Our New Home
Spring 2022
We have a house! It’s small, but on a big lot, and when we arrived for the Open House the yard and the path leading up to it was filled with dandelions. In addition to being a good omen, it’s evidence that the previous owners did not engage in chemical warfare against the land. We’ll start small, offering hospitality to a few women in need, and over the years we hope to build on the property to accommodate more.
Front of the new Dandelion House
It was 11 years ago that I first lived full-time in a Catholic Worker community. I spent July of 2011 at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker as a summer intern, joined the Redwood City Catholic Worker immediately afterwards, and eventually landed at the San Jose house. As with any major life decision, the reason people join a community like the Catholic Worker are varied and complex.
For me, an important element in my choice was the desire to remember. One afternoon during that summer at the LACW, after serving hundreds of meals at our soup kitchen on Skid Row, we made our way over to the Federal Building in downtown LA . There, we held a quiet vigil to pray for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All around us cars were whizzing by, and the skyscrapers that surrounded us were filled with people going about their daily work. It occurred to me then: most of those people were not, in that moment, thinking about the vicious wars being fought half-way around the globe. I don’t say this as judgment – I knew from my own experience that even when I was teaching war & peace in high school, most days I didn’t think about the current wars we were in because I had more pressing concerns – lesson planning, grading papers, making dinner.
In the context of general apathy towards war, it struck me what a beautiful and important thing it was that this group of people who called themselves Catholic Workers made it their business to remember. It seemed to me that whether we were for the war or against it, as long as innocent people were being killed in our name, we had a duty to at least remember that it was happening. And here, finally, was a group of people who scheduled into their weekly work calendars a ritual of remembrance and protest.
If we are called to remember Christ in the bread that is broken and the wine poured out, how much more are we asked to remember him in people whose actual bodies are broken, and whose warm blood is spilt?
Remembrance is at the heart of Christian worship. Take. Eat. Drink. Do this in memory of me. If we are called to remember Christ in the bread that is broken and the wine poured out, how much more are we asked to remember him in people whose actual bodies are broken, and whose warm blood is spilt?
And so, Dandelion House will be a house of remembering. We will remember not only those killed in senseless wars, but all those whose lives are crushed under the weight of injustice, or what liberation theologian Jon Sobrino calls “original violence.” We will remember, too, that it is not only – or even primarily – humans who suffer, but the salmon, the bees, and the over 200 species that go extinct every day.
We will remember, and we will act. Will you join us?