small miracles

"We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and dear God—please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend."

We continue in our fourteenth year of feeding our brother and clothing him and sheltering him and the more we do it the more we realize that the most important thing is to love. There are several families with us, destitute families, destitute to an unbelievable extent and there, too, is nothing to do but to love. What I mean is that there is no chance of rehabilitation, no chance, so far as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance of adjusting them to this abominable world about them, and who wants them adjusted anyway?

Dorothy Day, Love is the Measure, 1946

My friend F is amazing. She has survived an overdose, stroke and a heart attack, and been sober for two full years.

The first time I met her, she showed up at the door of our house during a community dinner she didn’t know was happening. I opened the door to her tearful face. She was crying because she had just been kicked out of her housing. This really isn’t typically how this works around a Catholic Worker, but for some reason, I knew I would take in this woman I knew nothing about—and I did—and she’s been a constant in our lives ever since.

F is moving into a new subsidized apartment, and her housing coordinator called me on Tuesday to tell me that she was trying to get her into a new place sooner, since her landlord was not fixing her refrigerator.

Now the thing about F is that she is a prodigious texter, and she texts a lot and in a single mode: panic. I’ve responded to multiple calls that she had “nothing to eat” only to get to her apartment and find her cupboards full. Cry wolf one too many times around a Catholic Worker, and the clamshell of a hardened heart seals shut. Both her and her housing coordinator suggest she spend less of her small fixed monthly income on vapes and cigarettes, but better those drugs than others.

So F was “up my butt,” as she might say, sending texts throughout the afternoon about needing food because her refrigerator wasn’t working.

I asked her to give me her landlord’s phone number and I would intercede for her with him. She did not, perhaps because she didn’t know how, but regardless, the number was not forthcoming.

Expletive expletive expletive, I screamed in my mind as text after text poured in, because, write it in capital letters: This Was Not My Problem. But it is her right as a tenant to have a functioning refrigerator in her apartment if the apartment came with a refrigerator. And so she is right, on one level, to be petitioning incessantly. I just didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the petitioning.

So I find the landlord’s phone number, and I call him.

Inside of me, rolled up into a tight little knot of rage, is more than just the small matter of a broken refrigerator.

It’s the despair from watching our neighbors waste their lives day in and day out smoking spice; it’s the helpless rage of wanting a friend out of detention and no relief forthcoming; it’s the fury from watching a male police officer “pat down”—really, grope—a woman he’s arresting in the street— “it’s not illegal,” his partner tells me: “it should be,” I snap back; it’s the disregard each car barrelling down the street at 100 miles an hour pollutes into the neighborhood, not caring if they hit a cat, groundhog, squirrel or person—life is meaningless, mine worth risking, yours worth nothing—it’s the helplessness of holding pieces of scattered and unstable lives together in a world that is constantly crushing down on them, because to hold up other, richer, lives, the poors have to be beat down. It’s the anger of a mother trying to clean up the house while everyone else living in it and enjoying its comforts just barrels through it, leaving it a wreck in their wakes, as though they didn’t live here, too. As though it has never occurred to them that someone has to clean up after them.

All of that is building up inside of me, and as poor Mr. H the landlord, a man just trying to make a buck in America, just like the President, just like Jeff Bezos, answers his Google Voice call, all that fury crashes through the phone into him.

My voice is a tight laser of anger, burning him through the phone. Hello, I am calling on behalf of YOUR TENANT… I’m a symphony of furies, descending out of nowhere upon the unsuspecting man. Something primal inside me is screaming to the surface. Given a runway, I hit the accelerator and don’t stop. “Chill out,” he tells me a couple of times, but the absolute worst thing to tell a woman hoisting the globe on her shoulders like Atlas is to “relax,” so I keep going. “Don’t tell me what to do,” are his closing words, and he hangs up on me as my scolding rant is crescendoing.

After I realize I’ve been hung up on, my first feeling is release. It’s like months and months of anger have finally been flushed from my system. Alison Hill is like a river delta—all the debris that flows downriver catches at the basin, as the river flows freely into the sea.

Sometimes, I bike through Camp Hill, Harrisburg’s suburb across the river, and I cannot believe that these manicured lawns, these polished rooms with immaculate crown molding, these perfectly tanned and bleached white people walking down perfectly maintained sidewalks are just a 15-minute bike ride from where I live. The cost of all that beauty comes downstream, all the toxic by-products pool in the delta where we live. We like to believe that the suburban standard of living is a sign of the general and universally applied improvement of the human race. We hate to acknowledge that the verdant splendor of our own lawn comes at a cost to others.

Kate Raworth, a favorite economist of Pope Francis, noted that truly sustainable, just human development only comes when all people enjoy the same standard of living that takes into account the finite, limited ecological boundaries of planet Earth. Capitalism treats Earth like it treats people: an expendable resource to extract value from, ignoring the needs of their own internal ecosystem. For humans, capitalism ignores the laborer’s full identity as a person: the need to sleep, have a safe, clean place to sleep, to be free from chronic stress, to build meaningful relationships, to develop their intellectual and spiritual faculties. Capitalism ignores the need for the oceans to be free from plastic, for the landfills to be free from food waste, for the rivers and lakes to be free from fertilizers and data center coolant runoff. Raworth notes in her Doughnut Economics it would take several planet Earths to offer the entire world the standard of living of Norway or Australia—a suburban standard of living like Camp Hill. These high standards of living—single-family homes with large lawns, zoned for residential use only, with garbage collection that takes garbage away from the neighborhood—are created in zones that exclude the poor. If the resources of the rich were shared, with taxes, with those who cannot contribute, then the rich would have to give up a little bit of their comfort. But then the public resources—traffic lights, speed bumps, bike lanes, public transit, sidewalks—would be enriched. The community would be richer if the rich lived in the city, a site of resource-sharing, rather than in the suburbs, a site of resource-hoarding. And perhaps we would all find ourselves a little bit richer if the poor were not so poor, if the toxins were cleaned up at the source rather than being deposited downriver.

But I have chosen to live in the delta. Because I don’t want to live in a world where someone else is living in the toxic consequences of my own choices. Solidarity means the toxins build up in your system, too. It feels good to flush them out, yelling at Mr. H, who is being—at best—an unsympathetic landlord to my friend F.

That’s my first feeling. My second feeling is guilt. Because, firstly, I am a woman and socialized to feel guilt. And, second, well, you reap what you sow, and I’ve sowed some pretty rotten seeds between me and Mr. H. What good fruit can come from bad seeds? Jesus says none, but I’m hoping he can make an exception for me just this once, so I take up my case with him. What’s the point of absorbing the toxins if you’re just going to spew them back out, anyway?

I offer up a small prayer that my little tantrum won’t backfire on F. I pray that my righteous anger or my hunger and thirst for justice or—perhaps better—my love for my friend will move Mr. H, who, like all of us, is just a human doing his best, to give F an effing minifridge. Or at least a cooler. Goddamn. I just ask a little bit of forgiveness for adding to the toxins choking the river delta and for grace to fill the path that my ire has carved.

I send my friend B a string of voice memos— “a new episode of the RDR podcast”— he jokes, and in the middle of dropping that episode, Mr. H calls me back.

We are both primly formal with one another. We embark on the dance of courtesy, stiff verbal bows, allowing each other the dignity of both being right. I politely challenge the white lies he needs to tell to save face, but do not puncture his ego, by deploying that old saw, “Sounds like there must have been a miscommunication, Mr. H. I’m glad we’ve rectified it.” He says he will get F a mini-fridge that is lying around his office. I commend him on his human decency and invoke the blessings of the Almighty upon him, and we hang up on fine terms.

A few minutes later, F texts me jubilantly that her landlord is bringing her a mini-fridge.

What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion.

Dorothy Day, Love is the Measure, 1946

They say Dorothy Day needs documented miracles to become a saint. But, to me, this is her miracle. Vatican medical boards may not care about them, they may not impress the holy bureaucracies of the world. But they are the tangible actions of God in the life of the world. These are the sorts of miracles that keep the world on its axis, that hold up the globe on their shoulders.

If it were not for Dorothy Day, would my own heart have been softened? Would I have thought to pray in the midst of my own fury? Without Dorothy Day, would I have known to “be what I want the other fellow to be?” To soften my own heart so that another’s heart might be softened? Dorothy Day taught me that it is not my anger at my fellow human being that will heal what is wrong in heaven and earth, but rather my love for them. It is not the rage that brings results, it’s the love that pulses underneath, it is our shared hunger and thirst for a more loving world that will create the kingdom of God within us and among us. It is the grace from our prayer that moves hearts, not the angry phone call. The mystery of the incarnation means that there is no separating soul and body, there is no dividing prayer and action. But the prayer opens up space for something else besides dumping the toxins injected into the world at the feet of another. Prayer wedges open space for grace to move, for the river to flow freely.

We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and dear God—please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

Dorothy Day, Love is the Measure, 1946

Sweet Unrest in the Streets

—Sweet Unrest writing out in the world—

“Living in Sanctuary: A Photography Exhibit on Seeking Refuge in Sacred Places,” Jesuit Media Lab

“You can just walk into a gallery, it’s all free and available,” George Civeris said in a recent episode of StraightioLab. His populist call to claim art galleries as a summer city activity replayed in my head as a motivational speech as I walked into Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York on a Friday in June to visit “Living in Sanctuary.”

Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York (located on Ludlow Street, which tripped me up at first) is exactly the sort of aesthetically intimidating gallery in the city that Civeris wants an apprehensive young aesthete to approach with a renewed sense of confidence.

Art galleries are kryptonite for creative sorts afflicted by imposter syndrome. Am I allowed to be here? It’s like walking into fancy hotels to use the bathrooms. You have to screw your confidence to the sticking place and saunter casually. Let your swinging hips signal disposable income of great significance.

In this particular case, I was sweaty and loaded down with an over-full backpack and canvas tote. I did not look casual, wealthy, or cool. And then I walked around the small cenacle of photographs circled on the wall like rosaries and entered another world—dark and even dank, hallowed and harrowing.

Read about “Living in Sanctuary” here.