Ella’s Corn Muffins & Uncle Bob’s Stew

This morning basically consisted of doing research at the Marquette University Library. I got a late start and discovered a wealth of material. So when I finally got home I immediately started the beef stew that I had promised Ella in exchange for some of her delicious corn muffins. Cooking on and off, while doing other things, I finished the stew at 4pm, just in time for the exchange. I brought Ella some of the stew and she gave me some of her corn bread muffins. Thus we both could enjoy a dinner of corn bread muffins and stew, something every elderly Jesuit and former Jesuit knows about since it was the regular Sunday breakfast fare for many years of our training.

Driving back from Ella’s house with corn muffins I thought about my next planned venture of the day, joining some friends in protesting the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. I think it is good to protest that which violates our conscience but considered how easily protest without nonviolent action is dismissed these days and how ineffective it has become.

While the stew was cooking I was working on pictures from the experience at SOAWatch, protest of the training of soldiers from Latin America to torture and kill those struggling for human rights. I decided that this protest was enough to last me a long while. So I came home, made the final preparations for dinner of corn bread and stew and skipped tonight’s protest.

During my research this morning I ran across statements of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, about the value of the principle of subsidiarity, the principle that political power should be exercised by the smallest or least central unity of government. It sounded like the Gandhi principle of Swadeshi, the use and service of our immediate surroundings over those more remote or foreign.

In my mind the protest of SOA Watch was all the protest I needed for months to keep me struggling, researching, writing and taking nonviolent action. Preparing corn bread and stew for dinner, together with Ella, was a practice of taking care of business on the basic level of food. Maybe research and corn bread was enough and missing the protest was not important.

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