We were just sitting there talking

I recently finished Dorothy Day's book The Long Loneliness. I once heard a Catholic priest at the Keur Moussa monastery in Thies, Senegal, give a homily on the love of God. God's love, he said, is like the water in Manon of the Spring. You know the source from the dirt in the water, even when you can't tell how it got to where you're seeing it now.



Here is Dorothy Day:

POSTSCRIPT
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 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 any more.

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, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. 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.

Finding an answer to child soldiers

When I was at Calvin College and hung around some with some philosophy majors, we used to joke about what they'd do when they'd get out of college. "Open a philosophy shop" was a common suggestion.

Keeping up with events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I served in Peace Corps from 1982-86, has led me to one life after college for a philosophy major that none of us had ever considered: Edward Rackley works as a consultant to international agencies operating in conflict and post-conflict contexts, primarily in Africa. In a posting on his blog entitled No shame for the shameless, he says, "As most of you know, I've been working with child soldiers in the DR Congo most of this year."

Edward Rackley's blog is called Across the divide: analysis & anecdote from Africa and he has another article about the eastern Congo called Lawlessness and Lucre in Eastern Congo.

Finding an answer to child soldiers and what creates them is certainly one of the great spiritual challenges of our time. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere of "the great men who built up the Middle Ages", and one of the things they did was to limit war and who took part in it. We need to create our own limits, but this time we need to do it so that it applies for wars with other races and ethnic groups as well, something Europe in the Middle Ages never got to.

Rackley mentions reading P.W. Singers' Children at War. I checked and it's available in our local libraries here in West Michigan. It on my to-read list.

Vocation

The following entry in Buechner's book is one I have always lived by and found most useful, and one of the reasons I always keep a copy of the book around.

VOCATION
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.