The Family Kitchen

 

The Family Kitchen
Thirty Years of Service at St. James Cathedral

by Matt Zemek

The year 1975 is most remembered in Catholic Seattle circles for the fact that it marked the beginning of Raymond Hunthausen's episcopacy in the Emerald City. But that same year, something else happened that would profoundly affect the life and rhythms of St. James Cathedral Parish: the Family Kitchen was born.

John Williams, one of the co-founders of the kitchen and the husband of current director Kathleen O'Hanlon, used the occasion of the kitchen's 10th anniversary in 1985 to reflect on the humble beginnings of a special place.  In Williams' words, one can feel the spirit of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement that gave rise to the kitchen. But just as important, one sees evident connections with the commitment to justice that Hunthausen would also bring to Seattle in 1975 and beyond:

"It was February 1975," Williams said. "Gerald Ford was President and the war in Vietnam was in its last exhausting months. Twenty miles away from us here in Seattle, the Navy was just beginning construction of a Trident Submarine Base. Those of us who began the kitchen had worked and would work against both the war and Trident. We understood that, whether the wars were hot or cold, the victims were not just foreign or in the future, but actually in our midst, and that, as (Dwight) Eisenhower warned us, every dollar spent on an arms race was stolen from the poor.

An article of faith we (in the Seattle Catholic Worker community) both understood and stood by was that all of us share a personal responsibility to make the future different by making the present different. So, from the beginning of the Catholic Worker in Seattle, it was our intention to open a kitchen and serve a free meal."

This meal is still being served today, nearly 30 years after the afternoon of February 24, 1975, when nine precious souls came to Cathedral Hall to taste Catholic Worker food... and the personalized, direct hospitality that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin envisioned when they conceived of the Catholic Worker movement in 1933.

Guided by principles of simplicity, personalism (doing work yourself instead of hiring outsiders to perform a job) and radical solidarity with the poor, the Catholic Worker movement--which came to Seattle in 1974--seeks to blur the line between server and served, and to create eucharist in the gritty yet grace-filled terrain of everyday life. While Catholic Worker houses of hospitality have seen ups and downs in the Seattle area over the past three decades, the Family Kitchen stands today as the most stable and enduring part of the Catholic Worker legacy in Seattle.

And while it is, in an all-too-real sense, a sad commentary on our society that a crowd of nine on Day One has become an average crowd of 130 nearly three decades later, the Family Kitchen has at least been able to remain a welcoming, safe and minimally judgmental place for women, families and seniors--in short, for everyone except single men under 55. In the cold of winter or in the searing heat of summer, the kitchen has been a safe haven for the particularly enfeebled and vulnerable members of the larger population, and it was this desire to provide safety for the vulnerable that gave rise to the single-men exemption that has been an understandable point of tension and unease throughout the kitchen's life and times.

Williams put it best in that same 10th anniversary reflection back in 1985:  "The community that is the Family Kitchen is not perfect--that is to say, nobody does it quite the way anybody else wants it done. It is arguable whether we are a community at all. But we are, beyond all doubt, a family--humble, lovable, cantankerous, judgmental, inefficient. No one has the slightest clue how we made it 10 years."

Williams concluded with a line that O'Hanlon has since echoed in subsequent years, as the kitchen has carried on to the brink of its 30th anniversary:  "Like odd vegetables thrown together in a pot of common stew, our individual flavors are deeper, our combinations more rare."

This is the expression of community, individuality and eucharist that defines the Catholic Worker vision of Dorothy Day, and of a humble soup kitchen that has thrown together odd vegetables--and odd characters--for nearly three decades on the ground of St. James Cathedral.

The Family Kitchen became the Cathedral Kitchen in May 2007.  To volunteer, call 206-264-2091.


Back to the Outreach Page

Return to St. James Cathedral Parish Website