CW Liturgy – Midwest CW Gathering 2012

Song
Prayer: Gracious God. We gather together this morning to share and give thanks for our common Catholic Worker vision and spirit. We call upon you and ask that you to continue to guide and inspire us and we ask for the presence and guidance of our brother and sister Catholic Workers who have gone before us:
Call out names:
Chuck Trapkus
Ann Manganaro. . . 

Readings
As Catholic Workers, we advocate
--Personalism, a philosophy which regards the freedom and dignity of each person as the basis, focus and goal of all metaphysics and morals. In following such wisdom, we move away from a self-centered individualism toward the good of the other. This is to be done by taking personal responsibility for changing conditions. . . 
Dorothy Day wrote, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

“One does not free a person by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them, one frees them by attaching them to their destiny.” (Emmanuel Mounier)
According to Dorothy Day, “Peter made you feel a sense of his mission as soon as you met him. He did not begin by tearing down, or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice that you burned to change the world. Instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacities for work, for accomplishment. He made you feel that you and all people had great and generous hearts with which to love God. If you once recognized this fact in yourself you would expect and find it in others.”
Each stanza read by someone else in the gathering:
A personalist
Is a go-giver
Not a go-getter,
She tries to give 
what she has
and does not
try to get
what another has.

He tries to be good
By doing good
To the other fellow

She is other-centered
Not self-centered
She has a doctrine 
Of the Common Good.

He spreads the social doctrine
Of the common good
Through words and deeds.

She speaks through deeds
As well as words.

Through words and deeds
We bring into existence
A common unity,
The common unity
Of a community.

As Catholic Workers, we advocate
--Nonviolence. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." (Matt. 5:9) Only through nonviolent action can a personalist revolution come about, one in which one evil will not simply be replaced by another. Thus, we oppose the deliberate taking of human life for any reason, and see every oppression as blasphemy.

16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergy:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely. . .  I want to try to answer your statement. . . 
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns . . . so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. . . 
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. . . 
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative. . . .
. . . we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.
You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. . . 
. . . Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. . . .
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
. . . Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. . . 
Never before have I written so long a letter. . . 
If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, [or sisterhood]I beg God to forgive me.
I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. . . . Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Published in:
King, Martin Luther Jr. 

	

                                                                     

Time for Silent Reflection
Song

As Catholic Workers, we advocate 
A "green revolution," so that it is possible to rediscover the proper meaning of our labor and our true bonds with the land; a distributist communitarianism, self-sufficient through farming, crafting and appropriate technology; a radically new society where people will rely on the fruits of their own toil and labor; associations of mutuality, and a sense of fairness to resolve conflicts.

Wendell Berry reading 
Excerpt from the forward to The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry

A farmer is popularly perceived as a hick, without dignity, knowledge, or social responsibility… There is virtually no public appreciation of the complex disciplines necessary to good farming.  Good farming is lumped in with bad farming as a low form of drudgery, not esteemed as the high accomplishment that it necessarily must be… [And] after a half century of industrial agriculture, farmers of any kind have become a tiny minority, and good farmers are rare.  To farm our land in the best way, to conserve it and keep it, we need many more farmers than we have.  

A Spiritual Journey by Wendell Berry from Collected Poems

The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, 
no matter how long, 
but only by a spiritual journey, 
a journey of one inch, 
very arduous and humbling and joyful, 
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, 
and learn to be at home.
 
Excerpt from Health is Membership by Wendell Berry

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world. summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation with God.

I believe that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the work of the English agriculturist Sir Albert Hovvard, who said, in The Soil and Health, that "the whole problem of health in soil, plants, animals, and humans is one great subject."

I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not "against technology" so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community

Reading from Dorothy Day: Postscript, The Long Loneliness

We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.
	We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, “We need bread.” We could not say, “Go be thou filled.” If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.
	We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.
	We were just sitting there talking and someone said, “Let’s all go and live on a farm.”
	It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.
	I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.
	The most significant thing about the Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.
	The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone anymore.
	But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.
	We cannot love God unless we love each other. We know [God] in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
	We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
	It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.

We ask those who would like to briefly share aloud what has inspired them in their life in the Catholic Worker. . . 

Blessing—Brian Terrell
This is from "Beautiful Losers," a novel by Leonard Cohen about Kateri Tekewitha. It was written in 1966, andeven though it is in reference to Kateri, it was written with masculine pronouns- go figure. I changed it for the reading. Again, thanks for all.
Brian

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

…and Sign of Peace

Final Song