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The Rev. John P. McNamee My Catholic seminary of the 1950’s, like many of that era, was very like a Trappist Monastery: no radios, no television, no magazines, hardly a newspaper. The closest thing to a newspaper that I could find was in the Reading Room: the tabloid-size Catholic Worker of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. This Gospel of the Last Sunday of the Church Year was and is, without a doubt, THE GOSPEL of the Catholic Worker Movement. The Final Round Up, if you will. Christ the King coming undisguised, “in all His glory,” is the phrase to tell us that He has been here all along quite disguised: I was hungry…sick…homeless…in jail…Whatever you did or not do for these you did or neglected to do for Me. Dorothy Day’s friend, Peter Maurin, was fond of saying: “the poor are the ambassadors of God.” The novelist Flannery O’Connor has one of her characters say: “Christ? Christ is that ragged figure in the back of my mind darting from tree to tree.” He is elusive in his disguises. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and Catholic Worker are whom I shall bless and blame for these thirty years in North Philadelphia where I live as well as work. Where weekdays and weekends, morning, noon and evening and night the poor are at the door, on the phone, on the street wanting food, or carfare, or rent, or heat, or a job, or a free lawyer or doctor. Bless? Our Gospel suggests that it is a blessing to live so close to all that need, that I have no choice but to face it and respond to it. I do get out to the suburbs for a wedding, a baptism, a funeral, or just a party, and my notice is that what is out of sight can really be out of mind. Blame? Blame because I do it so poorly, get impatient or angry even, if the poor come too late or too often or are too demanding. My dear Simone Weil whom I read more than anyone else says: The charitable exchange, benefactor to beggar, is often so patronizing, most often so condescending as to reinforce the roles of someone humiliating and someone humiliated. The charitable exchange that is true charity or love is more a miracle than walking on water. All I can say is that with the thirty years I am still working at it. But the “big picture,” as we say, is more than my performance at the front door, is it not? As long in me as the invitation of Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker is the summons of my friendship with Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan who, forty years ago, in the form of a letter to a young friend, wrote something I have never forgotten: I remember being appalled, after returning from Europe in 1954, at the situation of the Church in New York. How could a church so well established be at the same time so unproductive, so debilitated by all the illnesses of man’s spirit? …faced with what we saw, a few of us did what we could. It was discouraging and slow. I can still feel to the bone the uphill climb of those years. Many times the most we could claim was that we were still afloat for another week. And many times the only thing that kept us going at all was the feeling that, hard and unavailing as our work seemed to be, there simply was no alternative. It was a matter of consenting to fail here rather than succeed at something easier, something that was simply not to life’s point. The World Showed Me Its Heart For Dan Berrigan, the “bigger picture” embraces government, to be sure, especially that government here within the Beltway where all the resources are. Thus the actions at the draft boards in the Vietnam years, the more recent actions at nuclear weapon bases and Nevada test sites. The Commandments of Moses, the Beatitudes of Jesus are, according to Saint Paul, written on the fleshy tablets of our hearts before they were written on tablets of stone. We know what we should be. We know that these weapons are wrong. If only the Beatitudes and the heart had been at work in Congress rather than political caution when this disastrous war began. Often, as church people, we can only do what Rosa Parks did. We can only protest, God help us. While I was shaping these words a week or so ago, CNN was casually on the television screen in an empty room in muting mode—until I saw the images. The summoned voice told the story: Three million displaced in Pakistan from the earthquake, many being brought down from the mountains just ahead of winter. No refuge camps, no tents, just dropped in one place from another and making their way down a road with all their possessions on their back. The news soon changed. It was Election Day and much ado about election races where the issue is taxes. Again—out of sight out of mind. The week before, a similar scene: Images of how inadequate the response of developed countries are to Pakistan, and a news banner running on the bottom of the screen saying how NASA, so encouraged by the recent success of Discovery, wants two hundred million (or was it two billion?) to go to the moon again! This week, Thanksgiving, of course. A lovely feast uniquely available to all our various faiths. I do not know whether those pilgrims were grateful for an abundant first harvest or grateful that they had survived the harsh New England winter. It pleases me that my Roman tradition accommodated to this feast, Protestant in origin, with a preface to the Eucharist composed especially for the feast. It tries to see the American adventure in the biblical tradition of ancient Israel. It prays thus: It happened to our fathers, (and mothers?) who came to this land as if out of the desert into a place of promise and hope. In recent years I do not use this Preface. I hesitate to think of ourselves as a people, a country special. Oh, I know we have a special story written on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and I do believe we are special in our abundance. Yet despite our rhetoric, we are not proportionally more generous than others in sharing that abundance. And we are not special in some role of mega-power destined to spread “freedom and democracy” everywhere. We are not destined to liberate Arab women, to impose our culture on others. We are not right to dismantle the United Nations. We are not exempt from the banning of torture by the Geneva Conventions. Rather than a sense of ourselves as special or destined I prefer an image from Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Laureate Poet from Chile, a country we have greatly harmed with our Manifest Destiny adventures. The poem is “Demasiados Nombres”—“Too Many Names” Part of it reads: They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, Dorothy Day…Peter Maurin…Daniel Berrigan…Rosa Parks…a litany of sorts in my Roman tradition, and your Anglican tradition as well. Well, we do need all the help we can get. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says: …for Christ plays in ten thousand places, |