ii The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us A Peopleʼs Pastoral from the Catholic Committee of Appalachia CATHOLIC COMMITTEE OF APPALACHIA Spencer, West Virginia A People's Pastoral from the Catholic Committee of Appalachia iii The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us A PEOPLE’S PASTORAL FROM THE CATHOLIC COMMITTEE OF APPALACHIA © 2015 Catholic Committee of Appalachia. This text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Interna- tional license. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This license does not apply to photographs or artwork contained herein. Artwork and photographs appearing herein are used with permission and remain the property of the respective artists and photographers. Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, copyright © 2007 Priests for Equality. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Cover and interior design by Liz Pavlovic, www.lizpavlovic.com Front and back cover art by Christopher Santer, www.christophersanter.com Printed in the USA by Morgantown Printing & Binding, Morgantown, W.Va. First printing, December 2015 Published by the Catholic Committee of Appalachia (CCA) 885 Orchard Run Spencer, WV 25276 [email protected] www.ccappal.org www.peoplespastoral.org Facebook – www.facebook.com/groups/ccappalachia Twitter – @ThisLandIsHome Contact CCA for additional copies. iv The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us For Walter Sullivan A People's Pastoral from the Catholic Committee of Appalachia v vi The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us CONTENTS FOREWORD: CELEBRATING THE SEED GROWING .....................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................2 Re-membering Our History in a Changing Church...................................................................................3 Taking Our Place in the Story ...................................................................................................................4 PART ONE OUR STORIES: THE GROUND OF OUR STRUGGLE .....................................................................................6 The Challenge of Becoming a Church of the Poor ...................................................................................7 The Magisterium of the Poor and of Earth ...............................................................................................7 A Growing Chorus of Stories ....................................................................................................................8 The Voice of the Land .............................................................................................................................10 The Voices of Women .............................................................................................................................12 The Voices of Coalfi eld Residents ..........................................................................................................13 The Voices of Miners ..............................................................................................................................14 The Voices of Economically Vulnerable Communities ............................................................................16 The Voices of the Homeless and Imprisoned .........................................................................................18 The Voices of Communities Impacted by the Oil and Gas Industry .......................................................18 The Voices of People of Color ................................................................................................................21 The Voices of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered People ........................................................23 Voices in Context: Coal, Capitalism, and Climate Change ....................................................................25 PART TWO OUR TRADITIONS: THE GROUND OF OUR VISION ...................................................................................28 Shaped By New Stories ..........................................................................................................................29 Integral Ecology and the Culture of Encounter ......................................................................................35 The Place of God’s People: Israel and Empire ........................................................................................37 Putting Jesus in His Place: The Jesus Movement in Galilee ...................................................................40 Practicing Resurrection in Crucifi ed Places .............................................................................................42 The Spirit, the Giver of Life .....................................................................................................................44 PART THREE OUR ACTIONS: THE GROUND OF OUR HOPE ..........................................................................................48 Becoming Appalachian Mystic Activists .................................................................................................50 Transforming the Basis of Life .................................................................................................................51 Transforming Communities and Economies ...........................................................................................53 Transforming Politics ..............................................................................................................................54 Transforming the Churches .....................................................................................................................55 A Message to Youth ...............................................................................................................................57 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................................58 INTERLUDE: A CERULEAN WARBLER SPEAKS ...........................................................................................32 AFTERWORD: A NEW GENERATION’S PLACE IN THE STORY ..................................................................61 NOTES ..........................................................................................................................................................63 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................................73 A People's Pastoral from the Catholic Committee of Appalachia vii viii The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us FOREWORD: CELEBRATING THE SEED GROWING As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of "This Land Is Home to Me" (1975) and the 20th anniversary of "At Home in the Web of Life" (1995), we fi nd ourselves mourning the loss of so many who contributed to these Appalachian pastoral letters in the telling of their story, facilitating the process, or signing the doc- uments. Such losses open us more and more to God, allowing us to let go like the seed that perishes in order to become the kernel of new life that rises again. As we engaged in conversation over a three-year period about a new letter we began to hear a seed growing: “Somewhere in the Cosmos a new redemp- tive reality has made a beginning and [has] become the source of new blessings.”1 When the bishops gathered at Vatican II, they described the Church as “the People of God”—not only the pope, bishops, and clergy, but the entire People of God. They further articulated in Gaudium et Spes how the Church was to be present in the modern world, and their key was dialogue. It is not a new thing for the Church as institution to lead and speak out on issues it chooses to take a stand on, on its own turf. It is a new thing for the Church to listen, truly listen, to what people are saying in their terms, on their turf. A listening Church listens to what might be painful such as “the burdens that women bear in a tradition that too often continues to make religion a form of female servitude.”2 Pope Francis speaks of the need for us to become a “messy” Church that is not afraid to take risks, thus, not afraid to acknowledge the messy realities of women’s lives, realities that challenge the Church’s current practices in many ways, realities that the Church must acknowledge in order to communicate the joy of the gospel to future generations. As Pope Francis himself says, “God is not afraid of new things.” Never before has the Church needed so badly the presence and pain that is the prophet in our midst, whose only criteria is faithfulness to the Spirit. Pope Francis himself pointed to Dorothy Day as a model. The Catholic Worker is, and always has been, on the margins of the institutional Church. Its wealth lies not in its bigness nor its assets. Its wealth lies elsewhere, in its faithfulness to the Gospel and to the poor. We are seeing through Pope Francis that the Spirit is much harder on us than we are. Dying implies letting go and the Church does so reluctantly. We want to hang on to what we know, as opposed to a rising that we do not know. All three pastorals are in sync with Pope Francis. “Wisdom comes from listening to the holy faithful people of God. Listen, listen with the heart. And then let us walk together.” Beth Davies, CND St. Charles, Virginia 1 This quote comes from Rosemary Radford Ruether’s foreword to Edwina Gateley, I Hear a Seed Growing: God of the Forest, God of the Streets (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990/2010). 2 Catholic Women Speak Network, eds., Catholic Women Speak: Bringing Our Gifts to the Table (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2015). A People's Pastoral from the Catholic Committee of Appalachia ix Let me sing to you all those songs I know… Come along with me to some places that I’ve been… It’s sad, but the telling takes me home. —Utah Phillips1 2 The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us