DENVER CATHOLIC WORKER HOUSE

NEWSLETTERSPRING 2019

UPS AND DOWNS

This past year has been full of ups and downs. The months between April 2018 and September 2018 were mostly ups. The CW community and the Emmaus Housing Board both decided to pursue the purchase of 1027 26th Street. It is a house embedded in the Emmaus Housing half block, and it was being sold by our good neighbor, Margaret. We had the able assistance of our Board president, Mary Helen Sandoval, in negotiating a fair price and taking care of the details of the sale of the house – a definite “UP”!! Next, our community member Cole Chandler agreed to figure out a strategy for the fund-raising which I, mostly, would execute. Community member Jennifer agreed to keep track of the money. That team met weekly and was actually able to raise the money we needed, our goal being $300,000, which included purchase and renovation of the house, with the $130,000 we already had in contributions following the fire at 2420 Welton. A real “upper” was seeing how much so many people cared about the CW. Next, our good friends from Ave Maria Church swept into our lives and, by working four days a week for the next couple of months, managed to do the repairs needed to transform the house into what we needed to be able to offer hospitality. We continue to do repairs: replacing windows, painting the outside of the house, etc. In October we felt ready to open the house.

Next comes the “downer” which has taken us about eight months to get off our backs. A neighbor raised a question about how the house would be used, a city inspector visited, and the next thing we knew a process of pursuing a zoning permit had been kick-started. Meetings with zoning and planning departments were multiple. Suggested categories were abundant. City personnel were really helpful, but in the end another neighbor opposed our application, which would have given us the ability to house eight people, and the Board of Adjustments denied our application. With some more assistance from city personnel we were able to submit another application, and finally in May we managed to get a permit which allows us to add two more persons, for the grand total of four – half the number of persons we intend to house. All the while we had two empty bedrooms and feel sad that we could do nothing about it. Patience was our most called-upon virtue, and we often talked about reasons

why this was going the way it was. There is some chance that some anticipated zoning code changes could come around January of 2020, allowing us to fill our house without a permit.

The last “downer” has been that the community which gathered to make the decision to buy the house has all but disappeared. They are very good people doing very good things. A couple have remained, but very few are a part of our ongoing life at the CW.

So let’s end on an “upper.” Jennifer, Benjamin, Michelle and myself have met nearly weekly to work out the details of how the house will operate. We definitely have community together, and we do continue to have our Thursday night potluck and prayer. Michelle has been so faithful in cooking and making sure that there is something to eat on Thursdays. And look at the flowers in our little front garden!

Well, I guess it is like many lives – filled with UPS AND DOWNS.

If you would like to see the recent article on the CW in the Denverite, go to this link: https://denverite.com/2019/03/11/how-the-catholic-worker-houses-legacy-helping-people-experiencing-homelessness-spread-across-denver-across-years/

– Anna

ON THE JOURNEY

My spiritual journey was slow to get started because i spent many years looking for God before i finally realized (when i was 21) that i’d been walking with God my whole life. And then it was another six or seven years before i entered into a truly personal relationship with God. But from then on, it’s been increasingly clear to me that my best attempt at faithfulness gives me specific direction for all the major (not to mention minor) choices of my life: where i live, what work i do, who my friends are.

Looking back on this journey, i see an astonishingly obvious pattern of being given entirely new “marching orders” at about ten-year intervals. God sends me off on some new challenge, and i struggle to be faithful, stretching, agonizing, growing spiritually, until i become relatively comfortable and confident in once-foreign circumstances that are now familiar. Then, more or less suddenly, God asks me to do something very different, and i start all over again, struggling, learning, growing some more at ever deeper levels.

I plunged into intentional community living in 1974, then felt unmistakably called to solitary “pilgrimage” in 1981. That turned out to be the beginning of a decade of witness at Rocky Flats, with many stretches in jail and prison. In 1992 i felt freed for more deliberate attention to what i’d much earlier recognized as my vocation – prayer in the midst of the world – and tried to live as a sort of hermit within the Denver Catholic Worker community, my community for the previous ten years. In

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1999 Emmaus Housing happened, and i was caught up into a demanding whirlwind of more than full-time activity: repairing, renovating, landscaping, managing, administering and providing emotional support for rental housing for folks with limited incomes. The whirlwind slowed around 2007, and by 2010 Emmaus was feeling relatively settled and much less time-consuming – though i’ve tended to fill whatever time i have available with Catholic Worker work.

What were the “marching orders” for this past decade? It snuck up on me. Aging. I’ve never had more difficult challenges. Oh so gradually! – but inexorably – i’m no longer able to do everything i’ve always been able to do. It feels like an identity crisis. My personality is founded like a rock on being able to do things, and do them well. Nothing in my spiritual journey has yet managed to dislodge me from that foundation – which isn’t God. It’s myself. I know it’s myself, and it’s not what i want. I want to be founded on God, on the rock which is Christ, and i’ve been stretching toward that for decades, trying to be faithful, trying to surrender everything, to let go of everything, to trust God fully and deeply and unconditionally. It’s appalling how little progress i seem to have made. All those decades of trying (at least wanting to try, even wanting to want to try) to do God’s will with my whole heart seem to have accomplished little more than whittling away at the edges of my stuckness on my own competence.

So, now, i’m less competent. I can’t lift as much as i used to or see as precisely or control my shaking hands enough sometimes for detail work – like smoothing mortar or setting a screwdriver into its slot. I can’t think as clearly or remember as well or cope with much complexity. Aging is actually leaning into me and shoving me, little by little, off my ego-rock. When it finally succeeds – when i finally can’t rely on myself – will i be able to rely freely and completely on God? I fervently hope so. I pray for the grace to be grateful for all these diminishments that help me to overcome myself.

At the same time, Anna also is aging. Our friends are aging. All those who’ve been supporting the Catholic Worker for decades are aging. Who will take over Emmaus when i have to retire? Who will rally around the CW when our generation has moved on? Only God knows. All we can do is trust and hope and keep being as faithful as we can for as long as we live.

– Jennifer

WRITING ABOUT THE “OTHER”

As I revise roughly a dozen short stories—half of which were a part of my MFA thesis at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I graduated last month—I continue to wrestle with the ethics of telling someone else’s story. Many, if not all, of these stories, which I hope to publish as a linked short story collection if I’m able to, were inspired by individuals with whom I lived at the Denver Catholic Worker, on and off, between 2012 and 2016. Some writers say that the way narrative voices come to them is mysterious; “I couldn’t ignore this voice that was speaking to me,” they might say. For me, it’s not so mysterious. These voices are “real”; they are all around me. Recently I’ve torn from various notebooks I’ve kept over the past five-plus years quotes I’ve transcribed—things I’ve

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heard, whether second hand or first hand, that surprised me in some way, like a secret revealing something I needed to remember. I taped these onto a poster board; from across the room, this board looks like a work of art. Maybe a hundred pieces of various types of paper folded in such a way that the most interesting bits of what I’d recorded would be visible, stacked on top of each other like swatches of material, that I might engage with—pull off, read more closely, touch, or simply see again in passing—when I need to be reminded of what I am compelled by, and why.

At the bottom of the board, I’ve taped a picture of a twelve-year-old whom Marcus and I lived with at the Worker around 2013. It is a picture of her, taken in some kind of photo booth at Chuck E. Cheese’s where many of us, including her siblings, her mother, and other Catholic Worker volunteers, celebrated her birthday with her. In the picture, her eyes are heavenward. She is vibrant, even in the muted black and white photo, printed on thin, cheap paper. Last night, I asked Marcus if he remembered how her father stole her birthday money which her grandmother had given her, money which was meant to be used on her party. We managed to make the party happen, and she managed to enjoy herself, to experience a kind of joy that is a gift when witnessed. She is perhaps eighteen now, and for years I’ve imagined dedicating my book—if, God willing, there is one—to her. Of course, I do not know where she is, though I wish I could speak to her again, find out how she and her family are doing. Only now, as I write this, do I realize that perhaps I’ve been writing about her—the fictionalized version, of course, of her—to find out how she is doing, to discover ways in which she is growing, to consider deeply the obstacles she is most certainly facing. To discover both the pain but also the joy she experiences now. When my thesis advisor, author Michael Parker, read a short story about a twelve-year-old getting her period for the first time while she and her family are homeless and living in their car, he said, “You seemed more connected to this character than any others.” While the young lady to whom I’m referring was not, as far as I knew, in that particular crisis, my memory of her—as a girl coming of age in an extremely precarious situation, with more responsibility than I could’ve fathomed having at her age, with little privacy and access to the things she needed—was the heartbeat of that story. And I felt relief that this came through, that my love for her came through. A love that doesn’t aim to fix—a love that attempts to truly see another person.

It’s critical that I try to love my characters in this way if I am writing about experiences other than my own. And it’s important that I avoid, to the best of my ability, writing short-story versions of “poverty porn”; I must do my best to bring the reader as close to my characters as possible, so that there is no illusion that there is an “us” and a “them.” I think this is what I learned most during my time at the Worker, and there’s no greater gift to share with another person. Chances are if they are a white American, they are deluded by the idea that we must think of ourselves first if we are to survive. At Faith Community church, where Marcus and I attend, there’s a song often sung—the lyrics of which I should tack up on my “ideas” poster board—which goes: I need you, you need me / We're all a part of God's body. / Stand with me, agree with me / We're all a part of God's body. / It is his will, that every need be supplied. / You are important to me, I need you to survive.

– Kristen

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EARTH’S (AND OUR) RIGHT TO SURVIVE

For the last two semesters, I’ve been fortunate to spend three to five days a week thinking and talking about biology as a supplemental instructor for an introductory to biology class at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It’s an odd fit. In high school, I failed my science classes—and then dropped out of high school altogether. School—and science in particular—was abstract and boring, I thought. In college, I majored in political science before switching to social work. Outside of school, I spend much of my time focusing on issues of housing and police accountability and considering how communities of faith can combat white supremacy and systemic poverty. Point being, I’m not a biologically minded person.

Thankfully, the class I lead is called “Big Bio 105” and is intended for non-bio majors, which, of course, is why I got drawn to the class. I assumed a non-major course was the easiest way to jump through the hoop of a required biology course, and I expected to dread the class and be done with biology for good. I now work under an amazing biologist named Anne Somers who specializes in studying sea turtles and reptiles, and my job is to help students connect concepts like biodiversity, indicator species, mutation, evolution, and ecological devastation to whatever discipline they might be majoring in. I don’t know how good I am at making those connections, but I’ll share some of my thoughts on the subject here, and how it helps me further understand my own work.

We start by thinking about the ways in which different dominant world views have driven human choices and impacted the North American landscape. We contrast ecocentrism, a perspective within which humans view themselves as members of one important species amongst many, to anthropocentrism, which views species in a hierarchical order with all other species as subservient to humans. As a person concerned with homeless people’s rights, my mind starts making connections here. The prefix “eco” in “ecocentrism” means “home” or “house.” Ecocentrism, then, is something akin to finding ourselves at home in God’s creation and having a deep respect for our role within a larger web of relationships. This helps me think of homelessness as a breakdown of relationships rather than a mere lack of shelter.

Homo species first came to North America over 15,000 years ago. While these first-humans hunted, causing the extinction of many Megafauna species within North America during the Pleistocene Epoch, these indigenous communities of North America maintained a deep intimacy with nature. They treated life as sacred, and their concept of life (“bio”) was certainly not constrained to human life. When Europeans came, however, nature became victim to a process of subjugation and alienation. This was a natural consequence of European obsessions with objectivity and the scientific method, which relies heavily on division and imposed categorization. European ideas of “freedom” were entangled with a hierarchical notion of “sovereignty” or control. Nature, as something wholly separate from the post-enlightenment human, was something to be used, feared, or dominated. As a result, we wreaked havoc on the landscape, eventually destroying 95-97% of North America’s virgin forest. Human thinking, it turns out, is a powerful ecological force.

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From this point forward, we discuss the theory that eurocentrism—more commonly known as white-supremacy—is an extreme form of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism, a philosophy which is foundational to understanding European systems of law and rights, allowed Europeans to view nature primarily for its utility; things without any “use-value” were considered “trash-species” and could therefore be discarded. We talk about the Pacific Yew—a tree native to the Pacific Northwest—which was once understood as a “trash-species” until we learned it contained a chemical compound which has been found to cure ovarian cancer. Once this discovery was made, a once worthless species became one of the most valuable trees in the world, almost overnight. Europeans took this line of thinking to an extreme and began thinking of other humans as less-than, and literally sold people with phenotypically distinct characteristics according to their use-value. The pseudo-scientific classification of races followed.

In 1680, the Virginia House Burgesses offered the first legal definition of white people, which

followed the “one-drop rule.” Whiteness, which was a prerequisite to obtain the full rights of citizenship (as was male-ness at the time) was limited to people of Anglo-Saxon stock who did not have any lineage from indigenous (“savage”) or “negroid” families. But there was the “Pocahontas Exemption,” which allowed the descendants of John Rolfe—known in Disney movies as “John Smith”—to be included in the “white” category, despite Rolfe having married and reared children with a child bride named Matoaka, who we know as “Pocahontas.”

These descendants were included into “whiteness”

because they were wealthy and powerful enough in colonial America. Enslaved Africans, on the other hand, were easier to identify than indigenous persons because of visual attributes, meaning, they couldn’t blend into “whiteness” as easily. The European consciousness became fixated on the fetish that is “white” superiority, which was based on the false idea of “perfection.” Maintaining wholly human-invented categories of “race” justified the system of slavery and withholding equal status from black people.

Later in our class, after we discuss cosmology, the Stelliferous era, and the development of life, we talk about the earth’s five previous mass extinctions. During a mass extinction, a “bottleneck effect” occurs; because most populations die off, the survivors of a mass extinction have much less genetic diversity than previous generations. After some time—millions of years—mutations occur, new species emerge, and biodiversity is restored. But whatever is lost through a mass extinction is lost forever.

The problem with a lack of biodiversity, of course, is the inability of species to adapt to a

changing world around them. Cheetahs, for instance, are believed to have experienced a bottleneck experience and gone nearly extinct at some point, because modern populations across the globe have near uniform genetic compositions, making them highly susceptible to diseases and vulnerable to extinction. Nature turns the logic of white supremacy on its head—there is no such thing as a “perfect” species or life-form. Uniformity, biologically speaking, is a weakness, not a strength. And the closest we come to “perfection” is genetic diversity.

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Thomas Berry, the great Catholic Priest and writer, was from Greensboro, North Carolina,

where I now live. He also happens to be my boss’s late uncle. He wrote, “The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.”

Human activity has caused the earth to enter into another Mass Extinction, which we are in the beginning stages of today. Scientists agree that we cannot stop cataclysmic climate change from happening. We can work to lessen its devastations, but we are already experiencing the effects. And so, this is the paradox of our current moment—how do we talk about hope in the face of the inevitable?

I imagine that it requires us to rethink (repent of) our hierarchical way of valuing life and relating to the rest of creation. Again, I’m thinking of how we create divisions of people, and how this is a natural extension of our relationship with nature. Just recently, Denver residents voted to block a civil rights ballot initiative called the Right to Survive initiative, which would have given people experiencing homelessness the most basic right to legally cover themselves with a blanket without fear of police harassment. If we are willing to sacrifice the basic dignity of people on the streets at the feet of tourism and commerce, how are we ever going to prioritize the right of non-human species to survive? We need to give up on the designations of “trash-people” and “trash-species” altogether.

The great work of our time, I believe, is also the most basic calling of any person of faith—to remember that our lives are inextricably tied to the well-being of others, and that all of life (biology) has intrinsic value. No one is saved alone. As Thomas Berry put it, “The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.”

– Marcus

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(The following article was submitted with the request that it be published without any changes.)

BLACK WOMAN DIAMOND

. Sitting .

And sat in a sunny sci fi window cell of lights.

Looking at a old rusty train. On a one way ticket show. 2 go 100 yards to the next rail stop of no go. (To go nowhere once again.)

The things to have a black woman diamond woman do. She got tired of washing the ears of her brothers and sisters. She gave them brushes & combs so they could do their own God damn hair and ears.

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Then that damn woman got on a large boat and sat in the tub of it till it blew up like a fire cracker never to be rebuilt again.

That damn black woman went to live in life’s years of hell.

Somehow the light came through that broken window cell. And the way she raced around in the light with love in her eyes & the weakness in her arms.

Gave strength to her legs to travel to the man that a lover of love could only know. All this time.

The Black Woman Diamond is in a broken window cell of what is love. She jumped to love the only man she loved this whole damn life of living love of vision glass of a window cell.

A short 20 … 29.– Butt Loop

KAIROS OUTSIDE

Probably most of you have heard about Kairos retreats being given in prisons. Kairos Outside retreats are similar. These retreats evolved out of the Cursillo Movement. They call them 4th day retreats because the retreat is 3 days but the 4th day is the rest of our lives.

Back to Kairos Outside. Two weeks ago I was a team member for the first Kairos Outside retreat in Colorado. Women who are impacted by the incarceration of a loved one are invited to participate. There were 15 women varying in age from senior citizens to 20-somethings. They had fathers, sons, brothers, husbands or boyfriends in prisons.

It seems that this population is greatly neglected by our society. Most people don't want to hear about someone's loved one being incarcerated. These women are often alone and isolated in their

struggles. They need a place to share their pain in a non-judgmental situation where they can be loved and supported. These needs are definitely met during a Kairos Outside retreat.

The women arrived on Friday evening somewhat cautiously, the pain and stress of their lives showing on their faces. By Sunday afternoon they were smiling and happy. During the retreat each woman had been treated with dignity and respect. Their pain had been received lovingly, and their words had been heard by a supportive and caring group of friends, and they accepted that Jesus loves them. Kairos Outside didn't end that Sunday afternoon. Support will continue throughout the 4th day as well.

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The organization, preparation and carrying out of the retreat was amazing. There were many people involved. During the retreat about 25 team members were present. We all had jobs to do, and we did them in secure and competent ways. We had been through training and team building.

When someone called me and asked if I would be on the Kairos Outside #1 team, I said I would have to think about it because I really didn't want to get involved in another big project. I didn't have to think very long though. The next day I committed to being on the Kairos Outside #1 team. I have already committed to being on the Kairos Outside #2 team. That retreat will be held in about one year. This is an ecumenical program. For more information, go to kairosofcolorado.org

Peace to all, and have a great Summer!– Sue

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Denver Catholic Worker House1023 26th StreetDenver, Colorado 80205(303)296-6390denvercatholicworker@gmail.com