Bob's Blog

Justpeace + Better Times + Energy Conservation + Oklahoma Food +
Stop Spending, Stop (the) War + Running on Empty
+ Oklahoma Sustainable Living Resources

September 3, 2002

I sent this essay to the Vincentian Order social justice listserv this evening. RMW

Poverty is a many splendored experience, so to speak, it is not one single thing, it is many. In partcular, it is precarity (from precarious), inconvenience, and personal discomfort.

This is where things can get a bit weird, because it is practically a mortal sin in American culture to embrace or put up with any kind of personal inconvenience or discomfort.

But poverty isn't just not having much money, it's knowing that you live perpetually with one foot slipping and the other on a banana peel. It's putting up with a lot of personal discomfort and inconvenience. As long as everything goes exactly fine, you're OK. But one little slip, e.g. missing a few days of work, an unexpected car repair or medical bill, and down the tubes you go, never more than one paycheck away from homelessness.

Although Catholic Workers don't take "vows" in the sense that religious do, part of our charism is nevertheless to be poor and in solidarity with the poor. Since we don't have a "Rule", we try to figure out how this works, and often that means we deliberately embrace precarity, inconvenience and personal discomfort.

Most Catholic Worker houses are completely uninsured. We have no insurance here in OKC, except what the state requires for vehicles. If a tornado comes along and smashes our house tomorrow, well, that's that, as there is no way that I would have the money, or be able to borrow the money, to rebuild (we got started in a duplex which I own without a mortgage). Every spring when tornado season approaches, I worry a bit (I actually worry a lot) about this, I argue with myself, "wouldn't it be more responsible to get insurance to protect your investment?" Well, yes, but it wouldn't be very precarious.

And if I sat here in a fully insured building, maybe I would feel a little less personally precarious, and thus somehow lose something indefinable in words about the way we live and minister as Catholic Workers. Less passion, less honesty maybe, or perhaps less authenticity.

Then there's our heating system, or rather the lack thereof, hehehe. Three years ago our natural gas furnaces (old floor models) died. The first winter we used a wood stove, which worked great, and then when we fired it up the second winter, the chimney had apparently cracked since last season and piles of smoke billowed out from everywhere. So for both of the last two winters, we've used a small propane heater and an electric oil heater, which are fine except when it gets really cold, and then they're really inadequate. Then we retreat into one or two rooms and leave the rest of the house unheated, hang blankets and quilts over the windows and doorways.

It's just plain stupid for me to not to go and buy more heaters. that's the kindest way I can describe this, especially when I am thinking about it in January, I always know how stupid it is when I pull my head out from under about a foot of blankets and can see my breath, "what do you think you are trying to prove and who do you think you are fooling". I work as a director of music at a large parish, I make a just wage, I can afford better heating. But here again, the people we are to be in solidarity with are often doing the same thing we are doing on those very cold and frigid nights. They're only heating one or two rooms, everybody's inside those rooms dressed like they're outside, and when they go to bed the heater is turned off.

Words can't really describe that experience. You just have to be there. Dorothy Day used to write about how biting the cold was in the CW house in NYC during the depression. There is something about that experience that in its own way unites with the passion of Christ.

When people come to our place in the winter, it seems to me that they are embarassed for us. "Can't you do better than this?" is one way people put it. People have tried to give us central heating systems, and they always look Very Baffled when I say that that isn't the direction we're going, and until we can get where we want to be, we're just going to hobble along as we are.

If we were typical Oklahomans, with heaters everywhere blazing away, gulping fossil fuel like there was an endless supply of it or something, what would that do to our living obedience to our own little charism? Instead of being crucified with Christ, we're out there pounding nails into his hands.

We don't use air conditioning (except for one bedroom, where a man who is partially disabled sleeps), and that gets a lot of comment. Since it seems to be an issue for so many people, that suggests it does have some relevance and maybe we're onto something real.

We use fans, but it can be in the high 90s with high humidity in the summer here, and a person just has to relearn how to live with that. When to open the windows and when to close them, how to arrange shades and ventilation to make use of natural air flows, the importance of going out in the yard and spraying everyone with a garden hose, about every hour on the hour, etc.

Another thing we're commited to is buying food locally. This means many voluntary, self imposed limitations and inconveniences. More planning is required, less impulsive shopping. I buy our meat once every two or three months these days, directly from a farmer (actually two farmers, beef from one, pork, dairy and eggs from another) and that, together with what we grow or buy at farmers markets is what we eat, we spend about $40/month now for staples we presently can't get directly from farmers.

There's lots of reasons for this, which I won't list now, but we're satisfied that people who do these things are helping to build a more just and sustainable culture of love, starting right there in their personal household. We think that the more people who begin to live this way, who will consciously reject fundamental categories of the present culture of death, the sooner things will turn around and get better in the world out there.

Gandhi once said that he hardly knew how the whole world should live, so he thought that if he could learn how he himself should live, that in itself would be a big contribution to peace in the world (loose paraphrase, don't have the exact quote handy).

I have a lot of control and thus freedom over what I personally do and how I live my life. I get the whiskey AND car keys. What others may or may not be doing is in the hands of God. He didn't call me to live for them, but rather to live for Him. I recommend that to everybody, especially myself.

Some things just have to be lived, and you just have to decide to do it, and then you just have to do it. I don't have a "superior" to tell me to do (or not do) certain things. This has its good and bad points, believe me, there are many times when I have wished that I could call somebody up and say, "Father Superior, will you please tell me what to do about thus and such." There is a certain freedom in this, but there is also that whiskey and car keys responsibility. It is very easy to rationalize a typical high energy maximum consumption American lifestyle, but the very ease of the rationalization should warn us of its spiritual dangers.

It's not at all clear to me how embracing precarity, inconvenience, and discomfort can bring so much peace and serenity to one's life, but that pretty much seems to be what is happening. An inconvenience, really, is only an adventure wrongly construed (I think G.K. Chesterton said that).

Robert Waldrop

Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House

August 25, 2002

Late to the party as usual. Here it is, August 25^th, the 21^st Sunday in Ordinary Time, and I'm just now getting around to getting my own blog (which is short for "web log"). I've actually had one for some time, but I didn't know that it should be named that; actually, there are several. First of all there's my Garden Diary, chronicling the various misadventures and harvests on my urban agriculture journey. Then there's the collected Front Page Blog, which consists of the introductions of the Justpeace Front Page webzine I've been publishing since, hmmm, 1998 or so. The main Justpeace page has links to a number of other commentaries, and then there's my personal favorites, which are my occasional meditations on the lectionary readings.

The sustainable development conference in South Africa begins tomorrow, and once again I'm glad that I can't afford around the world jaunts or I would have been tempted to go just to watch the circus

It's been minorly annoying to see the conference publicized in the environmental internet as a significant event. But many of my fellow environmentalists remain wedded to a top down approach that will ultimately be as fruitless as the top down globalization agenda of the World Bank and IMF. Or George Bush's new bureaucrats that are dedicated to "helping" people of faith to help the poor, said bureaucrats being about as useful as mammary glands on a boar hog. (The colloqial way we say that in Oklahoma is not printable in a family blog such as this.).

Another not so minor annoyance is the dreary bleat from the Republicans about being pro life. As I recall, this session of Congress began with the Republicans controlling both houses of congress and the Presidency. Did they move immediately to a vote on a partial birth abortion ban? No they did not. In fact, they couldn't get around to voting on that ban in the House until the week before adjournment, when they knew they didn't have any chance of getting it through the Senate. How conveeeeeeeeeenient. Never mind the fact that George Bush and all the Republicans in Congress haven't managed to save the life of one unborn child in two years. Never mind the fact that while they sat around twiddling their thumbs, putting every issue in the book on the table ahead of protecting unborn children, 4,000 kids were being murdered every day. We're still supposed to forget about the collateral damage in Afghanistan (and what is soon to come in Iraq) and vote for them because they are "pro life". The dirty fact the Republicans don't want us to think about is that abortion goes forward in this country to this day thanks to supreme court justices appointed by Republican presidents, and the cowardice of Republican congresspersons.

The present crop of Republican politicians are liars who are shamelessly playing politics with the abortion issue. Pro life voters should not vote for one single Republican candidate in the coming elections. It's not that the Democrats are any better, they obviously aren't, but politics is about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, and the Republicans have proven themselves to be the enemies of unborn children. Maybe if they lost a lot of seats in Congress this time around, they will be better behaved in the future. Even if they get back control of the Senate, and keep it in the House, they will still find a way to evade a vote on a partial birth abortion ban. They did it before, they will do it again. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest voting for any Democrats (unless they are pro life), but I certainly do not intend to vote for one single Republican in the upcoming November elections. I don't expect to cast many votes on my ballot in November, but I will go and get one anyway, and drop it in the ballot box. I agree voting is a Christian duty, but there is no duty to vote for a candidate who is a thief and a liar and a murderer of unborn children, and if all the candidates are thieves and liars and abortionists, I think a person is more than morally justified in casting a blank ballot. Kind of a grassroots anyone can do it vote for "none of the above are acceptable." This is especially necessary in a state like Oklahoma, where we have less democracy than they do in Russia. In fact, it's easier to get a new party on the ballot in Russia than it is in Oklahoma. Which of course is why we generally only have two parties on our ballots. Leaders like Governor Frank Keating like it that way, can't have too much political pluralism, you know, people might get the idea that they were in charge and the leaders were supposed to represent them.

Speaking of Governor Frank Keating, any doubts I had about whether the bishops were corrupt or not went right out the window when they picked him, a politician who has never passed up a chance to grind the face of the poor into the dust, as the head of their new lay review panel. So I wasn't surprised when he popped up, promoting himself to apostolic nuncio, and announcing New Doctrine: Catholics who are mad at their bishops should not go to mass, they should go to another diocese and they should also stop giving money to the church.

Right, Oklahoma City Catholics are supposed to drive to Texas or Kansas or Arkansas to go to mass? And sure, while the President says we all have to do more to help the poor, the Republican Governor of Oklahoma calls upon Oklahoma Catholics to do less, to punish the poor because of our beef with the bishop. And to think that Call to Action wants to put laymen like Keating in charge of the hierarchy. May all the saints preserve us from the folly of our own leaders!

Fortunately, even though our religious leaders have been corrupted by greed and gluttony, the Church remains the Church, the mystical bride of Christ, a sure and certain guide in a time of trouble. Yes, we have bishops and archbishops and even cardinals who are cafeteria Catholics and who advocate the murder of the poor as a necessary adjunct to US foreign policy. But we as lay Catholics are not responsible for their sins, we have our own, and we can deal with theirs with our own prayers and especially, our own acts of reparation. The bishop's foolishness and wickedness calls for a response from the Catholic laity. We must do even more works of mercy, justice, peace, and environmental stewardship to heal the damages they have caused.

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around." - Orthodoxy, 1908

Robert M. Waldrop

Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City