Dynamite - Alliance Catholic Worker Newsletter Summer 2014 | Page 3

O’Flaherty House ! This winter at O’Flaherty House (our residential house where the community sleeps) we offered hospitality to six men. Our resources and the conditions at O’Flaherty House are very basic, but given the extreme inclement weather we were due in charity to offer our beds to those in need of shelter. Much works remains to be done to renovate O’Flaherty House and bring it up to standard. Please pray to the Lord will send us more community members so that we can continue this important work this coming winter and that the funds required to heat the house during the cold winter months, will come come forth. O’Flaherty House is named after Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest who worked at the Vatican and gave hospitality to people at the Vatican during World War II. We will have a feature article on Monsignor O’Flaherty in one of our coming issues.! ! -Tomas Murray ! Joshua Casteel’s “Returns” continued from page 1…! ! Returns is a searching, spiraling, splintering cry from an anguished heart and from the wilderness of the desert where war deals suffering to young soldiers, prisoners, families and children alike. This cry to God and humanity shatters and razes the wall of silence that we build around wars, those who wage them and those who suffer in or because of them on every side of the battle lines. Returns is unmistakably a lament which rises up from the stage to God, but it is also a plea which radiates out begging the audience to listen - to truly listen - to the testimony being spoken. In 2010 Joshua was a testifier at a Truth Commission on Conscience in War that the Catholic Peace Fellowship co-sponsored in New York City. One of the other testifiers at the event was a veteran named Tyler Boudreau who wrote in his book Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine, “War is the foyer to hell.” Boudreau described the attempting to journey home from war as even more hellish than darkness of combat. Joshua’s giftedness as a playwright allowed him to make art out of a brokenness that marks the lives of far too many and to challenge many, many others to see more clearly what they would rather not see and to truly listen to what they would rather not hear. The way Joshua Casteel wrote and spoke and the way he lived and died not only bore witness to the evils of war or the trials of attempting to return from the inferno of combat, it did something far greater – it pointed us out of the violent “hells” we devise and toward the peace and heaven that our loving God desires for all His children. By: Shawn T. Storer of the Catholic Peace Fellowship