The Simple Life and the Catholic Worker:
A Folk Testament
By
Michael Boover
Seed Clarifications & Publications
Annunciation House
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Initially prepared for the course
"The Rise and Fall of the Simple Life" taught at
Harvard Divinity School in the Spring of 2001. The paper was revised for its presentation
at the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker at 93 Piedmont Street, Worcester, Massachusetts on
January 4, 2002, at a “clarification of thought” meeting and subsequently rerevised as
needed not so much in substance (although there have been some additions) as in style!
Updates to statements made at the time of writing reflect a more current chronology.
Readers interested primarily in the Catholic Worker reflections may wish to go forthwith
to the second half of the paper (Distraction and Its Discontents)
A Long Conversation for the Short of It
I have been musing about simplicity and voluntary poverty for much of my adult
life. The musing got pointed and studious when spurred by an academic venture while in
graduate theological school. I would leave by commuter rail from Union Station in
Worcester, Massachusetts for South Station in Boston where, upon arrival, a sea of
humanity from multiple inbound trains passed like grains of sand through the bottleneck
of an hourglass into the city. From bustling South Station, I would then descend into the
subway with a smaller yet still multitudinous band heading for Harvard/Alewife. We
would come up from the train cellars of Boston for visual air but once- when arriving on
the other shore of the Charles River into Cambridge. “The Hub,” perhaps the most
European-looking American city, certainly one of the oldest in the so-called “New
World,” suddenly loomed up large behind us as a visual feast for our vista-hungry eyes
accustomed to the regular narrow pattern of sight when subject to much subterranean
travel. Once in Cambridge and off the train I would meander from Harvard Square
through the walkways of Harvard College and down several streets and campus passages
to the Divinity School on Francis Avenue.
Harvard Divinity is on the far side of the main campus, and the walk was mostly quite
enjoyable when there was no rain or snow to fend off. Once there, I took my seat among
the budding theologians (both young and older)- all eager to engage the themes in the
course, “The Rise and Fall of the Simple Life.” The getting to Harvard from Worcester
itself was an exercise in negotiating many complexities to converse about subjects
pertinent to the pursuit of simplicity! The journey via train and foot still serves as an apt
metaphor for the nature of the learning I was to do there. Complexity and simplicity
would play tag with each other throughout that blessed semester. Was this, then, to be the
very nature of the project? A game of metaphysical tag? Wrestling matches from the
various sides of the study?
I learned as an initially reluctant pilgrim to Cambridge, there was and remains much to
consider along the way to Boston as one preferring to stay out in the provinces of Central
Massachusetts where I reside. However, I was surely on a mission, in on a rare search for
the simple life and I was heading to a place many would consider far from simple to do it:
Harvard. However, there, scholar/theologian/ethicist, Ralph Potter, an old-time master on
these matters and a most refined gentleman of the spirit and mind, held forth and so the
journey Eastward called this one forth to the one who held forth.
Professor Potter introduced his students to many intriguing aspects of the study through
readings and discussions on "the simple life," not the least being that the concept itself
eludes simple definition or at least one satisfactory to all of its students. Nonetheless, we
came to some terms and learned more, even if about a necessary encounter with the
elusive in defining- and for some of us, defending- simplicity! The study appealed to and
captured my imagination those weeks and months. Grateful sentiments are very much in
order as I share this many years later some of what I learned there. There was in evidence
a persistent, perennial contagion that pursued those on the sunny side of the study. We
desired to scratch the itch of entertaining (and for some of us living out) the appealing
vision of simpler living. I, a bit reluctantly, admitted purist ideal brings with it many a
puzzle with many pieces bearing both gifts of grace and demands for responsibility.
We observed that many promoters and practitioners of the simple life notably seek the
integration of parts to a whole, the threading of strands into a meaningful and beautiful
design. Many of these also recognize the existence of challenges and obstacles to
integrative vision. Following our initial sessions in class, I began to view the study as a
long conversation- one that swung like a pendulum or reflected a dance this way and that.
I noted that the utopian impulse attempted to solve problems but that it also often created
them. I discovered my self with many questions that had long tugged implicitly on mind
and heart as a devoted communitarian called to simplicity day in and out. Challenged,
even humbled in these regards, I was still sympathetic to the cause. In this newfound
context, I could ponder the espoused verities of simple living visionaries and practitioners
in an explicit academic encounter somewhat removed from the front lines of battle. To be
in converse with a curious band of fellow divinity students about all of this was a great
privilege and is esteemed as a great blessing to this day.
We seekers after simplicity’s secrets found ourselves asking questions: “Where
does vision originate?” Is it a gift sent to a precious few? The historical record would
seem to bear this out, but there is also a sense among some contemporary thinkers and
mystics that there has been a reception problem, which, if addressed, might swell the
ranks of the visionary. I think in this regard of the thoughts of cultural critic Theodore
Roszak and a friend, Cistercian monk, and meditation advocate, Thomas Keating. Both
have held, even if in quite distinct ways, a sense that a romantic and sanctified
counterculture could take root and make a difference in the wide world.
We took note of the difficulties met by visionary leadership. Is vision, a blessing
to be sure, always as well a burden due to the many frustrations it generates in the lives of
its bearers? I discovered this type of bounding questioning becoming thematic in the
study. Is it this or is it that? Are visionary folk contradicting themselves by holding up
high ideals and behaving de facto in less than ideal ways? Is there a way to dance in an
extraordinarily enlightened direction at least for a while? Where dwells visionary
consistency and moral integrity? One thread that appeared to lead along a path of greater
understanding was the nature of leadership itself in the movements for simplicity.
Leaders of the perennial, if oft hard-pressed, experiments seemed extraordinarily moved
by the life of the mind.
Moreover, for many, upward movement extended to the life of the spirit and
emotions too. Some shared interior revelations or understandings that moved outward.
Others appeared to have been recipients of extraordinary educational and social
experiences that gave shape to personal vision. From within or from without, some
exceptional individual learning seems to have taken place, some in formal settings as was
the experience of the Harvard patricians. Other visionaries and practitioners of purer
living were schooled no less excellently but in far different and oft unlikely climes.
Ann Lee learned many lessons that would later serve her and her followers well in
the schools of persecution and imprisonment in 18th century England. She had received
an extraordinary education in forging a vision of augmented reality over the one she
knew in the slums of Manchester. Before setting sail to mother her remarkable American
movement for simplicity, the "Shakers," she had found the reasons to “shake” in Europe.
Dorothy Day, Catholic convert and co-founder of the gentle yet radical Catholic Worker
movement, was taught by the tortuous excesses of her bohemian past as well as by her
French peasant mentor, Peter Maurin. As she struck out for spiritual shores in the 20th
century, she appeared as a kind of new Augustine on American soil, someone articulate
in a similar conveyance of misery and yet of mercy and peace found through and to the
other side of discontent and spiritual malaise as had Ann Lee in the 18th.
Students and teachers of the simple life indeed appear gifted, but also welleducated by the attempt to live the simple life itself, knowledgeable and wizened enough
to blaze new and noteworthy paths. They trod along or were led somewhere themselves
to rarefied heights or different junctures and thereby charted schools of thought and life
that others could embrace with similar conviction. Such exemplars cannot help but draw
followers. Some of them did not intend to gather others, like Anthony of the Desert and
Benedict of Nursia, who initially wished to seek their salvation in hidden caverns. They
found themselves with needful and budding communities clamoring for the direction they
could give, the times begging for and eliciting their leadership and authority. Other
visionaries appear more intentional in the seeking of higher life for disciples as well for
themselves from the start. However, how does all this happen? Again, from whence does
the visionary impulse arise? From inner wellsprings? From socially constructed
influences? Is it given? Is it learned? Is there a necessary translation between inner vision
and outward communal expression of vision?
What is at the root of the noble ideal? Is it an inner quest for quality? Again, is it
the receipt of a wondrous or unusual education? Is it the same root ultimately for the
well-born as for those whose experience of mean circumstance has propelled them in the
direction of a new day? Are historical proponents and current heirs of the simple life rare
birds or ordinary people simply more open to moral giftedness, learning, or grace and
who deserve the broadest possible acknowledgments and extensions of their dreams?
Should visionaries hold fire close to their bosoms as to preserve or protect the flame or
must they share their lights with their fellows for the good of all, affecting what
commonly happens when the fire is shared candle to candle: greater light? Such questions
themselves kept tugging to and fro throughout that blessed semester.
We began the study at Harvard with specific questions that seem to frame the
conversation on the simple life. The lawyer and politician Sir George Mackenzie took up
the cause of an enlightened withdrawal, yet was one engaged as a high-level advocate
and prosecutor on behalf of the episcopacy and King Charles II against the freedomseeking "Covenantors." John Evelyn, his sparring partner, himself a lover of time spent
away from people in his revered library, yet called for a necessary and enlightened social
engagement.
Are we not all involved, at least to some extent, we might ask, in a project of
reaching out for that which we do not often enough possess but for which some holy
hunch or inkling resides on the other shore of our usual experience and draws us to it? Do
we not desire an appreciation of what's unlike the worlds we know and yet is worthy of
proposing some ideas and applications of the preferred path? There appears here to be a
perennial appeal to a compelling vision, an implied reach to ideals that lie a bit beyond
but which call for commonsensical action. It is exciting and honest to note that there are
precise and reliable statements made by certain persons who stand by their own
disaffected experience regarding the necessity to pursue simpler living and the upholding
of noble ideals. Their inspiration moves from the ground to the heavens.
Lest the quest for a better day be consigned to a centuries-old or even a near
distant past, it is instructive to note that the protracted fight over depersonalization in its
many forms today continues to occasion many a clarion call in defense of the sacred, the
reasonable, and the human. Many moderns, close to home, have discerned within
themselves troubling states, having tired of shared sorrow, a duplicitous nature, and an
inability to speak or live intently, honestly, creatively. They wish to reach beyond their
“dis-ease” by decrying their disorienting, disordered state of mind and heart that harbors
confusion about human purpose and direction. Some see that we have found it easier to
improve our tools but not our selves. Too often the tail wags the dog and with dire
consequences. The wish to address the situation of personal and social unease is ever a
new version of the age-old reckoning with unsatisfying and unappealing reality and not
settling for it.
John Henry Cardinal Newman is said to have been particularly sure that
something had gone wrong with the human project and that the Biblical fall from a prior
grace was quite obvious! It seems that vision is oft and rightly so, sown and grown in the
soils of discontent and discouragement. While much of humanity appears good at
diagnostics, an attendant proscriptive or prescriptive remedy seems not so facilely at the
ready. For instance, while some see that our technological capabilities in the West have
made us much more comfortable, they have also made us more anxious and often more
observer than a participant in much of life. Quiet resignations hang like storm clouds in
the social air. Some choose to live with a sense of enhanced human freedom that
bespeaks a personal creative capacity. Some reject mere survival as adjuncts to modern
machines. These know well what's wrong, but what's socially right by their estimates is
not so easily identified, pronounced or effected in the busy and distracting marketplace.
Still, many critiques of modernity and postmodernity are more daily sharpened at the
stone of bitter personal experience. Moreover, now even the polemical personalists have
their share of stinging critics. Naysayers may have a legitimate voice and place but also
severe problems in the common perception of their critics.
“Must one always be so critical?” detractors ask. Is there not some better
counting of the costs of maintaining the status quo that should temper the questioning and
challenging posture of the brighter picture people? Are rebels a melancholic, chronically
edgy and ungrateful lot? Are utopians a slightly cynical bunch at heart, and escapist and
irresponsible to boot? Such critics of social and cultural critics can also provide good
grist for the mill of taking a look at vision and its adherents. Moreover, such criticism
may even spark some defensive and needed apologetics which might lead to some
counter questions. Do some of these dissenters from the main do so out of joy beheld and
held, out of faith, out of gratitude springing from a full heart? If so, where are they to go
if the status quo is unacceptable to them? Where are they going? We find ourselves again
in the land of the pendulum swing and the regions of the dizzying dance, and perhaps this
is how it should be.
I grew to sense that the conversation about the simple life is shot through with
insight gained from the other side of things. Paradoxical elements run through many a
discussion. David E. Shi's excellent text, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High
Thinking in American Culture, makes the case. His summary histories of vitality and loss,
revival, and dissipation once again, of ever-renewed hopes, document the "rise and fall"
of brave efforts for a purer or more refined American lifestyle. Reading about them, we
can detect the pendulum swing, can see the tired dancers falling while new ones rise for
another round of the social dance- decay and new life, reaction and action, the old and the
new playing tag. How does one reconcile these natural but strange cycles? Shi and others
help us take note and measure of both periods of hoped for renewal and paradox. Shi
aptly introduces his readers to a pantheon of blessed principled agents and social
movements who yet have their share of apparent contradictions.
The austere Puritans and Quakers got rich. William Penn oversaw a beautiful
plantation. Aristocratic republican legislators sought to teach a political simplicity among
the lower classes. Thomas Jefferson, the American father of modern freedoms, is
rightfully criticized in hindsight by some of today's historical theorists for his treatment
of Native Americans and his own black family. Harvard boys went to the plains or the
woods. Emerson felt the necessity to leave the official ministry to preserve his actual
ministerial instincts. Transcendentalists, it would seem uncharacteristically so from this
eon, looked to the Civil War as a purifying agent. Some envisioned public education as
the best way of winning the masses to the higher life. Today it is often questioned, if not
scolded, for its diluting function. Charter schools have sprung up as a response.
Patrician intellectuals would corral the wealth produced in the Gilded Age for
service to high thought and improved civic life. However, their efforts fell short, and as a
lot, excepting William James, they all got depressed. Hopes dashed, they grew more and
more sullen and resigned that powerful social and economic forces would scuttle their
brighter vision of a kindlier order. Social and domestic reform movements, led by Jane
Addams from her Chicago Hull House and Edward Bok from the editorial perch of his
Ladies' Home Journal, sought to mix the classes in a two-way education for the
betterment of both. However, even these generous efforts were not without their critics,
or as some interpreters of the history would say, not beyond a sense that an attendant
precariousness hung over their popularity and temporary success like a haunting mist.
Thorstein Veblen, I suppose, expected some response from the rich to his scathing
critique of their "conspicuous consumption," but I wonder what reply, if any, indeed
reverberated from the insulated and protected chambers of the wealthy? It is also true that
visionary artisans and architects embraced a qualitative simplicity whose patrons were
actually on the side of class interests antithetical to their ideal of reinforcing principled
and artful labor for all. Craft and nature movements for children and adults appeared
harmed by their apparent triumphs as new organizational modes foisted compromise onto
their early and more innocent and promising undertakings. Moreover, strangely perhaps,
a most imperialistic president, Theodore Roosevelt, yet cultivated a strict conservationist
ethic at home.
Back to the land efforts and work projects born in the Depression spawned
exciting and purified social experiments. These strikingly different children than those of
"ol' Cal" appear to have landed eventually into the lap and direction of big business.
War, that woeful destroyer, is viewed by mainstream economists as that which brought
prosperity to the United States in the 50s, even if one that turned on itself in the
questioning, tumultuous 60s. Communal and political movements in that era may have
been short-lived, but their historical witness continued to impact the understanding of
cultural life in America into the self-seeking and materialist decades that followed.
Thinkers Theodore Roszak and Charles A. Reich worked their magic in trying to interpret
these times and movements for mainstream folk. Ascribed to the cultural experiments of
the time are rare victories and political and cultural defeats depending on the
commentators!
Jimmy Carter smiled and sang a simple refrain in an era marked by an energy
crisis, one that might have acknowledged consumptive limits more four-square, but a
chorus of sympathetic Americans did not join his cautionary call for conservation during
his presidency. In hindsight, they were so very relevant to the times in the light of the
currently accumulated crises related to a habitable and sustainable global environment.
Consumer tastes and values gained strength and ascendancy instead. The weight of a
building momentum began with rifts and then drifts away from social missions. Restraint
derived from the wiser founts of antiquity, from Biblical bearings, and enlightened civic
postures held up by the founders of the early American republic seemed to fade into the
background as more aggressive and unregulated commercial interests and imperial
designs moved more and more to the foreground of public consciousness. The years that
have followed Shi's examinations have been glaring in the unashamed pursuit of personal
and corporate self-interest. If anything, “the haves” have enlarged their sphere of
influence with paid lobbyists defending their causes. They have provided ample funds to
all too willing lawmakers dependent upon corporate largesse to protect their
accompanying self-protective political interests.
I weave and retell a bit of the historical tale with the vital record provided by Shi
to further describe and underscore the complexity that has accompanied and even
characterized the American movements for simplicity. Shi’s thesis confirms a bit my use
of a pendulum metaphor for describing the nature of simple (necessarily complex)
matters. A Webster’s pocket dictionary states that the word sim’ ple signifies: “a., easy to
know, unaffected, not complex, honest, -ton”! The last three letters attached at the end of
the word’s several designations may provide a further insight into the nature of this
slippery exploration. It just might contain the right admixture of ingredients as to
summarily do some truth-telling about the ambiguous nature of the project of untangling
the complexities surrounding simplicity in an age far from simple. Who and what can one
in good conscience and with wisdom embrace?
The dictionary entry might make for a humorous but apt juxtaposition between a
valued unitive knowledge that felicitously outshines inferior acquisitions of expertiseone leading to the happiest state of affairs. Simplicity advocates might legitimately view
such a perspective as worthy of championing by the intelligent and sensitive. The
counterpoint of critics suggests a rather stark recognition that a naiveté may intrude
indicating the worldview of the simple as one incapable of appreciating the nuanced and
complex realities more appropriately negotiated by the sophisticated! There is contained
in the simple wording of the dictionary entry a sense of these alternating weights (a ton!)
or values (as on scales or a see-saw). The incredible freedom and joy that simplicity of
life offers to impart must face perplexity as complications so readily intrude upon the
vision of simple living. In considerations made around the nature, truth, and implications
of a purer life, challenges abound such that they, in the eyes of critics, confirm that the
simple are simpletons! That a ton of problems presents itself as a historical weighing
down, however, does not necessarily deter the devoted from doing their part as a
counterweight. The record shows that a flurry of feathers from the upward flights of the
visionary still land on the ground of criticism as to ever renew the irrepressible veracity
of the Risen Life. Shi writes of the critical influence and ongoing appeal and draw of
simplicity.
Where does the ponderer of this history go from here? For me, the accounts by Shi
represent a grand tradition, even if at times a Quixotic one. A friend reminded me not so
long ago that Don Quixote was crazy. However, we also get a glimpse from Cervantes of
another kind of sanity, of foolish but forthright bravery. In many ways, I have come to
see the discussion surrounding the merits of the simple life and idealism as not about
reasonableness alone (although one can make a compelling argument on those grounds
from the vantage of our current humanitarian and ecological crises). Who can argue that a
call for more logical solidarity in the service of simplicity lacks merit? Human dignity
and the integrity of creation themselves seem to cry out today for some necessary means
to honor and cherish both before it is too late.
David Shi authored a companion text, In Search of the Simple Life: American
Voices Past and Present. In this text of original writings, Shi further consults and
illumines a heritage at once known to be battered and bruised but one also with ongoing
appeal and humble staying power. Surely it has already had some ardent banner carriers
into this second decade of the new millennium. As one sympathetic to the cause, I wish to
tell some of the Catholic Worker (CW) story I have been a part of and to think more
about Catholic Worker philosophy as it touches upon some of the themes covered by
noted authors read and proponents' thought explored while I was a student in those class
discussions at Harvard. The commentaries of others who understand a more extensive
alternative history such as Shi and Roszak serve as a useful and appropriate backdrop for
the movement of which I have long been a part and its fostering of "the simple life."
Distraction and Its Discontents
We are so easily distracted. The ancients recognized this and contemporary
thinkers take note of distraction's power to derail movements in the direction of selfknowledge and peace. From Socrates and the monastics to Dorothy Day and Theodore
Roszak, a lament can be heard about diminished capacities to know and be about what is
essential. However, the lament is not all. These figures teach or exemplify movements in
non-distraction. Proponents of a higher or inner life, they nonetheless showed great
concern for the well-being of their contemporaries and generations hopefully ahead.
Socrates shook up the social order (or disorder!) with his witness- the honest
acknowledgment of ignorance and the necessity of unpretentious and free inquiry.
Hermits and cenobites have withdrawn, but as many of them see it, for the common good.
Dorothy Day, in her life of sincere prayer and social activism, called many Americans
away from commerce and war and to the practice of voluntary poverty and the works of
mercy.
Theodore Roszak holds up the romantic poets as voices to hear and honor if we
are to avoid ecological catastrophe. He has hopes that a counterculture can emerge and
stem the urban/industrial tide that threatens both personhood and the planet. Roszak
claims that the recovery of personhood is the means to regain sensitivity to a need of the
earth to be treated lovingly (and personally) as to recover her (Gaia's) stature. He has
recently sought to align therapeutic movements with green ones wherein the recovery of
reverence for the ailing self and the sick earth coalesce. He is pioneering a new discipline
he calls "ecopsychology" to support expansive caretaking among us. 1
Of particular interest to me is the need to negotiate the tensions surrounding the
simple life that make for the pendulum swing and the off-center dance. Who has tried to
understand or reconcile tensions and how have they fared? Can sympathizers with the
simple life advance the cause a bit freer and more maturely if attuned to the swings or
dizzy spells? I turn to a mentor in the person of Peter Maurin, who I think gave this a fair
try. He is a model personage in David Shi's compendium of "Voices" on the simple life.
Peter finds a place in the chapter, "Simplicity Between the Wars," and is the featured
spokesperson for "Catholic Simplicity." 2
Peter Maurin (with Dorothy Day) founded the Catholic Worker movement.
He is considered its philosophical progenitor and Dorothy often credited him with being
the actual founder. He sometimes thought of himself, as did critics, as an "apostle on the
bum." Without Dorothy, it is not likely his lovely and dynamic vision would have had or
have as many adherents. Born in 1877 and raised in a peasant family of 23 children in
southern France, he grew increasingly learned as a Christian Brother in Paris. He was
also somewhat of an autodidact. He read very widely and with happy results. Peter taught
for a while as a de Salle brother, but emigrated to Canada in 1909, fleeing conscription.
When his homesteading partner died in a hunting accident, he quietly and illegally
slipped into the United States where he led the life of an itinerant laborer and teacher of
French. He spent two decades working hard in manual and intellectual labors, none of
which got him much notice.
Eventually, Peter landed in New York City. George Schuster, then editor of
Commonweal (circa 1932) encouraged Maurin to look up the former bohemian and leftist
journalist, Dorothy Day, who had converted to Catholicism in 1927. Schuster recognized
ideas shared by the pair. Peter found and harangued the single mom, writer, and beauty,
with his Catholic vision of a simple life.
Dorothy Day Photo Credit: CW Archives
Dorothy was a woman with intense spiritual longings, intellectually astute, and a
tad worldly wise; yet in need of more direction. She had written for leftist journals (The
Call and the Masses) and had abandoned radical secular pursuits when drawn to
Catholicism following the birth of her only daughter, Tamar, the fruit of her common-law
marriage with Forster Batterham, an anarchist biologist. When she embraced
Catholicism, Forster could not find accord with it, and they parted. Dorothy had been
supporting herself and her child as a new Catholic writer. Covering a hunger march for
Commonweal in December of 1932, she prayed at the national Catholic Shrine in
Washington, D.C. for help. While covering this March of the Unemployed (organized by
Communists) that had descended upon the capitol, Dorothy wondered and prayed.
Specifically, she sought a remedy for her particular puzzle- how to reconcile her unabated
hunger for justice and love for workers and the poor with her new-found faith.
Upon her return to New York, Dorothy found Peter Maurin waiting at her door,
he eager to reach and influence her with his "long view of history" and Catholic social
teaching. It seemed like the perfect match. She teamed up with Maurin, and together, they
published the Catholic Worker paper (still costing only “a penny a copy”). Moreover,
with many followers over the succeeding decades, they led a movement rooted in their
understandings of traditional Catholicism, personalism, pacifism, radical distributism
(decentralism) and direct action.
The Catholic Worker movement officially began in 1933, with the first
distribution of the movement's newspaper, The Catholic Worker, in Union Square in New
York City (on Mayday of '33 to be exact). The movement's express desire was to bring
the social teachings of the Catholic Church to "the man on the street," particularly the
unemployed or discouraged worker, who might wonder in the swirl of radical political
appeals being pitched early in that "radical decade," if the Church had anything to offer.
Peter and Dorothy believed with all their hearts and strength that it did. Recognizing they
could not simply talk about their faith and convictions to the downtrodden and
unemployed through their newspaper, they took action. Dorothy opened her small
apartment (and later houses and farms) where a little hot soup would be served up along
with Peter's ideas for a "new society built within the shell of the old," a Wobbly (IWW)
phrase readily appropriated by the fledgling Catholic movement for what it wanted to
accomplish too.
Peter and Dorothy's "houses of hospitality" spread to U.S. cities. Their immediate
relief could be given to and obtained by the poor. Moreover, they experimented with farm
communes, where a Catholic "Green Revolution" would answer the ravages of capitalism
as well as its violent alternative, "Red revolution." Peter envisioned a renewed and
sanctified community on the land as the ideal. The city houses always should patch the
wounded as best they could, but Peter proposed a return to agricultural life and agrarian
economics as the real way ahead.
The Newburgh CW Farm
Photo Credit: CW Archives
"Back to Christ, back to the land," 3 he declared. While the more public because urban
hospitality houses caught on quickly and sprung up to meet the desperate need in
American cities during the Depression, the farms, or "agronomic universities" as Peter
preferred to call them, followed, but nothing near the number of city undertakings. Some
of the farming experiments sought a measure of self-sufficiency, but many were "houses
of hospitality" on the land and housed dependents primarily and secondarily made
attempts at being working farms. Many were as dependent on the generosity of CW
subscribers/supporters of the work as the city houses. However, the rural experiments
were to Maurin the representative ideal of the Catholic life. The commune ideally
supplied the basic needs for all its members.
The Catholic Worker was and remains an "incarnational" movement. It has
always tried (even if poorly at times) to give flesh to its ideals. Its founders wed radical
practice to radical thought. Peter gave up his bed to destitute Bowery neighbors and
wrote rhyming essays that came to be known as "Easy Essays." In these, he pronounced
his vision of a primitive and more just and loving Catholic culture. He saw himself as a
teacher, and he would take anyone's ear who lent it. He became the quintessential
evangelist. Dorothy tells: "He never stopped unless you begged for rest, and that was not
for long. He was irrepressible, and he was incapable of taking offense." 4
Dorothy quickly came to the side of striking seamen, wrote of the national
poverty she found while on her speaking tours and bus travels throughout the land. She
deplored war and war preparation in her talks and spoke of the movement's work among
New York City's poor and the need for a new social order attuned to the teachings of
Christ. Day proposed and practiced voluntary poverty, whose radical embrace Dorothy
found, like Saint Francis of Assisi, brought an extraordinary harmony into the order of
things. "I am against poverty, and I am for it," she said to describe her opposition to
economic injustice and her remedy for it.
I have known several people who met or knew Peter. One elder nun friend, Sister
of Saint Anne, Mary Laurine Clermont, told me he paced like a lion in a cage when he
publicly read his "Easy Essays." An old CW farm couple told me he was "the perfect
guest" when he and Dorothy attended a wedding and stayed with them in Upton,
Massachusetts. In the early seventies, I read Loaves and Fishes, Dorothy's account and
description of Catholic Worker life and soon after that met her. I sensed she was pretty
much the holy person she wanted and labored for us all to be; even she could be a bit
temperamental at times. I became a disciple at a tender age.
However, the history thickens in what might be called my own and my peers'
third generation effort at Catholic Worker living. I have been blessed and burdened with
life at Catholic Worker houses and farms since 1972, when I joined a little storefront
community in Worcester called "The Mustard Seed." In 1974, I was part of a founding
group of a "house of hospitality" that grew out of our storefront experiment which was
connected to "The House of Ammon" Catholic Worker farm in the north county village
of Hubbardston and with the Trappist monastery in Spencer (Saint Joseph's Abbey) in
Central Massachusetts.
After living and working for ten years at the Mustard Seed (1972-1982), I found
myself reluctantly facing the fact that I was exhausted (aching but in retrospect
significantly enriched in many ways by Holy Poverty). Following a decade of intense
urban labors, I took to the road with Mustard Seed friend Joe DeVoe and landed for a
year and a half at the Catholic Worker farm in Sheep Ranch, California, a homestead
located in an old mining town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
There I was granted a blessed exile to those California hills and was lovingly and
compassionately received by generous and kindly rural kin. There I was welcomed to
heal on star showers, coyotes yelping at night, to walks with jackrabbits, supper of a
rattlesnake, the making of candles, the reading of Tolkien in "hobbit hikes" with the farm
children, and other tonics for the world-weary. I gazed in wonderment at the valley and
the sunset most evenings where I sat atop an old Jesuit wine vat which had, in its
reincarnation, come to serve as a water cistern for the farmers.
There I beheld a world held together by grace! I might have stayed except I was
lonely (most of the other community members lived in simple dwellings with their
families, though the singles chummed) and had some repairing that could only be done
back home in the East. It was the closest thing to lay monasticism that I had encountered
and the natural beauty that surrounded one each day surprised you every morning. It was
a good dose of the simple life.
The tiny village of Sheep Ranch had its history along the pendulum swing.
The Gold Rush had once made it a bustling town. There had been a George Hearst mine
there, and the place was once home to a brewery, seven saloons, hotels, a livery stable,
and a dance hall. When I arrived there, the mine had made its millions, had been
abandoned (the last mining effort closed after WWII), and a depressed and sleepy and
beautiful place was left behind. 5
The only village bells were those around the necks of sheep chiming a pleasant
announcement of peace to this city-worn boy. Here was the last open pasture on the
Western frontier I learned. If you did not want the sheep on your field, you had to fence it
in. Otherwise, the 50 or so sheep lodged in the old barn in the heart of town had the right
to graze and the right of way! The village had a rickety old post office with a halfsleeping dog on its porch, a volunteer fire department, and a cluster of small houses. The
Worker farm is 6 1/2 miles down a winding road from this metropolis, and your vehicle
had to climb a bit of a rock ledge before the pond and meadow greeted you to what was
also an open pasture for the likes of weary souls with dulled sensibilities. I stayed a year
and a half and then left for a meditation intensive at Saint Benedict's Monastery in
Snowmass, Colorado.
Following the intensive, I stayed at a new and kindred pacifist community,
"Erimias," also located in an old mining village, that of Cokedale, outside of Trinidad in
southern Colorado. Abandoned coke ovens and mountainous slag piles told a similar
story. The new community delightfully took up residence in the old "boarding house."
When the old men gathered in the tiny post office there eyed you, they seared your soul
with their unspoken wisdom and long travail. There, I would similarly climb a long hill,
but here to survey the snow-capped Sangre de Christo range.
I happened upon a historically sad remembrance (but fortuitous participation in a
quiet recognition) of an ongoing struggle. A nearby town, Ludlow, had been the site of a
massacre of miners' women and children who had taken refuge in the cellars beneath their
tent city when the National Guard, who had set up their Gatling guns in 1910, sent the
men running into the hills. It was 75 years ago in the spring I was there that those sad
events had come to pass. The community college ran a photo exhibit, and I walked
around old abandoned Ludlow. The new community was settling in nearby, aware of
present sadness about the treatment of Central Americans and the planned U.S.
militarization of space. The new community was soon struggling with its identity. The
religio-political activists and those more attuned to the land and farm labor tugged in their
respective directions, creating a bit of a fissure. I wished both sides well and longed for
home.
Returning to Central Massachusetts after two years away, I witnessed the
aftermath of a blaze that took down our decade-old house of hospitality. My friend, Joe
DeVoe, jumped from a third-floor window, breaking a collarbone and three ribs. The
others got out without physical injury. The entire region rallied and raised funds for a
new house constructed on the same sight. I did not rejoin the community full time but
took work in a Catholic Chronic Care Hospital (Saint Camillus in Whitinsville) while
living in a tiny, almost miniature, house (a cabin really) rented from old Swedish farmers
located up the hill from the hospital who named the little house fittingly as "the castle in a
field"! I put in two years of intense labor as an orderly and from there dated, later
married, and settled down once again in the city of Worcester where I adopted a daughter
(currently an opera starlet) and where my wife and I gave birth to three sons, all born on
Benedictine feasts!
Marriage and family have necessitated traversing some bridges into the so-called
"professional" world, but I remain haunted by questions of scale, meaning, quality of
work life, the necessity of prayer, and community. Along the way, I have maintained my
connection with the Mustard Seed House of Hospitality, which is 45+ years old. Saint
Bernard of Clairvaux writes of "reading the book of experience." I hope what I’ve shared
here is analogous to some writing from that book!
My learning thus far has led me to consider the importance of synthesis in moving
forward with a vision of holy and pure living. A desire to integrate seems sacred and
noble. The need to weave the various threads of our lives is a somewhat complicated
project yet in service to the simple! I've served soup, spoken to groups, attended the
Council of Youth in Taize, France in 1974. The experience led me to considerations of a
more systemic critique of world economics in the light of the Gospel. I have been in
many demonstrations and protests (jailed and imprisoned for some), taken a peace
pilgrimage to the former Soviet Union in 1980, lived away and returned. I am back at
bread labors that have been my best approximation to previous moral endeavors as to
support a family. I am somewhat happy, even if busy! However, there is a nagging that
bespeaks a yearning, perhaps the fruit of a middle age hunger moving, inexorably if
reluctantly into older age, to put the parts together better. Alternatively, maybe this need
is a response to the general fragmentation we all experience by dint of living in this age
of division and unsettledness both within and without.
I miss the Sheep Ranch farm but have tried to take it home to Worcester, where
my family's urban agricultural experiment (Annunciation House) speaks of nearimmediate kinship with that past. I learned to tend chickens there and kept them here. We
have fashioned, through the leadership of former Trappist, carpenter and late Catholic
Worker, Dan Lawrence, a rustic chapel near the house that we call "The Hound of
Heaven." We took down an old carriage house behind the Mustard Seed and put much of
it back up here on the edge of the city as a place for the "Lazy Bums" Meditation Group,
Bible study, prayer, and community retreats.
There is much about the city that I like. Having studied sociology and urban studies
rather contentedly as an undergraduate at the local State College, rural interests and
theology continually drew me to themselves! So 'round I go to this venturing beyond, to
this need for synthesis! I think, as Shi notes, historical precedents for simplicity were
diverse and complex. I find the conversation that swings from complexity to simplicity
and back again contains an excellent way to keep oneself honest and ward off getting
stuck. It makes sense that when things get too dull, we necessarily complicate them.
Moreover, when they get too complicated, we necessarily simplify! It seems a bit akin to
the beating of a heart, to a rhythm that needs both stress and rest to maintain equilibrium
and to remain healthy.
The Catholic Worker, has, in its now 85+ year history, been urban and rural;
laboring in both locales for a blessed vision wherein the active love of God and neighbor
makes all the difference- makes for "new heavens and a new earth." Dorothy always
remained somewhat of a city girl, always sympathetic to the aims of labor and supportive
of strikes. Peter boldly declared, "Strikes do not strike me." He urged workers to get on
the land and out of the wage system altogether. Within the movement, then, Peter and
Dorothy voiced different emphases and promoted moral gravitation toward both
engagements in cities and putting agricultural idealism into practice on the land. City and
country houses continue to live out their particular charisms, but questions of emphasis
can still inspire some debate with the movement as a whole.
Differences of emphasis are mainly on back burners but can at times generate
some heat. In Los Angeles, the Catholic Worker feeds close to a thousand folks a day at
their kitchen (popularly known as "the hippie kitchen") at the corner of 6th and Gladys on
L.A.'s Skid Row. They have been at it for forty-eight years. They prepare their meals in
huge pots, and boat oars are used to stir the concoction made with many hands attending
to each ingredient (much chopping and dicing work). It takes two hours to serve the line.
Above the serving table, someone had lettered a message on the wall: "Brothers and
sisters: No matter what comes down, don't forget the big picture."
Depending on your vantage, the "big picture" may look different. The Los
Angeles community has taken up great educational projects, publishing a fine newspaper,
The Catholic Agitator, begun as a Catholic hippie venture, with a format like "Rolling
Stone" magazine, with borders and a kind of subtle flashiness, appropriate, I suppose, to
an LA effort. How could they not be a little closer to the culture, if even the
counterculture? Some years ago if you were to go up to a hollow in Lincoln County,
West Virginia, and cross a rope bridge over the Mud River, you would have found a goat
farm and a small community living in log cabins built by themselves. The workers there
used underground refrigeration (as well as some electric) and published a paper, “The
Green Revolution,” later, “The Mountain Worker,” that included a farm diary and
detailed agricultural tips. The farm is no longer, but kindred neighbors carry the torch in
their ways according to their own best lights.
The tension and complementarity between urban and rural CW ventures were
aptly expressed by one-time Sheep Ranch Catholic Worker, Chuck Whatford, who later
became an anthropologist for the state of California. I remember him saying to me:
"In a way, the city houses are on the front lines, and we are behind. However, there are
ways in which we are in advance of them." Throughout our study on the simple life, the
tension between engagement and withdrawal appeared to constitute many a line of
argument. Are those who retire copping out or leading on the edge of substantial change?
Maurin and Day sometimes gave voice to their sense that the city houses met the most
immediate needs of the social wounded and the farms held up in the ideal the sanctified
life of blessed community and economy.
As an urban worker in need of relief, I was glad to be behind some lines. It was
my experience that sometimes the work in the city went on without a hitch. However,
often enough, like in a rugby or football game, gaining an inch, a foot, or a yard in the
struggle there meant coping with more resistance. In the country, any sanctified forward
movements were still formidable and challenging, but not as likely to be as socially
impeded as urban labors were. I have a healthy respect for the move back. I sense the
validity of what Chuck was saying about the quieter, pastoral clime. It grants the vision
itself some needed room. In the backwoods, the "Green Revolution" was ever gaining,
holding ground for good. Peter taught: "We must be announcers and not just
denouncers." The building up is the fairer task. I've appreciation also for the work of
denouncing. Phil Berrigan warned of the lengthening of soup lines if the arms racers are
left unchallenged. He had a perfect point.
I have come to believe in the high value of critique, especially of the disease of unfeeling
capitalism, but it is imperative to come up with an antidote; moreover, to build the holy
vision apart from reaction. Here, Peter, himself so deeply rooted and well steeped in
traditional Catholicism, was equipped to take up a favorable vantage. Peter admired the
life of the early Church, the hospitable, farming, and civilization-saving lives of monks
(particularly of those in Ireland). However, he also was inspired by secular thinkers- like
former Prince, Peter Kropotkin, who proposed decentralist and cooperative movements
that eloquently challenged social Darwinism and whose thought could also inform a
Catholic witness based upon the free cooperation and "mutual aid" of the members of the
"Mystical Body of Christ."
Peter saw the importance of city houses. We had the need, indeed the "personal
obligation," to look after the "needs of our brother (sister)"6 he taught. "We need parish
homes as well as parish domes," 7 he pleaded. However, the vision included bringing
ourselves to that Godly life! I have found myself often trying to get the donkey from the
back to the front of the cart. As one who began a CW journey in tender years, my
attraction was mostly exterior. I detected the shining vision when young, but it was not
long before my idealism was severely tested by a day to day, hour by hour, an encounter
with overwhelming need. The testing would later include a delayed recognition of my
bewildering neediness. I've identified with authors who see foursquare the difficulty of
merely keeping self together! Dorothy wrote of this too.
Art by Ade Bethune
Photo credit: Michael Boover
In an “easy essay,” Peter taught the need for personal integrity in the struggle for a better
society. Although he sounds like a contemporary Republican scoring liberal oversight of
the personal, he envisioned a society far from that of rugged individualism. He poured
out some wisdom in his very insightful essay, “Self-Organization”:
"If the best kind of government
is self-government,
then the best kind of organization is self-organization.
When the organizers try
to organize the unorganized,
then the organizers
don't organize themselves.
And when the organizers
don't organize themselves,
nobody organizes himself,
And when nobody organizes himself,
nothing is organized." 8
Dorothy, too, believed that we needed to start with ourselves. However, their vision
was grand, and this personal percolation of change (from the bottom up) was primary. In
the struggle to transform the social order, one had best begin by converting the self. In
Peter’s easy essay, “What the Catholic Worker Believes,” Peter outlined his vision for the
movement. One necessarily comes across the phrase "at a personal sacrifice," 9 even in
this proclamation of social vision.
"Communitarian personalism" 10 is a phrase used by Peter which answers to my
mind a concern and question much in evidence throughout the study on the simple life,
particularly about the American saga. The nation as founded on principles which rest on
Biblical assumptions in part (the Puritan start) and on contractual bases (some of these
with Biblical roots too) drawn from secular impulses that sprang from Enlightenment
sources in Europe is necessarily an experiment in ethical living. In both origins are found
concern for the rights and responsibilities of the person in connection to the Divine and
others.
The advance of mass culture appears to obfuscate the place and strength and
rights of personality. Personality requires time and space for development and
community for nurturance. Urban industrialism tended to speed things up, increase
mobility, and weaken social bonds strengthened in traditional extended families. Cities
served to concentrate persons in ever smaller areas, and work life more and more
reflected the mutual dependence of city dwellers upon an economy that no longer held
persons to first appreciations of calling, craft, or belonging but put persons to rote tasks
that served to toss somewhat esteemed "vocation" to the winds. 11
The Catholic Worker sought and seeks to rekindle a personalist ethic and a culture
of sacred work in the modern context. In traditional Catholicism, sacramental life, the
aspiration to reverence, the lament of the loss of the person from the vantage of faith, and
plain old hard work, a cultural and mystical labor counters a certain hardness in the
culture. Some would argue, and perhaps well, that personalism has not been the strong
suit of traditional Catholicism. However, I have been impressed by how many
visionaries hearken back to aspects of medieval life and culture influenced by the Roman
Church as sources of inspiration.
Peter Maurin celebrated aspects of the so-called "age of faith" (the Middle Ages).
In so doing, he perhaps signaled some approval to at least some institutional forms of
medieval Christian life, i.e., monasticism. However, it is the spirit that animated the agethe simple subjection of common life to the priorities of faith, such that ordinary
concerns, i.e., labor, householding, guild participation, politics, were religious in nature
or had spiritual implications or overtones- that he seems more to celebrate and want to
direct us to. Catholic Workers have spoken of themselves as "Christian anarchists," but
gladly take cues from the medieval monastic witness too, which may have been, to a
great extent, an institutional triumph of sorts.
The monasteries, perhaps the most preferred institutional form of the Middle
Ages, had concern for the person. Benedictine houses were urged to offer hospitality to
spiritual pilgrims and the poor. The guest, for Benedict and his followers, was to be
treated as if they were Christ. Catholic Workers, also inspired by Benedict's now 1500+year-old Rule, try to make their communities personalist in quite this fashion.
Serving a thousand on a soup line in LA or a hundred or two on a given evening
in Worcester may frustrate the ideal. One-on-one interaction with the desperate of the day
can be daunting. The costs of personalism can be very high. Personalist commitments are
not helped along by a culture that too often displaces people, making them a faceless
mass and more comfortably and conveniently dealt with on those terms. Despite the
failure, the personalist ideal motivates the movement, but personalism can suffer too, at
Worker houses and suffer in ourselves.
Quaker artist Fritz Eichenberg's "Christ of the Breadlines" aptly captures the Benedictine
and Catholic Worker belief and sense of Christ hidden and present in the poor. However,
it seems Catholic Workers are equally vulnerable to grand or more straightforward ways
of doing things, even dull and humble things! We, too, want to be successful, even if on
special terms! Some Catholic Workers are more alert to the danger of flirting with
accepted norms. They have taken precautions. I have heard rumors about houses of
hospitality that exist but appear in no directory and go about their work quietly. Perhaps
for that, these more unknown holy entities are better protected from the ambitious side of
doing good. The image can be a robber, tempting us to caricature the real. How quickly
we become dependent on recognition, and then the pretty picture of ourselves we present
to others becomes a powerful and cunning idol for us.
The simple life also seems an attempt to wrestle with this sad reality. We can so
often look good without being good. Enclosures have often served the cause of humility.
Benedict advises others in his Rule: "Not to wish to be called holy before one is holy; but
first to be holy, that one may be truly so called." 12
An authentic social witness may require solitude as a base for any true communal
fecundity and as a defense against that success known to win the world but lose the soul.
I have felt and still feel attached to others' thinking well. Of course, I am not
recommending an obliviousness to high opinions of others, but proper attention to prizing
our best lights. When we go public with these, they go up for sale. There is a fierce
temptation to skirt here. While called not to hide holy or needed light under bushel
baskets, there can be a dangerous diffusion or loss of light by trying to be or do too much
for the sake of reputation. Pride can still get you, even on the sacred fields. I know the
little, and personalist vision called out, even in the thick of a busy offering of hospitality
and often using mass dissemination in the CW paper!
In the 1970s, a priest of the Oblate order, Larry Rosebaugh, rambled along the
highways and byways of the more impoverished America, stopping notably at Catholic
Worker houses and shelters, living himself on the skid rows of cities and sampling the
conditions in such an act of profound solidarity and hiddenness. However, he did not fail
to write a column for the CW paper about his adventures in radical sympathy. He relayed
how well or ill was his reception at a particular house, a kind of Catholic Worker
equivalent of the anonymous restaurant reviewer, only here the review was much
enlarged and estimated the quality of hospitality in general.
We then young CWs in the seventies played a kind of game with one another. We
were on the look-out for the priest, anticipating such a chance visit. Occasionally, we
would nod to each other with a hunch that we were placing a dish before the special
guest. A review never appeared about our house, but the priest's radical witness had
reoriented us to a personalist sensibility that we too quickly relegated to the margins of
our consciousness in the throes of our busied routines. Fr. Rosebaugh spiritually
interrupted our often overly rote serving of a meal to our hungry neighbors. Sadly, it was
our image that we were (in large part) very eager to protect! Benedict and Peter preferred
we would see Christ in all and forfeit image in a better pursuit of interior reality. It is
humble self-effacement that is so needed. I am still trying to learn these lessons, even
after near fifty years in the movement! I sense this quest for a genuine life of simplicity
and service requires an ongoing and at times difficult personal moral education, yet not
one without its laughs at self and the absurdity often found to accompany even our best
efforts.
Stanley Vishnewski, a long-time follower of Dorothy Day, who at the tender age
of 17 aided the older 35-year-old Catholic pioneer, peppered his CW life with knowing
humor. Speaking of the wonderful volunteers who stayed for a glowing season and of
those who wintered and summered the years, he quipped a lament for the former and a
perception about the latter (perhaps poking more fun at the likes of himself) with his
observation that: "The gold leaves, but the dross remains." He came up with CW ribticklers that kept you going, such as: "There is no such thing as a single cockroach in the
whole Catholic Worker movement. They are all married and have large families."
"My book is finally getting out. I take it for a walk every day."
"I realized the truth of the assertion that the Catholic Worker moved on coffee, and
that without coffee, there would be no Catholic Worker movement." 13
Stanley lived in the movement's urban quarters and later lived at the Worker farm
in a quiet New York state village about a hundred miles north of the city. The communal
adventure of the Tivoli, New York CW farm, overlooking a most picturesque view of the
Hudson River, was regularly featured in the CW newspaper. Deane Mary Mowrer, a farm
resident, wrote the column, "A Farm with a View" for years. The community had some
serious farmers but was largely a settlement of the needy in the country. Stanley joked in
a self-effacing manner on behalf of the entire community when he suggested the
emphasis might be more properly placed- "Wouldn't the column be better titled "A View
with a Farm"?
Stanley died at the Worker in middle age. His parting words were reported: "I
think it was the soup." Even in death, Stanley maintained a sense of humor that inspired
others to consider the long haul as possible with some levity. Stanley was a serious
Catholic Worker (although he joked that after all the years he had been around,
Vishnewski still wasn't sure whether he wanted to join the movement). He was truly
Dorothy's "Sancho Panza." She dubbed him her "Knight for a Day." 14 In his humble
manner, Stanley led a most remarkable life of devotion and love. To me, he is a hero of
the simple life.
Stanley's book finally did get published (posthumously by the movement itself). It
is a book I prefer to the more academic or objective accounts of the movement's history.
Stanley knew how precarious this whole "ideal was, but remained committed to the end.
He writes of Peter's agrarian vision: "It was Peter's dream that these cells of Christian
living (farming communes) would catch on and multiply all over the world until
eventually the old capitalist order would be supplanted by millions of cells of dedicated
Christians and non-Christians living together in peace and harmony. One day people
would awake to the fact that the old materialist society had just died and withered away
and that a new culture, based on the Sermon on the Mount, had emerged with the wings
of the dawn." 15
Critics might find such dreams precisely that. However, what sanctions
entertainment of the Worker dream for its principled adherents is a kind of savvy, a
suffering persistence in imitation of Jesus' longing to have the Godly vision afire. There
is also a goodly nod to the power of failure as a testament to the truth. Borrowing a line
from Dostoevsky who put it on the lips of his Father Zossima in The Brothers
Karamazov, Dorothy taught with the great author that: "Love in reality is a harsh and
dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." 16
The first farms had many suffering folks living on them and tensions between old and
young, manual laborers and leisure-seeking scholars, destitute guests and the voluntarily
poor were sometimes pronounced. However, over the years, even as tensions remained,
people suffered them in hopes of effecting a better day. Persistence, despite failure,
characterizes the movement that knows at its collective heart that participation in the
"folly of the Cross" leads to Resurrection. I had come to see the pain in the folly in my
years at the Worcester house. There came a time when I no longer appreciated folly's
ultimate and eventual victory! With some distance, I am valuing anew the movement's
ability to keep the faith, and I have made a modest appraisal of my shortcomings as they
contributed to my distress. For (and despite) all this, the vision remains shining and
compelling.
Today, about 150 to 200 communities worldwide, from urban centers to nearly
hidden communes, continue in this spirit. The Vatican has declared Dorothy “servant of
God.” However, this growth and admiration would not in itself be the measure for
Dorothy or many of her followers. Love would be her ongoing concern. Is the movement
still in love? Is there a "revolution of the heart" going on, one deeply personal yet
connected to the way all of us lead our lives day in and day out?
Peter and Dorothy were not oblivious to the see-sawing or paradoxical elements
in their movement of and for simplicity. However, they seemed to resolve a lot through
sheer persistence, prayer, radical patience, and hope. The pursuit of "communitarian
personalism" kept them balanced. The more you lived with others, Dorothy learned and
taught, the more you needed to live like a hermit at times.
Benedictine friend, Dom Virgil Michel, advised workers to find in the sacraments
and prayer the source of any good social flowering. Creative approaches to problems
would surface from deep prayer. Liturgical worship and personal prayer were the
seedbeds of Christ's nonviolent revolution. There, the seeds could sprout, be nurtured,
and sown into the fields of public life.
Conversely, Dorothy taught the universal Church that unadorned love and
advocacy for the poor is a proper realm of Christian life, as if we had misplaced the
Gospel message for century upon century by maintaining narrow or private piety. Peter
and Dorothy taught us to touch bases, the personal and the communal. Workers should
become scholars and scholars become workers. They renewed Benedict's dictum, "Ora et
Labora." They set in motion a possibly fantastic work of reconciliation. "And," as
Dorothy remarked in her dotage, "it is still going on." 17
I conclude these simple reflections re-searched mainly from the trove of treasured
memory aware the coop calls for a cleaning, the garden to be turned over, piles of wood
to be cut, more stumps to be removed, "valleys to be filled in and mountains to be laid
low." Some of the hills I face are physical and lowered with sweat upon the brow. Other
hills, of a spiritual nature (those mountains that are moved by faith), will require the
attention of the Spirit of God. Work and prayer!
I shall take up a shovel and get to work on the dirt hills, and I will sit/meditate
when an obstacle to blessedness presents itself. There I'll hopefully be stirred by faith,
and hope and love to both do what I should and as well advert to the wisdom and action
of the great Other. It seems some hills will be ours to move. With others, much like the
fisherfolk of Jesus who labored on their own for a night with poor results, learn well how
to take cues from the One Who knows where the fish are? Who knows where to cast the
net? As hard as it can sometimes seem to activists, we need, perhaps desperately, to
listen.
It takes the pendulum swing both ways to keep the right time. I mean to
sometimes stay quiet and sometimes to dance (maybe wildly) like those Shakers of old, a
bit self-abandoned in praise of the great God. Moreover, as a believer and balancer like
they, perhaps even keep a beautiful neatness to economic life, maybe some highly
ordered rows in a better-weeded garden! I know dispositions to trust and intense labor to
be challenging to sustain or even come by some days. We seek such provisions too much
outside the perimeters or too far afield of blessed giftedness perhaps. However, inside a
needful, if sometimes painful for the ego, dependence upon grace, I (and friends in this
labor) will keep on, even if modestly. We may be crazed with limited or rare or maybe
even questionable sanity, but God has yet given us a vision of better ways.
Further reflection on the nature of integration of activist and contemplative dimensions of
the sanctified life has led me, in summary, to describe both the receptive and giving
aspects of Christian discipleship in the pursuit of the simple life as “a delicate dance” that
merits some final considerations. There is a saying from the East: “While walking, one
foot is always resting.” Contemplating even the simple act of ambulation reveals an
essential truth. There is a natural rhythm to be honored, and we are too often oblivious to
or scornful of it. Our postmodern temperaments are prone to overstimulation but hopping
on two feet cannot be sustained over the long haul. We fall eventually in one way or
another. One foot needs to rest, weight off of it while the other does the work.
We would do well to balance the life of prayerful trust (contemplation) with purposeful
activity (apostolic labor and social engagement).
Perhaps taking stock of our propensity to defy the natural order may lead us to reduce
artificial stimuli and unblock the grace that builds upon it. Maybe we can lift one foot
more intentionally and beneficially so that we may be more holily busy. We could
perhaps better thread meditative and activist traditions and practices, seeing them as more
complementary than polar thereby dancing with more skill and poise the delicate dance
between freedom and discipline, rest and exertion, enjoying just being and being about
much necessary doing. We might better negotiate a creative dialogue and partnership
between the surface of our outer lives and our God-given connection to our unfathomable
inner depths where God dwells with us most intimately. We might reflect upon the
experience of Elijah in the Book of Kings when at the mouth of a cave he finds himself
shamefully humbled to learn that God’s voice was not found in all the noise and drama
where he expected it but in the delicate breeze. Can we relate to his experience?
The Gospel portraits of Jesus, we see him fleeing to a desolate place to commune with his
Father from whence he comes to heal and to challenge those in need of upbraiding. Jesus,
tested in the desert, rejects the lures of sensationalism, image, and worldly power. Such
resistance to temptation seems tethered to his active ministry of healing and teaching and
essential to it. He sets an example for us.
Jesus encourages us to “enter by the narrow gate” and “to close the door” (of our inner
room) and there pray to our Father in secret who will reward us in secret. He holds up
Mary of Bethany sitting at his feet as choosing the better part while not rejecting the
useful and needed labors of Martha. How can we learn more about and from these
emphases of Jesus, from the interplay of receiving and giving, from the necessity of being
well rooted as to be growing well in our branches as to more carefully love and serve
God’s people?
Jesus calls us to consider the “the lilies of the field,” to know ourselves as cared for by
the God who attends to lilies and sparrows and so much more to us. Can we be more
receptive as to, in the words of spiritual master Thomas Merton “Make way for the Christ
whose smile, like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps in our
paper flesh”? Is it not via the receipt of Christ’s smile that we are empowered to give
away our own? Does not his smile give us confidence in generosity as to trust in the
kindness of others when they smile at us and to smile at others who do not return our
smiles? Does not his smile rout fear and give us the grounding by which to engage an
athletic Christianity that brings relief and change to a suffering world? Being beloved in
holy rest is the lifting of one foot so that the other may serve in loving interactions
animated from their source in Christ. The smile of Christ received is also the smile passed
on, the smile of vast implications that goes on and on.
Discernment in all of this is much needed. Balancing prayer and work raises the question
of whether we do too much of one or too little of the other. In times like these that are
both fearful and divisive, we are sorely tempted to lose our balance in either sphere. How
do we both keep the faith and a lifestyle worthy of it? We might “cast all our anxieties
upon the Lord for he cares for us” and we might do the works of mercy as antidotal to
helplessness and hopelessness. God is inviting, pleading: ‘May I have this delicate
dance?” Perhaps the wallflowers among us can courageously get out on the activist dance
floor, and the sweaty and tired dancers take their places along the wall with deep, calminducing breaths. Wonders may never cease! Our communities devoted to simple living
can be both exciting centers for blessed labors and places where the placid invites us too,
into happy restfulness gifting us with the fruit of needed resilience and peace.
So we shall work, dance and rest, for the Heavenly Vision still shines and can affect a
sparkling, a reflection in and around us, maybe even more than a sparkling. The
HEAVENLY VISION, approximating in its effects that of rising sun upon the land which
gently touches and transforms everyone and everything in its lit-up path, still comes our
way. It may do this more than we know or expect if we more generously welcome
visionary light with its gift and demands.
Grace is ever poured out upon this weary world I believe. Moreover, such grace
gently causes the visionless night to surrender and recede. We must sleep, but rising we
put ourselves to enfleshing holy dreams. So, let us learn of this graceful Light again and
again, for the dance goes on!
Notes
1. Roszak, Theodore, Where the Wasteland Ends, Politics and Transcendence in
Postindustrial Society, (Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972) and
see http://www.globalideasbank.org/B1/B-131.HTML and
http://www.isis.csuhayward.edu/ALSS/ECO/
2. Shi, David E., In Search of the Simple Life: American Voices, Past and Present (Salt
Lake City: Peregrine Smith. 1986), pp. 243-246
3. Maurin, Peter, Easy Essays, (Chicago, Illinois, Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), p. 97
4. Ibid., Introduction by Dorothy Day
5. Information recorded from a note below a photograph (framed and on the wall) of the
"Murphys Hotel," Murphys, Calaveras County, California
6. Maurin, Peter, Easy Essays, Chicago, Illinois, Franciscan Herald Press, 1977
7. Ibid., p. 11
8. Ibid., p. 7
9. Ibid., p. 110
10. Ibid., p. 119
11. For in depth thought about cities and their impact, see Person/Planet, The Creative
Disintegration of Industrial Society, (Garden City, New York, Anchor Press/Doubleday,
1978), especially chapter nine, "In the Empire of Cities" and White, Morton and Lucia,
The Intellectual Versus The City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright,
Cambridge, 38, Massachusetts, The Joint Center for Urban Studies/Harvard University
Press, 1962
12. The Rule of Saint Benedict, "What Are the Instruments of Good Works," in Manual
for Oblates, (Collegeville, Minnesota, Saint John's Abbey Press, 1955), p. 44
13. Vishnewski, Stanley, Wings of the Dawn, (New York, N.Y., The Catholic Worker,
printed by Jasiu Malinowski, 1980), p. 181
14. From the Catholic Worker, December 1979
15. Vishnewski, Stanley, Wings of the Dawn, (New York, N.Y., The Catholic Worker,
printed by Jasiu Malinowski, 1980), p. 176
16. Day, Dorothy, On Pilgrimage, (Grand Rapids, Michigan, William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1997, originally published in 1948 by Catholic Worker Books), p.
50
17. Day, Dorothy, from "The Long Loneliness,” quoted in "Rendering to God: Christian
Nonviolence," Introductions by Brayton Shanley; Edited by Suzanne Belote, Brockton,
Massachusetts, published by Agape Center for the Study and Practice of Christian
Nonviolence, uncopyrighted and undated.
Recommended Bibliography
Maurin, Peter, Catholic Radicalism: Phrased Essays for the Green Revolution, New York
13, N.Y., Catholic Worker Books, 1949
Maurin, Peter, Easy Essays, Chicago, Illinois, Franciscan Herald Press, 1977
Day, Dorothy, Loaves and Fishes, New York, N.Y., Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963
Coles, Robert, Text by; Erikson, Jon, Photographs by, A Spectacle unto the World: The
Catholic Worker Movement, New York, N.Y., The Viking Press, Inc., 1973
Piehl, Mel, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism
in America. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1982
Vishnewski, Stanley, Wings of the Dawn, New York, N.Y., The Catholic Worker, printed
by Jasiu Malinowski, 1980
Shi, David E., The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture,
New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985
_________ Edited and with an Introduction by, In Search of the Simple Life, American
Voices Past and Present, Utah, Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1986
Roszak, Theodore, Where the Wasteland Ends, Politics and Transcendence in
Postindustrial Society, Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972
_____________ Person/Planet, The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, Garden
City, New York, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978
Addenda
What the Catholic Worker Believes
1. The Catholic Worker believes
in the gentle personalism
of traditional Catholicism.
2. The Catholic Worker believes
in the personal obligation
of looking after
the needs of our brother (sister).
3. The Catholic Worker believes
in the daily practice
of the works of Mercy.
4. The Catholic Worker believes
in Houses of Hospitality
for the immediate relief
of those in need.
5. The Catholic Worker believes
in the establishment
of Farming communes
where each one works
according to his ability
and gets according to his need.
6. The Catholic Worker believes
in creating a new society
within the shell of the old
with the philosophy of the new,
which is not a new philosophy
but a very old philosophy,
a philosophy so old
that it looks like new.