‘Do You Want to Come Home?’ 18 Years Running a Kansas City Christ Room

Husband and wife couple Charles Carney and Donna Constantino offered Christ room hospitality for 18 years before recently moving to a small apartment. Charles recently spoke with Roundtable editor Jerry Windley-Daoust and was briefly joined by Donna during the interview. The following automatically generated transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Cover photo: Christ room guests of Charles Carney and Donna Constantino.

ROUNDTABLE: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

CHARLES CARNEY: Yeah, I’m Charles Carney from Wichita, Kansas, raised a Catholic, went to St. Joseph’s Elementary School. My wife’s name is Donna Constantino. I have done a variety of social work jobs in my life.

Probably the most easy way to describe it is the first half of my adult life, I did big-world social work, which was like activism, human rights work with places like the Eighth Day Center for Justice, which is a Catholic coalition for peace and human rights, and the Peace Center in Wichita. And then the second half has been mainly person-to-person social work, including homeless outreach work, social work, a lot of that, but a lot of my work too in the last half of my life has been as a Catholic Worker.

And at some point, I can mention the difference, you know, the difference of the power dynamic between being a quote unquote professional helper and a Catholic Worker. But, you know, for now, you know, just grew up in a large family, always had people around, always had community around. And I was imbued with a strong sense of human dignity.

I guess that’s the thing I appreciate most about my Catholic background. I do, I suppose it depends on who you ask. If I’m still Catholic, I think I’m still Catholic, but we tend to worship in alternative settings, which may not be exactly considered canonical.

But I take great inspiration from Dorothy Day and Peter Moran and Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa because of their radical inclusiveness, their radical hospitality. And, you know, in my view, religions so often are about excluding or creating a club for, you know, the most privileged or the most, you know, the true believers or whatever. And I think I was attracted to the Catholic Worker because it was about this radical egalitarianism where we are gonna reach out to the most vulnerable and treat them as their full human dignity deserves.

And so a lot of that, you know, my mother was very compassionate. A lot of that I learned, I had a brother who had a cerebellum degeneration and was bedridden for much of his life. And so I, you know, had some viewpoints in life that were not exactly from the top.

I got friends in low places, if you will. And that’s, you know, that’s part of my background and a big part of the reason, you know, I went to school at the University of Kansas and got a degree in social welfare and loved the principles of social work and the human rights perspective, the human rights orientation, all of that. Sometimes not real happy with the bureaucracy of social work though.

But anyway, yeah, that’s, I think that’s a bit scattered but a pretty good view of my background. My wife is a counselor and she’s the one who really got us started. Donna Constantino is really the one who got us started in the Catholic Worker Christ rooms, so.

ROUNDTABLE: Well, why don’t you say a little bit about when did you first hear about the Catholic Worker and how did you get formally connected?

CHARLES CARNEY: Oh yeah, you know, I didn’t really even know about Catholic Workers until I was 26 after college. You know, growing up in Wichita, it’s fairly conservative, a lot of military bases and military, at the time they were building military planes there. And I went to KU and kind of got a conservative Catholic education.

And I think when I joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at the age of 26, I started to learn about Catholic Worker houses and saw this really neat alternative way of being in the world. It was a little too overwhelming for me at that point in my life, but it certainly planted a seed. And, you know, for some time in Chicago, I was one of the hangers on.

I was a person who would go to their roundtables and visit and, you know, not really do much else. I mean, I just admired what they did, and I would go and hear stories and go to their roundtables and go to their events. And it wasn’t until—

ROUNDTABLE: Is that at St. Francis House?

CHARLES CARNEY: Yeah, St. Francis Catholic Worker House.

Yeah, that was my main introduction to the Catholic Worker. And then after moving to Wichita, we decided after four years of being in Wichita that we wanted to go ahead and check out the Holy Family Catholic Worker in Kansas City, Missouri with Brother Louis Rodeman. That would have been about 2004.

And that was, we were there for about a year. Actually, we were in a support community down the street, and it was tough duty. And there were two guys, really more than two guys, who were actually living on the front porch of Holy Family House.

And every day, you know, we’d leave the house or come in, you know, to do the meal. They did six meals a week. We would notice and we would see them sleeping on the cardboard, trying to stay warm.

It was wintertime and it bothered us or bothered our conscience. And we eventually decided to buy a home, but Donna said, “I’m not buying a home unless we are opening it up.” You know, we’re making a communal kind of thing.

We’re not just gonna go buy a home and not, you know, ignore what’s going on here. And so when we bought the home over in Kansas City, Kansas, we immediately invited Bob and Ricky to move in with us, the two guys that we knew. And they moved in the same day as we moved in.

They moved in with us and they both had their own bedroom or some common facsimile of a bedroom.

ROUNDTABLE: So back up just a little bit and tell me about the Catholic Worker in Kansas City. What was its setup and what did it do?

CHARLES CARNEY: Brother Lewis and many, you know, when they started, they had the idea of just going out to the dumpsters and looking for food and giving it to people. And as they found, you know, quite readily when they started giving out food in that particular area, midtown of Kansas City, Missouri, there was a great need for it. And there were a lot of people who would come.

And so they had bought the house. Originally it was just a house for, their charism was war tax resistance. And then they started just having community meals and that went to, you know, they recognized the need for people being hungry and they decided, we wanna feed everybody who comes to us.

And they did that, you know, they did that for, oh, 20-some-odd years. And Donna and I were part of that hospitality. At some point, they also bought a house next door and had women with children there, sometimes up to three families.

And Brother Louis, St. Louis, as we say, he wouldn’t want us to call him a saint nor would Dorothy, but he was, lived with the women and would do much of the prep work for the meal. And of course at the meal, we didn’t do showers like Cherith Brook (Catholic Worker) Yes sounds good time to ask for that email you sent up set up for a email, but we had bus passes, we had toiletries, we had vitamins and medicines. We did whatever we could.

We had flashlights for people who were homeless. We had clothing vouchers. We did whatever we could to make folks’ life a little bit more comfortable and a little bit easier because a number of the people who came in actually were going through homelessness, living on the streets.

And we also had a mail where we could help them. If they needed a mailbox, we would hold their mail for them. And the good thing too, was through Reconciliation Ministries, we helped with IDs and birth certificates.

And that’s a huge thing because that crisis of identity is something that really stops people from getting back on their feet. So we did a lot of the mundane work of helping people get their birth certificate and their IDs.

Yeah, more importantly though, Jerry is, that was a life-changing experience. That was an eye-opener. That was, I went in there, I’m gonna, I’m a social worker and everything, but I had certain stereotypes.

And by the time we left there, I understood that this is just, these folks are exactly, there’s no difference here. The same emotional struggles, the same problems. I mean, if people had struggles with alcohol, well, I have that too.

People have struggles with anger, well, I have that too. So that human level, it came down to, we’re just all kind of struggling through here. The only difference was maybe there was, well, certainly a lack of resources and maybe I had more resources and more social capital.

I had access to more things and that was the only difference. And all my stereotypes went out the window. It was a pretty life changing, I might even say holy kind of experience that continued into St. Lawrence House.

ROUNDTABLE: Well, so how long were you at the Kansas City House?

CHARLES CARNEY: Yeah, so the Holy Family Catholic Worker House in Kansas City, Missouri, we were there for about 10 months, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I would say we, quote unquote, burned out.

But in another way, it was fortuitous because we were able to start a house that had much more personalism. And even though we weren’t working with as many people, Brian Terrell, who’s a longtime Catholic Worker at Strangers and Guests, he would say that was the idea that Dorothy had originally. She didn’t wanna set up large soup kitchens with long lines.

Now that’s not knocking it because let’s face it, not enough people are doing that, but she wanted people to get more individual attention from family to family. And she wanted tens of thousands of these Christ rooms around the country. And that’s where I always get excited talking about this is a very doable thing and it’s not as daunting as people might think.

ROUNDTABLE: Well, let’s get into that. So let’s pick up your story with, you moved out in 2004 from Holy Family Catholic Worker.

CHARLES CARNEY: So, we were just across the river. We remained in the greater metropolitan Kansas City area. And I actually continued volunteering every Saturday night at Holy Family House.

So, in Kansas City, we feel like we’re all just one big Catholic Worker. I’m involved with Kimberly Hunter still at the Rosedale Catholic Worker. And of course, Cherith Brook, I still would do different projects with them.

But so we had two bedrooms, and one bedroom was for Donna and I and the other was a good space for another person. But we also had an unfinished basement and we also had kind of a utility room that wasn’t even insulated. But one of our guests, Bob, he loved that place because it was a step up from the front porch and it was warmer and he could take his extension cords and plug them into the power and have TV and he could plug in heaters.

And he was much more comfortable living there than on the front porch. And of course, there was a soup kitchen just two blocks away. So Bob and Ricky could walk down there for food.

And there were a lot of resources in that neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas as well. So it was, we had our struggles, but it was a good sense of community, I would say. And sometimes we ate together, but it was kind of like, you have a roof over your head.

We never said, we’re gonna provide food for you or anything because these guys were pretty resourceful. They were getting food when they were on the streets. They knew what to do and how to do it.

And we wanted to help them continue to have as much autonomy as possible but have some sense of community around that and some sense of belonging and some sense of not being out there alone. Yeah, yeah. I love the personalism of the Christ room concept.

ROUNDTABLE: So backing up a little bit, I know that Donna said, we’re not buying a house unless we can do this. Did you guys have any conversations about the downsides of doing this or concerns or fears? Because I think a lot of people, when this idea is proposed, they have a long list of reasons why they are afraid to do it. Did any of those reasons come up for you or were you feeling like, eh, we’ll just roll with the punches here?

CHARLES CARNEY: Yeah, much of the latter. It was a time in our lives where because we had been moved by experience at Holy Family House, and maybe we weren’t cut out for the grind of daily life there, we felt like we still wanted to make a contribution. And so it was mostly a feeling of being impelled to it. It was like, we can’t really ignore this anymore.

And at that point, we knew so many people who were going through homelessness. We knew there was such a need and that we didn’t really feel like we had to vet people too much. There were a few people we took in that we didn’t know very well, but we never had any problem except one guy kind of got in a disagreement with Donna and he kind of gave a veiled threat that sometimes people’s houses get burned down sometimes.

But that’s the only thing I can really remember that was threatening. We never felt in danger. I mean, it was a joint thing.

So it was just kind of like living in community with people. Everybody contributed as they can. One of the guys who lived there was really, really good with all kinds of handy person working.

I mean, he probably saved us $10,000 on our plumbing. So it was this great joint venture of like we’re all in this together using our talents to cope with life and get by and be the best people we can be. And it was, I know you got another question, but it was inspiring sometimes to see people, they would choose to leave and get on their feet and get their own place, whether it was in subsidized housing or whatever.

And that was not necessarily our goal. Like we’re gonna fix you or we’re gonna make it so you get out of community so somebody else can come along. But a lot of times that’s what happened.

I mean, it was not, I’ve said that it’s sometimes tough to live with people. Well, Donna and I aren’t always that easy to live with either. So a lot of times people wanted to get out and get their own space.

But we were glad that they had the, more of the wherewithal to do that. The research says that once people get a roof over their head, then their chances of getting another place increased dramatically. So we always love to see that.

ROUNDTABLE: What role did your faith play in enabling you to make the leap to do this?

CHARLES CARNEY: Great, great question. Donna has a degree in theology from Loyola or pastoral counseling from Loyola University in Chicago.

And she’s a researcher and I think she was just tired of having this in the intellectual, in the ivory towers. And as for me, I had read By Little and By Little and I’d read Loaves and Fishes and of course, being a Jesuit volunteer and then seeing St. Francis House and having even been in Catholic seminary, I always felt drawn and felt the most alive, if you will, to use a theological term, in identifying with the reality of the struggle of the poor. So liberation theology had a huge impact on both of us.

And they call us dinks, double income, no kids, although our incomes weren’t huge because we did try to live in voluntary poverty, and we still do. So we just kind of made enough money to be able to keep the house supported. We never did any fundraising or anything like that because we didn’t see ourselves as a Catholic Worker as much as we saw ourselves as a Christ’s room.

So we wanted to be self-supporting. Occasionally somebody would get their disability and they would give us a little rent, but it wasn’t ever very much. And it was used to just kind of keep the house going but to go back to your faith question, I mean, it just, I don’t know how to describe it.

If you take out all of the passages in the Bible about feeding the poor and economics, you got a pretty holy Bible. I mean, it’s like, I think again and again, we’re called, if you really look at the Bible, especially the gospels and the Sermon on the Mount and Donna’s written books on the Sermon on the Mount, it calls for this radical hospitality, this, maybe it’s not even so radical, but, and as so I just felt really called, I can’t describe it. I was in seminary, but it just didn’t seem for me very meaningful to help people get to sacraments.

Although I do think that’s meaningful, I didn’t feel called to be the one doing that. This felt like a very much more of a, we’re all on the same level and, maybe not unlike the early church before the church got co-opted by the government.

ROUNDTABLE: And so talk a little bit about how doing a Christ room like you guys did is different from social work, because you spoke earlier about the difference in the power dynamic. And talk a little bit too about how a Christ room is different from a Catholic Worker house.

CHARLES CARNEY: Yeah, well, different from social work in that, first of all, I’m not getting paid. So that dynamic is taken out of like, I’m a professional helper.

And so then we’re just kind of buddies. We’re just kind of partners. And if we’re going to the grocery store or if we’re working on, hey, I need a ride to public housing so I can do this application.

It’s kind of like a couple of friends working on it together, which is actually kind of freeing. And it takes away a lot of that stigma of like, well, you have to be helped. And the power dynamic is different because it’s a mutual kind of endeavor.

And I had lots of those and that was probably the most life-changing thing. Going to the grocery store with Bob, going over to the social security office with Andy and celebrating when he got his social security. Just human to human interactions.

Now in the movie that we, we had the faith and resistance retreat this weekend, Dorothy criticized the social work agencies as being one big referral source. And there is truth in that, but I don’t completely agree with her. I have seen social work do some good with people.

But I don’t miss the bureaucracy of having to go through a lot of red tape. Some agencies, a person can make that first phone call and they get right into what they need. But there’s a lot of agencies, they make that first phone call and that there’s so many barriers in the way that they got to go through that they give up.

And I experienced this in helping people get through, like with Kansas Medicaid or with their social security disability. I have helped people get through a lot of those barriers. The thing I love about the Catholic Worker is there’s no barriers.

It’s like, come on in the door and here’s your room and what do you wanna do next? We didn’t really have to have many set rules because it was just a few of us. And even the rules that we made could be made as a community of my wife and myself and the two or three other people we had. We did have up to three people at times and that was chaotic because that meant somebody was living in the living room or the basement.

But most of the time we kept it to two and it wasn’t as stressful and overwhelming as say Holy Family House because there wasn’t this constant line at your door. And that allowed us to really do some of the gentle personalism in a deeper understanding and friendship and camaraderie that we might not have gotten when 25 people come through the door asking for food—or well, actually it would have been over a hundred asking for food. So there was a much more depth of relationship with the Christ rooms.

It was much less stressful, not that it wasn’t stressful at times. It was probably more fun. And it was kind of in line with the original idea of what Dorothy wanted to see.

I think I figured out that like if one out of every 300 households would just take in one person going through homelessness, our problem would be solved. I mean, it would be, it would just take one out of every 300. And so we felt like, well, yeah, this is, it’s not rocket science.

We can do this. And I think sometimes social service agencies make it way too complicated and put up way too many barriers and don’t have any understanding of what it’s like to be on the street where I don’t, I may not have a cell phone today. I don’t know how to do my passwords and get in and apply for this thing that I need.

And that was not the case at our place. It’s you walk in the door and there’s your space. And I can remember going out underneath bridges and locating somebody and saying, come on, and let’s go get out from under that bridge, take up your mat, take up your mat and walk, so to speak.

Anyway, go ahead. You were gonna ask a question.

ROUNDTABLE: No, you were going in the direction I was going to ask about. Tell me some stories. What stories stand out in your mind? Who do you remember? What are some of the best stories you have?

CHARLES CARNEY: I remember Bob who was, he lived with us on three different occasions.

And the first, with the first time around, Bob’s the one who lived in the back room. In the utility room that wasn’t very well insulated. And we came to learn that he had escaped from prison while he was living with us.

Now, granted, it was a very minimum-security prison. And we had to decide, what do we do? And we decided nothing. He eventually went back to Iowa and turned himself in on his own without any kind of questioning from us.

And after he got out, he showed up at our door again. And we said, okay, come on in. We can at least put you up temporarily.

But it was kind of an honor to think that he felt enough that, you know, like this was home to him. And after he got out of prison, he came back home.

We had another guy who, he was really struggled with alcoholism. And our rule was no drinking or drugs at the house. If you do it outside, you know, we’re not encouraging that. But anyway, this guy was doing, he was living in that back room where Bob used to live.

And he said, he was really on some major benders. And by the time I had caught up with him, how can I say this delicately? His bedroom was, and I don’t know if I should tell this story. It has a good ending, but his bedroom was fouled with excrement.

And his benders were so bad. And that night I said to him, Frank, you can still stay here, but we need to get with your sponsor, your AA sponsor right now. And we need to figure out a plan on how you’re gonna get sober.

Otherwise I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. And he, it was summertime. And he said, take me to the railroad tracks behind Royal Liquors.

There’s a homeless camp over there. And at that point, his addiction was stronger than whatever else was going on in his life. And I took him over there, but we had helped him—we had worked with him together, we had applied for public housing. And on December 22nd, three days before Christmas, I learned that he had gotten that and he was able to get his own place and off the streets. I mean, what a Christmas present!

So let’s see, let me think of one more because I could go on and on. We had a gentleman who really struggled with schizophrenia, and he would just talk and talk and talk.

And, but I remember I knew, cause I had met him in an AA meeting, I’m in recovery. And I think he just came to the AA meetings cause it was a warm place to stay for a while, which I think is totally fantastic. I met him in a library and it was hard to really understand him, where he was going with things.

And I just said to him, what do you do all night? It’s wintertime. He said, oh, I just walk, I just walk and stay warm.

And I said, well, we have some space. Do you want to come home? And he was a lovely guy. I mean, he’s just harmless as could be. And so he came and live with us.

And it turns out that we were able to, he did get his social security benefits, but he loved to travel. And one day he just took off and his dad would call from Texas and his dad had no idea where he was. But then since he was with us, we were able to find out and at least he was able to talk to his dad and his dad knew he was okay.

But then he would just go and he’d have somewhere else like Colorado he wanted to go. And so he, you know, once springtime came around it was kind of like, okay, I’m done with you guys. So anyway, those are a few stories.

Our lives changed way more than probably the people that live with us changed. So anyway.

ROUNDTABLE: Well, tell me a little bit about that. What do you mean when you say your lives changed more? Like how did all of these encounters change you?

CHARLES CARNEY: I guess, you know, I’ve had to take a new life to look at how I see the world. And I’ve gone through times of great trial myself. The only reason probably I didn’t become homeless is because like I said, I have those resources.

I have a college degree. I was able to fake it till I make it, so to speak. And I guess I’m able to look at people and sort of understand, I think this is a big one, Jerry.

I did not understand how much trauma affected people. I was not trauma-informed. And I would just look at the surface of people’s lives and say, why do they keep going from place to place? Why do they keep getting evicted? Why do they have to come here every night for a meal? And then living and working with folks both at Holy Family House and our house, I understood deeply, deeply what trauma does to people.

And, you know, this idea that these are able-bodied people that can just go to work and why do they have to, they wouldn’t be with us if they didn’t really have a need. And, oh, you know, just the power of understanding trauma and, you know, and then the power of community. I also understood that like how much chances, how much it increases people’s chances when they have a roof over their head.

Their chances for recovery from addiction increase. Their chances for getting a new, more permanent place increase. Their chances for getting a job increase.

Their chances for eating right increase. Their chances for getting healthcare increase. And so just to have that roof over their head, you know, I learned that, man, once you get out on that street or you’re in those woods or you’re in that car, it is so much harder.

And it was really a blessing for us to be able to provide a safe place for folks to land and have that, have some basic level of comfort and just a space to work.

Do you want to say anything, Donna? My wife just came out into the kitchen. She probably won’t, Donna probably won’t get in front of the screen, but she might be saying something from the side, if that’s okay.

ROUNDTABLE: Ask her who’s a guest that she remembers.

CHARLES CARNEY: Who’s a guest that you remember, Donna?

DONNA CONSTANTINO: Bob.

CHARLES CARNEY: Okay, I already talked about Bob. What about Ginger and Rachel?

DONNA CONSTANTINO: Yeah, Ginger and Rachel. So Rachel had, she had multiple illnesses. She had PTSD. She had a head injury. She had traumatic brain injury.

She had, what was that illness she had? Oh, fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia, yeah. There were multiple illnesses and she was able to get a disability.

But one time she went to the hospital under the influence of drugs. And that led her to her, it unraveled her life because that was in the report, in the hospital report that she was, she had drugs in her system, and she lost her disability. And her and her mom were like on the streets homeless.

And so we had them live with us until we helped them find an apartment. But, and Rachel’s mother had some form of mental illness, and she had problems with the rectum and just needed surgery and nobody would touch her. And just the agony of, you know, not knowing where am I gonna be tomorrow? So Charles and I let them live with us for a while until we got them situated.

But they were very demanding emotionally, mentally. And so it was really exhausting to have them live with us, but there was no other option at that point. So, and 15 years later, they’re still facing homelessness again.

So it’s just, it’s a system that just, once you’re in poverty, it’s so hard to break out of the cycle of poverty. It’s just, it just pulls you down. And they’ve been in and out of homelessness for the past 15 years.

And, you know, you can only do so much. And, you know, you’ve run out of emotion and empathy to be that present. We had a lot of people with mental illness live with us.

So it was really challenging. Some of them had delusions, schizophrenia. So, you know, I’m a clinical therapist, and I’m a trauma focused therapist.

So I knew, you know, what some of the symptoms they were having and what was at the core of those childhood wounds. So many of them, their family systems were just chaos and violent and no stability. So it really was a challenge because you had to not only deal with their homelessness and their personality, but also their mental illness.

But I think because Charles was a social worker and I’m a clinical therapist, I think though having that training and those skills enabled us to cope and to provide the emotional resources we had, as well as the financial and providing them, you know, with a home. And we really tried not to make it our house, but it belonged to the community. It wasn’t like we’re taking you in and we’re doing you a favor, no.

Never took that out, that place was as much as their home as ours. So that really broke down barriers. So, those are some of the insights that I am sharing.

It was a wonderful experience. We did it for 18 years, but eventually when we got older, we just had to stop doing it. But it really was a powerful, powerful witness to have the mind of Christ and to be present to people that society rejects and has no patience or no, any compassion.

And so it was really our prayer life, our spiritual life that really was what held us for all those years. Because if we didn’t have a spirituality, you know, praying and meditation, you know, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. So our spirituality was primary in being not burnt out, not running on empty, so I would say that would be my final reflection.

CHARLES CARNEY: And being in community with other Catholic Workers, like seeing the great work of Cherith Brook, you know, Eric and Jody and Brother Lewis and the many at Holy Family House, many volunteers, that kept us going too, along with meditation a couple of times a day and just do the relationships once, you know, the relationships were bonding. And so then you become friends and then you do whatever you can to help a friend. Yeah.

ROUNDTABLE: Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? I’ve had that experience myself with my Catholic Worker life. I still am in touch with some of the guests from 30 years ago. So that movement from, ‘I’m here helping you’ to, ‘we’re in this together,’ is a beautiful movement. How long did people typically stay at the house with you?

CHARLES CARNEY: I would say on average, it was longer term. Two years. We did have some overnight guests, you know, here and there. We had a political prisoner, Helen Woodson, who after she did her very long stretch in prison and was on parole from a plowshare’s action, she stayed with us for 18 months. But we didn’t have a certain time set that you gotta be out of here in, you know, six weeks or six months.

We took it on a person-by-person basis because we didn’t wanna be like an agency. We wanted to be like a home. And if people were, we didn’t even say, hey, what kind of progress are you making in getting your own place? Because not everybody’s cut out to have their own place.

Some folks maybe do need to live with others and have that extra support. So, we didn’t say, it wasn’t a cookie-cutter approach. Like, well, you have to be in public housing by within seven months.

If you wanna go to public housing, that’s great. But if you’re doing well here and you wanna stay here, then stay here. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but.

ROUNDTABLE: That does. Let me ask, and this can probably be our final question. Let’s say there’s a young couple out there who’s considering doing this, or even a middle-aged or older couple who’s thinking about doing something like this. What advice would you give?

CHARLES CARNEY: If you have a Catholic Worker close by, lean on them, bond with them, make friends with them, visit them, volunteer there. And other than that, it does probably help to know a little bit what the person you’re asking in so you can accommodate what their needs are gonna be.

I don’t know, just good self-care. And don’t try to do it all. Remember that people are resourceful.

And sometimes all they wanted was, hey, I just want to come in and crash, and then I’m gonna leave and I’m gonna be gone the rest of the day. And that’s okay too. We can have as much bonding or community as we want, but we don’t need to feel like we have to be a be-all and end-all to people.

It can just be as simple as living in community with others and whatever happens in any community you would live in can happen in the Catholic Worker, St. Lawrence Catholic Worker House.

ROUNDTABLE: Did you, was there any issue with sharing? You said that you didn’t necessarily provide food. So like if someone wanted to go into the refrigerator and it’s like, hey, you’ve got milk, can I have some milk? Or was there any issue around that?

CHARLES CARNEY: You know, Donna and I are, we’re both on the Myers-Briggs, we’re not, we’re pretty loose. I don’t know what the term, perceiver or whatever. And so in terms of cleanliness and sharing food and stuff, we were pretty laid back about it. You know, unless we were having a high tolerance for chaos, unless we were really having a bad day, there was a spirit of sharing.

And we did buy food for people sometimes if they needed it, but it was like a party, you know, not party in the sense of, it was like a banquet, a celebration atmosphere. And even if it was just a common, you know, they needed a week’s worth of food and they couldn’t get what they really wanted from the food kitchen, then it was kind of like, hey, you know, we have the money, we have this, let’s celebrate it, you know? We’re not, we weren’t really about, we didn’t get into it because, you know, we wanted to be stingy or not have a feeling, not have a sense of sharing with others. And that’s, I can’t remember the quote from Dorothy Day, but you know, even with the, even with crumbs, sometimes it wasn’t crumbs, sometimes it was pot roast and cheesecake and party on, you know, or Turkey or Thanksgiving meals or Christmas meals or whatever.

And those were some great times. I mean, I still miss it, you know? Yeah, not all of it, but that joy and that camaraderie, I still miss it.

ROUNDTABLE: So I predict you’re going to, once you get settled there, you’re going to find a way to meet that need again, you know, maybe not in your house, but you’ll find a place to plug in because one thing we know for sure is there’s no shortage of the work.

CHARLES CARNEY: Right, there’s a place here in Lawrence called Drop Inn and Rest. And people can come in in the afternoon and take a nap and do their laundry. And yeah, it’s a resource center and nothing more important than just helping people feel safe and welcome.

So we’re gonna be volunteering. Any time of the day, yeah. So we’re gonna be volunteering there. So we’re already on that path.

ROUNDTABLE: That’s great. Well, this has been good, Charles, and Donna, I am glad you popped into there.

CHARLES CARNEY: I hope this was, I hope I didn’t ramble too much, but it’s, if nothing else, it was a really good outlet for me to sort of process, you know.