Keeping the Spigot Open: An Interview with the Rev. Duncan Hilton

Reflecting on the end of this chapter of the newsletter and podcast, and what's next

I began this podcast series in January as a 12-week experiment. The time is up. As I wrote in my introductory post to this series, I launched it as a way to explore my own call around “religious life” and to invite others who are curious about Christian theology and community into conversation with theologians and practitioners about living faithfully in this historical moment. This interview with myself is a way to help me process what I’ve learned, discern what’s next for this newsletter, and hopefully help readers find their way to any enticing interviews which they may have missed over the last twelve weeks. I couldn’t get the guest, my podcast-host-self, to agree to a live audio interview. He said recording and editing podcasts has made him even more aware that he struggles to think clearly and quickly off the cuff. His high school English teacher’s euphemism for his struggle was calling him a “long distance thinker”. He did agree to a written interview. Here it is:

You usually began your interviews asking people about their call so I wanted to do the same. You started out this podcast series in January talking about your own call to “religious life”. You wrote in your introductory post, “I launch this podcast as an act of self- acceptance. ‘Why not explore creating a Christian community around devotion, care for the land, and work with the poor?’ How do you explore creating a community? By talking to people who are similarly called, hearing about their successes and failures, and letting the Spirit who is present when two or more are gathered reveal the next step.” Can you share more about how your own call has evolved over the course of the podcast series?

First of all, thank you for inviting me. I’m much more comfortable asking questions than answering them; this will be challenging but good. To answer your question well, it’s important to say that while I was doing the podcast series I’ve also been serving as a prison chaplain one day a week at a nearby prison, teaching an online Ignatian discernment class, and doing some guided work with my wife and a spiritual director around “life planning.” That’s all to say, many things have been informing my call over the last few months: holding space for others thinking about how to hear and live out God’s call; doing some listening and sharing with my wife around questions like, “What would you do with your life if you found out you only had a year to live?” “What would you regret not having done?”; and spending time leading a Bible study at the local men’s state prison. Some of the guys I meet with there have served their sentences but they can’t find housing on the outside so they remain imprisoned, some others have committed crimes in order to return to prison because they crave the certainty of the food and shelter there and they don’t have that on the outside, and some just seem like hardened, vocational criminals.

With the experience at the prison in the background for me, one interview that really hit home in the podcast series was with Miguel Escobar, “Jesus, Wealth, Ancient Christian Exemplars, and the Danger of Boutique Christianity.” Spending time in the prison has made real for me the ancient wisdom about the imperative to include the poor in worship (Miguel lifted up Justin Martyr’s writing on this). I find Bible study and worship more urgent and heartbreaking there. For instance, this Sunday is “Good Shepherd Sunday” when the readings are all about Jesus as the Good Shepherd. At the prison this week we talked about what it means to call God a Good Shepherd when you’ve served your time and feel like you’re rotting away in prison because you can’t find housing on the outside and you’ve burned your bridges with family and friends. Miguel’s book assuaged some of my doubt that I’m on a guilty-affluent-White-guy-savior mission. Or maybe more accurately, it assuaged my self-doubt that that’s my only motivation (who knows what’s stirring in the unconscious!). There is also ancient theology and perhaps even the Holy Spirit backing the decision to study the Bible at the prison as well.

On a related note, the interview with Chris Hoke gave me insight into the mechanics of mutual transformation and practical possibilities for my own. I’ve known a quote for years which I’ve seen attributed to Lilla Watson, an indigenous Australian activists and artist, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I’ve known that to be true over the years as I worked with folks with disabilities or as a community organizer in various marginalized communities. But when I heard Chris give the specifics about how his liberation has happened in tandem with the gang members he works with - his being able to offer his gifts as an empathetic listener and as an educated person who can navigate the system to help free guys from the tombs of the prison system in return for his receiving freedom from the “straitjacket of performative goodness” - I could sense a concrete direction for mutual transformation at at this moment in my life . Moreover, as he began to talk about the One Parish, One Prisoner program he’s developed I could feel my confidence and excitement to join in or develop something similar in this corner of the world.

On a slightly different note, there was a time in February when I feel like God was hollering at me as relentlessly as my toddler son does sometimes. I experienced a litany of signs to pay attention to the Catholic Worker movement: someone wrote me to recommend that I interview Catholic Worker Fumi Tosu; I learned that a Catholic Worker house may be starting locally; I met someone living nearby who had worked at Catholic Worker communities in Chicago and California; and I met a woman who I learned had been a teacher of one of Dorothy Day’s great-grandchildren (or maybe even great-great-grandchildren?). Fumi then connected me to Dennis Apel and Tensie Hernandez, fellow Catholic Workers, for an interview. Meeting Catholic Workers and reading more about that movement has shaped my thinking about how to lead a religious life as a husband and father. I’ve experienced a lot of resonance as I have heard them talk about their lives centered on works of mercy, manual labor, voluntary simplicity, and nonviolence. Dennis and Tensie’s call has been especially inspiring for me and my wife Bethany as we discern our own - their sense of adventure in their vocation and their deep conviction that, as Dennis said regarding Jesus’ teaching that if you seek first the kingdom of God, everything else will be given to you, “I believe that's an absolute truth that you can only discover if you experiment with it.” That conviction has challenged us to reflect on what it means for us to seek first the Kingdom of God and just how trusting we are that we’ll be provided for in every way.

When you started this podcast, you wrote that you hoped it might reveal a next step. Has it?

Some next steps are emerging but nothing is clear enough to put in writing. I start work as a carpenter apprentice soon so that I’m more prepared when the moment comes for us to hopefully build our own house under that carpenter’s tutelage (those plans have been delayed by some legal issues with the land). I’m going to continue visiting the prison for Bible study one day a week. I’m also supply preaching at a local church while the rector is away on sabbatical. As far as this newsletter, my spiritual director told me something like, “Now that you’ve opened creative spigot, don’t turn it off.” That’s all to say, I’ll be back next week with a new post. I don’t know the exact form yet but the themes won’t stray from what I’ve been writing about over the last six months. Feel free to send me thoughts about what you’d like to hear more or less of.

Anything else you want to say in closing?

Thank you to my readers and listeners. I’m especially grateful to those who have emailed comments, questions, or words of encouragement, those who have given financially, and my friend who has opened his home to my family over the last year and made this creative experiment possible. I began the podcast series ending my interviews with a prayer. I lost that practice, but I’d like to revive it here at end of the series. These are some words from Thomas Merton I’d love to close with. I cut and paste them onto a digital photo of my family last summer and that has been the “wallpaper” on my laptop ever since. “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” Amen!