I’ve been meaning to write a first post here on our website to introduce myself. Of course, time has been marching (often sprinting) along this summer, and I both can’t believe how much the time has flown since I arrived here at St. Martin de Porres House on May 24 and how much has happened over the past three months.
I am from Minnesota, but come to St. Martin de Porres House from a season of a lot of pilgrimage: I spent six months at my grandmother’s house in Raleigh, North Carolina after her death in October, where I helped my family with the packing up, tending to, and caring for a house after a death. My grandparents (my grandfather passed away January 1, 2016) lived in the house we called The Rancho for 30 years: and their garage was filled with artifacts from their 60 plus years of marriage along with many family mementos from my great-grandfather’s house once my grandmother cleared out his old lake house. Some of the treasures found included family photos, wedding portraits, and a seemingly undetonated grenade from World War II. I’m currently working on an article for U.S. Catholic about death and dying (burying the dead is a corporal work of mercy that Catholic Workers definitely take part in, but it’s certainly not as common as feeding someone hungry or offering a shower) and one of the themes coming up in my interviews is how divorced we are in the United States from the process of preparing a body for death. Until the Civil War, washing and wrapping a body for its burial was something every family would have done for themselves. I remember being struck by the many family burial plots in my grandmother’s neighborhood, outside of Raleigh. These little plots, on the side of the road, wedged in between a new development, overlooking a strip mall were reminders that death, like birth, is a family affair: to welcome someone into this world or see them out of it after a long life is a sweet and happy privilege.
But before I was in Raleigh, I lived in two different intentional communities in Chicago—St. Francis House Catholic Worker and Jesus People USA (JPUSA). I moved to Chicago from New York City with my boyfriend James who was a founding community member of Canterbury House—a house of hospitality at Mary Mother of God Parish.
I had lived in New York City since 2014 (with a brief return to South Bend to study a Masters in Theology at my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame), and so though I’m a born-and-raised midwesterner, returning east feels a bit like a homecoming.
It’s a great gift to come into St. Martin de Porres at this kairos moment—a season of change and grace. Even since I first visited the house in February, the amount of fixing, brightening, polishing, transforming and turning the house into a place of true hospitality is astonishing. It’s exciting—if challenging—to live in Allison Hill, to see the wounds of what Dorothy Day would call our “this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering.” To see the ugliness that overwhelms the neighborhood, that doesn’t reflect the beauty of our neighbors. One of the Catholic Worker mottos is to bring order out of chaos—and beauty out of ugliness. One just has to look at the garden out back and see the love that brings beauty out of a trash heap. That’s the sort of beauty that Day believed would save the world.
One of the highlights of the summer was a Harrisburg CW dinner with our Catholic Worker friends from Lancaster and Bishop Timothy Senior. Not all bishops prioritize the poor and the social programs of the dioceses—like Catholic Charities and Catholic Campaign for Human Development—like Bishop Senior does. We were grateful for his interest in the work of the Catholic Worker and his support.
We had a beautiful house Mass in the dining room, with a print of Dorothy Day by artist Connor Miller watching over us. Connor had presented the print to Martha Hennessy, Dorothy’s granddaughter, when she spoke at the National Eucharistic Congress. Martha generously gave it to the house. She said she long wanted to visit Naed here in Harrisburg, and we’re hoping that this winter she can come visit to see Naed’s legacy.
Patti Grady of the Notre Dame Club of Harrisburg had loaded me up with groceries and so I thankfully had a great dinner to prepare for the bishop—baked chicken, potato salad, and veggies and a charcuterie plate from our Lancaster friends. After dinner and a blessing of the garden, we celebrated a belated birthday for Heather. It was a truly beautiful evening of fellowship and breaking bread together—the sort of community that Dorothy Day talks about at the end of The Long Loneliness. We saw that the very next night, again, at our first Roundtable Discussion on the roots of the Catholic Worker movement, where we crammed more than 25 folks into the same dining room (and spillover into the living room). Rachel Bryson covered the evening for The Catholic Witness.
As I wrote my own blog, after a Catholic Worker road trip this spring, there are no strangers in Christ. We live in these webs of connection and belonging that come with the territory of being Christian. I have been so inspired by the community and connection that surrounds this house here in Harrisburg. And I have been overwhelmed with the love that I have been embraced with here in Harrisburg, I am grateful, and I look forward to cultivating these seeds of love, to see, despite the chaos and ugliness, what beauty will bloom.