A Simple Welcome
Silk Hope’s Catholic Worker Community is an oasis of hospitality in rural Chatham County
By Rich Reece
The name of Silk Hope, a farm community just outside Siler City in Chatham County, allegedly came from an attempt in the early 1800s to create a silk industry there. No signs remain of those ambitions, but there is a spot in the countryside where hope -- for a better, more peaceful world -- is very much alive. A 2010-square-foot, white farm house on one acre, with chicken coops and an organic garden in the yard, is home to Catholic Workers Steve Woolford and Lenore Yarger and their two-year-old daughter, Geneva. It’s also a temporary home to, well, just about anyone who needs a temporary home.
The Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, was grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person. Today over 185 Catholic Worker communities around the world are committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless and the hungry. Steve and Lenore met in such a community in Phoenix, AZ, and in 1998 began their own hospitality house here to be nearer family. (Lenore has parents in Raleigh and a sister in Apex.)
“There’s no one story of the people who come here,” Steve says. Referred by churches, social workers, police, and the county health department, the guests at Silk Hope have included victims of abuse, those with drug issues, people with disabilities who are waiting for their benefits to be approved. “They’re often people in transition,” Steve explains. “Some are migrants. They may have been sleeping in cars; maybe their mobile home has been reclaimed. They may have jobs, cars, but no place to stay. They are people who for one reason or another are left out.”
There’s no firm policy about how long a guest can stay. Steve smiles: “We’ve had people for one night, and for two years. Our expectation when you come here is just that you have a realistic plan for achieving independence.”
Steve and Lenore try to have community meals two or three times a week. Eventually the guests get to know each other. “It’s impossible not to,” Steve jokes. “We just have one flush toilet.” There are three spare bedrooms in the house and a small cabin in the front yard. The day Steve and Lenore spoke to NCC their guests included two women, a father and son from Mexico, and another Catholic Worker couple with a new baby.
For a young couple with a two-year-old, voluntarily sharing their house with strangers whom poverty has scarred in various ways can be an ordeal. Lenore wrote movingly of the life to which she and Steve feel the Gospel calls them in a recent issue of the biannual newsletter they publish. She titled the piece “Harsh and Dreadful Hospitality.”
“I await each phone call with mixed feelings,” she wrote. “On the one hand, I am hopeful that those who need us most will find us. On the other, I’m scared to death they might actually come.” Speaking of one family who disrupted the house to such an extent that the other guests eventually asked them to leave, she quoted Dorothy Day: “Daily, hourly, to give up our possessions and especially to subordinate our own impulses and wishes to others – these are hard, hard things; and I don’t think they ever get any easier.”
“Long ago,” Lenore wrote, “I relinquished the expectation that offering hospitality will always feel good. All I can realistically expect is that our phone will keep ringing. I hope I keep having the guts to pick it up.”
The community receives no benefits from its guests. “We have a ‘paying job’ through the Quakers,” Lenore explains, “advising GIs who want to leave the military and aren’t sure of their rights.” Catholic Workers, like the Quakers, are committed pacifists, one aspect of their opposition to violence of any kind. As part of their pacifism, they do not earn enough to pay taxes, since that money might finance the war.
How “Catholic” is the life of a Catholic Worker community? “We don’t proselytize very much,” Steve says. “We try to live peace out, to build the kingdom. I like to think we evangelize by example.”
Lenore agrees. “It’s a spirituality of practice,” she says. “Sooner or later, our guests wonder why we live this way. And they see that it’s because of our faith.”
The community is also focused on simple living: recycling, organic gardening, preserving energy. “You can’t just offer hospitality,” Lenore explains. “It’s one part of non-violence, but you need to address the whole continuum: war, racism, violent parenting, the violence we are doing to our planet…”
“When we say ‘simple living,’” Steve says, “we realize that much of the world would find the way we live completely luxurious. But we try to be aware, and to help others be aware, of the extent to which we can avoid being complicit in spreading any kind of violence.”
In that spirit, Steve and Lenore have participated in many vigils and protests. “We started during the Clinton administration,” Lenore recalls, “in vigils against Clinton’s threats to bomb Iraq, against the sanctions that were imposed on that country.” In June 2003, Lenore traveled to Iraq, “to talk to people, to find out first hand how the Iraqis felt about the sanctions, how their lives were affected.” Steve has demonstrated against the death penalty, in favor of the rights of farm workers. He’s been arrested more than once. Does he really think he can change the world?
“Admittedly,” he wrote in the community’s newsletter, “I have felt overwhelmed at times by the world’s problems. The spirituality that feeds me at such times is simple: To trust that God is with us in our efforts, and that God multiplies the good we do. This is the spirituality of the loaves and fishes, of the manna in the desert, of the lilies of the field. Only by living such trust can we sustain truly abundant life.”