“Growing Old Ain’t for Sissies – Even at the DMCW” by FC, 2024 March v.p. p. 6&7

“Growing Old Ain’t for Sissies – Even at the Des Moines Catholic Worker” by Frank Cordaro

Borrowing a line from Betty Davis, an old movie star, a year in review of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Elder Collective has not been easy. We began 2023 with the death of our beloved Norman Searah (72) on January 4th. Norman did not have an easy death. May he rest in peace  now. He certainly deserves it!  

As I write, Annie Patton has started three months of chemother- apy following her recent colon cancer surgery. Her daughter, Regina, is a nurse and is hosting Annie at her home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Please keep her in your prayers, and feel free to write to her. She is missed most by our guests in the Dingman House on the serving line.

Annie Patton
c/o Regina Williams
804 55th Ave East.
Tuscaloosa, AL 35404

Rev. Bob Cook is also struggling a lot. He has his good and bad days. Bob (80) recently gave up his car. He is looking forward to getting back to El Salvador at the end of March. Eddie Bloomer (76) has a hard time sleeping and a hard time getting up. He is anemic and losing blood, but the doctors at the VA can’t find the source of the problem. When Dingman House is open, you can usually find him in the store room or breaking up fights.

As for me,I turn 73 this February and I feel my age. Truth is, I am no longer the organizer and front-line activist I was most of my Catholic Worker years. The last couple years, trying to get local folks interested in a vigil or protest at our Des Moines Drone Command Center is like pulling teeth. No one locally wants to deal with it. It’s really hard for Ed and I to have a weekly presence by ourselves with everything we are dealing with at the Worker.

The most important resistance work I’m doing now is to support our Des Moines Catholic Worker community’s front-line resistors, spe- cifically, Jessica Reznicek and Julie Brown. Both came to us during the Occupy Wall Street days, both stayed and became Des Moines Catholic Workers, both are doing resistance work, and both are in need of our sup- port.

From the start, during their Occupy Wall Street days and throughout their one- year internship at the Des Moines Catholic Worker, Jess and Julie were inseparable. Both visited Palestine. Both were arrested for attempting to de-arrest a Palestinian farmer who was planting olive trees on his land near an illegal Israeli settlement. This act ultimately saw Jess deported while trying to reenter the following year. Both now need a home base and community/family support.

Right now, Jess is two and a half years into an eight-year sentence. Her co-defendant Ruby Montoya got six years for their nonviolent, noble, and heroic dismantling of an Dakota Access Pipeline going through Iowa starting in November 2015. Dakota Access Partners, the pipeline com- pany, said thatJess and Ruby’s efforts caused a three month delay and cost them over three million dollars. Both were sentenced as domestic terror- ists in federal court. Jess is doing her time in a federal women’s prison in Waseca, Minnesota.

Being Jess’s primary support person, getting calls from her every other week, making sure she has money on her books (with help from Juile), and being someone she can talk to about doing time – the good, bad and funny – is the most important resistance work I am doing. Next to being locked up, being a support person to a locked up nonviolent resister is important resistance work.

Please keep Jess in your prayers. As I write this, Jess is in the hole (solitary confinement), a sixty-day lockdown for minor infractions. She gets to make one phone call per month. I got her February call. She is doing well. The forced isolation has given her the privacy she seeks in regular prison life. She is actually reading books, something she could not do in the general population. She misses coffee and food, two things she got plenty of working in the kitchen. She plans to call me again in March. Stay tuned.

Since 2015, Julie Brown has been working with Community Peacemakers Teams (CPT). CPT partners with grassroots changemakers already doing nonviolent resistance in contexts of lethal violence around the world. This is frontline activism for nonviolence in active war zones! After almost five years in the field in Iraqi Kurdistan, Julie returned to Des Moines after transitioning to CPT’s Outreach Coordinator. We were her

home base, a place where we offered her our hospitality first and fore- most. We offered Julie a safe space to do the self-care anyone would need after doing frontline work. When Julie was back in the United States, we allowed her to pick and choose when and how she would help us do the Des Moines Catholic Worker work.

While in Kurdistan, Julie met and fell in love with Mohammed Salah, a local CPT member. They got married in 2018. It took five years to get Mohammed a visa to come to the United States. He got his visa in April 2022 and has been a great addition to our community! Mohammed is now a core community member! Julie and Mohammed hope to get Mohammed’s sons to the United States and are working on getting visas. They also have a dream of setting up a project supporting a small area of Iraqi Kurdistan where several Asyrian Christian and Muslim villagers are impacted by bombings. This, along with providing nonviolence training for folks, would run out of the Rachel Corrie House. That is exciting.

Our third frontline resistor in the field is not a United States citi- zen. Araceli Benitez-Moya is from Chiapas, Mexico. She married former Des Moines Catholic Worker, Richard Flamer, twenty years ago. Richard had just moved back to Chiapas from the Des Moines Catholic Worker community with the idea of setting up a special ministry out of the Des Moines Catholic Worker called “The Chiapas Project.”

At that time we dedicated our 713 Indiana Ave house to the Chiapas Project, with the idea Richard would live half-time in Chiapas and half-time in Des Moines. That was a very short-lived plan. Soon after moving back to Chiapas, Richard fell in love with Araceli. I moved into 713 Indiana and started the Phil Berrigan House.

Araceli moved to the Des Moines Catholic Worker three years ago in an effort to establish her dual citizenship. She got a job and started sending money home and taking English classes. She immediately became an asset to the community, living and working at Dingman House. She has made herself invaluable here, and these days, along with all the hospitality Aracelli does, she often offers to translate Spanish for me. I try to be mindful that English is her third  language, Spanish her second, and her first language is her Mayan village native language. Her offer is a blessing.

Araceli has been a core community member for over a year now. She has recently moved out of the Dingman House third floor and into the Berrigan House. She is hoping to develop an “asylum seeking/immi- gration ministry” out of Berrigan House.

Araceli was once a new immigrant here, and now she wants to help other new arrivals. If you’re here long enough, “What goes around comes around” happens a lot. As I reflect on the current journey of our community, I personally see many love stories at play. That’s not a bad thing!

On a more personal, spiritual level, it strikes me how much of my life’s focus has been an honest attempt to be a disciple and follower of Jesus, the one in the New Testament.  How grateful I am to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. They helped me find a way as an American to both follow Jesus and stay a Catholic!

The other thing about growing old in a New Testament faith is that Jesus died at 33 years old. He lived the life and died the death of a young prophet who stood up against the Roman Empire and his own people’s religious leadership and was killed for doing so, a prophet’s death.

Well, that ain’t going to happen to me anymore. I am 73 years old. Too late.

These days, I find I have more in common with the life of St. Paul than the young Jesus on a cross. It helps that my scripture scholars tell me that half the books attributed to Paul in the New Testament were not written by him.

I used to find Paul’s radical poem on love (1 Corinthians 13) oversimplified, a silly sing-song poem which people use today at their weddings. I now believe Paul’s love message is at the heart of the Jesus movement before the Gospels were written. In literary fact, Paul’s New Testament writings preceded the writing of the Gospels and helped to form their message!

I believe 1 Corinthians 13 is the clearest and most complete state- ment on love and the mark which love sets for us all, at any time, in any place. Just because the mark seems impossible to hit all the time doesn’t mean that you change the mark. You seek forgiveness, and you get for- given by forgiving others’ wrongs.

The other thing older Paul came to know better than most was that the real enemy of the Jesus movement is the world’s allegiance to the “Powers and Principalities” (Ephesians 6:12). These principalities rule the governments of the world. Paul’s “Powers and Principalities” are also literary essentials written into the four Gospels’ storyline and plot.

I have come to see these demonic powers as one and the same to- day as they were in Paul’s times. The world Paul lived in the first Century CE and the one we live in now are all the same, if measured by wealth, victory in war, and allegiance to a world empire. The authors of the New Testament knew this and assumed it in their writings.

Today, this demonic human pursuit of wealth, victory at war, and global empires are killing the very life forces of the planet; something not imaginable in the first and second centuries. My most difficult, personal task in my elder years is finding hope in all these harsh and dreadful truths of our times.

It’s not easy for me living in a human world where “Baby Bum- mers” – my generation of Americans – are the worst group of human beings ever. We were born into a post-WWII world where human life could come to a sudden and imminent end with a United States-led nuclear war.

As a lifelong Iowan, I am also part of a generation who allowed an oil-fueled, corporate-based global industrial food system to take over our post-WWII Iowa small family farm agriculture food system. In the process, we lost half of the topsoil God gave humans to care for! We’ve poisoned what’s left of our soil and water.

And yes! We are feeding the world while making slaves of us all. A repeat of the biblical story of Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob’s twelve sons, sold into slavery, yet made good in Egypt, help Pharaoh set up an imperial food and debt system based on Joseph’s divine “insiders’ info” that allowed Pharoah to enslave the known world, Jews included (Genesis 4).

After I moved into Manning House, I started calling my housemates the “Des Moines Catholic Worker Elder Collective.” I also told folks our motto was “We have no future.”  My negative humor on display, a bleak motto at best, reflective of my deeper struggle finding hope in the future.

That all changed with baby Angela. I fell in love with her the mo- ment I picked her up and held her in my arms. At the time she was two months old. She came with her mother and father, Nicolle and Alexander, and two brothers, Jesial (9) and Killian (5). They were from Honduras, seeking asylum in the United States.

They were in a desperate state. The place they were staying was not safe for them. They needed housing immediately. We put them up at our recently emptied Berrigan House in exchange for cleaning the house for a month. A month turned into two, two turned into three. By then it was too late. I was in love with the whole family!

Nine months into the arrangement, we moved the family to Manning House with our elder collective, with an eye on long-term hospitality.  Their needs were many, their problems legend. We’ve taken them all on, one at a time.

Thank God for Rev. Amy Bruner, who started volunteering at the Des Moines Catholic Worker around the same time our Honduran fam- ily moved into the community. Rev. Amy agreed to work with me as the main support persons for Nicolle, Alexander, and kids. Rev. Amy knows how to work in the internet world and the social work world. We both have been learning the state of immigration and asylum law as practiced in Iowa as we go. Since then, Nicolle gave birth to little Amy, named after Rev Amy! So cool!

These days, I spend a lot of my time with the kids watching car- toon movies and playing games in Spanish, which I don’t understand. I love bringing and taking Jesial and Killian to school, holding Angela, and now, little Amy, every chance I get. We have daily meals together. Nicolle is a great cook.

Now my motto for Manning House is “The Des Moines Catholic Worker Elder Collective and Future’s Hope.” We are trying to be a family in one house; the elders and the kids give me great hope!

Another source of my hope is our weekly Saturday 9:30 a.m. liturgies at Dingman House. We are not drawing big crowds. We haven’t broken double digits yet. Doesn’t matter! It’s a rich and full experience for me. Receiving Jesus in the bread and the wine in the same room we serve Jesus five days a week is a better worship space for me than any cathedral or church. All are welcome: Join us Saturdays at 9:30 a.m. at Dingman House.

My main man Paul perhaps says best what growing old at the Des Moines Catholic Worker is like in Romans 5: 2- 5:

“Through Jesus Christ, we ‘rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’”

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2024 March v.p. .

2024 March v.p. .