The Sower (Summer 2026)
The Summer 2026 Sower shares updates from the farm, offers a reflection from Betsy on her life as a liturgical musician, and includes wisdom from Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.
The Sower is the newsletter of Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa.
We moved here from the Davenport Catholic Worker in October, 1986, and I reflect on our 40-year history and the events of this summer, a busy one in our house, in our gardens, pastures and barn. Betsy came of age “as Vatican II’s liturgical reforms reached the parish level” encouraging “full, conscious and active participation” in the prayer of the Catholic Church and she writes of her life as a liturgical musician in university chapels, urban and rural parishes beginning when she was in high school and with Catholic Worker communities, starting at the Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli, New York, in 1977.
We offer two short voices from the past that speak to the present condition of the world. From 1941, Thomas Merton was already pondering the meaning of “real ID”: “You think that you can identify a man by giving his date of birth and his address, his height, his eyes’ color, even his fingerprints. Such information will help you put the right tag on his body if you should run across his body somewhere full of bullets, but it doesn’t say anything about the man himself. Men become objects and not persons.” And Dorothy Day, in 1948, warning against “taking care of the wrecks of the social order” without working to change it. “Palliatives, when what we need is a revolution, beginning now. Each one of us can help start it. It is no use talking about how bored we are with the word. Let us not be escapists but admit that it is upon us. We are going to have it imposed upon us, or we are going to make our own.”
We make a rare appeal for funds.
The back cover features Fritz Eichenberg’s image of Joan of Arc that hangs in our dining room, a rare depiction of Joan as a peasant, listening to the voice of an angel while tending her flock.
Brian
