The Soul of the Parish is Making

The soul of the parish is mak­ing: craft­ing a world to work, pray, and live in.

The soul of the parish is mak­ing. I pro­pose that we put our parishes to work mak­ing some­thing: bicy­cles, plates, shoes, beer, mir­a­cles, some­thing tan­gi­ble, any­thing local.  The parish does not need to worry about com­pet­ing with China, but can offer some­thing of real qual­ity and the added value of local ori­gin, “the work of human hands.” Built to serve the work­ing classes, inner-city parishes can become home to small-scale work­shops that man­u­fac­ture for local markets.

Consumer savvy and the grow­ing demand for sus­tain­ably pro­duced goods and fair-trade dove­tail with a bur­geon­ing taste for the local: locally grown food, locally pro­duced goods.  Particularly in the inner city, parishes have the space and the human resources to man­u­fac­ture.  The parish as man­u­fac­turer could—and would—support its com­mu­nity in both body and soul.

The ancient Pauline and Benedictine tra­di­tions teach us that the church can—and should–make and sell goods to avoid bur­den­ing the faith­ful with the increas­ingly dif­fi­cult task of sup­port­ing them­selves else­where in the com­mu­nity.  Paul made tents and Benedict ordered his monks to earn their own liv­ing, which they still do in very mate­r­ial ways: from the tra­di­tional cheese, beer, bread, wool, cloth, and wine to con­tem­po­rary print­ing car­tridges, high-end mois­tur­iz­ers, and cus­tom coffins.  The medieval notion of the benefice—a parish that pro­duces a good to sup­port the parish—was often abused in church his­tory, but still holds the promise of becom­ing a sig­nif­i­cant gen­er­a­tor of Western Christian cul­ture and prop­erly ordered wealth in our day.

Arguably, there is an even greater pas­toral than finan­cial need for the parish to become a man­u­fac­turer. On the one hand, cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for sat­i­fy­ing and dig­ni­fied man­ual labor makes eco­nomic sense. Just con­sider the pro­lif­er­a­tion of small farms and wineries. The boom in knit­ting also speaks vol­umes.  But more than rev­enue is at stake. The labor involved in pro­duc­ing a knit­ted gar­ment, for exam­ple, almost always exceeds its eco­nomic value..  But some­thing in the work artic­u­lates the soul. Economically and cul­tur­ally, there is a cry­ing need to pro­duce that which reveals—and touches—the soul.

The soul of the parish is mak­ing. Henry Nouwen spoke of the impor­tance of tedious work in his life, describ­ing the plea­sure he found in the chore of stuff­ing envelopes at a table with cowork­ers in prepa­ra­tion for pub­lish­ing one of his many books. The work made him reflect on all that goes into con­ceiv­ing, writ­ing, edit­ing and finally pub­lish­ing a book. The mate­r­ial world war­rants soup to nuts attention.

The plant­ing of the hops vine requires two to three years to mature its root sys­tem before high jump­ing over a trel­lis. The green cones of fresh plant origami are the inex­pen­sive yet price­less ingre­di­ents in beer-making that promise to sum­mon back to the table the lost male quo­tient of the com­mu­nity of the faith­ful. With the major­ity of America’s eth­nic make-up still of German descent, it doesn’t take a chemist to fig­ure out this win­ning recipe. Beer costs about 25 cents per 12 oz serv­ing to make. Upstate New York was scored with trel­lises for hops from colo­nial times well into the 19th cen­tury. Many rural parishes have unused and arable land that could be con­verted to grow vines, and not much land is needed.

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Count Levin chooses to live on his coun­try estate and work along­side the field hands gath­er­ing wheat. In his supine ecstasy at har­vest time, lying on his back at mid­day in exhaus­tion and mirth, he con­fronts the spir­i­tual dan­gers of being “lib­er­ated” from man­ual work. He is an ide­al­ist pin­ing to be human again, tuned into his fel­low human beings, fixed to the earth and to time. Meaningful com­mu­nal work makes life surge in him. From Thoreau and Rushkin to Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being and the phi­los­o­phy of Wendell Berry, it is clear that the unmoor­ing of our fun­da­men­tal anthro­po­log­i­cal bear­ings is an exis­ten­tial prob­lem that can­not be healed by any imma­nent sci­ence. It is a para­dox that the heav­enly side of being human requires earth. We all long to be more fully human. When sci­ence tempts us to aban­don humil­ity (derived from the Greek for earth) in accept­ing the lim­it­ing terms of life we risk becom­ing mon­sters rather than angels. Transcendence isn’t as easy as an ele­va­tor ride. It requires work to ascend to the lib­er­a­tion of knowledge.

Unfortunately, we have jet­ti­soned the rela­tion­ship between mak­ing and cog­ni­tion, as Matthew Crawford notes in Shop Class as Soulcraft.  He offers the exam­ple of a wheel­wright and an assem­bly line worker. The wheel­wright reads the vari­a­tions of crude wood into the invis­i­ble finesse of a trued wheel. The assem­bly line worker is only a cog in the wheel. The less he knows the bet­ter, because man­ag­ing mech­a­nis­tic pro­duc­tion by dumb­ing down the worker widens the mar­gin of profit. Making the worker dumb and mak­ing the engi­neer rich is a rule of thumb in cubi­cle farms too. No job is safe.

The soul of the parish is making. Bread and wine becom­ing the body and blood is also a form of mak­ing. Awareness of the lit­er­al­ness of the offer­ing is often lost. Witness the scram­ble to gather the offer­tory gifts, which can seem like a rit­u­al­is­tic after­thought: “You know, I think you for­got these.” But “fruit of the vine and work of human hands” can, and would, be more emphatic if you had the actual vines and hands to make it in the first place. I know many pairs of cler­i­cal eyes will roll at the sug­ges­tion of another round of home­made altar bread, and I can appre­ci­ate that the church must pro­tect the sacred­ness of the bread-made-body rit­ual. At the same time, the com­mu­nity that makes the bread and the wine that is to be trans­formed and con­sumed is also a com­mu­nity more appre­cia­tive and awed by the mys­tery of that bread and wine becom­ing the body and blood of the res­ur­rected Christ.

On Labor Day, a com­mer­cial from the AFL/CIO’s local New York chap­ter paid homage to the fruits of the labor move­ment. Workers with heavy authen­tic Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx accents claimed that we “have the union to thank for the week­end” and we “have the union to thank for workman’s comp” and we “have the union to thank for the 40-hour workweek.” The bless­ings are con­sid­er­able, but it reminded me of a sort of Maginot Line, sep­a­rat­ing the call to pro­duc­tive work from the need for leisure.

The ad also fee­bly demanded that the lis­tener take for granted there are legions of union­ized fac­tory work­ers in the tri-state area. In fact, unions are the province of monop­o­lis­tic ser­vice indus­tries: actors, fire­fight­ers, law enforce­ment, teach­ers, nurses, porters, san­i­ta­tion work­ers.  These aren’t work­ers who make any­thing tan­gi­ble.  I am not sug­gest­ing that they do not do any­thing good and worth­while, but they do not make any­thing.  Neither does the banker. The jobs that fuel sub­stan­tial pay are more often than not deriv­a­tive: invest­ment and finan­cial sec­tor jobs.

The soul of the parish is mak­ing. Making room in a parish struc­ture to make some­thing cre­ates a local arbiter of value. In the same way that you value the man who chops the wood and feeds the home fire because you con­nect feel­ing warm to feel­ing grat­i­tude for him who makes the fire, tan­gi­ble links to the pro­duc­tion of our basic neces­si­ties opens our minds and hearts to the lan­guage of grat­i­tude that is the heart of the Eucharist.

To be sure, we don’t need any­one to chop wood for us, but the rein­ven­tion of a rela­tion­ship with the very ori­gin of a product—as worker or con­sumer, or even both—could be the basis of a com­mu­nal prayer bring­ing about the heal­ing of frac­tured eth­nic­ity and iden­tity that came about as a result of mobil­ity and exog­a­mous marriage.The mate­r­ial sign of the local, the hand­made marked by the hum­ble honor of craft, points the way home for many who often have no way of artic­u­lat­ing their root­less­ness.  Interdependence is more palat­able now that a col­lege grad­u­ate can eas­ily rack up a 100K debt for a Bachelor’s degree that was sup­posed to ensure finan­cial inde­pen­dence.  A local parish as a place to live, work, and pray offers, poten­tially, a holis­tic envi­ron­ment to develop new com­mu­nal struc­tures that can mod­ify con­sumer appetites and habits.

The soul of the parish is mak­ing. My exper­i­ment with Goods of Conscience, a line of sus­tain­ably pro­duced apparel made in a Bronx parish, is based on this tra­di­tion of the parish benefice, based on a model learned that Msgr. Greg Shaffer, a Maryknoll priest estab­lished in San Lucas Toliman in Guatemala. His parish pro­duces cof­fee and honey sold directly to cus­tomers in the United States through the mis­sion based in New Ulm, Minnesota.  Interestingly, in Spanish the pro­cess­ing plant for cof­fee is called a ben­efi­cio. The San Lucas ben­efi­cio has been of suf­fi­cient suc­cess to finance the con­struc­tion of a parish clinic and has attracted a stream of vol­un­teers from the United States to add exper­tise to local forestry initiatives.

Some American parishes dab­ble in T-shirts and cause-related goods, but this is more of a reflec­tion of afflu­ence and leisure than neces­sity. These ven­tures are not brave enough. We need to begin liv­ing in a new way tap­ping into our ancient beliefs and prac­tices: mak­ing some­thing out of lit­tle or noth­ing, build­ing sacred depen­dency on one another, imbu­ing the ordi­nary desider­ata of life with intel­li­gence and the savor of love. The era of pro­duc­tion on-demand and the desire to make on the part of the full spec­trum of socio-economic back­grounds in the United States makes this a moment of pos­si­bil­ity for parish-based benefices. The soul of the parish is making.