Looking for a More Joyful, Vibrant Church? Catholic Worker Ideas Point the Way, Author Says

Art: Detail from “The Works of Mercy” by Jen Norton. Used with permission.

They called it the Hill. The priest at the little church on Main Street, for whatever reason, hadn’t heeded the conventional wisdom that the homeless were to be sent to the shelter or charged with trespassing, and so a group of five or ten men could usually be found squatting on old chairs or milk crates along the edge of the property that sloped sharply down to the adjacent gas station. They all knew one another, and had for years—Bubba, Mac, Danny, Will, Ruben, Mike, Concrete, and others—many of them growing up together on the other side of town.

I lived nearby and started coming to the church most days for morning or evening prayer, and I would occasionally run into them. I usually got panhandled and slowly started to get to know them, whether I wanted to or not.

At first the interactions were relatively short and often, shall we say, transactional—a few bucks or a pack of smokes, a ride downtown, or maybe a hotel room if it started getting really cold. Some mornings those of us who were there to pray would have to maneuver around a couple of sleeping guys to get to the door of the church.

Over time, it became apparent that I was on friendly terms with at least some of the guys. “Oh, good morning, Colin,” Bubba would say as I did my best to gingerly step my 225 pounds over him. Bubba was a cheerful regular and always professed to sleep well on the cardboard box underneath the covered walkway, in part because of the large stick he kept in his hand for protection, which he named Betsy. “No one wants to meet her,” he’d say with his good-natured chuckle.

Many mornings after prayer, a couple of us would end up going with Bubba or Ruben or Charlie to the grocery store across the street to get them some breakfast before heading off to the rest of our day. It got to be a hassle to go to the store every day, so we decided to just bring some cereal to church. We set it out, along with the milk and bowls and spoons, and chatted for a bit. At some point, someone asked, “You aren’t going to eat anything?” and at that point you couldn’t refuse, of course—not without firmly drawing a line between “us” and “them”—and so it was settled. We all started eating together most mornings.

After doing this for a while it began to become clear that we were getting ourselves into something, though we weren’t sure exactly what. However different we all were, the combination of common prayer and encountering the poor had, quite accidentally, made us into a little community. At some level, the few of us who gathered to pray—mostly graduate students at Duke University—were becoming friends with the homeless.

If we were absent for a few days, they’d come to our apartments to make sure we were okay. We, in turn, increasingly felt more obliged to consider their welfare. Both “sides” were beginning to feel a little responsibility for the other.

What to do now? We were vaguely aware that this had something to do with the Gospel, but the situation seemed so particular and even peculiar. Had anyone thought about this before, much less done it?

The Catholic Worker

And so we did what any theology graduate student would do—we took our questions to the divinity school library and started typing keywords into the catalog: “poor,” “homeless,” “Church,” “poverty,” “hospitality,” “fellowship.” It didn’t take very long before we came across these two figures, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who had founded something called the Catholic Worker movement.

And the striking thing was that they had met, it seemed, the same kind of guys we had and had the same conversations and ended up doing many of the same things. But they also had put a lot of thought into it, drawn largely from the depths of the Catholic tradition. They talked about ideas like personalism; voluntary poverty; “the little way”; “blowing the dynamite of the Church”; good work; community; and cult, culture, and cultivation.

Day and Maurin had, it seemed, built up a whole philosophy around exactly the experiences we were having, a full eighty years before we were having them. They had made a whole way of life out of it, which they claimed was nothing but the outworking of being committed Catholics in our day and age. And they authenticated all of this by testing it with their own experiences.

This was by far the most compelling model for the Church’s engagement with the poor I had come across. Actually, it was the most compelling model of the Church that I had come across. I was (and am) about as white-bread as you can imagine. I grew up happily in the Minneapolis suburbs playing sports and Nintendo and had come to Durham for graduate work in theology.

I liked the Church and thought I knew a fair amount about it, but it had never even occurred to me to get to know any homeless people. But something about the situation I had stumbled into struck me as right. A church should have the poor gathered around it. The smell of pews and incense and the smell of folks who hadn’t had a shower in a few days somehow went together.

For the Catholic Worker, the Church was not some theory—it was not just a set of beliefs or moral principles. Each day when I walked up to St. Joseph Parish on this little corner of Main Street, I could see the Gospel. The simple existence of that place, with its round of prayers and mix of characters, was the closest I’d ever come to Jesus talking to me. It was beautiful. It was only later when I discovered that Day said that the world will be saved by beauty.

Part of this beauty was not only taking responsibility for the poor as Christians, but, as Day and Maurin emphasized, learning that in many ways the poor were there to help me. So the goal was not “meeting needs,” but friendship. The goal was a new kind of community, which the Church, they said, had always been meant to be. That’s what this book is about.

Looking for Something More

These days, in my day job I work at a large parish in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. A lot of different folks come through our doors, and the more I get to know people here, as well as people in other parishes, the more I am regularly impressed by the faith of average Catholics in the pews. No doubt, we have our problems, but I tend to think these issues pale in comparison with the simple fact that there are any people at church at all. In an increasingly non-Catholic world, if you are in a pew on Sunday, it is more likely than not that you want to be there and that your faith is important to you. There are vanishingly few “cultural Catholics” these days—people who are just there going through the motions like they always have.

We go to church not just because we believe and want to practice our faith but because we are looking for something— something that our everyday lives are not giving us. Sometimes without even being able to put it into words, we sense that there must be so much more to life than screens, online relationships, social media, jobs we often don’t care about, making more money, or the general encouragement to invent yourself or find your own identity.

We go to church because we intuit that there must be more to the community we experience at church than various forms of “friend dating”—a beer here, a soccer game there, virtual community, and holiday get-togethers with other people who are just like us. We go because we somehow know in our bones (even if not quite with our brains) that the Lord is calling us to more than pew-sitting, family prayers, and “social service,” however important these things are.

People ask me, “What can I do for the homeless?” I think it’s because they suspect there must be more to what Jesus says about the poor than writing checks to charities or volunteering. We have all heard that following the Gospel is supposed to fill us with joy, and we rightly wonder if this could take us beyond simply being nice to one another.

In one sense we are relatively happy, and we put on a pleasant face most of the time. On the other hand, many of us are vaguely aware that we are sick of our own attempts to distract ourselves through another day by constant busyness, often superficial relationships, and, yes, more screens. We are serious about our faith, but at the same time we fear that without the next beep, buzz, ring, podcast, or commitment, the boredom and despair we occasionally glimpse might jump out and swallow us.

So we come to church, yes, because we really believe, but also because we sense that the Church should have something to say about the fact that the shape of our lives is somehow not satisfying us. Churches, too, do their best to respond, and yet often struggle to break out of the mold of offering as cures simply more of the disease: low-commitment gatherings, commuter fellowship, virtual “connections,” and yes, even more screens.

We are longing for the Church to give us a vision of life that is a compelling alternative to this status quo. Many of us have a secret hope for a whole alternative way of life, with a depth that corresponds to the seriousness with which, at our best moments, we take our faith.

This book suggests that the Church has always had a vision for this kind of living, and the principles that animate the Catholic Worker can help us rediscover it and bring it to life wherever we are. It is a life of regular common prayer, material simplicity, fellowship with the poor, good work, and real flesh-and-blood daily relationships, rubbing shoulders with those who are doing the same. It is a life of friendship, adventure, humor, joy, and learning to take God seriously but ourselves lightly. This book outlines this vision, explains it, and says why it is so deeply relevant for those of us choosing to be in the pews today.

This excerpt from We are Only Saved Together by Colin Miller is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.