A lot of us generally understand the concept of material detachment, enough to feel uneasy with owning more things than are strictly necessary. For those of us who live or participate in intentional community, we even structure our lives and decisions around the belief that God will provide a spare tunic if we need one. It’s telling, therefore, that Christ’s exhortation to his followers doesn’t end with a command to take “only what they need,” but continues with instructions on how to detach from work. “Any place that does not receive you or listen to you, as you leave it, shake off the dust from the soles of your feet as a testimony against them.” That is, the indicated response to communities that don’t want their message is to move on.

Shaking the dust off our feet is evidently a much more challenging concept to accept than the call to travel light. Our challenge isn’t always that we need to have more, but the very insidious belief that we need to do more. Our economic system manipulates primal fears of scarcity and subsequent failure, leading us to do everything possible to protect an imagined imperiled future self – justice-based intentional communities, even those rooted in faith traditions, are hardly immune to the pulls of the dominant culture. 

I’m reminded of Thomas Merton, a very hard worker himself. Towards the end of The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes the very early days of his time as a novice in the Trappist monastery, in which the novices woke up very early to work outdoors, and where the expectation was “to make some act of pure intention and fling yourself into the business and work up a sweat and get a great deal finished by the time it is all over…The idea is to keep on working.”

We know what it looks like in practice when we “keep on working.” Organizers, activists, leaders and followers are trapped in by the demands of the workspace, culture, and our impossible, self-imposed expectations. We’re often tired, bitter, hopeless, anxious, and tragically lost. We cling to learned virtues but forget their purpose: detachment should lead us to trust.  

It would do us good to remember that we can trust that God can do a better job than we can. The apostles may not have convinced every single person they met, but demons were still cast out and the sick were still healed. Merton writes that God had always been working in the background of his life, and that the problems that seemed so important and insurmountable to him had been quietly resolved. Indeed, without his even noticing, God “had worked the solution into the very tissue of my own life.”

The Los Angeles Catholic Worker hasn’t only provided me with community for almost a decade, but with constant lessons in trust. The LACW operates three times a week out of the tiny “Hippie Kitchen” in Skid Row, providing meals to hundreds of the neighborhood’s residents. As the city’s count of unhoused and residents unwaveringly goes up, serving beans is an effort that can be as rewarding as it is hopeless. Nonetheless, the community continues its mission of providing loving, healthy meals to those who want them. Three times per week, anyone can eat (or rest) at the kitchen’s garden, which one gentleman described to me as “a real oasis in downtown Los Angeles.”

I get a big kick out of the “Icon of Christ and Abbot Mena.” The big eyes are adorable, but the hand Christ has on the tired Abbot’s shoulder is an invitation to consolation, reassurance, and trust.

Image description: In a faded, old image, the Abbot wears a brown robe, with a halo behind him. Also in a brown robe, Jesus stands to his right holding a book in one hand, with the other arm around the Abbot.