Hearth, Warmth, and the Holy Spirit
BY CASSIDY KLEIN“Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.”
—Dorothy Day
Each year, around late May, the intentional community where I live, The Fireplace, throws a Pentecost party. In the late afternoon, we start a bonfire in our Chicago backyard, fill our kitchen with snacks and treats, and begin a lay-led liturgy celebrating community and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We play music, read poems, and break open a loaf of bread. Our neighbors stop by, and friends come in and out. Last year after the liturgy, we used our back deck as a stage and held an open mic. The bonfire burned until well past dusk as people lingered, and a few bright stars poked through the city lights. My clothes smelled like a campfire.
There are seven of us who live at The Fireplace—two Franciscan Catholic Sisters and four laywomen. We also have many nonresident friends and neighbors who are part of our community.
We have a community prayer that we pray before house meetings that we adapted from the USCCB’s official prayer for the synod. One of the lines is: “Teach us the way we must go and how we are to pursue it.” This prayer resonated with us because we are still figuring out who we are as a community, but like the church is doing with the synod, we know that we want to listen to the Spirit and respond to it with authenticity and trust in one another. Pentecost means a lot to us because the name and theme of The Fireplace is centered around fire: hearth, warmth, and the Holy Spirit.
The Fireplace is a community and refuge for artists, activists, and spiritual seekers. We are heavily rooted in and influenced by the Catholic tradition, but not everyone identifies as Catholic. We have community dinners and prayer twice a week and events a few times a month, such as collage and craft nights or Taizé prayer. The Fireplace is an intergenerational space where friars in their habits can casually talk around a fire with young adults who have little or no connection to organized religion. Even our extroverted tortoiseshell cat, Ember, knows about hospitality—she’s the first to greet people at the door whenever the doorbell rings.
We live in a big, turn-of-the-century house that has lots of cozy communal space, house plants, art, and furniture donated from closed convents. We rent our house from an order of
priests. Our community turned three years old in 2024, and being so new, we are in the thick of strategic planning, visioning, and long-term planning for how to remain sustainable for years to come. Sister Julia, my community mate, received a grant from her Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA) community to start The Fireplace, and we are working to become financially independent and self-governing.
Intentional communities vary in practice, but all are modeled around people sharing life together around a common mission or values. At The Fireplace, we seek to respond to the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” which the U.S. surgeon general has called a public health crisis, with community. We also seek to prevent burnout, especially among artists and activists.
In the story of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, through wind and fire, descends on the apostles and other early Christians as they were gathered in an upper room of a home. Some residents and friends of The Fireplace are people who have been harmed by, or have a difficult relationship with, the church tradition in which they grew up—Catholic, evangelical Protestant, LDS, or otherwise. There are many deconstructing or disillusioned spiritual seekers who are finding their way and figuring out what faith means to them. As a community, we center the liturgical leadership of women and LGBTQ+ people. We’ve been told that The Fireplace is “church” for many people.
“Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes,” says a Dorothy Day quote that’s taped above our sink, written in purple marker. Intentional community is about the ideal, “fun” stuff—mission and hospitality—but it’s also about nitty-gritty practical things, like creating a budget on a Monday night, voting about governance structures at house meetings, and doing dishes—so many dishes. Living in community, I do give up some privacy and a certain level of independence. I also learn, in a microcosm of a way, what loving my neighbor and interdependence really demand of me on a specific, down-to-earth level.
There’s a Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote that says, “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
As The Fireplace moves into the next stages and years of our existence, we have to stay grounded in why we do what we do, and that, always, is loving the people around us, our neighbors, those who seek belonging. We can’t get too caught up in differing visions or ideals of what we should be, and I think this is also true for the institutional church. We have to always meet people where they are and not impose an ideal on them.
When someone finds a sense of belonging at The Fireplace, I remember why we do what we do, even when it’s hard and messy. The Holy Spirit is with us, helping us build this new and chaotic thing, this alive and welcoming “church.”
Cassidy Klein (she/her) is a writer and journalist living in Chicago.