A Family Practice of Catholic Worker Simplicity

Agitator: We know that you and your husband David have lived a Catholic Worker simple lifestyle and raised your children accordingly. How did that come about?

Kathleen: David and I met at the Catholic Worker in Alderson, West Virginia, where I had been living for three years. I went from high school directly into the Catholic Worker. But David went to college and traveled around to visit different Catholic Worker houses, to find a place where he could work for a year before he entered seminary to become a priest. He thought being a Catholic Worker would be good training for the priesthood. But lo and behold he met me and didn’t go to seminary after all.

After getting married in 1981, we decided to continue the Catholic Worker lifestyle, and if possible, be part of a Catholic Worker community. We went to Olympia, WA where I studied organic farming at Evergreen State College. I really wanted to live Peter Maurin’s ideal of the agronomic university. A Catholic Worker house opened in Olympia as I was finishing school and we moved into a house across the street. We lived there for five years, during which time we had our babies, Peter and Clare, and tried to live the Worker lifestyle. But the Worker was unstable, so we searched elsewhere to volunteer yet continue to live our lifestyle. We decided to move to Alabama and work with the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, where I cared for mentally ill women, and David worked in a preschool. I loved it and wanted to stay, but David could not deal with the heat. After one year we moved back to Olympia and searched for another place to live where we could continue our vision of living below the taxable income.

Agitator: Why was that important to you?

Kathleen: We did not want to pay taxes because we didn’t want to support the war system. In fact, we don’t even pay the federal tax on the phone bill, because that all goes straight to the war machine and we don’t want to participate in that even a little bit.

Agitator: In order to avoid paying taxes, how much income are you allowed to make?

Kathleen: Right at this time I’m not sure. That’s David’s domain. At one point though, it was $19,000 for the four of us. Then he lost his job through downsizing and our budget for the year was suddenly cut down to $9,500 That’s what we had to live on and I made it work. My theory is that when you don’t have money, you grow more food, and so we did.

Agitator: So, at one point you were making $9,500 a year, and the four of you were living on that. That’s not much money. Did you pay rent?

Kathleen: Yes.

Agitator: And your transportation costs?

Kathleen: We do not have a car. We have never been able to afford a car. We bicycle everywhere and we take buses.

Living under the taxable income was a choice not to support the war machine, but we also wanted to be in solidarity with other low income families in our area. We can really relate to them and they can relate to us, because we are on equal footing. One of the things we learned at the Catholic Worker is that if you want to serve the poor you have to be on somewhat of an equal footing with them and struggle along with them, not over them. So we have struggled alongside our neighbors. We live in a low-income neighborhood with many one and two bedroom houses; we’ve had crack dealers down the street along with lots of police interference. But we are part of the neighborhood and on equal footing with our neighbors financially, which has been a real blessing, to be in community and solidarity with them.

Agitator: Tell us about your garden.

Kathleen: People don’t realize how much food you can grow in your own yard and what food really costs. This last year food prices have doubled. David and I went out food pricing last spring and found we were eating $25 worth of produce from our garden a day. I grow vegetables 12 months of the year.

Agitator: How large is your garden?

Kathleen: It’s on a city lot that is 60 feet wide by 115 feet deep, which includes our house. I would guess it’s about 1,500 square feet. I grow enough vegetables for four people all year long and fruit for part of the year. I have 13 fruit trees that are trained on trellises along the fence line of the property. We have kiwis, strawberries, and raspberries, and we are planting grapes this year. There’s a big filbert tree for nuts. We estimate I grow $1,200 a month in produce, 12 months of the year, on a city lot. That is quite a bit of money, especially when you calculate your income that Uncle Sam does not tax.

Agitator: It’s still free, right?

Kathleen: It’s still free other than water costs. And, I save my old seeds from year to year.

Agitator: So you don’t buy seeds?

Kathleen: Not from Monsanto. I probably buy approximately $20 worth of seed each year, and I get those from seed companies that do not support Monsanto.

Agitator: Why would you not buy seeds from Monsanto?

Kathleen: Monsanto is a big agribusiness company that is slowly taking over agriculture worldwide. They are monopolizing seed companies and they do genetic modifications with their plants and seeds. Their modifications generally make the plants infertile, so that you have to buy new seeds year-to-year.

I save my seeds and share them with my neighbors that they too can grow food. More and more of our neighbors are starting to grow vegetables, devoting their entire front yards to vegetables and fruits.

Agitator: They have started gardens as a result of watching what you have done? They actually plowed under their lawn?

Kathleen: That’s right. There are six houses in a row in our neighborhood with no front lawn—they’re all growing food.

Agitator: Have people come and asked you for help?

Kathleen: Yes. It has been a slow process. In December, we had 18 adults in our yard on a Sunday afternoon, in their rain gear and boots. I gave them a little mini class and we will meet again soon for a follow-up as the growing season begins.

Agitator: Tell us about raising your children. Have you ever been accused of being irresponsible in not providing more material advantages for them?

Kathleen: We have responded to such criticism by stating we believe we have done what is best for our children. We believe we are called to live this lifestyle and called to raise them with Gospel values, to give them lives that are not full of overconsumption. We have tried to raise them with a lot of parental attention. They never really suffered, except that they shared a room, which we partitioned from floor to ceiling. They traveled the country; they have been to Europe. Peter attended a really good college and graduated debt free.

Agitator: What did your children think about this simple life? Did they have friends that had their own personal computers or their own cars or their own telephones?

Kathleen: Peter did. Peter often criticized us for dressing poorly. He used to go to Goodwill and garage sales to buy slacks and button-down shirts and ties and dress shoes and a London Fog raincoat and a briefcase. He was going to go out and meet the world. He did not want anything to do with us, in his rebellious phase, because we did not dress well enough.

But then he went to college. And within the first semester, he would call us and thank us for the way we raised him. He was grateful that we did not burn him out on TV; he still had a brain. And he was grateful that he knew how to value money and how to live within simple means to get through college without debt.

Agitator: Was it hard to reinforce your family values in the larger culture?

Kathleen: Clare was mostly home schooled, but she went to public school in our low-income neighborhood for a few years. Our school took in all the homeless children in Olympia as well as all the foster children. One night when Clare was in second grade, our family was working in the family shelter and some of her classmates were there, living in the shelter.

Agitator: You took Peter and Clare with you to volunteer at a homeless shelter?

Kathleen: Yes, we did. We believe in living the corporal works of mercy within a family unit, and that means exposing your children to a variety of situations. We not only took them to homeless shelters, we also spent the night there as well; we helped out at the soup kitchen. But, my children also had a family membership to the Pacific Science Center, where we went every month. We traveled on the train to visit grandma in California. We went to all the library programs. We did a lot of reading. We have a wonderful circle of friends.

Agitator: Your life is very centered around growing food and reflecting on the politics of food. Tell us about the role of food in your family.

Kathleen: Families bond by coming together around food. Our whole culture is centered around food and our faith tradition, Catholicism, is centered around a feast, a meal. In fact, the home is the “little church.” We have the “big Church,” the international Church, and we have our parishes, and then we have the “little church,” which is the family unit. To come together around the family table is like gathering around for Eucharist and is a most important part of our daily life. We pray together at that table; we share our stories at that table; we learn to love and hate each other around that table; and we work out our differences around that table. And it is all around food. When we gather and invite somebody into our home for hospitality what do we do? We give them food, and we give them something to drink—it’s another form of Eucharist. I insisted that we always eat dinner together, in fact, even when they were in high school, I insisted my children be home for supper.

Agitator: People traditionally eat together, but now, to insist that your family come together and have dinner most nights of the week is a kind of radical action. What caused such a change?

Kathleen: I think the busyness of life. Soccer, that’s a big culprit. Meetings...we are an overly busy society…. When you have a meeting every night of the week or a soccer practice or basketball or baseball ... I view this as an attempt to control our lives, and I do not want to participate in anything that’s going to control our lives. I don’t want to be that busy, that preoccupied. I want to be in charge of my life, as much as possible, given the nature of life. I wanted to say, this togetherness is important, this is what I value. My children are important! I am only given the gift of their presence for 18 years and then they will leave me. I want them to have known family life, and central to that is the family dinner and quality time together.

Agitator: That is a basic human value that was lost in my family. The family dinner just didn’t get practiced too often. How else does busyness keep us from being human?

Kathleen: If you do not work as much and have more free time, are you going to fill that valuable free time with busyness or are you just going to “be”? I spend eight hours a day, five days a week, in my garden working. I don’t want to do anything else after my long days. Oh, I do toenail care, and during the off season I do some volunteer work with preschoolers, teaching them to be peacemakers, but beyond that I say no. Where is your prayer life? Where is your centeredness? Where is time with your spouse? Where is time with your children, if you are constantly on the go. You live in your car. I did not want to live in a car.

Agitator: Do you deliberately focus on trying to stay in one place?

Kathleen: Yes, I deliberately structure my life so that I am not running around a lot. Sometimes, for four months of the year, I remain within a one mile radius of our home. Because we live in the center of Olympia, we are one mile from the library; we are one and a quarter mile from the farmers’ market; and it is a twenty-minute walk to the food coop. And our parish Church is just a few blocks away. There is no need to go anywhere else.

Lately I have been called to be more contemplative, so I have taken to (and I never thought I would do this) the rosary. You know Dorothy Day prayed the rosary every day as well as the Liturgy of the Hours. So I have my prayer book; I do the Liturgy of the Hours, and I have my rosary that I use. David and I also do centering prayer. I wait for the silence in my garden and I live the seasons. I live the church’s liturgical seasons and I live the seasons of the garden. I can tell you what goes on in the garden every month. For example, soon it will be pruning time, and I will spiritually prune my life as well.

Agitator: Obviously the Catholic Worker was a tremendous influence on both your personal and family life. Now that your children have moved on, do you continue to reflect on that influence?

Kathleen: Certainly the Catholic Worker influenced the way we chose to live our lives. We now have been married for 27 years. The principles that Dorothy and Peter talked about—choosing to live simply so that others can simply live, and placing the corporal works of mercy at the center of community life—we inserted into our family, for indeed we are in community with our children. And Peter Maurin’s agronomic university—I am the agronomic university.

We still hold these principles really close to our hearts and had many conversations in the four years that Clare has been out of the house about what we are going to do next. We have talked about doing hospice care for those on the streets. There is a wonderful old red house that I would like for that work, but we have encountered one roadblock after another toward acquiring it. Meanwhile, David has been trained in nonviolence and gives nonviolence retreats and does mediation work, and I’m doing toenail and foot care. And now, suddenly, that house I have yearned for is going on the market in spring, and so we have to decide what we will do, given our other ongoing projects. How do we hold this Worker dream and ideal? What is God saying to us? We are in constant prayer, trying always to be open, always to be flexible, and to think out of the box. This red house has more land—it’s on two city lots. What could I do with that? How much more food could I grow? So, I come back to prayer and listen to the call. Ω