[Announce] How to start a Catholic Worker House and why you should do so.

[Robert Waldrop]

Several years ago, in the spring, I wrote the essay below.  For some reason, I read it again tonight, and decided that it is the best response I could make to the roaring fear of the present churning of the financial markets. Don't panic! we are told, by breathless commentators who are obviously themselves on the edge of panic.  The Empire is strong!  We will survive!

Well, maybe so, but we need more Catholic Worker houses. There are a lot of poor people already and the way things are going, there will soon be more, and many of them will be "newly poor".

http://www.justpeace.org/may152003.htm

How to start a Catholic Worker House and why you should contemplate doing so. 
An essay and some poetry on the Feasts of Saints Isidore and Maria:

Today is the Feast of Saints Isidore and Maria, patrons of farm workers and gardeners. It is a wonderful day to feast on the bounty of the earth and pray blessings on your garden and all farm crops growing so bravely and with great beauty this spring. 

Gardening is a true blessing, and even though it takes a certain amount of time and effort, which is to say, manual labor, it is not at all an onerous burden. The rewards are so tangible. Our gardens this year are more beautiful than ever. We have had a steady flow of color since March, the yellows of the dandelions, bright reds of the crimson clover, deep purple of the vetch, a yellow so bright it is almost metallic on the wild geraniums. (Some people think that they are weeds!!!!! They are so beautiful, have been blooming now for longer than a month, and are showing no signs of fading. It's also a plant created by God to provide medicine and dyes.) 

There was pink on the peach trees and white on the apple trees, and now there is a bright lavender purple on the rose bushes and a light lavender on the comfrey. The wild volunteer sunflowers are already blooming, and the maximilien sunflowers and confection sunflowers we've planted are growing tall and are promising abundant blossoms to come, as are the day lilies. Yellow and purple have bloomed the iris, and white elder flowers are just now opening. Yellow shone from the clove currants, and presently shines from the tomato plants and lingers on the turnips, while white blossoms covered the plum trees and bushes. The onions and chives are about to open round globes of white and purple flowers, standing tall in the garden like slender skyscrapers with futuristic globes on top. 

And of course everywhere there is green, a myriad of shades. silver green on the horehound, bright green on the horseradish, forest green on the garlic, onions, shallots, and walking onions. Am abundance of textures are woven into the tapestry with the leaves of the plants, the paths of wood chips and borders of logs of various sizes and stages of weathering, and the occasional brick or fieldstone.

Besides the color we have been blest to feast on a constant yield of food from this garden since April, crisp salads with ten and more ingredients, impossibly sweet and perfectly ripe strawberries. sweet tart purple mulberries. mints and sorrels and docks and lettuces and herbs, oregano, sage, thyme, winter savory, rosemary, tarragon, chocolate, lemon, apple and pepper mints. 

And to think that some people look down on the manual labor that produces beauty and wisdom such as this. Our holy Father St. Benedict was right. Ora et Labora. Prayer and Work. I like to do them both at the same time and recommend that to everyone. Practice the presence of God and your work will never be quite the same, whatever it is you are doing. 

These sacred anchors help us find balance in our busy and sometimes chaotic lives. Go here, do this, drive there, do that, there is no end to the things we all have to do. 

For many, it is an increasing struggle to just survive as jobs disappear and economies crash. 

For the last few years, farmers have been receiving at times historically low prices for their produce. Yet, has anyone noticed any real decline in prices in the grocery stores? I sure haven't, and even though we get most of our household food from farmers these days, we buy a lot of groceries to give to the poor, as much as seven or eight hundred dollars each and every month. I can tell you for a fact that five hundred dollars does not go as far as it used to when it comes to buying basic staple foods like flour, oil, rice, sugar, beans, corn meal, and etc. to give to the poor. 

People talk about unemployment not being all that high, but can someone give me a reason to trust the government's unemployment figures? Like their CPI calculations, or the USGS estimates of world oil reserves, the unemployment rate is a highly politicized statistic. It only counts people "actively looking for work," and if you look for work for X number of months, and still don't have a job, "poof" you disappear from the official labor statistics, you are no longer a worker, you are "long term unemployed".

The minimum wage is certainly not a living wage, and while the government reports claim that inflation is low, that is not what people are experiencing with the things they have to buy with cash out of their pocket, like energy, medical care, and food.

Things are worse for more people than the government's statistics suggest. Empires always rig their statistics to make themselves look better than they really are. Washington is no different in that regard from the old Soviet Union.

I despair of a solution to these huge nearly incomprehensible mega trends going on out there in the worldwide imperial culture of death.

Fortunately, dealing with that whole situation out there isn't my job. And there is no solution "out there" anyway that proceeds from the top down in human terms. That's what we're all looking for, a cavalry to come to the rescue, a Great Man that will ride in wearing a white hat and set everything aright. We might as well stop doing that because we aren't going to find what we are looking for out there anywhere anyway. We might as well learn right now that we are the ones we are waiting for to rescue us. To paraphrase Pogo, "We have seen de Cavalry, and it be us!"

Meditate carefully about this. look at the world as it in fact is, and try to understand and even visualize the spiritual forces that are at work for good and and the demonic forces working for bad in the present situation. And then think of this wisdom: "I fall before the overwhelming strength of my adversary, but in the act of my collapse, his defeat is made certain." Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, nothing happens. With God, humility and meekness overcome power and violence.

Saints Isidore and Maria never went to Washington. Yet today there is a feast in the Church calendar that remembers them and the holiness of their vocation of tending the land as farmers and gardeners. They remain powerful in their work for justice and peace even to this very day.

And the situation these days is increasingly grave. The old Republic is near death; for the time being in Washington DC the Empire has won and will have its day in the sun, but it will pass away as all empires have before it. Given the velocity of world events these days, the quality of the empire's bipartisan political leadership, the mendacity and venality of our media, and the behavior of our cultural and economic elites, it is not likely to be a long reign. 

These days, It is better to be friends and companions with earth worms and lady bugs, than it is to have the ear of Congress. And the earthworms and lady bugs are also likely to be a more fruitful relationship. I will continue to write letters and sign petitions, and watch the signs of these times unfold before us. But no one should mistake where my effort is going. Ora et labora, where you are, wherever it is that you live, that is the place to build the civilization of life and love. I certainly have more trust in my earthworms and lady bugs than I do in Congress, and advise others to do the same.




The Wizard of Oz said to Dorothy and her companions, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Indeed, what are all those who are "behind the curtains" manipulating the affairs of this world to God? The psalmist sung, many centuries ago, "The Lord knows human plans, they are only puffs of air."

The promise of the Gospels is that the meek will inherit the earth, and they will do this by the grace, power, wisdom, splendor, and beauty of God, not by themselves becoming sharks able to navigate and manipulate the imperial system. 

The peasants will receive this inheritance because those who account themselves as powerful and mighty in human terms are on the road to collapse due to the inherent contradictions and unsustainabilty of their imperial system, which has become so complex that increasing investments in more complexity are yielding increasingly small and marginal and often negative returns. Our leaders are like teenagers with whiskey and car keys. Already, in just the last three years, there has been a lot of water under that bridge; many who were rich, powerful, arrogant, high and mighty have been brought down low and humbled.

These are classic historical signs of a civilization heading towards collapse, and if you open your eyes and really look at that imperial system out there, you will see it is full of so many cracks and fissures and contradictions that every moment that it does not come crashing down is a wonder in and of itself. It looks so scary and magnificent and brave and bold, bolts of lightening flying around and clouds of smoke going up from impressive art deco statuary, but in reality its just a bunch of guys manipulating levers hiding behind a curtain, afraid that we are going to notice them and see them for what they really are, and thus they will lose their power over us. So they try to keep us scared, on edge, worried, afraid. Don't go there and play that game.

The American Empire is a naked emperor that stands astride there across the world, one foot on Washington, DC, the other on the oil fields of the Middle East, Supreme Lord so it thinks of all it can see. Alas for the imperialists, it is indeed triumphalistic pride, arrogance, and hubris that go before a fall. We will not be an exception to this historical truth.

We will find salvation from all this not by our own clever manipulation of inside the beltway politics, but rather by learning how to do small beautiful things for God at the grassroots, where even as we speak a civilization of life and love is growing in a myriad of hidden places everywhere in the world. There are some who shine brightly and beckon others to follow, others are quiet, hidden, secret; they are what by the grace of God stand between us and chaos. 

This Kingdom of God, which even now is upon us, can be found in the secret bags of groceries left on porches at night, good deeds done, prayers said, masses celebrated, chants sung, meditations contemplated, gardens planted, devotions practiced, flowers growing, trees towering, kind words said and repeated often. The Kingdom of God is here and there, then and now. You find it in choirs, singing Exultate Justi at rehearsal preparing for Ascension Sunday. It is where priests and peoples celebrate mass, and with Benedictine monks in the eastern Oklahoma mountains chanting the liturgical hours. And then there are the people who come to our house three Saturdays a month to deliver food to people in need who don't have transportation to get to a regular food bank.