The Witness of Radical Welcome

IN 1967, I TRAVELED with activist friends from New York to Baltimore to support four people there who poured blood on the 1A files that compelled young men into the military and the massacre in Vietnam. The “Baltimore 4,” as they became known, committed the first of some 100 actions focused on draft boards, the source of cannon fodder in the ever-escalating wars in Indochina.

It was during one of these trips that I met Willa Bickham and her husband, Brendan Walsh. Our friendship has been rich, varied, invaluable.

In The Long Loneliness in Baltimore, Walsh and Bickham tell of their nearing 50 years serving the people of Baltimore as the Viva House Catholic Worker. It is a story that needs telling, especially now in this country that is profoundly ruptured by economic and racial conflict.

Try as the politicians and the press might, it is impossible to disengage economics from race. Bickham and Walsh know this intimately, living in the midst of an impoverished black neighborhood. They have experienced drugs, murders, robberies, and destruction right outside their front doors. The alley that runs beside their home, thanks to their creativity, is marked with memorials to men and boys shot and killed there. Repeatedly, after almost every major killing, Walsh has told the press what has become crystal clear to him: that in Baltimore City (as in too many cities), selling drugs is the only job that exists for all-too-many people of color.

In the garden outside Viva House is the Hope Stone. In Bickham’s script, it quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: “We will hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” That is the invitation to all who come to Viva House for whatever reason, to meet whatever need. Each is sure to receive respectful and caring human interaction, food, fellowship, help with bills, a place to escape the cold or heat or rain, a place of justice and peace.

Bickham and Walsh are people of deep faith that is put into practice in their choice of where and how to live and how to welcome people of all faiths, races, colors, and ages into their home. Were this practiced more widely, we might be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation.

I was stunned at how profoundly people who had been part of their lives, and are now deceased, came alive in this book. It enabled me to spend time with Mary Moylan (one of the Catonsville Nine), Jim Harney (an activist and photojournalist), Tom Lewis (one of both the Baltimore Four and the Catonsville Nine), and teacher and activist Bill O’Connor, to name a few of the many. What a gift. Walsh and Bickham understand that death is part of this thing called life. I appreciated that as my own beloved Phil Berrigan was dying; they walked that walk with me, my family, and my immediate community, sharing the grief and loss as well as helping us all open ourselves to the reality of death.

There’s a compelling immediacy to Walsh’s writing. It’s a matter of heart combined with head, of profound belief in and love for those about whom he is writing; it’s a matter of art; and, reductively, it’s a matter of faith and hope and love. Bickham’s art is stunningly beautiful, consistent with the outpouring of her compassion with the people she serves and loves.

I rejoice in the people that Walsh and Bickham are, the service they do daily, the model they continue to be for so many of us, the fidelity. What gifts they and Viva House are and have been all these years to untold numbers of people. And what a gift this book will be to all who take time with it.