Eric Anglada wakes up at 6:30 a.m., before the
noise of the day starts. At this early hour, he is the only one
awake.
His small room is furnished with a desk, a
small dresser, a bed with navy-blue covers, and bookshelves. The
only flashy thing here is the color scheme: Soon after he moved in,
Eric painted each wall a different color — blue, mauve,
orange, green.
Everything here is quiet; outside, the street
is deserted. Eric enjoys the solitude — it won’t be
long before the phones will start ringing, people will start
arriving, and he’ll be hard at work.
This day, Eric will help Johnnie move
out. The 60-year-old woman has lived here for the past year, and,
when she needed help getting into public housing, she turned to
Eric.
Around here, everybody turns to him.
“Eric, can you check with Social
Services and see whether she has a caseworker already?”
“Should I get started on the
coffee?”
“Can I make
a quick phone call?”
“Hey, Eric, I am gonna go out on the
porch and smoke a cigarette.”
They turn to this slight blond 25-year-old who
still looks like a teenager, even when there is no need to turn to
someone.
Eric is one of three live-in volunteers at
Champaign’s St. Jude Catholic Worker house, a soup kitchen and
shelter for homeless women. And he’s a most unlikely volunteer:
He comes from a privileged background, attended good schools, had every
opportunity. Even as his high-school friends are entering the corporate
world, starting families, and moving to the suburbs, Eric wants none of
it.
“It has been my desire since leaving
high school to reverse my social location,” Eric wrote in St.
Jude’s newsletter. “Depending on where we stand, we see
things differently; we see the whole world differently.”
From where they stand, Eric’s parents
and friends back in Rosemont, Pa., see Eric’s life as, well,
odd. Twice a college dropout, he lives below the poverty level and
doesn’t rule out the possibility that some day he might go to
jail to show his commitment to pacifism. On April 15, he spent
three hours in front of the post office on Neil Street in
Champaign, protesting against the U.S. tax system. He believes, he
says, in “community” and “simple
living.”
In short, he believes in the Catholic Worker,
a social-justice movement that was born in the depths of the Great
Depression.
“The past two-and-a-half years,”
Eric says, pouring tomato sauce over the pasta he will serve at St.
Jude’s soup kitchen, “that’s the happiest
I’ve ever been.”
Eric takes the bus back to
Pennsylvania three times a year, but his home is St. Jude’s.
He lives with six homeless women in the main house of the Catholic
Worker. The other two live-in volunteers, Andy Lewis and Florence
Yeri, live in an annex house, across the back yard. The living
arrangements will change in the next months; three more volunteers
are expected to come to St. Jude’s.
There are days when St. Jude’s seems
like a gathering place for friends rather than a shelter for the
homeless. The house is always warm, and the entire building has an
inviting personality with its big windows, green back yard, and
squeaking doors and floors. The dominant place is the giant
kitchen, which looks and is thoroughly used. It opens into a large
dining room, one wall plastered with newspaper clippings about
Catholic Worker. On a rainy April evening, volunteers and guests
laugh and talk loudly over ice cream.
For Eric, living at the house is a privilege:
“Not having to worry about bills and basic needs. Having real
solitary moments and balancing it out with real convivial
situations so I can engage with people but also to have the ability
to disengage and close my door and be alone.”
Eric cooks the meal for the soup kitchen every
Friday and helps out on Thursdays. Two nights a week, he is in
charge of locking the house’s three doors in the evening,
answering phone calls and e-mails, and cooking dinner for the
guests. When he talks about himself, he seems unconvinced that
people are going to understand or even want to hear his story.
“How do people relate to your living in
a homeless shelter?” he asks. This may be why his friends in
Champaign — such as the 82-year-old retired history professor
he met at the Emmanuel Episcopal church and the 60-year-old
photographer with AIDS whom he met at St. Jude’s last summer
— are a lot older than he is.
“A lot of people that are old are really
interested in what I have to say,” he says. “Most
twentysomething-year-olds couldn’t care less.”
Dorothy Day started the Catholic
Worker movement with Peter Maurin in May 1933. They published a
newspaper advocating hospitality for the homeless, nonviolence, and
voluntary poverty. They practiced what they preached by living with
the homeless. “We must and will find Christ in each and every
man,” Day wrote, “when we look on them as
brothers.”
There are more than 185 Catholic Worker
communities in 12 countries, 168 of them in the United States. Some
shelter people with AIDS or illegal immigrants, others offer soup
kitchens and overnight hospitality to the homeless, and still
others are involved in peace protests and civil disobedience.
Philip Runkel, an archivist at Raynor Memorial Libraries at
Marquette University, the main repository of Catholic Worker
records, estimates that the movement has as many as 1,000 live-in
volunteers. Rosalie Riegle, the author of Voices From the Catholic Worker , explains the success of the movement in this way:
“Perhaps it isn’t a mystery after all when we recognize
our hunger — a hunger for meaning, a hunger for hope, a
hunger to do something that matters.”
It is this hunger for meaning that turned Eric
into a Catholic Worker.
Nothing in Eric’s childhood
suggested that this is the life he’d be leading today.
“We live in a really wealthy neighborhood,” says his
mother, Kathy Anglada, “so he was not exposed to needy
people.”
Although Eric’s mother did not work
while she was rearing Eric’s two older sisters, by the time
Eric was born she had gone back to work in the banking industry.
With Eric’s father busy as the office manager of a
ball-bearing factory, Eric’s grandparents helped raise Eric.
“Being the youngest person in my family
has had an influence in the sense that there wasn’t an
influence,” Eric says. “I wasn’t given a
direction, and I was free to find my own path.” The family
never talked about politics. They didn’t go to church or to
PTA meetings or get involved in any other civic action.
Eric attended Radnor High School, which he
describes as a “top-notch” public school. He hung with
a popular crowd but wasn’t one of the wild ones. He
didn’t drink and wouldn’t join his friends when they
slipped into the strip clubs of Philadelphia. Politically
conservative then, he loved watching Fourth of July parades. His
first choice of college was Valley Forge Military Academy.
Back then, Eric was loud and comfortable
getting public attention. He once bet a fellow student that he
could interrupt a teacher the most times and won by asking 30
questions. “It was all just ego, really,” he says, and
notes that it came from his family. “They are all extremely
self-confident and very boisterous and very sarcastic and very sure
of themselves.”
Yet, gradually, Eric was changing. He began
feeling disconnected from his friends and from everything and
everyone around him: “I was just trying to figure out who I
was, and I didn’t think I could communicate much to my
friends, so I felt cut off that way.”
At 17, Eric waited for his mother to come home
from work and coaxed her into driving with him around
Philadelphia’s slums. Driving through those poor
neighborhoods, Eric saw burned-out buildings, narrow streets, small
houses, and rusty cars. But he also saw people barbecuing in their
yards and neighbors talking on their porches, demonstrating a sense
of community that he didn’t experience where he grew up.
“People really tend to be shut off in
the suburbs,” he says. “They tend to stay more in their
houses, spend time in their back yards so that they don’t
have to face their neighbors. Most people in the suburbs
don’t even know their neighbors.”
And Eric started going to church. “I had
this innate desire for the sublime, the transcendent, something
ultimate, something beyond the here and now,” he recalls. He
chose a Presbyterian church, mostly because of its inspiring youth
minister. After about a year, Eric decided that he wanted to join
and was baptized.
When each Radnor High senior was given two
weeks to explore some field of interest, Eric picked up a phone
book and found Daylesford Abbey, 20 minutes from home. He was
inspired by a book his mother had given him, titled Cloister Walk, about
Kathleen Norris’ experience in Benedictine monasteries. Eric
came away from the experience impressed by the monks’
communal lifestyle and their deep commitment to prayer. He left the
monastery believing that he’d never be satisfied living in
Rosemont.
“I think in this day and age in our
society the only place to be is on the margins,” Eric says.
“I think we live in a society that is really going awry.
It’s militaristic, it’s nationalistic, it’s
consumerist — lots of ignorance, lots of possessions, lots of
avarice — and so I think you have to be standing on the edge
and working toward change.”
After high school, when all of his friends
were going to college, Eric began a year of three-week travels to
volunteer communities throughout the country — a farm in
Mississippi, a community in Appalachia, a homeless shelter in
Phoenix. He financed the trips with $3,000 left to him by his
grandfather.
He was searching for a way to a life that
could bring together simple living and prayer. Most of the places
he visited exposed him to various forms of Christianity. None quite
fit. Some repelled him.
Eric finally found what he was looking for
when, in February 1999, a volunteer at the homeless shelter in
Phoenix told him to look up Catholic Worker. Days later, Eric was
spending time at a Catholic Worker community in Baton Rouge that
had been founded by two Franciscan monks who, earlier in their
lives, had been a lawyer and a labor organizer. He shared a room
with two homeless men. One of them, Adrian, an African-American who
wore a hat over a big Afro and a goatee, took him under his wing
and showed him where to stand in line for food at a soup kitchen,
where to donate blood for extra money.
Eric identified with the simple ways of the
Catholic Worker. “This is not destitution,” he says.
The Catholic Worker is based on the paradox of preaching poverty
while fighting against it, but the shelters are not destitute.
“Just see our kitchen — we have two microwaves, a
commercial stove and griddle; a lot of it is quite
luxurious.”
At the end of his traveling year, Eric
enrolled at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he
found a girlfriend who shared his ideals. It was his idea to spend
the summer in a Catholic Worker community, and the pair e-mailed
about 50 houses. St. Jude’s Catholic Worker House in
Champaign extended them an invitation. Eventually the couple split
— Eric dropped out of college and returned to Champaign; she
went back to school. But Eric had found what he wanted, “to
achieve some proximity and move closer to the status of the
poor.”
That proximity is important to Eric. Two
months ago, he was standing in line at the Champaign public library
waiting to check out six books. A person whose library pass lists a
homeless shelter as his or her address is not allowed to check out
more than five items at a time. The librarian noted that Eric had a
shelter card, loudly enough for the three other people in line to
hear. “I did look a little bit scruffy that day, so everyone
thought I’m homeless, but it’s satisfying in a way
— that’s why I’m there,” Eric says.
Eric realizes there are other ways to help the
poor — a member of Congress can help pass laws that may do
more good than he or she can do alone. But that is not the point.
“The government is not a faithful, truthful witness to
God,” he says.
“The Catholic Worker is all about
personalism,” Eric says, “taking on direct
responsibility for the poor and the homeless and those that are
hungry rather than looking to some other agency or government to
take care of those things.” Eric is not saving the world. He
knows it. In a sense, he is saving himself.
“It’s a moving experience to think
that the food that I made is being eaten by 60-or-so people, which
is really incredible — it’s a privilege.”
Every day at 11 a.m., the doors to
St. Jude’s are opened and people sit down to eat, 10 at a
time. The dining room is wide, and the blue-and-white-patterned
tablecloth looks friendly. Volunteers have been preparing the meal
since 8:30 a.m. Although the heat inside the house makes the knees
weak, most people sit down to eat wearing their coats and hats.
Most do not look up. They seem to not notice that the mismatched
silverware has been neatly folded in shiny white napkins and that
each slice of apple pie has a spoonful of strawberry jam atop it.
“We’re treating this poor guy like
a king,” Eric says. He has written the reasons why: “We
stand as a counter, or contrast, to the existing society. We must
be the change we wish to see in the world.”
When people ask Eric what he plans to do next,
when this stage of his life ends, he has a simple answer:
“There is no afterward,” he says.
“I am a Catholic Worker.”
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2005.
