———- Forwarded message ———
De : Catholic Worker Roundtable catholicworker+the-cw-reader@substack.com
Untangling the Twisted Love of War
essay from The Catholic Agitator (2025) on untying the knots of hate and
learning to live in the unconditional love of Christ.
Claire Lewandowski https://substack.com/@talkandwork
Feb 13
∙
Guest post
https://substack.com/@talkandwork
READ IN APP
Art
by Monica Welch at DovetailInk
Justin and I first met at Dolores Mission Church here in Boyle Heights
sometime last year as our scrappy young adult group began to form. A
self-professed “short king” with a brilliant smile and colorful tattoos
lacing his arms, Justin had a story I wanted to hear.
It came to me in bits and pieces as we began to spend more time together.
“In the same way that the Air Force Academy taught me war, I feel like the
Catholic Worker is teaching me peace,” he said once during a post-Mass
discussion. His words confused me. What had my bubbly, friendly, creative
friend been doing in the Air Force?
Last week after Mass, Justin and I sat down with aguas frescas and I
prompted him, “Start from the beginning.” So he did.
One of several children in an Eagle Rock Filipino family, Justin had always
longed to live a unique life. Torn between his desire for adventure and his
unwillingness to be a financial strain on his family, he followed his
father’s footsteps and joined the Air Force Academy right out of high
school.
“My dad was always a big proponent of it,” he explained. As immigrants, he
went on, his family had always valued a sense of structure and routine in
their new country. Why risk everything when you had already risked so much
in order to start a new life? The Air Force gave Justin a taste of both
things: adventure, but within a framework that promised security and
discipline.
“At this time, I wasn’t religious,” he said. His teenage years had been a
kind of rebellion against what he saw as a hypocritical set of Catholic
rituals. “At Loyola [High School], I learned more about the origin of our
rituals and I could respect that, but I didn’t know how to actually be
faithful.” He stopped going to church with his family, much to his parents’
chagrin.
The exclusionary attitude of the church frustrated him. If he wanted to
include everyone, he reasoned, but the church seemed not to share that
attitude, how could he profess to believe in it? The hierarchy of the
military promised a kind of flow of authority that was easier to
understand. “My general became my god,” he said. He became an air advisor,
a trainer of foreign military personnel in the strategies and structures of
the Air Force.
But even this top-down human authority began to chafe. The adventure was
there, yes—Justin spent four years in Eastern Europe after graduating from
the Academy in Colorado Springs—but relinquishing power to the man-made
order of command in the Air Force proved difficult. He prided himself in
doing things differently, in going out of his way to be there for his
subordinates when they needed him, even if it went against the cultural
norms of the Air Force. “I always wanted to take care of my people, even
beyond the rules of the military structure,” he confessed. “I grew to
really resent those above me in the hierarchy. It became toxic.” This
resulted in a lot of warnings and talking-tos as he struggled to reconcile
his caretaking nature with the boundaries and rigidity required of him.
As he grappled with this resentment, the military’s casual relationship to
violence also began to trouble him. “There’s this obsession with ‘the
enemy,’” he explained. “Where they sleep, where they go—it’s like a twisted
kind of love.” This fixation, combined with the strategic distance that
modern warfare allows, meant that eradicating the “enemy” could be
justified as a simple necessity, no more morally complicated than
exterminating an infestation of bugs in your kitchen so your family can
cook. “When we watched airstrikes, people would cheer like it was a
football game,” he recalled. “The Air Force pride themselves on being the
scientists of the military. We spend so much money to kill the enemy so
efficiently—there’s so much we could be doing with that money and
intelligence instead.” He described a growing sense of emptiness. “Whatever
God wanted me to be doing, it wasn’t there.”
At this point in our conversation, I grew to wonder how a self-professed
teenage atheist, Air Force air advisor, disillusioned Filipino Catholic,
music-loving artist, came to feel God in a way that he hadn’t before. What
changes had happened in his heart?
I knew something of this mysterious transformation myself: the subtle ways
in which God calls you to something different. I found myself
simultaneously frustrated by and marveling at the inadequacy of language to
express this slow change. Even as Justin sat before me in a yellow plastic
chair on the Dolores Mission plaza, explaining his life, that subterranean
growth of God in his spirit remained invisible to me. Or rather—I couldn’t
see God Himself, but I could see His movement in my friend’s life, the way
a strong wind blows leaves off of a tree.
“How did you finally leave the military?” I asked Justin.
“I had to look in the mirror and surrender,” he said simply. He described
how the pandemic at first gave him a chance to rest, but how this silence
soon gave way to a cacophony of voices in his head. “I had lost that sense
of security and structure. I didn’t even know what would happen to me
tomorrow.”
Alluding to veteran suicide, he expressed his understanding that anyone
faced with similar internal conflict would contemplate such an option. “But
I had the support of friends and family. I had all the philosophy I had
read as a teenager. Suddenly it all made sense to me.” Again I saw the
quiet workings of God at hand, the ways in which seeds planted early in
Justin’s life could only begin to grow once his heart was ready.
Justin mused on Kierkegaard, naming the “leap of faith” required of him,
rather than one of reason or logic. “I had been trying to reach out and
‘get’ God, but He was already here,” he said. “God’s not acquired, He’s
someone to be realized.” We spoke more slowly now. “God was looking for me.”
He described his life since leaving the military as a series of trying
different things to find his place. A lifelong lover of music and art, his
creativity provided a sense of comfort during this time. He became a
Confirmation teacher and started working more on his music and DJ skills.
“I think God wants me to share stories,” he said. “How do you know God
doesn’t want you to go through the things you go through? To be a Christian
is to be with people on their journey, not to convert others.”
I recognized the truth in this statement immediately. I thought about how
my own conversion journey has never been about becoming someone different.
Rather, it’s been about becoming more of whom God wants me to be: a
deeper version of myself. I heard Justin’s deeper self speaking out to me
during our conversation. Hearing Justin’s story reinforced a belief I had
been nurturing for some time—that the journey of conversion resembles
nothing so much as a stripping away of everything that keeps us from God
and each other.
Like the Scripture that tells us that the kingdom of God is “at hand” (Mk
1:15), our deeper selves are right here, immediate, accessible, requiring
nothing more than a willingness to turn back towards ourselves, our own
hearts. Perhaps in that way it is also like Ellen Bass’s tender poem “The
Thing Is,” which ends with “Then you hold life like a face/between your
palms, a plain face/no charming smile, no violet eyes,/and you say, yes, I
will take you/I will love you, again.”
Our hidden selves are not so hidden after all. They reside at the heart of
our very nature, longing to help us live the life we are called to, if we
can only accept and love this deepest self in the same way God
loves—unconditionally and with great playfulness and joy.
At the end of our conversation, Justin identified this exact kind of
unconditional love. “If you can’t love yourself, what kind of love are you
really showing to others?” he said. “Jesus was always hanging out with
hood-ass fools.” We laughed in the late winter sunshine, two hood-ass fools
irrevocably loved by Christ.
*Justin Domingo can be spotted in the wild mashing up classic disco,
feel-good tunes, and the unmistakable Filipino pop sound alongside his
buddies in the aptly named Manila Sound DJ collective
If you’re in LA, holler and Claire will take you to one of their epic
intergenerational dance parties.*
*Originally from the Midwest, Claire Lewandowski is a teacher, writer, and
organizer whose travels have led her to various Catholic Worker
communities. She is a current resident of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker
and splits her time between their Hippie Kitchen on Skid Row and teaching
middle school theology and history at Immaculate Heart School. You can find
her (infrequent) writings at talkandwork.substack.com
*Originally published as “UNLEARNING WAR, LEARNING PEACE,” in the April
2025 issue of The Catholic Agitator. Read the issue online here
A guest post by
Claire Lewandowski
https://substack.com/@talkandwork?utm_campaign=guest_post_bio&utm_medium=email
Teacher, writer, and organizer from the Midwest. Currently in Los Angeles
living in a Catholic Worker community and teaching at an all-girls school.
My retirement portfolio is the friends I made along the way.
Subscribe to Claire
*You’re currently a free subscriber to Roundtable. You can support this
newsletter and CatholicWorker.org by upgrading your subscription. Please
note that free subscribers receive access to the same content as
contributing subscribers.*
Upgrade to paid
——————————
*About us. Roundtable is a publication of catholicworker.org
http://catholicworker.org that covers the Catholic Worker Movement. Send
inquiries to roundtable@catholicworker.org
*Roundtable is independent of the New York Catholic Worker and *The
Catholic Worker* newspaper. Roundtable is produced by Renée Roden
and Jerry Windley-Daoust. Monica Welch
assists with art. *
*Subscription management. Add CW Reads, our long-read edition, by managing
your subscription here
Need to unsubscribe? Use the link at the bottom of this email. Need to
cancel your paid subscription? Find out how here
Gift subscriptions can be purchased here
Paid subscriptions. *Paid subscriptions are entirely optional; free
subscribers receive all the benefits that paid subscribers receive. Paid
subscriptions enable us to do this work every week and cover operating
expenses at catholicworker.org http://catholicworker.org. If you would
like to stop seeing Substack’s prompt to upgrade to a paid subscription,
please email roundtable@catholicworker.org roundtable@catholicworker.org.*
Share
Like
Comment
Restack
© 2026 Gracewatch Media
664 Winona Street, Winona, Minnesota 55987
Unsubscribe
–
-- Milady *Renoir* --
Alias La CoUrBE du CUBE <https://miladyrenoir.org/>
Ateliers <https://miladyrenoir.org/ateliers-decriture/>, Scènes,
Textes, Luttes
Podcast Les Parleuses
Yvonne Sterk https://carhif.lescollections.be/Detail/objects/28090,
poètesse belge fedayin
Film Tout Contact Laisse une Trace
https://zintv.org/video/tout-contact-laisse-une-trace/, colonialité de
l’espace public