A radical call: Lay Catholic community Agape lives off the land, following gospel of nonviolence with no compromise

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Amid the hum of crickets and tree frogs, at the end of a rocky lane deep in the New England countryside, more than 200 people are gathered on folding chairs on the knobby grass on a surprisingly warm October Saturday. The crowd is a mix of gray-haired grandparents and tattooed college students, full-time peace activists and middle-class homeowners who believe Christ's central message was a radical call to nonviolence.

They all trekked into the woods of Hardwick, Mass., Oct. 6 to mark the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Agape, a lay Catholic community committed to living and teaching a philosophy of radical Christian nonviolence. The community lives off the land, growing its own food and generating most of its own electricity in a conscious rejection of what it considers the life-destroying values of modern American society.

Agape--it means selfless love in Greek--is a mixture of lay monastery, retreat center and commune. In the course of the day Agape's supporters will hear Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, lecture on the meaning of nonviolence; discuss the best forms of resistance to a violent culture; tour Agape's environmentally friendly houses; perform a meditative Native American dance to heal the Earth; and pray for healing with an Iraqi boy grievously burned by an American bomb.

Christianity has always hosted a tension between withdrawal from the unholy world and engagement with it: John the Baptist eating honey and wearing animal skins in the desert or Christ breaking bread around a crowded table in the city; cloistered monks making jam in silence or Jesuits educating the elites in the corridors of power; the yearly retreat or the daily grind. Agape lives in that tension. It is deep in the woods, 20 minutes from a small town, but it is sustained by and performs service for the madding crowd.

Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a Byzantine-Melkite rite Catholic priest who founded the Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University of Notre Dame and a cofounder of the Agape Community, praised the faithfulness of the community as he welcomed supporters to the anniversary. "We are celebrating the fidelity to the struggle to magnify God, to bring peace to the world. Agape is an experiment in making the truth of God visible in the human world," he said. "There is no choice but to keep trying in the face of failure. But look at what we're struggling for: We are striving to bring God into the world. We are striving to bring peace. We are striving to bring the intimate God into every person in a way that they will know they are loved."

Agape was founded in 1982 when Brayton and Suzanne Shanley and a few friends decided they needed to live their Catholicism according to the uncompromising dictates they understood from the Gospels.

"We had a strong conviction that we didn't want to go the mainstream American way. We had a deepening understanding that we had to be voluntarily displaced, you need to live differently to really follow Christ," recalled Suzanne Shanley, former teacher and now a hearty woman in her early 60s with a wise bearing. "I didn't know how that would become concrete until I started studying my Catholicism through Daniel Berrigan," she said, referring to the Jesuit priest, poet and longtime antiwar activist. "What did it mean to be a Catholic teacher, to be a Catholic person? It was a series of movements and revelations about what my faith really is. It was reading scripture in a true and unvarnished way to find my faith."

The Shanleys and cofounder McCarthy believed Christ preached an end to war. But being American taxpayers made them complicit in the military actions of the United States, their dollars paid for contra weapons in Central America and for the nuclear arms race that was imperiling the planet. So they decided to stop paying taxes.

Some tax resisters refuse to pay the government what they owe and instead redirect the same amount of earnings to nonmilitary causes they support. The nascent Agape community instead decided to live below the taxable income, currently a household income of about $20,000 a year.

"We were reducing our lifestyle. If you are going to live under taxable income, well, food is very expensive," Suzanne Shanley said with a laugh. So they looked for land where they could grow their own food.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

Back to the land

The search led them to Hardwick, a tiny central Massachusetts village in the Worchester diocese, just up the road from Ware, a faded mill town. On 32 acres of land they set up camp, planted vegetables, built a hermitage and began offering hospitality to anyone who wanted to join in their study of nonviolence.

"It's a model of living. What are the dimensions of this life? Serving humanity, resistance to war and evil and violence," said Brayton Shanley, a wiry 60-year-old with a shock of coarse white hair and an impish manner. "If you look at Jesus' message, that's where it takes you."