and you have your choices

but you are not alone in this

and you have your choices

these are what make man great

his ladder to the stars

but you are not alone in this

— Timshel, Mumford and Sons

My grandmother died this fall.

I am currently staying in her home, in the middle of the North Carolina pine woods outside of Raleigh.

When I first arrived, at 10 pm on a Wednesday, I was mostly sad and scared to be here without her. But being here, in this house, reminds me of who she is and why I love her, what I’ve learned from her. Every time I look up from a piece of paper or a screen, I see pine woods outside or the warm wood of the house, I see wrens, cardinals, a few woodpeckers, a thrush, chickadee, and an insistent, ingenious squirrel who has made his way to the birdfeeder, no matter on which hook I’ve hung it. These little pieces of what this place are wrap around me like a hug or a prayer.

Overwhelmingly—meaning a feeling so foundational and strong that often you can’t pull it into consciousness, but you just let sit glimmering at its edges—I feel grateful. Overwhelmingly grateful to be surrounded by her photos and her kitchen and her books. The places and people we are from hold us, carry us, and give us our two feet to stand on.

My grandmother’s house is beautiful. Even the Triple A guy who showed up last week to jumpstart the car noted how beautiful it is. How unusual it is. How it blends into the land, how it feels like part of the woods around it.

But in the twenty-five years that my grandparents lived out here, the city has come out to meet them. One bland subdevelopment after another McMansionized neighborhood have moved into the land around them. I remember getting lost in her woods when I was 12, and now there’s not a spot on the 36 acres of land where you can’t see or hear some reminder of neighbors.

It makes me sad to think that this place, this sanctuary, will just turn into another bulldozed segment of houses that could be in any ex-urban area anywhere in the contiguous 48, and because of that, they will erase the land underneath it instead of, like this house does, exposing it.

I never noticed this growing up, either, but our neighborhood was on the border of a nature preserve, and the suburbs were old enough that the houses were small enough to live in the landscape. For a child, at least, there was enough nature around to absorb it, to notice it, to be a part of it, to have some sense of it, rather than being consumed by the empty pre-fab soul of a suburb.

We are supposed to have deeply rooted lives. To come from somewhere, to belong to somewhere. To recreate what we learned in our childhoods in our adulthoods. If there is perhaps one gift of the past 100 years, it is to realize how fragile and flawed the lives we were given were.

“Timshel-’Thou mayest’- that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open.”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Sometime after college, when I was living and working in East Harlem, I remember wondering when I would move to the suburbs and have a house and how exactly that would happen.

I remember wondering this before it occurred to me that it might not happen automatically, and then I remember sort of slowly realizing that the world was divided into people who had houses in the suburbs and people who did not and I was among people who did not and was slowly—if not entirely—among their ranks at that point. I began to see the world as a series of choices with different outcomes rather than something more automatic.

I imagined that my life was a conveyor belt, that would take me from one socially-dictated stage of life to the next. I mean, wasn’t that how it had gone for the first two decades or so? As a child, you are enrolled in school, you are told that after high school comes college, and then after college, you have to get a job. Well, there I was, in a job. And so what was next in the social script?

Writing that down, the blaring privilege of a distinct class experience is obvious. But, also, the point of having a culture is that you have, to some degree, a conveyor belt to take you from one stage of life to the next. Rites of passage are essential—to embark upon something new, to leave something behind—most of them note that the passages we are journeying through are not in our control, hence the necessity of a rite. Ritual is our human agency drawing our attention to something happening, in blessing the inevitable and wrangling the mystery of existence into a comprehensible narrative.

In a certain sense, we need those conveyor belts, set in motion by the many mothers and fathers who came before us and kept in motion by our community.

Yet, on the other hand, it becomes clear how tenuous and feeble our collective lives together on this continent are. There are few sustainable ways of life—or culture—to pass down to our children.

Three years (a lifetime and a blink) ago, I wrote my first piece about the Catholic Worker movement. In the three years since, I’ve written more about the Worker, Dorothy Day, and Peter Maurin than I ever thought I would want to, and learned even more about them than I thought there was to learn.

December 8 is such an important day in the history of the Catholic Worker because it was on December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1932, that Dorothy Day prayed in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. for her road to holiness—for her way.

“I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor,” she wrote in her first autobiography, From Union Square to Rome. The next day, she met Peter Maurin. And that’s my folklore.

Dorothy credited that prayer—her longing for some tradition to be a part of—with opening her heart to Peter’s rather lunatic message and mien. “If I had not said those prayers down in Washington, I probably would have listened, but continued to write rather than act,” Dorothy wrote in Houses of Hospitality.

I love to periodically get on my hobby horse about how feasts like the Immaculate Conception have lost a lot of meaning, a lot of folk culture, and that feasts that have been reduced to going to a worship service and checking the box—the word “obligation” is in the title, hunny—are not really giving what a feast ought to be giving.

I’m not sure if I could have told you what I was doing on December 8 each year until 2020, when the first piece I ever wrote about the Worker came out on—serendipitously—on December 8th. But I can certainly tell you what I was doing each December 8 since.

I have always loved Immaculate Conception—the feast of choices, that feast that celebrates what makes man great, our ladder to the stars, because Mary is who God desires all of us to be—but I think the image of Dorothy Day kneeling in the cathedral asking for the way to be opened, asking for something worth saying yes to, is an image of the Annunciation closer to the touch. It grounds it a bit more in one’s own knees and on this side of the ocean, in this century of history.

We are all, us sweet little uprooted Americans, looking for traditions, because life is partly our own creativity, our own choice yes, our ingenuity and gifts, and yet it is also being a part of a world, being a part of something beautiful that is not of our own creation, but something we belong to and always have.

And our choices, of course those matter, they matter so very much. Isn’t the world hung on a thread of all our fragile choices?

But this is also the feast of the serendipity you can’t predict, the grace looked for but unexpected, the Ambassadors of God—Gabriel, a philosopher who looks like a bum, a beggar—who arrive to let you know the way you have been seeking is indeed open.