To Live Differently
Lent 2022
It’s dandelion season. Maybe you’ve seen one peeking out of a crack in the sidewalk, or on someone’s lawn during an evening neighborhood walk. In cities, their bright yellow against the drab gray of concrete always makes me smile.
The news, as ever, is crushing. Russian aggression in Ukraine is immoral, and as of this writing has displaced 10 million civilians in a country of 44 million. The Biden administration is right to condemn the invasion. Yet, it’s hard not to see the double-standard of an American president siding with the innocent of Ukraine while continuing to arm Saudi Arabia in its 7 year war against the people of Yemen, and doing nothing to pressure the Saudis to lift the embargo that is starving millions.
“War is a defeat for humanity,” Saint John Paul II remarked over 20 years ago. More recently, Pope Francis tweeted, “War is a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a stinging defeat before the forces of evil.” Even speaking in purely economic terms, the cost of war is astronomical: according to Brown University’s Cost of War project, our post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. over 8 trillion dollars.
We will never recover the $8 trillion we squandered, but what about the trillions more we will surely waste unless we change course? If the real challenges we face – rising sea-levels and extreme weather patterns, the extinction of species and the suffering and death of our neighbors on the street – were part of a Russian, Iraqi, or ISIS strategy to harm us, perhaps we would find the political will and $8 trillion to fight them. As it is, these ills are the result of corporate profits and an extractive economy that form the foundation of “our way of life.” When it comes to altering our economic structures, we suffer from an extreme lack of imagination – we simply cannot see another way of doing business.
Like the dandelion breaking through cracks of concrete, we insist on life where death seems to reign.
Dandelion House, and the Catholic Worker movement of which we are a part, are one small attempt at imagining something different. Like the dandelion breaking through cracks of concrete, we insist on life where death seems to reign. What if we invited people experiencing houselessness to live with us, instead of confining them to an institution? What if we relied on the gift economy, instead of on the profit motive? What if we resisted the allure of violence, instead of pretending that it is the only “realistic” solution? What if we put spiritual practice at the center of our lives, instead of relegating spirit to religion, churches, or an after thought?
We will, no doubt, do these things imperfectly. We will compromise, and fall short. Yet my hope – the wager of my life – is that in living with intention, we may gradually come to know what is required of us in this time of disintegration. Lent is a time of pruning – of shedding the things that keep us from seeing more clearly and acting more boldly. As we carve out space in our day to day lives for the things that matter, may we find the collective wisdom to live differently.