Humans And Our Edges

Volunteer James Catterson reflects on living in community.

Graphic by James Catterson

Over the past two years, I’ve lived in three intentional communities. As my current chapter living at the London

Catholic Worker (LCW) as a live-in volunteer draws to a close, I thought I might reflect on my time here and note a small handful of things I’ve learnt across my experiences in intentional community.

I didn’t really know what to expect in coming to the LCW as a long-term volunteer. I vaguely heard about the project from a friend in 2023, then throughout 2024 the LCW sat at the back of my mind as a possible intentional community I could be a part of. After getting in contact in late 2024, I visited shortly afterwards in early 2025. It’s such an interesting experience to dip your toes into an established community and wonder how you could fit into it. It can be quite vulnerable actually, to consider – “How could I complement this? Would I fit in here? What will this place teach me or mean to me?”

Well, it turned out that living at the LCW has been a gift that I didn’t quite expect. I have worked alongside other young live-in volunteers who care a lot about people, the injustice that we are seeing, and faith in God. I have lived alongside a household of men with vastly different stories to mine who have truly welcomed me in like a brother, a son, a friend. I have even gotten to be involved in the current chapter of their stories. I have met volunteers who come to cook for the community, drive for the community, live in the community to help for a week; all who generously give of their time, finances, stories, joy, and love in a way that I can’t quite comprehend. Although living in community can be hard, I believe that it allows us to face the reality of our humanness as we experience living alongside one another’s hard and soft edges day in and day out.

Here are a handful of things intentional community has taught me:

Living in community means letting yourself have a bad day in the community and being okay to wear that. Especially when you’re in a role, such as a volunteer. It says, “Yeah this is my home. And I’m human. This is where I have my good days, my bad days, my in-between days”.

Living in community asks you to think of mercy regularly. Living with multiple other people means your edges will rub up against other’s edges. I often have to choose to show grace – to choose to be forgiving and not hold a grudge, to choose to still be kind when I’m agitated, to accept it when I can’t have my preferred way.

Living in community means that you need to make time in your week to do something on your own, or something that is just yours. Going for a few runs during the week is something that is solely mine. I am alone, I am moving my body, I am seeing different houses and different people, I am breathing deep breaths.

Living in community means making decisions together. We are a bit of a yes generation – feeling the need to answer straight away, and often for the answer to be a yes. It’s been a big learning curve that when someone asks a question, instead of answering straight away, to reply with “I’ll let you know after I’ve checked with the others”. Humbly, it helps you to see something in a different light, and respects that the community is home to multiple people and views.

Living in community means getting sleep and having a sacred space. Being able to switch off, letting your room or a nook be your introvert haven, is vital. I stand by the concept that I am always more loving if I’ve had enough sleep and some alone time. Even if that’s a nap on a day when you’re not feeling it.

Living in community ultimately means seeing the human in one another: embracing the human imperfection. Clichéd as that sounds, it’s something I think I’ll stand by forever. Often, you don’t have the choice of the exact kind of people you live in community with. Maybe someone really gets on your nerves. I’m often someone who takes a first impression of a person and holds onto it. But time and time again, I am surprised as I learn about people, how I am softened to them, to their edges, their story, their vulnerabilities, their gifts.

To the Edge and Beyond

Alex Holmes writes about life and loss in the borderlands.

Calais Draughts, Alex Holmes

Watergang du Nord, Calais. The narrow stream that flows along the northern edge of the Courgain Est playing fields. Willow scrub on its southerly bank once sheltered many dozens of Eritreans’ tents. All that remains now is a broad carpet of wood shavings. Another campsite obliterated. The new site is an old site from which the Eritrean community was last evicted in 2022. Back then, it had become a swampland of puddles and mud.

September. The weeks of summer dry have ended; torrential cloudbursts now herald the change of season.  After a night of heavy rain, the fence is a festoon of wet clothes and bedding. Five sodden blankets topped by a sheet of plastic will serve as a soft underlay for Zehra’s tent. The sun emerges and there’s now a holiday feel. The grass, newly mown, is a sward of alternating dark and light green stripes. A pot of food bubbles on a fire. There’s music, Massawa delicately plucking the strings of a krar, a traditional Eritrean instrument.  Finishing his tune, he passes the krar to Fikru who plucks and sings. Elsewhere, a game of dominoes is underway.  Dawit is deep into a book. You want morning coffee? Hayat proffers a small paper cup emblazoned with the words ‘Café Royal, Switzerland’. The coffee is intensely sweet.

How is UK? Fireside, it’s the question asked again and again. This time it’s Ariam who’s asking. And then, Ariam, you tell your story. How you escaped from Eritrea to Israel only to be deported after five years to Rwanda and then pushed by the Rwandan authorities into Uganda. How you journeyed to Egypt, married and became the father of three children. Your dream is to reach the UK and have your family join you. But today is the very day that the UK government has added to its ‘one-in-one-out’ flagship deterrence deal with France by putting a halt to refugee family reunion.

A sudden electrical charge pulses through the campsite; everyone is immediately on edge. Robel and Hamid stride towards the gate at the field entrance to check who might be approaching. After a recent night attack, two Eritreans keep guard throughout the hours of dark. Yusef describes how his fingers were slashed and needed stitches. Now, Yusef, you sit on the edge of your seat clutching your bandaged hand, your eyes following Robel and Hamid. This time the approaching group are new arrivals, an Eritrean family with two children. The relief is palpable; the electrical charge dissipates.

But the police clearance that occurs every second day is expected and the camp must be dismantled. Anything left will be taken away. Within minutes it becomes a ghost site, emptied of people and possessions. There remains just a residue of occupation: Yohannes’ wheelchair, a single trainer, a pair of trousers on the perimeter fence sporting the words ‘The Past’. And close to the edge of the smouldering fire, the abandoned krar.  It will be dusk before anyone will dare return.

Wissant, a village at the Channel’s edge, down the coast from Calais. Another story told. Your story, Abbas. “Fishermen rescued you on your way from Libya to Italy, where you were the only survivor of a shipwreck involving 58 people. In 2012, you were one of the first to testify that the Mediterranean border is killing people, but the UNHCR blocked the broadcasting of your testimony. You spoke of your route, Sudan, Lalibela and the restaurants in Addis Ababa. About the war when you were a child and how you left Assab by stepping over dead bodies. Eventually you were resettled in France where the psychiatrists wanted to pump you full of drugs. Rightly, you didn’t want to take them. What’s the point of taking medication in order to conform to a society that excludes us, destroys us, imprisons us in individualism? You have shown us once again, and once too often, how the border kills and how important it is to fight for freedom of movement.” Words of tribute spoken at your graveside, Abbas. A single candle flickers in a glass jar. Hands are placed on your coffin. Gently you are lowered over the edge and into the dark earth.

God is a Starving Man

Community member Thomas writes on the Gospel the Far Right forget.

Print taken from the CW Newsletter (December 1947)

In September, tens of thousands of people descended on London to take part in what was probably the largest

far-right rally in British history. As one would expect from such a large group, their messaging was not entirely coherent, but the general sentiment was that immigrants, and particularly refugees, are a threat to Britain and should be treated with as much cruelty and violence as necessary to deter them. Leaving aside false claims about migrants being more likely to commit crimes, and particularly sexual violence – a claim which has been made by virtually every wave of bigotry in the modern era – a commonly cited justification for hostility towards migrants is the idea that, through immigration, Britain is losing its “identity”, an identity which the far-right is increasingly inclined to identify as specifically Christian. A significant minority at the march were carrying crosses, and a handful of the speakers were clergy from various denominations, some of whom led the crowd in prayer. Tommy Robinson himself claims to have become a Christian during his most recent imprisonment for contempt of court. He has spoken very little about it, and it certainly seems to have had no effect on his politics. But even the more outspokenly Christian figures of the far-right tend in practice to achieve very little integration of the Gospel with their politics. We do not find in figures like Calvin Robinson any particularly developed theology of the nation-state, or any explanation for the apparent contradiction between their hostility to impoverished migrants and the Gospel.   They generally present themselves as defenders of Christianity, but have little to say about the religion itself, or the so-called “Christian nation”, which they are supposedly defending.

Still, this development requires a serious response. Sections of the far-right have made a claim about what Christianity is; we have to be able to respond with confidence, knowing that the authority of Scripture and

the tradition of the Church is behind us. Thankfully, there has been a response from the leadership of the Church; the presidents of Churches Together in England released a statement condemning the appropriation of Christian imagery at the march to ends contrary to the Gospel, which is worth reading. But also, by a happy coincidence, a couple of months after the rally, Pope Leo published the first magisterial document of his papacy, Dilexi Te, which he completed from a draft written by Pope Francis before his death. The focus of the document is the poor of the world, and their centrality to Christianity and the Church. Jesus was a poor man who devoted himself to serving and preaching to poor people; the first thing he says in public about his own ministry is that he has been anointed “to bring good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). This was not merely a “poverty in spirit” – Jesus was itinerant, and had nowhere to lay his head; his poverty must have come with discomfort and suffering, and he was born and died in a position of social exclusion. As Pope Leo puts it, “he experienced the same exclusion that is the lot of the poor, the outcast of society [...] not only as a poor Messiah, but also as the Messiah of and for the poor.” (DT 19). Thus:

Love for the Lord is one with love for the poor. The same Jesus who tells us, “The poor you will always have with you”, also promises the disciples: “I am with you always”. We likewise think of his saying: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me”. This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, he continues to speak to us. (DT, 5)

To come closer to Jesus, we must be close to poverty, through direct experience or solidarity:

works of mercy are recommended as a sign of the authenticity of worship, which, while giving praise to God, has the task of opening us to the transformation that the Spirit can bring about in us, so that we may all become an image of Christ and his mercy towards the weakest. (DT, 27)

There is no arbitrary distinction between a set of spiritual practices on the one hand, and on the other hand encouragement to do good works; Christianity is a social religion, something we do together. Jesus’ position in society, and the way he related to others, is the key to understanding how we are supposed to relate to each other.

Jesus was also a refugee. The Holy Family was forced to flee political persecution under Herod and seek refuge in Egypt, away from Herod’s political authority, when he was a baby. Migrants without papers are often, of course, the poorest in our own society, because they are not entitled even to the inadequate welfare which is afforded to citizens. Jesus knew not only material poverty, but also the social exclusion which is often migrants’ experience. Pope Leo notes that “The experience of migration accompanies the history of the People of God,” in the lives both of Jesus and of exiled Israel, and:

For this reason, the Church has always recognized in migrants a living presence of the Lord who, on the day of judgment, will say to those on his right: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” (DT, 73)

We ignore this at our peril. A genuinely Christian country would regard migrants as part of the Body of Christ and act accordingly. We would have to recognise a vision of the common good which genuinely included all of the people whom God has given us to love as our neighbours, which is everybody. Those who migrate, especially those who do so illegally, are doing us a valuable service. They are insisting on their own dignity, and their concomitant right to a decent life, against everything the modern nation state can throw at them. We should follow them in insisting on human dignity ourselves. Let us thank God that he has chosen to reveal himself in the poor, so that in enacting justice we come closer to him. Let us thank God that he reaches out to us with millions of hands every day. Let us thank God that we have a Church which still recognises these things in a time when most of our institutions have failed to. I will end with some words from the end of Dilexi Te:

For Christians, the poor are not a sociological category, but the very “flesh” of Christ. It is not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s Incarnation in general terms. To enter truly into this great mystery, we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment. A poor Church for the poor begins by reaching out to the flesh of Christ. If we reach out to the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to understand what this poverty, the Lord’s poverty, actually is; and this is far from easy. (DT, 110).