Sunday To Sunday Attentive Heart

Welcome to the Attentive Heart Podcast where we explore how an integration of mind, body, and spirit makes us whole and enables us to become more compassionate to ourselves and to others. I'm your host, John Grbowich, and today my guests are James and Renee.

Why don't you just first tell us a little bit about your backgrounds and what occupies most of your time these days? Renee, how about you start us off? Well, thank you for having us, John. James and I live in Chicago, but I'm currently at Notre Dame working on a story for a magazine, and this is, yeah, I'm kind of coming back to my roots a little bit.

I went to Notre Dame for undergrad and for a master's degree in theology, and I've been coming back pretty frequently for a couple of different writing projects since we moved to Chicago, and that has been taking up a lot of my time. I'm working on a piece for Notre Dame Magazine, and I'm working on a book about ECU Medical Institute, Institute for Christian Unity started by Pope Paul II right after Vatican Two, that Notre Dame has taken ownership of a little bit.

And when I'm not doing that, I'm at St. Francis Catholic Worker in Uptown. And maybe James can talk a little bit about what we do in Uptown. Awesome. I know. And first off, I know that you guys are saying “we” here, so James and Renee are partners here, and I'd love to hear more about how you kind of use your relationship as a way to kind of grow in a vocation or a mission.

So James, just tell us a little bit about what you're up to in Chicago. Yeah. Thanks for inviting us onto your podcast. My name's James Murphy. I'm from Rochester, New York originally, and I'm in Chicago right now. I live and work in a place called Canterbury House, which is also in Uptown only two blocks north of the Saint Francis House Catholic Worker.

Before we moved here, I was living at the New York Catholic Worker for three years, and I lived at the Rochester Catholic Worker for five years. Canterbury House is part of a, it's called Mary, Mother of God Parish and it's three churches that have been clustered, and I'm at St. Thomas of Canterbury and we run a soup kitchen and a food pantry out of here. Uptown is a neighborhood that's just north of the Downtown Chicago. And at one point it was, you know, very poor, but it's been gentrifying in the last 10 years and it still has, I've been told, I don't know if this is true or not, but I've been told that it has the most shelters per capita in the Chicago land.

And so we've got a lot of friends who are experiencing homelessness and between the hospitality of the Catholic Worker, between the soup kitchen and the food pantry, we come into contact with a lot of people going through homelessness. So we, you know, so here at St. Thomas of Canterbury, I host a lot of round table discussions in the Catholic Worker tradition. We do it on everything from cooperatives to urban farming, the Eucharistic revival, the history of the Catholic Worker, Peter Marren Easy Essays things like that. But I also opened my doors for hospitality, when the Catholic Workers closed during the week on Monday, and host, invite people from the tents to come in and try to connect people with services that are around here and things like that.

Slowly creating a network of people and organizations to see yeah, how we can address the homelessness in Uptown. Well this is something that of course, really fascinates me living here out in San Francisco and people maybe get lots of the stories coming out from California of just the magnitude of homelessness that is here, that's here on the West Coast. It's interesting that here in, in Chicago that you're talking about, and even on the East Coast there are more tent cities popping up. They're becoming common in all cities throughout the country. So you have experienced being in New York that's where we all met at first. And I just wanna kind of get a little bit of your journey.

What compelled you to want to essentially live off of other people in, in these different ways that you're doing this right now in Chicago, in these two different houses? So, for me, James really sold me on this voluntary poverty thing. I met James through you and then we got to know each other at the Catholic Worker.

And I was really, really curious about this thing James kept saying, which was that voluntary poverty is freeing and that poverty is creative, right? You have to get really creative about the solutions that you have. And reading Peter Marren, wrote an article on Peter Marren together, and reading Peter Marren really convinced me of how voluntary poverty is sort of this antidote to a lot of the frustrations that we feel with our world or frustrations to why things don't seem to be working.

And I think it's because voluntary poverty is sort of like the key that unlocks the door to so many solutions once you, and it's personal responsibility too partly, because when you are poor, all you have is one another, right? And if you need something, you have to ask for it. Which is the true of all of us, right?

That's a universal experience of the human condition. It's just easy to avoid that discomfort if you have money, right? To like sidestep that universal truth or to ignore it or to try to opt out of it, right? It's like easy to ignore. You can sort of live in this unreality where you ignore how dependent you are on others.

And I felt like Peter Marren, there was something I had read, like many things you read right. They sort of paved the way for you to hear the gospel in like a new way, because you know, James wasn't saying anything that Peter Marren wasn't saying, and Peter Marren wasn't saying anything that St. Francis of Assisi wasn't saying, and St. Francis of Assisi wasn't saying anything that Jesus and the gospel wasn't saying. Right. But I remember reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals and thinking that this was such a beautiful image of what a community was and a sort of good grounding for political theory that we should take our relationships seriously and that neighborhoods should be based on this understanding that we live in relationships of dependence and that's not something to be avoided, or it's not a problem to hack our way out of.

With ever-increasing dependence on technology, it's a problem to be embraced. Because it's always the fundamental reality of who we are. And so I think voluntary poverty has really opened that up for me. And once you're poor, I think you begin to look at your neighbors. Like you begin to engage in like honest dialogues, right?

And honest sort of relationships where you could begin to think of how we could find solutions together. So I think, and I guess also like, yeah, this other part isn't very related, but that's how I think I see voluntary poverty as really unlocking this sort of creativity and also helping us to see that we do have the ability to solve problems that seem so overwhelming and bigger than us, like a homelessness crisis that's happening on the scale of, I think it's a million people.

Is it half a million people? I'd have to check those stats on the number of homeless people in the United States, but it's close to a million, right? It's over half a million and so that's right. That's so overwhelming. But I think that sense of, “okay, the answer is not going to be a systemic change so much as it is a change within ourselves and in our communities” because each of our neighborhoods has enough. We have enough for everyone who is in that, whether they're in tents or in a mansion.

And the question is how do we sort of reimagine our communities to be places of dependence and sort of radical welcomer hospitality? And for me, voluntary poverty really unlocked my ability. Instead of thinking, “Oh, I need a day job. I'm a writer”, right? So like instead of thinking, “Oh, I need a day job, and then I'll squeeze the writing in on the side”, it's like, well, what if I just did the writing?

So that was kind of my first sort of step into voluntary poverty was like, well, what if I just wrote the things that I felt called to write or pursued the sort of work that I felt really fundamentally called to do, and then trusted that everything would be okay, right? And so that was sort of my first foray into voluntary poverty, which I don't know that I would've been able to do without the support of James because no one else in my life thought that was a great idea.

Yeah. Well, I mean you, I mean, you said so much there and so much rich things. I mean, first off, I mean like this character of Peter Marren, James, I know that you have a great love for him. When did you discover Peter Marren and when did he start to speak to you? And when did you start to think, gosh, I gotta do what he did? What he proposed? Yeah. Because I mean, I wanna get to the, to the whole understanding of your life and like how you were living in the world and you were successful, and then you kind of just said, “Okay, I'm, I'm doing something different”. So let's get to, how did Marren inspire you to do voluntary poverty, to become poor so you can serve the poor?

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I never really jived with Wall Street. And but yeah I just never felt like I was doing anything good for humanity and I had enough Catholicism in me to know that, you know, we should be trying to help our neighbor and, you know, so I had a very deep sense of justice, but I just didn't know how to do it.

And I left Wall Street right after the first 2008, 2009 collapse. And you know, I moved to Rochester, my hometown. My daughter was in college. I took a job that I hated just to kind of get her through college and you know, when she left and got a job and, you know, things looked good for her, I began going to Mass and I stumbled across, I used to go across the street after Mass sometimes, and there was a used bookstore.

And I found this book called No Bars to Manhood by Father Dan Barrigan. And I read the book. I read it in one sitting. It just, you know, like, I felt like he had written this book to me. And he wrote it while he was in prison for his Catonsville Nine action. And, you know, he was just talking about like, we all want peace, but no one wants to give up their status in society, their reputation, their money, and I was like, yeah. Like I wanted to be Catholic, but I just didn't see any, I didn't see how to do it. And reading Father Dan Barrigan, I was like, “Okay, this is, this is really interesting”. And he talked about Dorothy Day in that book. So that kind of led me to Dorothy Day.

And then Pope Francis became Pope and you know,, I heard these stories that he would leave after he was elected Pope. He would go out into Rome at night, he would sneak out of the Vatican and go, tend to the poor in Rome. And it was never true. But it just got me thinking like, I'm not doing anything. This guy's like in his eighties. And you know, here I am like, you know, healthy, you know, much younger than the Pope guy. And so I said yeah, I wanna volunteer in a shelter. I have no idea even why I chose a shelter. But I Googled shelters for Rochester, New York, and St. Joseph's House of Hospitality, a Catholic Worker, popped up. I didn't even know there was one in Rochester at the time.

And so every Thursday night for two years while I was still working this job, I would sleep in the shelter at St. Joe's. And I met these homeless guys and you know, I'd stay the night and I'd bring my, you know, work attire and take a shower and go straight to work from there. And I did that for two years.

But, you know, I really, very soon let like. Even the first night I volunteered there, you know, these guys were just telling me their stories and, you know, I would just go to work the next day and just think about them all day. And I realized, you know, for the first time I'm not like thinking about myself.

And then I went to Mass and, you know, the gospel just made more sense because I was listening and. I was listening to it through the ears and eyes of, of the homeless men that I'd been getting to know. And, you know, I realized, yeah, the, the gospel is the good news for the poor and yeah. You know, so after two years of volunteering in the shelter, I decided to move in for a year.

I said, I'll do it for one year, and wow. Yeah, and I stayed. That means you quit your job to do this. Yeah, yeah. I left my job. I went to live at St. Joe's and you know, I treated it like a mission, like I'm gonna do it for a mission for one year, and then, you know, I'll go back out into the real world, you know, never realizing that I was really kind of entering the real world.

I was entering reality and that's where I met Peter Marren. And I was immediately, you know, after I think around it was probably after two years of being there that I really got to know him. And there were two things that really drew me to him. One, he was French and I had lived in France for a couple of years, so I was very intrigued by that.

And secondly, he wrote about the Irish and my name's James Joseph Coleman Murphy, I'm going through and so I was really, I knew the story of, you know, those seventh-century Irish monks who had left Ireland and kind of just brought a whole new culture, you know, just redid the European civilization, Western European civilization after the, the Dark Ages.

And Peter and Dorothy were talking about this, this green revolution and it really spoke to me because a lot of people in the Catholic, a lot of people think when a Catholic Worker talks about the Green Revolution that they're talking about Catholic Worker farms. And a part of that's true, but what they were really speaking about was the Irish monks, many of them saints who were very educated and very much missionary monks who left Ireland starting in the seventh-century and went to mainland Europe and, you know, began this, this centuries-long process of evangelizing, reconverting Europe to Christianity. And you know what Peter and Dorothy were saying was, you know what the Irish did a thousand years ago could be done today.

Wow. And so, and so the Catholic Worker is really modeled, you know, after that event that took place a thousand years ago. And then voluntary poverty is just part of the whole thing. Like, you know, I didn't, again, like, I never intended to embrace voluntary poverty. To me, it was a scary thing. Poverty is something that scares people, and it certainly scared me at the time, but when you make $40 a week, that was our, we got a stipend of $40 a week in Rochester. And Yeah, don't spend it all in one place, right? Yeah, exactly. And, but you know, after a while I realized, “Okay, like I have everything I need.”

After a while, it just didn't scare me. And then I realized what it really gave me was, was true freedom. I mean, You really have nothing to lose when you have nothing to lose especially when we ain't got nothing. You got nothing to lose. Right. And I also learned that in order to, you know, so people are afraid of voluntary poverty, people are, but really it's more of a, a voluntary simplicity that I choose not to desire or need money and depend on the providence of God, which you know, comes from community. You know that you cannot be poor and alone and you need community around you in order to survive. And that's, that's how Catholic Worker communities survive is, you know, they are poor, but they have everything that they need.

And you know, you just begin to realize, “Yeah, we don't need much to live.” And those things that I thought I needed, you know, all sorts of material items you don't really need. And, and I think too, yeah, it's a lot easier to connect and relate when you too are poor. You know, so I think they, people recognize that and it's like, yeah, we're all in the same boat together on this.

Right. Can I just say something too about the voluntary poverty thing is, I think, like, I, well, one, yes. I think like people love to talk about examining our privileges, and I think that's important, right? And like both James and I have college degrees and there's a certain privilege, speaking of mind, body, and spirit, right?

There's a certain privilege to have an education, to have, I don't know, that sort of intellectual formation. But I think what's more important than sitting around debating about or pointing out the ways in which I'm not as poor as I could be, is to begin to engage in that question of what voluntary poverty is.

I think any religious community, I mean, John, you've spent time in monasteries, any religious community that takes vows of poverty, ask themselves what that means, right? What is, what does a vow of evangelical poverty mean in a world where there's so much crushing, abject poverty? And I think what's important is not to sit back and only intellectually engage with that conversation.

It's important to put your body in, like, to say, “Okay, well I will, I will do what the gospel says”, which is to sell everything and give it to the poor. And I'm gonna do that imperfectly because I am imperfect. But I'm gonna begin to try that action. And I'm gonna seek first the kingdom of God, and then trust that everything else will be added onto me.

For me, I feel like voluntary poverty is the Worker. Gives me a way of living, like a way of being great or successful or like doing what I think is great or successful, that the world, I couldn't find anywhere else in the world, right? I couldn't see a career path that I was like, “Oh, that's it. Like, that's what's gonna make me a saint.”

And that sounds so cheesy and corny, and I hate it when people say things like that, but it is true. That's like, I don't until I sort of embraced voluntary poverty, I don't know that I was living in a way that felt to me successful or felt like a way that was bringing me actually closer to the way I wanted to live.

I hope you enjoyed Father John Gwi. He will be back as a contributing podcaster. Please share the Sunday to Sunday Witness podcast with your friends and if you have comments, send them to me. Ann Mary at Sunday to Sunday. Dot com. As always, this is Anne Mary Lanin coming from Kearney, New Jersey for Sunday to Sunday Productions.

I hope you enjoyed Fr. John Grovowich. He will be back as a contributing podcaster. Please share the Sunday to Sunday Witness Podcast with your friends, and if you have comments send them to me annmary@sundaytosunday.com. As always this is Ann Mary Mullane from Kearny, New Jersey for Sunday to Sunday Productions.