The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. You’ll also find the next installment in an upcoming edition of Roundtable and at CatholicWorker.org.
About us. Roundtable covers the Catholic Worker Movement. This week’s Roundtable was produced by Jerry Windley-Daoust and Renée Roden. Art by Monica Welch at DovetailInk. Roundtable is an independent publication not associated with the New York Catholic Worker or The Catholic Worker newspaper. Send inquiries to roundtable@catholicworker.org.
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