Mike Baxter announces the plans just before the end of mass at OLR.

They’re actively seeking donations to help them buy the drop-in center outright. You can’t make a tax-deductable donations at the moment, but you will soon be able to. Please contact peterclaverhouse@gmail.com for details.

OLR is open Friday and Saturday mornings, and is at 744 South Main Street in South Bend, Indiana. If you’d care to make a small donation right away, please bring by any of the following items:

• Coffee
• T-shirts
• Small canisters of shaving cream
• Dish soap
• Laundry soap
• Socks
• Trash bags (13 gal and 30 gal)

Grab yourself a cup of coffee while you’re there and hang out awhile.

Are you able to help the South Bend Catholic Worker with a donation?

They need the following items:

• Coffee
• T-shirts
• Small canisters of shaving cream
• Dish soap
• Laundry soap
• Socks
• Trash bags (13 gal and 30 gal)

I think they could also use a copy of the Joy of Cooking.

You can bring donations to their drop-in center, “Our Lady of the Road,” 744 South Main Street in South Bend, Indiana, Friday and Saturday mornings. If you’d like to volunteer at Our Lady of the Road, please stop by and say hello.

Your generous donation will keep Al fully caffeinated.

A week later, with no word from either of the Mikes, their friends told police to check out an abandoned building where they were known to hang out, or down in the nearby manholes, in case something bad happened.

Their hunch was right. Nolen and Lawson were down there, bludgeoned to death. So were Jason Coates and Brian Talboom. As best we can reckon, the bodies lay in the manholes more than two weeks.

Several things trouble us about all this. For one thing, there’s the violence of their deaths. For another, there’s the lethargic response to the missing person’s report; not the kind of response we would have seen if it had to do with, shall we say, more respectable members of the community.

For yet another thing, there’s the prospect of the murderer, or murderers, still among us, walking around, which has left a lot of folks uneasy. And then there’s the way the murder victims have been described in the press, with words such as “homeless” and “scrappers.” Not that these descriptions aren’t accurate; these guys were homeless, and some of them were known to collect scrap metal. But these words also imply that they were lowlifes who ventured into shady dealings, maybe even got what they deserved. In any case, such words don’t explain their deaths. Nor, as we see it, do they sum up their lives. For us at the Catholic Worker, this is especially true when it comes to Mike Lawson, who lived with us on and off for the past three years.

Lawson came to us at our house on West Washington Street. He was one of a group of guys who would regularly come for coffee, a shower, supper and (when there was room) a bed. He had an easy, boyish smile, a friendly way of talking and a flare for delivering droll comments with a deadpan face. We could tell he’d been in places like ours before. He pitched in, especially with the dishes. He and a couple of friends used to joke about having dishpan hands. “Every fork in this house,” someone once remarked, “has, at one time or another, been scrubbed by Lawson.” He knew where to find the light bulbs, the towels and the tools. He was ready to help with repair work, plumbing and roofing — evidence, we came to learn, of a pretty impressive string of construction jobs.

Sometimes he wouldn’t show up. Other times we had to ask him to leave. But he always made his way back. Over time, he told us that he had been married, twice; that he had a daughter, of whom he spoke glowingly; and that he had other family as well, though the references here were vague. As we have recently come to learn, most of his family lives in the area and would certainly have taken him in. But he just wouldn’t go, for reasons that surely had to do with failure and shame, of not feeling worthy of love and forgiveness. But such things are profoundly personal and utterly mysterious, so we will never really know what demons beguiled him, the particular kind of darkness that overwhelmed him from within.

About a year ago, Mike and some friends were sleeping in an abandoned building and awoke to find themselves surrounded by flames and thick smoke. He jumped out of a second-floor window, stumbled to our house, collapsed on the couch, then went to the emergency room to discover that the fire was toxic and had permanently damaged his lungs. He vowed to change his ways after this, refusing to accept the prospect of dying homeless in some old abandoned building.

Soon he took a dishwashing job at Fiddler’s Hearth, moved into his own place and seemed to be flourishing. But then things went downhill. We didn’t see him for months, until this past fall when he started coming around again. He stayed with us for a few weeks after Thanksgiving and helped clean up for the opening of our drop-in center. A few weeks later, he said he had been to a doctor who told him he had spots on his lungs. Like anyone, it scared him, caused him to think. “I just want to be around my friends,” he said, “around people I love and who love me.” A week later he disappeared.

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, often wrote of “the mystery of the poor.” At the heart of that mystery lies the truth that we are all impoverished, all in need of love and mercy from God and each other. It’s a truth we ignore to the extent that we imagine ourselves as self-sufficient, as safe somehow from the seamy side of life. It’s a truth that pertains to the non-homeless as well as the homeless, teetotalers as well as alcoholics, solid citizens as well as scrappers.

For the Gospel reading at Lawson’s memorial Mass, we chose the story of the good thief, the one who asks, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” and who receives the assurance, “In truth I tell you, this day you will be with me in paradise.” We like to think that Mike grasped this truth when he spoke of love and friendship shortly before his death. To remind ourselves of this truth we’ve put out a photograph of Mike. The camera caught him turning from a stack of dishes in the sink, his hands still in the dishwater, smiling one of his easy, boyish smiles.

This article was written by the South Bend Catholic Worker community: Michael Baxter, Brenna Cussen, Margie Pfeil, and Cinnamon Sarver. It is copyright 2007 and reprinted here by permission of the authors. The photo is of Mike Lawson at the opening of Our Lady of the Road, December 2006, and was taken by Cinnamon Sarver. It’s not the one mentioned in the article. The original is here. The photo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Some rights reserved.

Lawson and three other men were found dead inside city manholes near Coveleski Stadium last week.

The deaths of Lawson, 53, Michael S. Nolen Jr., 40, Jason Coates, 29, and Brian G. Talboom, 51, have all been ruled homicides.

Authorities released no new information Friday regarding the deaths of the homeless men.

[Jerry] Eason spoke fondly about Lawson at the Mass held at Our Lady of the Road, a drop-in center at 744 S. Main St. About 80 people — primarily friends and a few family members — attended the Mass, which was followed by a potluck dinner.

The Mass was for Lawson, a Catholic who stayed at the Catholic Worker House, but all of the victims were prayed for.

Dave Griffith:

When the third and fourth bodies were found is when I began to worry about my family; specifically, I worried that Jessica would hyperbolically conclude—as she usually does—that we were all going to die at the hands of some homeless serial killer lurking in the sewers bopping people over the head; that he would find his way into the building through the drain in the laundry room. I decided not to tell her because as I parked the car at the curb outside Mello Place, just below the green awning, I happened to look up and see the train underpass in the distance and realize that it was the very place that the men were found.

Mike Lawson at the opening of Our Lady of the Road, December 2006. Cinnamon Sarver photo.

The event began with a mass celebrated by Father Paul Kollman, CSC. Well over 100 people were there.

Before

Photos: Grand opening, history of the building since mid-August.

After

(I’ve been sifting through the 800 hobo names for Our Lady of the Road, or Boxcar Mary, but no luck so far.)

From the program book:

Our Lady of the Road is a day-time drop-in center for folks who find themselves on the street. We will offer coffee, snacks, use of the restrooms, showers, and washers and dryers to do clothes. Most of all, however, we will offer a place for people to sit and talk–a place to belong.

We could greatly use your help! To volunteer your time, please contact us at [574] 235-0623 or [574] 287-7734.

Also, the following helpful items are needed: laundry soap, coffee and filters, toilet paper, bath towels, soap, shampoo, razors and shaving cream, women’s hygene products, and other toiletry items.

Most importantly, we ask for your prayers and your presence. We have a lot to celebrate, lots of friends and supporters to thank.

(blueprint)

Mike Baxter in a dust cloud: The middle room is clean!

Margie Pfeil and Mike Benedetti, Mike Baxter with an axe

I have a couple comments on the review; if I can get my hands on the book, I’ll comment on that, too.

The SBCW is not as loosely-organized as the article might imply; they’re not tax-exempt, but they are incorporated. There’s an interesting tension at the SBCW between the personalist/anarchistic leanings that many Catholic Workers have, and the responsibilities of opening a big drop-in center.

Now a good chunk of Catholic Worker communities are non-profits and/or run big operations, and they a good job of it. I’d never think of complaining about them, but part of what interests me about the Catholic Worker “model” is that it works so well with small-scale, personalist/anarchist efforts. Before coming in contact with the CW, I always assumed that to be effective in doing good you had work with an “official” organization, or else be an extraordinary person. I no longer think either of these is necessary.

I want to do big things, but without a big operation, and Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day is an obvious inspiration here. Ammon Hennacy (a sometime Catholic Worker) and Henry Spira are two others. Hennacy wrote of the “one-man revolution” (which also included women like Day and Emma Goldman) and lived it too. Spira worked with big organizations but kept his autonomy; his own organization remained tiny.

I guess for some people the tension between efforts “rooted in the local community, highly personal and against the grain” and “global in orientation, corporate and unmistakably intertwined with secular culture” is religious or philosophical. For me, it is a matter of style and temperament. If I can do a great job loving God and serving others without a lot of overhead, who needs it? Not everyone thinks this way, and I’d never argue that they should.

Introduction to the book: PDF.

Approving blurbs from Ms. Pfeil and Holy Cross’s David O’Brien.

From the introduction to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row:

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

The Catholic Worker community: Margie Pfeil, Mike Baxter, Cinnamon Sarver, Brenna Cussen

From today’s reading (James 2:18):

Demonstrate your faith to me without works,
and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.

Paula Xenopus is now blogging her SBCW adventures at The Walnut Picker. She even blogged the hiking talk I gave Friday night. Thanks to all the Notre Dame students and Sierra Club members who showed up and packed the Catholic Worker’s living room.

You can also follow the SBCW at Flickr and Pie and Coffee.

Another, more secular, vigil was held in South Bend earlier in the day.

The group, most wearing black, held signs reading “From Nagasaki to Lebanon / Mourn the Dead.”

Pictured: Mike Schorsch. Photo by Mike Benedetti. More photos.

The event was sponsored by the South Bend Catholic Worker and the Catholic Peace Fellowship. It began with the reading of a meditation, reprinted below.

(The South Bend Tribune covered this event. Last year when the Worcester Telegram & Gazette saw fit to cover a similar event in Massachusetts, they saw fit to “balance” the coverage by interviewing a WWII-era man with a poor understanding of the facts. The Tribune, to its credit, did not do this.)

A meditation by Mike Schorsch, on the 61st anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 9, 2006

“Here are the beginnings of the age to come; here we see it reflected as in a mirror.” With these words, an ancient sermon describes the Transfiguration, the moment when Jesus revealed himself as God to his disciples. The “age to come” the sermon speaks of is the age of God’s peace, and the reflection is describes is found in the love and light of Christ.

On August 6th, Catholics celebrate the feast of the Transfiguration.

On August 6th, 1945, America became the first and only nation in the history of the world to use nuclear weapons against civilians.

On August 9th, 1943, Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant, a husband and father, was beheaded for refusing to fight in the Nazi army. Despite the objections of his bishop, Jägerstätter insisted that Christ was calling him to resist, to have no part in Nazism or its works.

On August 9, 1946, America dropped its second atomic bomb. Between the two bombings and their after effects, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.

With profound sorrow we remember these thousands. We also remember the thousands killed in Iraq, in Palestine, in Israel, and in Lebanon. We pray for all of their souls, and for their families.

We pray for our times, that they will reflect the love of Christ, and not the cold, dispassionate hatred of the atom bomb. We pray for the “age to come,” that it will be one of souls transfigured by Christ’s peace—souls like that of Franz Jägerstätter.

We pray to the God of mercy for mercy, and to the God of peace for peace, and we ask for a time of transfiguration in this season of fury.