by Eboo Patel
Like everything else that seemed good, I was convinced that the Catholic Worker movement had faded away in the 1960s.
“Oh, no,” somebody told me when I made an offhand reference to the Catholic Worker and bemoaned its disappearance. “There are still many, many Catholic Worker houses left. In fact, there is one here in Champaign.”
“What’s it like?” I asked, shocked.
“Part shelter for poor folks, part anarchist movement for Catholic radicals, part community for anyone who enters. Really, it’s about a whole new way of living. You’ve got to go there to know.”
From the moment I entered St. Jude’s, it was clear to me that this was different from any other place I’d been. I couldn’t figure out whether it was a shelter or a home. There was nobody doing intake. There was no executive director’s office. White, black, and brown kids played together in the living room. I smelled food and heard English and Spanish voices coming from the kitchen. The first thing somebody said to me was, “Are you staying for dinner?”
“Yes,” I said.
The salad and stew were simple and filling, and the conversation came easy. After dinner, I asked someone, “Who are the staff here? And who are the residents?”
“That’s not the best way to think about this place,” the person told me. “We’re a community. The question we ask is, ‘What’s your story?’ There is a family here who emigrated from a small village in Mexico. The father found out about this place from his Catholic parish. They’ve been here for four months, enough time for the father to find a job and scrape together the security deposit on an apartment. There are others here with graduate degrees who believe that sharing their lives with the needy is their Christian calling. If you want to know the philosophy behind all of this, read Dorothy Day.”
I found some of Day’s old essays and a copy of her autobiography. In those writings, I found an articulation of what it meant to be human, to be radical, and to be useful. Recalling the thoughts of her college days, Day wrote, “I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn’t see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt and the blind. And those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too.”
Elsewhere in her autobiography, she wrote: “Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place? … Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?”
Here was what I had been seeking for so long: a vision of radical equality—all human beings living the abundant life—that could be achieved through both a direct service approach and a change-the-system politics. For so long, those two things had existed in separate rooms in my life—a different group of friends, a different way of talking for each. Here was a movement that combined them. Finally, the two sides of myself could be in the same room.
The most radical part about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement was the insistence that everything the movement did was guided by a single force: love. “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community,” Day wrote at the end of her autobiography. I felt as if she was talking to me one-on-one. I was tired of raging. It left me feeling empty, and what did it achieve anyway? I wanted to improve people’s lives because I loved humanity, not because I hated the system. Sometimes, I thought, my activist friends hated the system more than they loved humanity.
The Catholic Worker became my community. I started making weekly visits to St. Jude House while I was in Champaign. And the summer after my sophomore year, Jeff Pinzino and I did a seven-week road trip through Catholic Worker houses ranging from the Northeast to the Deep South. I cut up carrots for the soup kitchen at St. Joseph’s House in New York City; demonstrated at the Pentagon with Catholic Workers in Washington, D.C.; heard the inspiring story of a Vietnam veteran in Atlanta who had climbed back from addiction and mental illness and was now helping others do the same.
More than anything, I marveled at the spirit with which Catholic Workers carried out their tasks. The only word to describe it is grace. I was accustomed to seeing the staff at social service agencies get frustrated, even angry, with the people they were working with (whom they referred to, strangely, as “clients”). I never saw that at a Catholic Worker house. The Houses of Hospitality were, by and large, cultures of kindness. And unlike most of the other demonstrations I went to, which were dominated by anger and self-righteousness, speakers at Catholic Worker demonstrations spoke even their most radical statements with an air of humility and love. When I demonstrated at the Pentagon with a group of Catholic Workers, they didn’t shout about how evil soldiers were; they sang hymns and said they would pray for the military brass walking in. Even when Dorothy Day referred to America as a “filthy, rotten system,” she somehow managed to do it in a way that called for hopeful, loving change, not anger and rage.
I was intoxicated by Day’s vision and felt deep admiration for the Catholic Workers I met. I found myself asking constantly, “What is the source of the love you so often speak of?” Their answer came in one three-letter word that I had rarely heard during my time in college: God.
In The Call of Service, Robert Coles described a conversation between one of his Harvard undergraduates and Day in the late 1970s. The young man, a science major, told Day, “You’ve done so much already for these people.”
“The Lord has done it all; we try to be adequate instruments of His,” she answered.
“Well, it’s been you folks who have done all this,” the young man insisted, pointing to the soup kitchen in which Day and other Catholic Workers were busily preparing a meal, skeptical of calling in a supernatural power for what seemed clearly to be a human action.
Day was gentle but equally insistent that God was the source of her work. “Oh, when we pray, we are told—we are given answers to our questions. They [the answers] come to us, and then we know He has sent us the thoughts, the ideas. They all don’t just belong to us. He lives in our thoughts, the Lord does.”
According to Day, all we humans can do is be grateful for the opportunity to hear God’s call and ask for the strength to answer it. For Day, that answer came in the form of prayer and work, which to her amounted to much the same thing:
I may be old and near the end, but in my mind, I’m the same old Dorothy trying to show the good Lord that I’m working for Him to the best of my ability. I pray that God will give me a chance to pray to Him the way I like to pray to Him. If I pray by making soup and serving soup, I feel I’m praying by doing. When I’m in bed, and the doctor has told me firmly to stay there for a few days, I don’t feel I’ve earned my right to pray for myself and others, to pray for these poor folks who come here for a square meal.
My college years were about entering alien territory intrepidly. What was a suburban, middle-class, Indian kid doing in Marxist circles and homeless shelters? I wore the unexpectedness of it all like a badge of honor. Sometimes I wondered whether shock value was more important to me than social justice.
The Catholic Workers were the least likely circle for a kid like me. They were more radical than the Marxist intellectuals I knew, more gentle than the social service types I volunteered with, more intelligent than the professors who taught my classes, and more effective than the activists I protested with. And yet I felt so at ease with them. Reading Dorothy Day, I realized why: they knew that God had created humanity with the hope that we would achieve the Kingdom on earth. Their purpose for doing this work was in their bones and emerged with every breath. Once one realizes that, what can one do but obey with joy? As William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “[Faith is] the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
One of my discomforts with radical politics was that it deified the indi
vidual. The underlying belief of all the radicals I knew was that our reasons, our methods, our ability to help others all came from our own minds. We were so smart and smug. I even felt a peculiar similarity with the Jeopardy battles my friends and I had had in high school, except the game with my radical friends was who could most elegantly apply Fanon to current events. Day’s view that God is the source of love, equality, and connection—and that He requires His ultimate creation, humanity, to achieve the same on earth—made sense to me in a deep place, perhaps the same place I was trying to fill in high school by fasting.
When Catholic Workers asked about my religion, I told them that I didn’t really have one. They were happy for me to participate in their prayer life anyway, and they made it clear that I should do whatever felt comfortable to me and no more. I found the singing and praying and moments of silence deeply inspiring. I bowed my head and followed along as best I could. But I always found myself standing at a slight angle to the core symbols of the Christian faith—the Cross, the blood, the Resurrection—and I never felt any desire to convert. Nobody in the Catholic Worker movement ever suggested that I do so.
They saved me just the same. I realized this years later, when I met Bill Ayers. I was working in Chicago and interested in new models of youth development. Several people suggested I go see Bill, a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a key figure in both local school reform and the small schools movement. “Where have I heard that name before?” I thought, and suddenly I made the connection to the Weather Underground, the radical sixties group that had planted bombs in federal buildings as a strategy for bringing down the system.
Bill had recently published his memoir, Fugitive Days. The similarities between our stories was scary. We were both middle-class kids from Glen Ellyn who had discovered the dark side of America in college and responded with rage. We both had contempt for liberals and romanticized the violent rebellions of John Brown and Che Guevara. We were both familiar with the Jeffersonian line that the people should rebel during every era. We both fancied ourselves in the vanguard.
Sitting at the kitchen table one night in 1968, talking about the death machine that was the U.S. government, a new guy in Bill’s circle, Terry Robbins, had suggested that things had gone too far and it was time to bomb the pigs into the Stone Age. At first Bill and his friends resisted. That’s crazy, they said. “There’s got to be a place in this revolution for a man of principled violence,” Terry responded. Bill found the image intoxicating, and he spent the ensuing years doing violent battle with cops, learning to build bombs, and calling for all “mother country radicals” to bring the war home with acts of violence on American soil. He lost several friends and a decade of his life in the process.
What if I had been at that kitchen table that night? What if a Terry Robbins figure had crossed my path, showed me his sketchbook full of bomb designs, encouraged me to study the Blaster’s Handbook? At nineteen, I was already convinced that America understood only violence. I was just this side of believing that it was my responsibility to inflict it. I only needed a nudge.
My father couldn’t make it all the way through Fugitive Days. “It reminds me too much of you,” he said. “It scares the shit out of me, what you could have become.”
It had been chance—grace—that I had sat at the Catholic Worker table and it had been Dorothy Day’s book that had fallen into my hands.
On our summer road trip, Sarah and I visited Emily Shihadeh in San Francisco. She received us warmly, with big hugs, and after spending a few minutes with Sarah, she declared that taking her advice and making my move was the smartest thing I had ever done. Then came the platefuls of hummus, falafel, and pita. “I love Middle Eastern food,” Sarah said.
“This is Arab food, Palestinian food,” Emily responded, growing suddenly cool. “The Israelis occupy our land, but they cannot take our culture.”
Sarah understood that comment in context, as illustrative of the sentiment of the people who had lost something, in some cases everything, when Israel had triumphed. She did not grow defensive or angry. Instead, she resolved to explore the Palestinian side of the matter during her semester in Israel.
I visited her in Israel, at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, where a few years later a close friend of hers was in the cafeteria during a suicide bombing. We floated in the Dead Sea, wandered through Jerusalem’s markets (where Sarah bought a plaque for my parents with IN THE NAME OF GOD written in Arabic on it), ate hot bagels with savory zatar (an aromatic spice mixture), went to the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock, visited the Way of the Cross. In Haifa, we walked through the gardens of the Baha’i Temple and listened to an earnest young man in pleated khaki pants tell us about the need for unity.
Sarah delved into the Palestinian situation and into Jewish history in Israel. She was heartbroken by both. I knew little about either. Sarah took me on a tour of the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The tour guide was a friend of hers, a young American Jew who had moved to Israel, what Jews call “making aliyah.” He and the Arab kids who gathered spoke in both Hebrew and Arabic, talking about life in Arab villages, the simple pleasures of backgammon games and Arabic coffee on Sunday afternoons, the frustration of waiting for hours at Israeli checkpoints on their way to visit family in the West Bank. Sarah put her hands over her face when she heard this. “I hate that their lives are like this,” she told me later.
Our tour guide at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, was another American who had made aliyah. He came across as a smooth intellectual, mentioning his two PhDs in passing. After he had caught us in the web of his seductive intellect, he carefully injected his right-wing poison. He told stories of the destruction of Kristallnacht, the livelihoods lost, the intimidation of children and women in Jewish neighborhoods, the fear of men that it would only get worse. He ended the story in a flat voice, saying that the world had done nothing then, and why should Jews expect the world to pay attention to their suffering now? He walked us through the various halls of Yad Vashem, telling more stories of suffering, bringing half the group to tears, and continuing to press his particular politics. “Oslo,” he said, and shook his head in disgust. “Haven’t we Jews heard this before? Land for peace. It didn’t work when Neville Chamberlain, that spineless wimp, tried it sixty years ago. Look what it led to then. Who can believe it will lead to something different now?”
I knew little about international peacemaking and nothing about the Oslo Accords, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, but I could tell a spoiler when I saw one. Sarah was as furious with him as I was. “There are so many people who are trying to create a just situation here, and people like him are working to defeat us every day,” she told me on the way out.
Jewish identity issues had always played a large role in Sarah’s life, and they became paramount in Israel. “The most important thing to people here is that you marry another Jew,” she told me. “The intermarriage rate between Jews and non-Jews is so high now that some Jewish leaders are saying that the Jews are killing Judaism ourselves. They would rather a Jew eat a bacon double cheeseburger than marry outside the faith.” In her own gentle way, Sarah was telling me that she was struggling with our relationship. She felt as if she had an obligation to her tradition, her people. I was too daft to catch her drift.
We went to a Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem with a group of young American and Israeli Jews. The conversation shifted back and forth between graduate school plans and social justice issues. These were the things that college students and recent graduates talked about all the time. I felt completely at home. I wound up in a conversation with a young Jewish woman in a long skirt. It looked like a religious outfit. I asked her about it, and she explained to me that she was an Orthodox Jew and followed a tradition called shomer negiah. In her community, unmarried men and women could not date, could not touch, could not be in the same room together unsupervised. “I will
marry a Jew,” she told me with total certainty, “and I will do it according to the dictates of my tradition.”
She motioned toward Sarah and said, “The girl you came with, she is your girlfriend? She is a Jew?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you, what are you?”
“Nothing really, I guess. I’m exploring different spiritualities right now,” I told her.
“Will you and Sarah marry?” she asked.
“Um, we don’t really talk about that right now,” I said. “I mean, we’re together. That feels like a lot for where we are at in our lives.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at me with some suspicion. I realized that she was younger than both Sarah and me, but she did not consider marriage too much of a responsibility for her. It would be an honor and a duty for her to be married; it would be carrying out the will of her community and continuing with the practices of her tradition.
“And if you get married, what will your wedding be like? Whose tradition will it follow?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t something I had thought about. It didn’t seem important.
Sarah had been listening to our conversation, and I could feel her getting increasingly uncomfortable. At the mention of our wedding, she got up abruptly, disrupting the conversation she was in, and said to me, “I want to go.” I could tell she was mad, but I had no idea why. I got our coats, hailed a taxi, and waited for her to lay into me.
“Do you have any idea what you were doing tonight?” she said. “That girl you were talking to is a devout Orthodox Jew. She lives by rules that were handed down by God. She is part of a tradition that is thousands of years old. Every question she asked you was a ridiculing of me. There was an invisible conversation that you were totally oblivious to, whose main theme was that Sarah is a bad Jew because she is dating a goy. The only reason she kept on asking you questions was to get more details on how wayward I am.”