By Thea Jarvis

In the deep chill of a Manhattan winter, Ed Loring and his wife Murphy Davis set out for the Catholic Worker house on East Third Street. They were visiting in the city and had phoned ahead to Maryhouse to be sure their visit would be welcome. It was.

“I had a sense in my life that I wanted to relate to poor people,” Ed remembers of that January in 1979 when he first made contact with the Catholic Worker. Beyond that, he and Murphy had no working knowledge of the movement Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin had launched in 1933, although Ed, an ordained Presbyterian minister, had taught the history of American religion for years at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Dorothy Day had been accorded a mere “one half of one sentence” in his American religious history text, Ed says, smiling at the irony.

A New Direction

At Maryhouse, he and Murphy were warmly received by a worker from the Boston house of hospitality who showed them around and discussed Catholic Worker history and philosophy.

In the upstairs office, he pulled out some books and showed them to the two Atlantans to take home. The selections included Dorothy Day’s “On Pilgrimage,” “Loaves and Fishes,” and “The Long Loneliness.”

It was on the southbound train that Ed and Murphy had time to realize the impact the visit had made on their lives. Ed recalls that Murphy cried most of the way home. For his part, reading “The Long Loneliness” during the leisurely ride to Atlanta resulted in “a reshaping of my life.” He claims he has “never been the same since.”

He and Murphy had already attempted the formation of a small community which was encouraged and supported by the 40-member congregation at Clifton Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, where Ed was pastor. Four people, including Ed and Murphy, lived together, sharing meals, prayer and funds in commons.

“It was a great community for 48 hours,” Ed says with a smile, the perspective of time sharpening his perception that this first effort was a failure. His own intense desire for the communal adventure, he acknowledges, became more important than listening to others and the inner directives of the Lord.

The initial community at Clifton, however, combined with the brief but powerful immersion into Catholic Worker thought during the visit to New York, sensitized Ed to the fact that it was not the individual but God who plots the path on which his work is to be accomplished.

Turning to scripture, prayer and discussion, Ed and Murphy found themselves asking, “God, what would you have us do?” They were eventually joined in their searching by Rob and Carolyn Johnson, fellow members at Clifton.

Meeting The Challenge

Together, they began working with the poor in the area, opening a night shelter at Clifton, trying to carry out Dorothy Day’s challenge to love in a very personal way. They visited other Catholic Worker houses around the country to see how they were answering the challenge.

From that time on, “we were on the road to being Catholic Workers,” Ed Believes, “forming a house of hospitality in our hearts before it was formed in an actual building.”

Three years later, in December of 1981, with the official opening of the Open Door community on Ponce de Leon Avenue, the Atlanta Catholic Worker house of hospitality became “the only house (in the country) where those here for the long haul (volunteer leadership) are not Catholic,” Ed relates.

The preceding February, he and Murphy, Rob and Carolyn had spent time together at the Trappist monastery in Conyers. Through prayer and sharing, they reached the decision to leave Clifton and begin the Open Door ministry. Ed emphasizes that their decision had to have been God’s doing since none of them had come to Conyers with the express intention of making such a definitive move.

A 10-day stay at the Catholic Worker house in New York in October of 1981 galvanized the two families for their Christmas day opening in December, during which about 100 street friends were served a holiday dinner.

Murphy’s parents had come down to Atlanta from Greensboro, North Carolina the week before and had pitched in to ready the two-store house on Ponce de Leon for its first guests.

“We handed Murphy’s father a broom and her mother a mop” and they all set to work cleaning the gracious old home, which was much in need of a proper scrubbing, Ed recalls.

“That was the way we began our shelter work,” he adds, with the quiet confidence of one who is convinced the work is more God’s than is his own.

Guests Arrive

The scrubbing and cleaning resulted in a room for two overnight guests, as well as a working kitchen facility and spacious area for serving food. As more rooms were cleaned, more guests were sheltered. Within weeks, the Open Door was giving nightly shelter to over 30 guests.

Today, the Open Door continues to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. Those driving to Atlanta down Ponce de Leon Avenue can daily view the line of men and women who flock to the house for warmth and nourishment.

Beginning at 9 a.m., the doors open to those needing a shower or change of clothing. The use of a phone is also available. Lunch is served to non-resident guests at 11:00 Monday through Saturday. On Sunday, service begins at 5:15 p.m.

Hot, hearty soup, sandwiches, iced tea and crackers fill empty stomachs in an atmosphere that is gently encouraging, peaceful and friendly. Sometimes, depending on what has been donated or is readily available, a dessert accompanies the meal. Fruit, cake or pudding add a special touch to the menu.

Those who live at the Open Door, both volunteer workers and resident guests, take their lunch sometime after noon when their street friends have been cared for. Their evening meal is served at 6:30.

As of this fall, the Open Door was feeding and clothing an average of 100 guests each day. The community includes 25 resident guests as well as volunteer workers who commit to a minimum stay of three months.

Areas Of Concern

The Open Door is a Catholic Worker house and, as such, it follows that the community is led into related areas of ministry because of its commitment to Dorothy Day’s theology of love, which Ed Loring calls her primary gift and legacy.

“The daily agenda in my life is to love other people,” he asserts, citing the difficulty of the challenge. This work of loving leads to work of peace, first in one’s own heart and secondly within the larger community.

Ed quotes Peter Maurin: “You begin the revolution with you.” This means, he understands, filling one’s own life with peacefulness and gentleness toward others and ridding oneself of any violence that exists in the heart, the mind, the eye, the hand.

In dealing with one’s own contribution to violence in the world, Ed is convinced, “the place of God’s peace becomes enlarged.”

On a broader scale, workers at the Open Door lend support to peace efforts within the state and sometimes nationally. Their Friday night meetings, which begin in the fall and continue through the spring, are open to the public and frequently feature guest speakers who are advocates for peace.

Their support of the recent protest against the training of Salvadoran troops at Fort Benning is an example of workers actively involved in the peace movement.

In addition to the strains of pacifism running through the Open Door commitment, Ed feels “the community is at the point where we see ourselves as advocates for street people in the city.”

In the realm of the concrete, this means a campaign for public lavatories in downtown Atlanta, to cite the most recent example. Flyers distributed by Open Door workers state quite clearly the fact that there are no advocates of the poor, the unemployed and the destitute to contact the mayor or the city council and encourage them to provide these necessities.

Of course, before the Open Door community itself approached Holy Mother the City, as Dorothy Day called her, they installed a public lavatory in their own backyard.

Downward Mobility

“The idolatry of activists is to substitute the Lordship of Jesus Christ for a cause,” Ed acknowledges, adding, “Jesus is Lord not only of the poor but of the rich and powerful” as well.

This awareness of removing the beam from one’s own eye before plucking out the mote in one’s neighbor’s has become primary in the lifestyle of the Open Door community.

The workers espouse a philosophy of voluntary “downward mobility,” in which the lower one moves on the ladder of traditional success in terms of money, clothing, housing and social standing, the deeper one moves into the “pilgrimage of spiritual maturity,” Ed explains. “It is the opposite of American success.”

Within the last few weeks, during the common life meeting that volunteer residents hold each month, Open Door workers voted to cut their monthly stipend from $60 to $50. The monthly allowance, Ed says, gives workers “Christian liberty” in the area of personal expenditure and is above and beyond the necessities provided for them. In looking back over their records for the first few months of their operation, he said, they found to their surprise that the initial stipend had been $75!

While Ed Loring, Murphy Davis, and Rob and Carolyn Johnson for the leadership core at Atlanta’s Presbyterian Catholic Worker House, the success of the Open Door ministry is due in great measure to the generosity of volunteers willing to share their time and talents with the homeless and needy of the city.

Volunteers span a broad ecumenical spectrum, and Catholic involvement, not unsurprisingly, is substantial. Catholics are found serving in the soup kitchen and providing funds for the continuance of the Open Door effort.

A generous member of Holy Family Church in Marietta supplies the house with ice throughout the year and the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers donates bread each week.

“They not only bake it, they deliver it, too,” Ed Loring says with gratitude. “Open Door gets a whole lot of support from the Catholic community.”

Such support is easily understood. One visit to the Open Door is a mini-journey into the ground floor of the Gospel message, where the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, the thirsty are given to drink.

“One of the resources of love is living with the poor,” Ed testifies. Living in Atlanta with the Open Door in our midst is a blessing that is itself a resource of love.