From our office window, just three blocks down Vermont Avenue, the White House is clearly visible -- a symbol of the most powerful nation on earth. From the other office window, looking three blocks up Vermont Avenue in the opposite direction and just behind Luther Place Memorial Church on N Street and 14th, are visible three once nearly abandoned row houses where the core living group and most of the ministries of the Community for Creative Non-Violence are now centered.
CCNV, as it is know in a city filled with organizational initials, is in the central city ghetto just out of sight of the White House. District police estimate that within a ten block area on any given night, at least a thousand men and women walk the streets without shelter or money to buy food. Rachelle Linner, a 26-year old woman who has worked with the community since its beginning in January 1971, sees the community, like the neighborhood which surrounds it, as “a symbol of contradiction.” “We try to raise questions of values in the minds of people who are uninvolved. They can’t understand why we freely choose to live this way.” “Our very living arrangements,” says 40-year old Paulist priest Ed Guinan, now married, who began the community with others while a chaplain at Georgetown University, “carry both a theological and political judgment upon what is, and have created a defection and rupture from the secular/ecclesial arrangements.”
Ed Guinan did his seminary training in Washington DC in the late sixties after a short career in international finance in California. He asked the bishop at his ordination not to assign him to a parish but to let him start work among the poor in the city. His request to set up a community of people that would live poorly themselves and make themselves available to the poor was “unanimously approved, blessed, encouraged -- and separated.”
Though known by outsiders as one of the largest of the couple dozen radical communities of the Catholic Left, CCNV is actually “broadly ecumenical.” Though some individuals come out of humanistic backgrounds not tied to any religious tradition, the great majority are from various religious back grounds -- primarily Christian -- but the heaviest number do come from a Catholic heritage.
The 25-person core community lives together in the three row houses: four children (three of whom have been born into the community), couples, priests, former prisoners, single parents, workers, students, and those who have broken from the streets. They range in age from nine months to 63 years. Five more live about a mile north in a house on Euclid Street, and the community has acquired a farm about two hours outside the city “to create a greater rhythm in our lives and provide an ongoing place for earth-toil, reflection, and sustenance.” In addition, says Guinan, life in the houses is further enriched “by the presence of welfare mothers, fathers who deserted, men and women released from incarceration, and the poor, the broken, and the sick left homeless on the streets of Washington.”
Rachelle estimates that in the past five years perhaps as many as 70 people have been involved at one time or another in the core community. There has been a serious level of commitment, though most stay only slightly over two years and then leave for other places, Only three -- Rachelle, Ed and Dick Dieter -- have been there from the beginning. Those who leave stay actively involved in the same lifestyle in other places. “Almost none,” says Guinan, “have returned to where they were before -- a middle-class lifestyle of non-involvement.” CCNV is linked closely with a much broader extended community of people within the Washington area, perhaps 200-300, and with a much wider network of people and groups both nationally and internationally.
There is no formal entry process into the community and apparently only an implicit form of leadership that emerges with intensity of commitment. Ed Guinan believes that there is no tactic or method to keep people together in community. “There is nothing to keep the community together if what you are doing does not have real validity and truth-force in people’s lives.” While community is taken seriously, with full community meetings every three weeks and household and ministry meetings weekly or biweekly, CCNV is loosely structured with no firm distinction between the core community and the broader extended community. Many living elsewhere but part of the extended community are as actively involved in the ministries, educational functions, and worship of the group as are those who live in the community houses. An attempt is made to free up those in the community houses from the need for a full time job so they can give more time to the various ministries of the community.
In the community, there are no paid positions. The community receives no funding, outside of donations from individuals. They charge nothing for any of their services and own no property (they have lived in the row houses at very low rent for the last few years and now use them rent-free). Over 1,000 pounds of food is begged weekly to sustain a soup kitchen, hospitality house, and pre-trial house. Free food is received at the docks where the food is daily delivered to the city and from sympathetic small retailers around the city. A support network throughout the metropolitan area includes schools, churches, individuals, and various groups. Because the budget for a household of fifteen (though hard to estimate) is well under $300 a month, those in the core community can easily support themselves through one-day jobs, educational work in the city, and writing. What is lacking is provided by the extended community in gifts and donations.
Guinan believes that there are three essential elements or functions which are necessary for any community which hopes to make an impact on society: the “monastic,” the “deaconal,” and the “exorcistic” -- or, to put them more simply -- prayer, service, and protest. Anything less than this “trinity of gospel wholeness,” as Guinan terms it, “is inadequate at best, destructive at its worst.” Without that balance he believes that contemplatives will feel little or no responsibility for history, those who work among the poor will accommodate themselves to the system, and revolutionary protest will be divorced from involvement with the poor and the spiritual process of liberation.“ Radicalization demands both internalization and privilege defection, or it nourishes regression. In the process of liberation everything must change -- our proximity to illegitimate power, our shallow spirituality, our comfortable and secure life, our very identity.”
Though there can be no easy separation of these three elements in the community’s life, CCNV began perhaps more in protest than in prayer. The community was born in those convulsive last years of the Vietnam struggle and is perhaps best known by those outside of Washington for various prophetic direct actions that have gained considerable media coverage. While not seeing themselves primarily as an anti-war group, and attempting to root their activism in the basic spiritual convictions of a nonviolent witness, the community channeled its energies into an “exorcism” of the Pentagon and the White House.
Community members demonstrated everyday during the Cambodian bombing; chained themselves to the White House fence and threw bags of broken dolls onto the lawn on Christmas Day; poured blood over official files; built tiger cages and shackled themselves to them in a prayer vigil and fast; dumped huge chunks of concrete and rubble on the road leading to the Pentagon; set off mechanical laughing boxes during Henry Kissinger’s keynote address to the Pacem In Terris conference; prayed and sang in the White House. And they have gone to jail. Most of them. Within the recent past, one third of the adults were awaiting expiration of parole or probation and nearly two-thirds had been recently exposed to the whole arrest and lock-up scene.
In their early years there was a lot of abstraction in their talk about global justice. With that realization, the community began to move more deliberately into a more “day to day” justice, “being educated by and in close association with the poor and the disenfranchised,” and finally, says Guinan, “not making any division whatsoever between those phenomenon -- between international mine and local hunger, between day to day violence and more systemic violence -- and trying to balance our own involvement in both of those in a complementary way.” He continues: “The activities of civil disobedience and resistance to local, national, and international tyrannies are not seen as something separate or apart from our daily lives and struggles, but as an integral part. In trying to engage the primary violence, some of the best revolutionary theory says that you try to insert yourself in the contradiction and try to make comical with contradiction. Our actions are organic -- they come out of our own involvements and try to show the contradictions in the church and the state, between the values they espouse and the policies they pursue.”
One such action was the Eat-Ins in the Giant and Safeway food chains. “The Eat-Ins,” Rachelle says, “came out of our day-to-day experience at the soup kitchen.” Beginning Holy Week of 1974, they daily entered supermarkets, took bread, broke it, shared it with those present, and said, “This bread has been stolen ... It has been stolen by Safeway from the children, from the elderly, from the hungry.” The hungry person, they argued, holds a priority of right to that food, a right superior to property ownership, a fundamental right of eminent domain. These were actions trying to make visible the plight of the hungry in Washington and urging that the right to eat should be a constitutional right, that a national food policy should guarantee the right to eat. When on several occasions they attempted to deliver food to the soup kitchen, they were arrested but later found not guilty by a nearly all black jury who were aware of the recent large profits made by Safeway. That same year Ed Guinan began a 25-day water fast to protest the purchase of a half million dollar Chase mansion on Embassy row for the official residence of Archbishop Baum and to prod the archdiocese of Washington into making a greater contribution to the poor.
CCNV’s experience has led them to see little distinction between the “protest” and “ministry” dimensions of the gospel; the two are inextricably linked together. Like the protest actions, the different ministries of the community developed without an overall, strategic plan. They have emerged “organically” by listening “to the agenda of those who are suffering.” At the root of that involvement is making the transition from one’s own convenience to, what Dick Dieter termed, “being inconvenienced by the needs of other people.” When they started the soup kitchen, there was no intention of a medical clinic, free housing, or working with the courts in pre-trial and release. All of these evolved as they related to the people around them, often against some resistance on their own part from feeling overextended already. These activities testify to a belief that the “gospel means direct, face-to-face servanthood rather than the indirect paid surrogate.”
The Zacchaeus Community Kitchen, the first ministry of the community, opened in September 1972 and is characteristic of the other ministries. The kitchen serves free breakfast and lunch to 250-350 people daily. The name was thoughtfully chosen. Like Zacchaeus the people of CCNV feel that they have been confronted by Jesus and by the dispossessed with their own thievery and ill-gotten goods. The kitchen, then, is not a “charity organization,” but gives back to people what is rightfully theirs. As in their other ministries, "the basic premise of our work is justice, not charity," according to Rachelle Linner. "Charity says that out of compassion and pity people should share from their excess with those who have less; justice says that people have a right to food regardless of ability to pay." The kitchen exists not simply to give out food, but to create an atmosphere of community where people receive what is rightfully theirs, without any strings attached -- no prayers, sermons, or lectures.
In addition to living quarters for the core community, the N Street facilities also house Zacchaeus Medical Clinic, Zacchaeus Hospitality House, and the Community Pre-Trial House. The clinic began operation in January 1973 as the only free medical facility in its area; 25-30 patients come each time it’s open (two nights each week and Saturday morning) and are met by a rotating volunteer staff of 90 medical professionals who are able to ask them not just where it hurts, but if they have enough to eat and a place to stay. The hospitality house, opened just one month later, can provide housing for as many as 10-12 people at any one time; the pre-trial house, opened soon afterwards that same year, has room for as many as eight individuals who would otherwise be in jail awaiting their trial, and are enabled to stay in the community through third party custody.
Only a few individuals have come through the various ministries into a committed living situation with the community. To have such hopes are generally seen as “exaggerated expectations.” In most cases, Guinan believes, there is provided, at best, just a “temporary kind of change in their lives.” “Most charities are based on the premise of the deserving poor. The undeserving poor tell you to go to hell.”
Serving the poor arises not out of any strategic political consciousness but out of a deep belief that this is how Christ calls them. Here is a place where they believe themselves to be on a collision path with Marx, “in his total contempt for the underclass -- not the proletariat, but the people left on the streets, the bodies that are seen as lumps but not people.” “We refuse to sacrifice a class of people,” says Guinan, “because they do not have an organizing ability or can’t be part of seizing power or of even sensing their own dignity.”
Living and working among the poor is not out of any false romanticism. “Often we get an implicit feedback, ‘You people are crazy. Why do you do this? Why in the hell are you here? Nonviolence is crazy, the gospel is crazy.’ It’s almost a distorted kind of compliment and respect.” Guinan believes: “The oppressed often show the worse traits of the oppressor. We just skim the surface of what oppression really means until we start understanding that the poor can exhibit the worse kind of racism, the worse kind of violence on each other, the worse kind of distorted values and views.”
The community is also involved in different kinds of educational work. The Euclid street house focuses on the Fast for Famine Relief, raising funds and educating about global hunger since September 1974. Rahab, located over the kitchen, has acted as a resource center for churches trying to develop programs on social justice and peace. Amid the litter of publication debris, the Center house is “editorial office” for Gamaliel, a Catholic pacifist quarterly which just completed its first year of existence. In addition the Center office acts as an education center, sponsors talks, hosts workshops, compiles resources, maintains a library and establishes communication with other groups.
From its beginning, CCNV has struggled with the meaning of the “monastic” or prayer dimension of their lives; there have always been attempts to explore their spiritual roots through liturgy, meditation, fasts, and the “almost exaggerated spiritual ritualization of births, marriages, baptisms and birthdays.” The community has developed a common prayer life with daily meditation from 7-8 a.m. and a weekly Sunday liturgy. In reflecting over the past five years, Guinan believes that “the core of all the community strength and vision and stamina has been the liturgy.” It has been their formal way of gathering and being critical of themselves, of building vision and sharing, and at times it has been a place where real reconciliation has gone on.
But this has not always been the case. There is a certain “rhythm” to the liturgy that reflects the fragmentation or unity of the group. And it used to be, so they say, only a nice “other” function that they all did together. “Now it comes out of a sense of really wanting to come together and explore our roots.”
Part of the change occurred as they grew out of the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging themselves to be “gospel” people. The name Community of Creative Non-Violence was chosen to be as inclusive as possible, but as the names taken after that have attested (such as Zacchaeus and Gamaliel), “we as a community feel much more comfortable in publicly stating where our roots are, and they are overwhelmingly in the gospels.” There is a greater sense of that now than at the beginning. So, though still broadly ecumenical, the community’s life and outreach is deeply informed by the gospels. “What we do,” says Guinan, “is much more found in the tradition of Christianity, of the gospels, than it would be in just any revolutionary movement, or any type of secular movement.”
There seems to be a certain organic and sequential logic to these three elements: prayer, service, and protest. Prayer and the deepening of spiritual life in worship should be the context out of which service flows and provide the spiritual discernment needed to determine the shape of protest. Worship releases the spiritual resources necessary to sustain a long-term commitment to being “inconvenienced” and overwhelmed by the needs of others and to transform the daily frustrations that build up when all of our giving is seemingly not returned. At its root, identity with the poor means identity with Jesus who, “though he was rich, yet became poor, that we might become rich.” Prayer identifies us with Jesus and keeps us from romanticizing the poor and conforming to the poor in their values as we live with them. It is only when, out of a context of prayer and worship, we are actively involved daily with the poor around us, that our protest and our prophetic actions are balanced and have integrity.
When a group takes seriously any one of these three dimensions and persists in faithfulness, ultimately the other two will rear their urgent plea to also be heard. Any community that persists in worship and does not find itself moving outward in service and protest will ultimately betray the very nature of worship. Any group that begins in protest and does not find itself deepening its own worship and its daily involvement with the poor will ultimately betray the integrity of protest. Any group or community that begins with service and is not led sooner or later into a deepening worship and visible protest will ultimately fall into an empty form of charity. These three elements are but three braided strands of the same reality, which is obedience to the kingdom and faithfulness to the gospel. Faithfulness beginning at any one point should ultimately bring the other two following in its train.
Many people, especially family people, often rationalize risk out of their lives. The whole strength of the witness of CCNV as a community, Guinan believes, is in the “contradiction” the community symbolizes. Many people ask, “Why do you live in a poverty situation at risk to yourself? You should be upwardly mobile and securing your future.” “That,” says Guinan, “is the whole paradox of the gospel.”
Bob Sabath is web technologist of Sojourners.
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