Simone Weil CW: Call Volunteers

The Simone Weil Catholic Worker (portland, OR) is looking for:

• Live-in intentional community members/Catholic Workers (full-time, but p/t outside work is fine)
• Members of a new associate community of folks living in our second house and sharing in our life while working and contributing to our rent

Simone Weil Catholic Worker seeks to live the microcosm of “a society where it is easier to be good”. We organize ourselves as an urban agronomic university, integrating work, prayer, study, and hospitality. In everything we seek to live and support “conversion of life” to the Gospel.

• Hospitality
  :
  We offer supportive, residential community in our two 4-bedroom houses and 3 backyard tiny houses for folks who were living on the street, and we try to support households and parishes to offer hospitality spaces for Christ the Stranger. Multiple times a week we host open dinners, work parties, and prayer, allowing us to share life with many of our neighbors.
• Prayer & Work
  :
  We are associated with the Benedictine Abbey of Mount Angel as oblates, and borrow from their rhythm of prayer and work (Ora et Labora):
  Our weekdays are structured by chanting Mount Angel’s liturgy of the hours: 8am Morning Prayer, Noon Prayer, and Night Prayer (varies); and we are evolving into a structure of manual work periods shared by intentional community and resident guests that includes work on food prep, gardening and chickens, our cottage industries (paper, candles), and cleaning.
• Shared Study
  :
  In 2022-23, our shared study primarily takes the form of a guided read through the whole of Scripture, which we share with a virtual community that meets weekly. Over 2023 we will be organizing ourselves as an in-person learning community, integrating this aspect into our rhythms of prayer, hospitality, and manual work. Besides Scripture, the coming year will hold (beginner’s) study of Greek along with a few classical and Patristic Greek texts, and readings from Simone Weil, Peter Maurin, and others on the social order.
• Home Economy
  :
  We live and invite others into a complex home economy that centers on making, growing/raising, and bulk-buying food for ourselves, our extended community (through our CSA-inspired Community Supported Pantry ), and the free pantry and refrigerator we host in our front yard.
• Communion Economy
  :
  Our community is a center for economic practices and learning that express what we believe about the Body of Christ. We facilitate “communion economy” practices, starting with a mutual-aid credit union community that can offer 0% interest loans guaranteed within the community in order to prevent and redeem interest-bearing debt. In addition to adopting this practice ourselves, we support other communities, especially parishes, to do the same.
  
  So far, other topics we’ve explored through the lens of communion economy are food growing and buying, medical debt/insurance, technology, and reconciliation/mediation.
• Newspaper
  :
  We currently publish a roughly quarterly newsletter that we plan to transition to a full newspaper!

In living these practices, we seek to live the beginnings of a small but encompassing way of life, “rooted and grounded in love,” adequate to explore “the breadth, and height, and length, and depth” of life in Christ (Eph 3:17-18)

The mission of Catholic Worker.org is to document the Catholic Worker movement in all its diverse expressions around the world. The website includes a searchable archive of all of Dorothy Day’s writings in THE CATHOLIC WORKER newspaper, a directory of all known Catholic Worker communities, information about the aims and means of the movement, and news from Catholic Worker communities around the world.

See the About CW.org page for more information.