Alice McGary and Mary Kay McDermott: The CW’s Land and Craft Vision (CCW Ep 23)

In this episode, hosts Theo Kayser and Lydia Wong are joined by Alice McGary from The Mustard Seed Farm in the Ames, Iowa region and Mary Kay McDermott from St. Isidore Farm in Southwest Wisconsin. They explore if the word “cult” in Peter Maurin’s alliterative vision of “cult, culture, and cultivation” is scary or a turn off and how they’re trying to be producers and not just consumers.

Episode transcript

The following episode transcript was autogenerated by AI from the audio transcript and subsequently reviewed and lightly edited for clarity; all the usual caveats apply. It’s provided here to aid discoverability. If you’d like to help provide episode summaries or transcripts for Coffee with Catholic Worker episodes, reach out at info@catholicworker.org.

[music]

Theo Kayser: Welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers, a podcast made by and for Catholic workers. I’m Theo.

Lydia Wong: And I’m Lydia. We’ve both been a part of the Catholic Worker for the last decade, and we’re excited to bring to you conversations with various Catholic workers from around the world.

Theo Kayser: On this episode, we get to talk to Alice from the Mustard Seed Farm outside of Hayes, Iowa, and Mary Kay from the St. Isidore Farm in southwest Wisconsin. They told us about trying to be producers rather than just passive consumers, trying to balance a life of work, prayer, and study, and ask whether Peter Maurin’s use of the word cult is off-putting for audiences today.

Lydia Wong: All right. Let’s get to our interview.

Theo Kayser: Alice, Mary Kay, welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers. We usually start off by having guests tell us how did you come to the Catholic Worker and how did you get to where you are today on your Catholic Worker farm?

Alice McGary: You want to go first, Mary Kay?

Mary Kay McDermott: Oh, sure. Thanks, Theo and Lydia. It’s nice to see this in action. Thanks for inviting us. I’ve been part of the Catholic Worker Movement for about 25 years, so that brings me to what, like 18 years old when I was in college and had a couple really profound service trip Catholic Worker farm experiences in the Appalachian Mountains, and have been part of two Catholic Worker houses, one in Dubuque and one that I helped to start in Portland, Oregon.

I worked at a cafe for the homeless in Portland for three years based on the principles of the Catholic Worker movement called Sisters of the Road Cafe, an incredible organization where I got to really study and examine the roots of Catholic Worker philosophy. And after that, I got married to my husband, Peter, at New Hope Catholic Worker farm in Dubuque, outside of Dubuque, Iowa, where we lived then for seven years, and have now lived at St. Isidore Catholic Worker farm with our community members, Eric and Brenna, for it’ll be eight years now in May. So, kind of spanned the all different possibilities of Catholic Worker life, and currently our days here at the Catholic Worker farm at St. Isidore look like getting up, we have about a half an hour of prayer every morning together, and then, you know, it’s the whole Ora et Labora theme. So, we pray, and then we work on the land or in our home, doing and trying to be a house of production, more than a house of consumption in whatever ways we can. And I believe that those acts of production are also a little bit of a resistance against mainstream culture, that we don’t have to consume all of the things that we need in life, we can also produce them. So we spend a lot of our days in production.

And so yeah, that’s a good beginning, I think.

Alice McGary: Mary Kay, what are you producing?

Mary Kay McDermott: Oh, what are we producing? Oh my gosh. Well, this week, I was extracting some honey from our honeybees. And let’s see, we’re producing some sweet potato starts behind us.

We have dairy cows. So, we’re producing butter, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, all the dairy delights. We’ve got eggs, we produce Chapstick from our beeswax, and Brenna dips candles, you know, so just a lot of great home cooked meals from our food on the farm.

Yeah, the list goes on and on, Alice.

Alice McGary: Thanks, Mary Kay. I can answer also, I’m Alice McGarry, I’m at the Mustard Seed Community Farm and Catholic Worker in Central Iowa. And perhaps my Catholic Worker journey has also been around 25 years.

Yeah, I grew up Catholic, and I also participated in a Mennonite church in Chicago, the Reba Place Church. And I was involved in a lot of community, yeah, I guess I feel like the values of the Catholic Worker were like soaking into me, but I had never heard of the Catholic Worker until college, when some of my cooler, more radical friends were doing Catholic Worker things.

So, I’m going to the Des Moines Catholic Worker on the weekends to help out. And one of my really best friends, Dorothy Dvorak, who was named after Dorothy Day, she was a little older than me, she was two years older than me. And so, when she graduated, she went to volunteer at the Su Casa Catholic Worker in Chicago, and invited me to stay with her for a summer. And we worked on a big community mural project.

So I think that I’ve been volunteering a little bit at the Des Moines Catholic Worker. But my first sort of intense Catholic Worker experience was doing community art. And I think that like, yeah, for me, the art and the craft, and the music and the community and the farming all have gone together for a lot of my Catholic Worker journey.

But after I was done with school, I did go work at a number of Catholic Workers, like the Des Moines Catholic Worker, and I helped, I went and volunteered at an Annunciation House in El Paso. And I went and lived with my sister in Tucson for a while, helping her start her restaurant and take care of her newborn or her new son. And yeah, and I helped out some at the El Paso, I mean, the Tucson Catholic Worker.

Anyway, so I just feel like I was really passionate about all the values and also about the farming. There were a number of years where I was like, well, I want to learn to be a farmer, and I want to do other things. And so, there wasn’t a Catholic Worker farm near me to join.

But then I started looking at other Catholic Worker farms, like the New Hope Farm in near Dubuque, and other community farms. But in the end, we kind of decided to start a project here in, in the Ames area. So yeah, so I’ve been here at the Mustard Seed Farm for 16 years.

And what is our life like? A little different than Mary Kay’s life, I think, because we don’t have dairy cows. But we grow a lot of food here.

We grow a lot of vegetables and herbs and flowers and do prairie restoration and do a lot of community education, community workshops, community building, I think like Mary Kay does, around music, around art, around food. Yeah, I guess that’s me rambling. Yeah, that’s what I got at the moment.

Lydia Wong: And Alice, who all lives and works at Mustard Seed?

Alice McGary: Yeah, so, when we started our farm, we didn’t have a home here, we were just camping out in the summer, and then moving back to town in the winter. So, our farm has always been kind of, our core community doesn’t necessarily all live together. And that’s been kind of that thread from the start.

So at this point, we did build a house and Nate and I live here year round, and other people come to live with us during the summer, we usually have about four or five more people living with us between May and October, basically when it’s above freezing. And a lot of those folks are here for our agroecology education program, or our agronomic university here on the farm. But then we have our core team of people don’t all live on the farm.

So we have a core community that makes consensus decisions. But some of them live a couple miles away, some of them live in town. But most of them at least are out here once a week through our growing season on those harvest days.

Yeah, so come live with us, we still have spaces if you want to come live with us in the summer.

Lydia Wong: So, you mentioned “agronomic university,” and that’s a very like Catholic Workery term. Maybe if one or both of you could explain a little bit of what that means, and what are those values of the agronomic university that you try to live out or share or propagate?

Mary Kay McDermott: Yeah, I was trying to be a really smart Catholic Worker this morning. And so, I was like, I’m going to like reread some Peter Maurin Easy Essays and his philosophy about the Green Revolution and Land and craft and agronomic universities. And I’m still just as smart as I was before I started that.

But yeah, what are some of the core values? Well, I mean, I think Peter Maurin was very, very into a land and craft economic system that was not capitalist, not Marxist, not acquisitive, meaning not trying to acquire more or not competitive or for greed or for gain, but for for subsistence, for creating the goods that we need, the goods and services that we need for a good, functional, meaningful life. And like an economic system that was that everyone had meaningful, dignified work and was able to feed their families and have homes and beauty.

So I’m rambling a little bit, but I feel like it’s all connected, which is kind of why I love the Catholic Worker. I feel like every part of the philosophy is kind of connected to the other parts. And he talked about that the farming commune or the agronomic university as being a place where workers could be scholars and scholars could be workers, but that we could have a more balanced life of work and prayer and learning.

So, yeah, I’m stopping for a moment to give Mary Kay an opportunity to say something.

Mary Kay McDermott: I thought you did very well, Alice, and I think some of your study was helpful. The first words when I think of agronomic university that come to mind are cult, culture, and cultivation, which I believe are Peter Maurin’s words, which can be kind of scary to people because of that word “cult.” I mean, I don’t really like using it because I think we get we sort of, people think we’re in a cult anyway.

So to use that word. But I think he meant more like community. And maybe Alice can touch on that, too.

But those same words of prayer, study, and work come to mind for me that these are values to include in our everyday life when we have what we call like agronomic sessions here at the at St. Isidore farm. We do a Growing Roots on decolonization every year. So, it’s like a week-long group session on prayer, study, and work.

So, combining those three elements. And yeah, I think Peter Maurin had it right. Those are some of the finest elements of Catholic Worker life, and they make for a very fulfilling lifestyle.

Alice McGary: Mary Kay, can I say something more about cult, culture, and cultivation, please, because I did just read this Easy Essay this morning.

Mary Kay McDermott: Yes.

Alice McGary: And also maybe somebody talking about it. So, it was sort of like “cult” being like spirituality. And I guess I want to say for myself as a Catholic Worker who has a lot of different faith traditions that I draw on, but that also our community is very spiritually diverse.

So like wanting to have a space that is uplifting and open and embracing of spirituality, but also for us, at least, it’s important to not be like, oh, you need to be Catholic or Catholic is the way to be right. So that’s something that’s important for us here. And then, culture, I feel like he was saying, are like those are the things that we do in life that kind of, I don’t know, maybe like I think he was saying that those are the ways we, the work and the acts that kind of show our cult, I guess.

But I do think that Mary Kay and I work a lot in the space of culture, of music and art and food and community, is like the space of culture. And I also think that culture is a really powerful place to be working, but I feel like one, there’s all these cultural things that we need to un-, like, dismantle, maybe like cultural problems or like colonialism and racism. But I also feel like culture is this powerful force of social change.

So, sort of like working in that space is exciting to me. And then cultivation being kind of that farming space or that growing of food. So anyway, I’m excited about culture and cultivation, even though I agree, Mary Kay, the word “cult” is a little kind of scary, like the word “Catholic” to some people.

Lydia Wong: Yeah, some of us last night at our community dinner, were actually talking about cult and whether or not the Catholic Worker was a cult. So, I do think that there’s an element of it, even without Peter Maurin’s terming of it, perhaps not in the way that Peter Maurin meant. But it seems like a lot of this is all tied together with this like creativity, as Mary Kay was saying, this production of things, the creation of things.

What do both of you see as like the main, maybe not the main, but some of the important things that you feel like you are creating with your communities?

Alice McGary: You go, Mary Kay.

Mary Kay McDermott: First, I have to make a comment on the “cult” thing, because somebody once said to us, the difference between a cult and a community is a cult is easy to get into and hard to get out of, and a community is hard to get into and easy to get out of. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but just to just to put a little, you know, another idea in there.

Okay. And Lydia, ask your question one more time. Sorry.

Lydia Wong: Sure. It seems like the idea of like cult, culture, and cultivation, it’s all tied together with this idea of creation of something. And so, I’m curious with you also referencing this idea of production versus consumption, you mentioned some of the physical things your farm is creating, but what are some of the other things that you view as being valuable that your farm is creating or generating?

Mary Kay McDermott: Well, I love the Catholic Eucharistic prayer that uses the words “fruit of the earth and work of our hands” to describe the bread and the wine. And so, I just love this idea of us being called to be co-creators with the earth and with the divine.

And, you know, I used to be more involved in musical endeavors that were sort of like performance based. I’ve never been that great of a performer even, but it was like that was the way that I thought you could be involved with music was to be in a choir that did occasional concerts or things like that. And when I traveled to Haiti and East Africa, I lived in both of those places for a time and I just really saw the way that music and song and dance, storytelling, they were all a rich part of their culture.

And it permeated through all of the not-so-good stuff to this joy that you could feel. And I started believing that, really, we’ve outsourced too much of this stuff to people who are professionals and who are trained and who can do it really well. And we all have two—well, most of us have two feet. We all have vocal cords. So that means we can all sing and dance.

And so I’ve started just really pursuing more of these endeavors that are co-creating activities and using community dance and song as a way to bring people together in a place where we’re so divided in our culture, it’s just such a great way to make people feel like they’re breathing in unison, that they’re looking each other in the eye, that they’re holding hands and feeling like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. And I just think that this is increasingly important.

And, you know, especially with the square dance calling that I do, this is building on a tradition that’s hundreds of years old and sort of honoring folk arts that have been important to people for a long time and holding on to the heritage of those. So that’s kind of a roundabout. But so, with song and dance, but also just, you know, with the work of production on our farm, I just want to go back to that “fruit of the earth and work of our hands” as being sort of what I love about the call to co-create.

Turning it over to you, Alice.

Alice McGary: Oh, that’s so nice, Mary Kay. So, part of why I wanted to be on this show with Mary Kay is because I’m just so excited about what Mary Kay does and who you are. And yeah, just like the community singing and the square dancing.

And it was so fun to play for your dance a couple of weeks ago. I’m a fiddle player and I love community dancing, community singing. And yeah, the question was, what was the question, Lydia?

Lydia Wong: Yeah, it was in thinking about the idea of creation or generating things. What are the things that you view as yourself creating or your community creating?

Alice McGary: Yeah, well, I think our community and I create a lot of things. And I also think we create a lot of opportunities for encounter, which I’m actually excited about both of them. So, I really like making functional things that are beautiful.

So, when we make a lot, we grow a lot of food. And it’s really, I think, is core to the work of our community to grow really healthy food, to share with anyone who needs it. And I think it’s a core part of what the Catholic Worker does, too, is just that people need good food in order to just like, yeah, like to kind of meet their human potential and that, it’s not charity, it is like kind of foundational liberation for people to be able to have good food. And from that, you can have like, your full self. You can be, you can grow up with a creative, active brain and a healthy body.

And so that’s one thing that we produce. And I personally, well, our community makes candles, and we have bees and we have honey. And we’ve been growing a lot of flowers the past number of years. We have a woman on our team, Jen, who’s just like really passionate about flowers and has been leading these flower projects. And so, we’ve been able to also deliver flower bouquets with almost all of the food we’ve been delivering. So that’s just really fun to be like kind of our bread and roses.

But yeah, so, I’m a potter and I’m a fiddle player and I make rugs and I have been like getting kind of obsessed about, you know, spinning wool and weaving things and growing cotton. But I just really like that intersection of where something is really useful and necessary, but also beautiful for your eyes, for your lips when you’re drinking or, you know, like a quilt that just brings those little joys and connection into your daily life. But I also think that our community is really invested in making opportunities for encounter.

So, just opportunities for people to learn things, to come on our harvest mornings, to connect with all the people there, to connect with the beauty of the earth and the sky and the vegetables and learn new skills, to have time to have conversations, you know, or like potlucks and workshops. I think like partly to be like, well, yes, you could like to kind of show people like, oh, look at this crazy way we’re living. Like now that you need to live the way we are, but like there are different ways.

And like, just to create that space for people to meet each other and to connect to each other and connect to the planet, I feel like is providing maybe like an opportunity for what is like, I don’t want conversions, not the word, but maybe like those little mini-spiritual experiences that you have in life where I think that our hearts can be transformed. Anyway, that’s my answer.

Mary Kay McDermott: That’s good, Alice. I was just thinking, you know, you don’t want to use the word “conversion,” but I like the idea of the thin veil between what we know and what’s beyond our knowing. And so, I think that these opportunities that we provide to people who visit, to people who come dance and sing or engage in these acts of co-creation, it’s like it can offer at its best a little peek behind the veil of like what more is possible.

And that’s something I love about it. I also wanted to add that I have Chuck Trapkus’s “Catholic Worker Primer” in front of me. And I really liked the way you said you like creating functional, functional pieces of art.

He wrote here under the art class category: “Peter was big on a craft-based economy, and he didn’t mean refrigerator magnets and plywood lawn ornaments. We must stay connected with the work of our hands, avoid becoming industrial slaves, and write in short, choppy, free-verse lines.”

Like his essays. Anyway, I just thought that that was, you know, just related to what you were talking about. But the crafts we’re doing are not, you know, finger paintings.

They’re like things that we use. Functional.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, and I mean, going back to that, that word “culture” from earlier today, one of the things Peter Maurin talks about is that like, we’re confused about culture, that we think it has to do with leisure, but he wants us to know that culture has to do with work, you know? So like, when you’re making a rug, you know, like instead of just passively buying one, like you are part of that culture, I think he would say, instead of just like a passive consumer. I think that’s a lot, sounds like a lot of what you all are wanting to do and is the vision of the Catholic Worker.

Because so often in our life, we don’t get to be creative or like we’re discouraged from it and we aren’t meant to participate. Like Mary Kay was saying, like, why would you make your own music? I can listen to the best musician on my phone, like any music in the world, you know?

It kind of ends up being just like, I’m only a consumer and not a participant. And like our workplaces, you don’t, you know, so many of us don’t get to decide how the work’s done or what work is important or whatever, but the Catholic Worker is trying to bring these, this like very participatory model into like all aspects of our life and what we eat and what we use and how we relate to each other. And that’s what I really appreciate about you all and your music and what you’re trying to do at the Catholic Worker.

Mary Kay McDermott: Thanks, Theo. I appreciate you sort of affirming that and raising it up because, you know, I’ve had conversations with Alice about how sometimes it feels like compared to resistance work and going to prison for protests and things like that, like that our work that we’re doing is like fun and games or something compared to what maybe people see as the work of Catholic Workers in these more, I don’t know, dramatic ways, that I haven’t always felt like, this is also work of a Catholic Worker. But I really, like I said, I appreciate you affirming it and I do believe it is the work of a Catholic Worker and it’s just taken me maybe 25 years to sort of like be okay lifting that up and honoring that.

Alice McGary: I, yeah, thank you both for those thoughts because it’s making me think about our work as also resistance and it made me think about Gandhi and his spinning wheel and his whole aspect of his philosophy about work and about for him that spinning of cotton and like the growing of cotton in India and spinning it and making your own garments was this resistance to the both the colonialism and the industrialist capitalist economy of kind of that, yeah, the cotton was being exported, it was being milled in Britain and then sold back to them and but just that like, yeah, in our time and in our day that like industrial agriculture, our fiber, our clothing and fashion industry, like those things are, they’re causing so much environmental destruction, they are causing so much exploitation of workers, so much poisoning of our waters and, you know, so this idea of if I’m a consumer I’m also asking someone else, like if I want to buy a cheap garment, I’m asking someone else to do, you know, maybe almost slave labor in order to make that garment and I’m going to export all my dye trash and everything onto them and so, yeah, it is harder to grow our own food and it is harder to, you know, grow our own clothes and I’m not, you know, I am not Chuck Trapkus, I am not like yet at a place where I’m like, oh, I am clothing myself in the flax that I spun but I am growing some cotton and I’m going to make myself at least one outfit out of the cotton I’ve grown but, yeah, but that like our little farm here is an active resistance against industrial capitalism or industrial farming and, yeah, that our, these little acts are a resistance.

Theo Kayser: I’m curious, Alice, if you could just take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about your experiments in growing your own clothing that you’ve done so far because you said you’re growing cotton, you have sheep out there, right? You do natural dyeing, if I’m not mistaken. Can you just tell us a little bit about all of that and some of us, like me, know almost nothing about what that might look like.

Alice McGary: Sure. So, yeah, so we shear, we get wool from three sheep every year. We also get wool from some of our friends and neighbors who have nicer wool sheep and, yeah, so I would just want to say that, like, the use of the time of my labor, yeah, it takes so long to process wool.

If you’re just doing it all by hand, you have to wash it, then you have to card it to kind of get all that, like, get the fibers in a row and get all the burrs and the dust and the hay out of their fleece. Yes, I’ve been growing lots of plants for doing natural dyeing, which is super fun for me. I just, yeah, I love fiber.

I love color and pattern and texture. Yeah, and then we spin the wool. I usually spin two strands and ply them together to make a yarn, which then I could weave or knit.

Yeah, and so I’m at the stage where I can make really, I can, I’m trying to learn how to then, now I need to, like, weave sort of rectangular shapes of fabric that I can turn into clothing. So I haven’t started weaving my cotton because I’m trying to figure out, like, what is the garment I want to make and, like, what are the pieces I would want to weave? Because I’m still weaving kind of thicker yarn that is not, like, fine like a cotton sheet or, like, a piece of cotton you would buy at the store.

So, yeah, I don’t know if that’s a good answer. Mary Kay, what do you say?

Mary Kay McDermott: I say you start with just a bikini. That sounds doable. I love it, Alice. It’s so inspiring. I love all of your fiber work and, yeah, it’s incredible. It makes me want to come stay with you and learn more.

Alice McGary: Yeah, come. I think we’re going to have a natural dyeing workshop or craft retreat this summer, maybe with some artists like Sarah Fuller coming, and then I think we’ll have another craft retreat in the fall this year. So if I get my calendar to you in time, maybe you can schedule to come.

Mary Kay McDermott: Yes, I hope you do.

Alice McGary: Also, just to say, the Midwest Catholic Worker farms have been doing some awesome craft retreats for 16, 17 years, too. So that has been a fun thing that happens here in the Midwest.

Mary Kay McDermott: Yeah, Betsy O’Brien hosting those at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker in Maloy, Iowa.

Lydia Wong: So, if people wanted to come and visit either one of your farms, how would they get in contact with you? What would that look like? And maybe what should be things that, I don’t know, people should be aware of?

Alice McGary: So, I think we are both on the Catholic Worker Directory. I think that’s always a good place to start is, yeah, just look up, do a search for Catholic Worker Directory, and it should take you to the big Catholic Worker site, and it’s just a great resource. We like visitors here on our farm between May and October.

If you want to visit us in the winter, I think you need to be like a really good friend or enjoy really cold sleeping places. But yeah, I would say don’t visit us in, yeah, in the winter. Yeah, we like people who are passing through or want to camp with us.

If you want to stay for the summer, I would love to hear from you really soon. So I would say follow those links. All of our information, we have a website, all of our information is there. You can call me, text me, email me. I’m kind of the like, I’m the contact person.

I’m Alice. I’m the contact person on the website. If you don’t hear back, you should text me until you hear back from me because there’s a lot, there’s just a lot to keep track of on a farm, and sometimes I don’t look at the computer.

Mary Kay McDermott: Yeah, similarly, you can find us on that same website, the Catholic Worker website. Eric is the main guest contact person in our community. He can be reached at catholicworkerschool@gmail.com.

We would have you year-round. We have a space, indoor space, that’s heated, and you can expect during the winter to be carrying a lot of wood, chopping wood, trying to keep animal water from freezing, so not super exciting stuff, but in the summertime, we always do host this Growing Roots Decolonization Workshop of Prayer, Study, and Work, which is, you should all come. It’s a great week where we build a great community, and that’s this year, the first week of June, so be in touch about that, and yeah, I mean, if you visit us, you’re just gonna encounter lots of some kids.

We’ve got two children. We’ve got some beautiful cows, chickens, a cat. They all are part of our community, and they are always a huge hit with all of our visitors to just encounter these other creatures that live with us here.

Alice McGary: Yeah, I would say also, yeah, even if you come in the summer, you might end up in a sleeping space that is a little primitive, meaning you might not have electricity, and you might need to go outdoors to use a bathroom or to find some running water, but we will not make you sleep outside in a storm. We have indoor sleeping space for everyone if there is severe weather coming.

Theo Kayser: Awesome. Well, thank you both for your time. Is there any, like, final thoughts that you want to make sure you get out there about the Catholic Worker Farm or the Mustard Seed or St. Isidore Farm?

Mary Kay McDermott: Is there anybody out there—yeah, so for a lot of years, I was really regularly publishing the Catholic Worker Farmer newspaper, and I keep imagining doing it, but not actually doing it anymore. So if anybody out there wants to help publish the Catholic Worker Farmer newspaper, that would be great.

Yeah, and otherwise, I’d say check out our agroecology internship, apprenticeship education program. Come to a square dance that Mary Kay is hosting. Or a community singing event.

Mary Kay McDermott: Yes, the next opportunity will be the St. Isidore Feast Day, where we bless our fields and animals and then have a dance and a huge potluck. Really fun, huge gathering. That’s your next opportunity.

Theo Kayser: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking to us today.

Mary Kay McDermott: Thanks, you too.

Alice McGary: Yeah, thanks. Maybe I may say one more thing.

I want to tell everybody who’s listening that you are amazing and creative, and you can make beautiful things, and you can sing, and yeah, you can do it with your friends, and you don’t just have to buy it.

Alice McGary: I agree.

Theo Kayser: Great words to end on there, I think. A good closing line.

Mary Kay McDermott: Absolutely. Thanks, Theo and Lydia. It was not as stressful as I thought it was going to be.

Lydia Wong: We’re pretty chill.

[music]

Lydia Wong: Huge thanks to both Mary Kay and Alice for being willing to join us in talking on this podcast. We always love to have people on and to share their experiences.

It was actually particularly fun to have two people from two different Workers on. It was a lot of fun to watch them sort of ping their ideas and conversation off of each other. I really enjoyed that.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, it was one of the more fun interviews, I feel like, in a certain way. It was fun to see Alice and Mary Kay just banter, you know, like old friends. They don’t see each other every day.

We have had a couple people on at a time before, but not quite like this.

Lydia Wong: Now, one of the interesting things about Catholic Worker farms is that both Theo and I live in the Midwest, and there is a much larger number of farms in the Midwest compared to, I believe, other parts of the country. I’ve always appreciated being able, coming from the cities, I’ve always appreciated the overlap of being able to appreciate what the farms can teach us and the ways in which they’re living out the Catholic Worker Movement in their context.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, and Mary Kay kind of alluded to in the conversation that sometimes the farms can seem a little bit like those “other” Catholic Workers or that “other” thing that the Catholic Worker does. I think being in the Midwest and, you know, we see these Catholic Worker Farmers at our gatherings and our protests and stuff, it helps us be connected in a way that I think sometimes Catholic Workers on the West Coast or the East Coast, where they don’t have as many farms, they don’t get to be enriched by the Catholic Worker farmers the same way we do. So we’re lucky in a way, we get to see that whole vision and be in relationship with those wonderful people too.

Lydia Wong: Yeah, and I don’t know if it’s just the circles that I currently run in, but I feel like I know a lot of people who have expressed some sort of like explicit desire to live on a farm. Maybe not always necessarily be farmers, but to live in like a more rural setting than in Chicago. So I do think it is this missing piece that people have this desire to be closer to the land, to be closer to nature, even though many people might not fully embrace yet the idea of becoming producers rather than just consumers.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, you know, I like to, I think about sometimes how during like the worst of COVID, when everyone was not working at their normal capitalist jobs, and of course that was a difficult time, not to romanticize it too much, but all of a sudden you started seeing like seed catalogs were running out of seeds because so many people took up gardening. And I was working at a grocery store during COVID. We couldn’t stock yeast at the store because so many people were baking their own bread.

And I read an article about how sewing websites were seeing like hundreds of times the traffic they had previously done before. So I think there really is like a yearning for this kind of stuff on a certain kind of level, but in our, in so many folks’ day-to-day lives, you know, you’re busy with the job and everything modern life has to keep you running on this treadmill, you know, that it’s hard to make time for these things that when people do them, they find it like really life-giving and even pleasurable to do.

Lydia Wong: Yeah, I think, yeah, the mindset of producing the things that we need for life ourselves is just very, very far outside of most people’s lived experiences. Because even when we think about some of the sewing or gardening or bread making, it feels like people engage on it on like a hobby level, which I think is good. That’s a great entry point.

But not necessarily, oh, I am able to help create the things that I need rather than relying on others. Now, maybe not for some of the gardening. I think there’s a little bit more of maybe some self-sustainability in that.

But yeah, this idea that we can be ones who help produce what we need.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, you know, it’s by little and by little, too. So like, depending on where you are and what you can do, maybe just one tomato plant or something is all you have space for, like on your apartment balcony or something. But I think just coming and doing it, it’s that’s part of the Catholic Worker thing.

And however ways we can start where we are, and then who knows where it goes from there. You know, I don’t know if I’ve said this too publicly before, but there was a time where I was like, “Theo, should you be a Catholic Worker farmer?” Like, it sounds really nice to be like living out there on the farm and, you know, milking the cows and stuff like that.

But it is different. I mean, I kind of, you know, I spent a summer living on some of these Catholic Worker farms. And in the end, I’m not living at a Catholic Worker farm right now.

But I really appreciate that there are the folks doing that. And it does kind of encourage me to go out and grow a garden in my own way where I am, too.

Lydia Wong: I have heard, Theo, that you’re pretty good at chopping wood.

Theo Kayser: Eric at St. Isidore will tell anyone who asks about that. So, Lydia, what is your opinion on the word “cult” in cult, culture, and cultivation?

Lydia Wong: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s not my favorite word ever. It doesn’t exactly have the greatest connotations.

But I think, yeah, the word “cult” is kind of, at least in my opinion, not always the easiest to be defined at the moment. I think that there could be some argument about the Catholic Worker being a cult. But I think that’s probably in today’s context, not necessarily the banner we want to lead with, especially given that there’s been several high-profile cults recently that have had documentaries made about them.

But there is this piece where I was thinking of other terms that sometimes sound strange, but partially fit. And there’s also the term of being radicalized, which also can sometimes have a very negative connotation, but isn’t necessarily bad. And thinking about how are people radicalized into the Catholic Worker and leading a countercultural life and participating in something that can be very demanding, depending on someone’s commitment.

I mean, that’s the nice thing about the Catholic Worker is that people can commit to a year, depending on what community is, or they could commit for life. So it can be something that takes this high lifetime commitment, has these values that don’t fit into the mainstream, has people doing sometimes risk-taking activities, like risking arrest, depending on what community you’re in. So there are some ways where I don’t know that generally, I think most cults, I think the definition of most cults generally has some charismatic leader who holds the majority of power.

So, at the moment, I don’t think that we have that. Maybe when Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were around, it actually fit more into a cult than it does now. Well, I’ll let other cult scholars figure that one out.

Theo Kayser: Well, our previous guest, Brian Terrell, would actually argue that when Dorothy Day was alive, more people were willing to say she was wrong about stuff than they are now, actually. So I don’t know if it would have more like a cult back then or not. There definitely was more of a figurehead, that’s for sure.

Lydia Wong: Yeah, yeah. So maybe now, in some ways, for better or worse, can be like a religious cult of Dorothy Day.

Theo Kayser: I mean, I think that there is a little bit of a danger to that, just too much idolizing Dorothy Day or something. I guess our previous guest, D.L. Mayfield, talked about that some. But bringing it back to cult, I think that’s why we need to continue doing clarification of thought and updating the way we talk about these things and how we talk about them.

Because Dorothy Day died 43 years ago, and Peter Maurin died like 60 years ago. And the exact way they did things might not be the best exact way to do things now. Or even if their ideas are good, maybe the way they talk about them is not always the best way of conveying them now.

So, I do think it’s good for us Catholic Workers not to get too caught up in everything the founders did or said.

Lydia Wong: For sure. Everything is always evolving. And in some way, I think the ways that things are old are sort of made new. Just because something is old doesn’t mean that it should stay the same all the time. There’s a constant renewal of thought and practice.

Theo Kayser: Yeah.

[music]

Lydia Wong: Well, that wraps up for us another episode of Coffee with Catholic Workers. If you want to reach out to us with any comments, suggestions, clarifications of thought, feel free to email us at coffeewithcatholicworkers@gmail.com. We want to thank our Catholic Worker Audio Engineer, Chris, as well as David Hayes for our music and Becky McIntyre for our graphics.

Theo Kayser: Thanks for joining us again for some clarification of thought. We hope today’s conversation was enlightening and maybe even that you’re encouraged to go out and help build a world where it’s easier to be good.

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Coffee with Catholic Workers is a podcast by and about Catholic Workers. Every two weeks, join Lydia Wong and Theo Kayser for a conversation with some of their favorite Catholic Worker folk. Special thanks to sound engineer Chris of Bloomington, IN.