The Simple Life and the Catholic Worker: A Folk Testament By Michael Boover Seed Clarifications & Publications Annunciation House 6 Strasburg Road Worcester, MA 01607-1620 (508) 753-8974 mbhoundofheaven@gmail.com 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.