by Renée
We are now living in a real Dark Age,
and one of the reasons why the modern age
is so dark,
is because
too few Irish have the light.
— Peter Maurin, “Irish Culture”
A St. Patrick’s Day tradition James and I have developed over the past couple of years is celebrating the Irish-American holiday with a roundtable dedicated to Peter Maurin’s articulation of “the Green Revolution.”
The only way to prevent a Red Revolution/ is to promote a Green Revolution/the only way to keep people from looking up to Red Russia of the twentieth century/is to make them look up to Green Ireland of the seventh century.
— Peter Maurin, “Red and Green”
So, on Sunday, we gathered in the basement of St. Francis of Assisi, after our Sunday evening compline, to discuss Peter Maurin and what he meant by the Green Revolution. We enjoyed some delicious bangers and mash and corned beef and cabbage provided by Patti. We read some of Peter’s Easy Essays dedicated to the reconstruction of the social order modeled by the Irish monks and their “Green Revolution” in the Middle Ages. Our multi-generational gathering clarified what each of their generations meant by “the green revolution.”
But the Green Revolution, to Peter Maurin, is the synthesis that Irish monks and scholars developed and spread all over Europe—from London to Istanbul—was a life based on three pillars, which he calls “the three C’s: Cult, Culture, and Cultivation.
As we read his essays, I reflected on how each of these pillars is incarnate in our lives at St. Martin de Porres House.
Cult
That is to say, liturgy
Not only have we been praying compline on the Sunday nights of Lent at St. Francis (all are welcome!), we pray morning prayer in community before Monday morning Mass at St. Francis of Assisi. And, after Mass on Tuesdays, we gather in our living room for morning prayer. Sometimes, our group is just two or three people and, other times, the living room is full.
Sometimes, we’re all comfortable praying in English, other times, we’re translating back and forth into French and Spanish. Yesterday, as we prayed the Our Father together, each person prayed in their native tongue. Our voices blended together, English and Spanish fusing into one language of prayer. Unity is a precious gift to find these days—even in the liturgy!—so we savored that rare treasure: an ephemeral moment of common unity.
Culture
That is to say, literature
The past week was a rich one, full of formal clarifications of thought, like the Roundtable Discussion on Sunday night, and more informal—fixing the problems of the world around a kitchen table, discussing the newspaper—just talking through things, trying to understand where we are in the world, how we got here, and what we can do to make our world more just and our neighbor’s lives “better and better off.” One highlight has been our book club with a few Allison Hill pastors on Emmanuel Mounier’s The Personalist Manifesto. Reading this key text for the Catholic Worker’s philosophy over the past couple of months has helped me learn more about this mysterious philosophy, “personalism,” that is at the heart of the Catholic Worker movement. In short, personalism asks us to create economic and civic systems that are all based on the fundamental reality of each person’s inherent dignity.
If you sit with a neighbor in a Social Security waiting room, at the DMV, trying to get housing or signed up for food stamps or health care, you quickly see how very much not oriented toward the dignity of each person our current system is. Russell Moore, writing in Christianity Today, said:
The tech-bros have inherited the earth, for now. That’s not their fault. It’s ours. We have believed what they told us about ourselves: that we are ultimately just data and algorithms to be decoded, appetites to be appeased. And because of that, we’ve looked for programmers and coders to keep our simulation going—what previous generations would have called “gods.”
We are so often treated as numbers rather than images of God, possessed with our own unique vocation and the free will to live it out. As Dorothy so often said: the goal of the Worker is to make a world where it is easier to be good. It shouldn’t be this hard. And the lives of the poor need not be as miserable as they are made to be.
Cultivation
That is, agriculture
It’s been quite a week for cultivation! Paul and Dean—Tuesday morning prayer regulars—took on the massive undertaking of helping us transport a 500-gallon rain barrel from the old Gather the Spirit for Justice garden into the backyard to help water the community farm. (Thank you, Gather the Spirit for Justice for giving it to us!).
We must have looked quite the sight on Market Street, rolling it down off its perch and into the bed of Paul’s pick-up truck, and rolling it down the stairs in the backyard. We hoped to get it set up in time to catch the water for our massive rainstorm on Sunday, but, after examining our leaky gutter, James determined we needed to replace the gutter entirely before the rain barrel will be functional.
And today marks an important anniversary: last week on Wednesday we got the call that our ten chicks had arrived at the post office! I drove over to get them, and, as soon as I walked in the door, could hear their peeping and chirping coming from their small box.
James had been working on a box for them to live in indoors before they are big enough to go outside, and so he sped up production on their crate. Now they’re living in an avian penthouse in the dining room: it’s hard to believe that just a week ago they arrived in a tiny cardboard box: they’ve been growing quickly. Four of them have names so far, courtesy of neighbors and Joshua Students who have visited them: Jaquon, Queen, Pikachu and the runt, Lazarus.
Even in just a week with them, I can see how “shortening the supply chain” between us and the earth, as our friend Colin calls it in his book We Are Only Saved Together, creates a different way of thinking about food, the weather, time, and opens up new avenues of concern and care for the environment around us.
