Garden-Variety Exclusion

It’s always amazed me how the thing I need to hear often shows up exactly when I need to hear it. As usual, I was late to get around to reading an article (clearly I missed it the first time, it’s from 2023!) but Zina Hitz’s piece “Other Monks” in Plough found its way onto my reading list recently, and it was provoking–in a very good way.

Hitz lived for a time at Madonna House, a Catholic community founded by Catherine Doherty where laity and priests live together in community and simplicity, serving the poor. Her description of her experiences felt perfectly true to my own brief experience with community life (though to be fair, I chose my companions):

I learned to see that life with unchosen strangers laid bare one’s own faults so that one lives with a painful self-consciousness, regularly realized if not constant.

The sort of non-homogeneous community Hitz found at Madonna House is what we hope to move toward with our own Catholic Worker group – but for the most part I think we still fall into the same category with which Hitz labels her own friends of choice: “all bookish, and all middle class.” There is room for improvement in my own life if I want to love as Christ loved, leaving no one out. But that was not the insight that made me pause and blush with recognition, this was:

Among the forms of human speech sacrificed in common life are gossip, trivial comments about the lives of others: complaints, hasty judgments, salacious stories, speculations, cruel entertainments, and gratuitous criticism.

My first thought was, “If I said none of those things, my house would be very quiet…”

But how to break out of these habits of speech? This is not the main question of Hitz’s article, but it was the question the article raised for me. I could start any number of places – the way I correct my children, the stories I share with my husband, my reaction to the news, or traffic, or broken household appliances (I’m looking at you, mircowave)…and yet even as I consider how to stop complaining a little joke-complaint slips in. It looks to be an uphill battle.

***

A little later in the article Hitz continues:

[My friend groups] were, perhaps, intelligent, wise, authentic, morally upright, or edgy. Perhaps we drank fresh-brewed coffee rather than instant, read books rather than watched movies, or had in other respects excellent taste in consumer products. Nonetheless, such garden-variety exclusion is the antithesis of unconditional love.(emphasis added)

She held up a mirror, and what I saw was not pretty. I probably say something along these lines several times a day, I laugh about it, I have (mostly unintentionally) taught my kids to think like this. But I think Hitz is right: when we judge first, there is no opportunity for love to take root.

I don’t have a solution, or even a plan of action to work on this. Yet here, perhaps, is a place to start: with humility. However good I may consider my coffee or book choices to be, I am well aware that there are many things I just don’t know or understand. Could a stance of humility and curiosity – and, for me personally, a willingness to ask questions rather than play the part of quiet know-it-all – be a first step? My kids are very good at this; maybe I need to take some lessons from them.

I know what I don’t want: my hasty judgements, uncharitable speech, and “garden-variety exclusion” to prevent me from forming interesting, loving friendships with people whom my very limited imagination doesn’t recognize as good candidates for part of my community.

***

I just finished reading The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day (how’s that for some alliteration). Over and over again Day prays that she will learn to control her tongue – to speak less, less hastily, and less critically. At the beginning of 1960 she writes:

This year I must strive for gentleness and listening–less talking, no passing judgements, no impatience. God help me.

And all I can say to that is, “Me too. Amen.”