Kris Neufeld – NSFA Staff Editor

One of my favorite books is Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Rachel Naomi Remen, a medical doctor who, as she puts it, listens to people’s stories. She writes, “Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering… Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time.”

I am now in a new life phase. In the last three years, I have moved that many times, including a frustrating eight months in a furnished house which was intended to be a 2-3-month stop between selling my house and moving back to Minnesota. I sat on furniture and slept in a bed that weren’t mine, surrounded by cardboard boxes that contained the familiar things of my past life. What had been intended as a short-term fix turned into an isolating, frustrating year.

Now I live in what will likely be my last home—a small rental cottage in a senior community in Rochester, NY. It is a city where I know a few people and where I hope to be able to pay the rent if I happen to live as long as my ancestors. However, it is an additional two hours away from old friends in the New Jersey Affiliate Chapter, whom I have tried to see once a year for the last 15 years, and six to seven hours away from happenings at Maryknoll.

So, in many ways it feels like my “telling-stories-time” is on the back burner, but not because I don’t have the “pausing time, the reflecting time, the wondering time” of which Remen writes. The task now is to seek like-minded people who are willing to sit around kitchen tables to tell me their stories and to listen to mine.

It is difficult, as one grows older, to make new relationships, and yet it is necessary, given the steady loss and erosion of long-time friends whose stories I knew so well and whose lives had intersected with mine for so many years.

These are some of my musings when I read in NSFA that Affiliates have been discussing a book they have read in common. I must confess this doesn’t hold much appeal for me. A virtual community, however, could be another matter—a sharing with others of my clumsy attempts to integrate into a new space and a new and confusing city, and of my attempts to be of service to others in a new way. I might like to tell them about my four Syrian women refugees who speak only enough English to respond to “What is your name?” (How I hope, someday, to listen to their stories!) And I’d like to hear others’ stories about how they continue to find ways to feel, and be, relevant—not just as a person but particularly as an older Affiliate.

See the next article: Virtual Coincidence.

In Seattle, Fr. Tom Marti, MM, and Anna Clarke Johnson,
Team Leader for the Western Region,
Maryknoll US Mission Education

Connections. The Seattle Chapter makes a point of maintaining contacts with missioners in the field and contributing to mission efforts. Ralph Maughan (Western Region Co-coordinator) will be connecting with Br. Tim Raible, MM, and Br. John Beeching, MM, in Bangkok, Thailand, in early 2017. For many years, Br. Tim was assigned to mission promotion from the Seattle Maryknoll House, where the Seattle Chapter meets. 

On their way to visit family, Affiliate Board Chair David Schaffner and his wife, NSFA co-editor Paula, enjoyed a newsy lunch with California Regional Coordinators Hugh and Jean Menton and other Los Angeles Chapter Affiliates. Kathee Bautista is working on a human trafficking project, and Richard Perez talked of his long-time ties to Maryknoll. 

The Sierra Club has revived its midwinter, midnight walk among the homeless of Skid Row, and many LA Chapter members plan to join them. As a new member of the Los Angeles Chapter, Jean Minton had written  about the walk in the March/April 2013 NSFA article, “LA – Sierra Club Skid Row Walk,”  p. 5. 

Kitty Schiltz – Seattle Chapter

A review of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, The New Press, New York, 2016.

For the last five years, Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociology professor from Berkeley, listened to, observed, and became friends with the people in the Louisiana bayou—Tea Party country. Her sociological study provides insight into the almost inevitable election of Trump. In her words, the political climate was “like a pile of dry kindling waiting for a spark to ignite it.” Hochschild’s stories flesh out her exhaustive study of the Louisiana bayou people who live in a very petrochemically polluted, poverty-riddled area.

We may feel really good living in our little isolated bubble. But there are many bubbles, large and small. How big is our family? We feel good when we are within our bubble, but Professor Hochschild’s study asks us to go outside our comfort bubble and be with others.

Strangers in Our Own Land speaks to a missioner’s approach when entering another culture. Quoting Max Warren, of The Church of Ireland Missionary Society, “Our first task in approaching another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on other peoples dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival.”