Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Harper.
Hi Matt, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles (La Canada Flintridge). In this predominantly white, extremely affluent part of town, I was raised by Catholic parents whose moral compass included considering our responsibility to and for our neighbors. Historic policies and current practices worked to ensure racial and economic diversity was kept away. Thus, my concept of “neighbors” was pretty simple.
At Loyola High School, I had mandatory service hours and volunteered at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker’s Hippie Kitchen on Skid Row. With little intention of returning to L.A. afterward, I went away to college (College of the Holy Cross) and through a series of experiences and relationships was transformed. I began to see the place not just of ill-intentioned people but systems that both limit opportunities and increase obstacles for people who do not hold the identities I hold. This was also the time when I both left the Catholic faith – unable to reckon the hypocrisy I felt between our words and actions – and returned to the Catholic church – as I uncovered other communities and parts of our tradition that saw our responsibility to really enflesh the radical teachings of Christ as I had long felt.
After two years working at a youth prison in Central America and living in an intentional community after college, I returned to Los Angeles with greater clarity. I felt a clear responsibility to move through communities like the one I was raised in, to push back on narratives, values, and practices that perpetuated or at least tolerated the wholesale disposability of marginalized communities. I felt excited as I learned more about the history of organizing and movement work that has come to life in Los Angeles to be a part of these efforts. And I wondered if there was a place in the Catholic community for a faith that does justice work.
I returned to Los Angeles and began organizing in my free time with AWARE-LA (the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles) and their burgeoning active resistance arm White People 4 Black Lives. This anti-racist organizing community continues to be an active part of my life. I began attending Dolores Mission Catholic Church and began to find a spiritual community that I remain active in. For work, I began teaching in Los Angeles Catholic schools and living in an intentional community with other teachers. On the night Darren Wilson was not indicted for the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, I felt compelled to go to the streets while my housemates felt compelled to go to grad school. It was clear to me in that moment that my heart was calling me elsewhere. I wanted to be in a place that honored my deepest priorities and desires for growth. It became clear to me that I was not being courageous enough in my life decisions and that if I didn’t take a bigger risk, I would look back with profound regret years later.
So, what would this bold life look like? I felt called to live in an intentional community that pushed on the norms of the prioritization of the nuclear family – where complicatedly diverse strangers could live together and thrive. A community that lived at the margins and oriented itself around a profound commitment to cast away people. A community that knew that to wait for our churches, governments, and institutions to solve the problems of our day would be a fool’s errand, and that if there was something we could do today to make a difference, that this was the only hope our world had. Where the responsibility to justice work came not just from guilt and ego but from a recognition both that our faith tradition demands this as well as from the belief that it is in everyone’s interest (not just the most discarded people) to bring forward a new society with the culture, values, and systems to match. A community that recognized that living simply and maybe even owning things in common was not just a Biblical mandate but something that would liberate us in a society that tempts us into decadence, hoarding, extraction, and individualism.
I found myself refusing to give into the voices around me that said compromising on my values was the only way to live, and instead, imagined what it would mean if I could really demand a life of integrity with the whispers of my heart, which kept telling me the world does not have to be structured to prioritize profits over people.
I had met the Catholic Worker community during my college years in Worcester, MA and had befriended the Los Angeles house upon my return to L.A. I joined in 2016 and continue that life and work today.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Months after I moved into the community, my father called with the ominous invitation, “Sometime, we should talk about your future.” Though I have been supported by my parents far more than many in this movement have found, it was a challenge to navigate the person I am becoming through this work with the worlds I grew up in and the relationships I still hold from my earlier years.
It’s been hard to live in a community that espouses some particularly radical values – that calls so many other people and institutions to task for their failure to live up to these values – given our propensity for falling far short ourselves and sometimes not really being open to growth and transformation.
It is hard to cast your lot with thrown-away people only to have to watch the unrelenting violence they face day in and day out. To watch people of faith – who should be running to support them and working to change the structures that throw them away – be some of the primary perpetrators or tolerators of their violence. To try and maneuver the world I grew up in – which only exists because resources and opportunities have been stripped from the world I now move through – and move with kindness and compassion for folks who don’t seem to care. To watch friends who hold radical visions for a future, equitable world forfeit them when the complexity of being a parent tempts them to give up a better world for a world where their kid alone is prioritized.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
At the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, there are no real titles, only responsibilities. In our house of hospitality, I scrub toilets, and I maintain our cars. I care for sick and dying housemates, and I help do our massive inventory/shopping work. I am the musician for our in-home liturgies and the IT host for our assorted Zoom events. I am (in a way) a “Chief Financial Officer” for the community. Some days, I am a chef at our Skid Row soup kitchen; other days, I do the dishes. Some days, I organize all the volunteers, and other times I repair the shopping carts we give away to our guests. Some days my job is to address conflicts that arise in our garden – breaking up fights and deescalating people in the midst of a complex mental health moment, all without calling the police. Some days, my job is to comfort people as they weep or to give out Narcan to those struggling with addiction. Some days I clean people’s feet, and some days I rearrange our trash so we won’t be charged for going over the height capacity. I am co-editor of our newspaper, the Catholic Agitator, and often speak at schools, churches, and civic groups about poverty, housing insecurity, the criminalization of poverty, and the responsibility of faith communities (which often includes the irresponsibility of faith communities). I often film the police.
In case this list has all been an exercise of ego, allow me to be clear: I am not special at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. All of our community holds the assorted responsibilities of our shared projects. We work together because we reject the notion that our world must wait for professionals and experts to meet the needs before us. We do a little bit of everything because we reject the bureaucratization so common to this sacred work, where the people doing the human-to-human work are out of touch with the very people they claim to be serving. We do this work to try and usher in a new world in the shell of the old. And we do it as full-time volunteers: no salary, no benefits. Just a roof over our heads, some delicious rice and beans and salad in our bellies, and enough to see a movie each week.
What’s next?
The day we close ourselves off to learning, to growing, to hearing the movement of the Spirit in our lives and work, I hope we will close our doors forever. Fortunately, that is not where we are at.
We get to continue to imagine how to make this work more accessible to diverse folks coming in with varied needs. We get to hold the many sacred projects our community has been doing for decades and see if there are new works that our community needs or that we are inspired to offer. We need to consider what the new rezoning of Downtown L.A. means for our unhoused neighbors and how we can continue to advocate with and for them for practices, policies, and a culture that stops throwing them away. We need to prepare for the mass displacement that has already started and the criminalization soon to come as our city prepares for the World Cup and Olympics so that we can better protect the folks we serve. I want to recruit Catholic organizations and institutions to reimagine their responsibility to the unhoused (including getting my alma maters to convene all their alumni that deal with funding, housing, social services, and the like to see how they can be a part of creative solutions to our largest, growing problem). We need to find ways to ensure we still have fun, still find ways to recharge our batteries, and feel inspired to continue this work in the face of its seeming impossibility.
We are living in a powerful moment in Los Angeles; it is exciting to be part of the same movement ecosystem as other liberation-oriented organizations, refusing to be victim to the imagination of other people who do not care for our communities. We dream big with the hope of never losing touch with the ground under us and the lives around us.
Contact Info:
- Website: lacatholicworker.org
- Instagram: instagram.com/lacatholicworker/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064973040641
Image Credits
Photo of Matt and General Dogon: Bob Eiden Photo of group in red shirts (Unite Here Local 11 protest): Hannah Petersen Photo with rainbow flag: Mike Wisniewski Photo of Matt in green shirt in garden: Soomi Lee Photo of Matt in yellow shirt speaking at protest: Mike Wisniewski Will check on other photos, but that is what I remember. Happy to provide more context for photos if needed.
