One evening in the early 1980s in a log lodge at Nova Nada Hermitage in Nova Scotia, special guests joined us: Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge. They had befriended our Sr. Sharon before she entered our monastic community and they may have been skeptical about a small band of Carmelite hermits hunkered down in the woods. Were we good enough for their dear Sharon?

We had all read some of Muggeridge’s books and were eager to meet the grizzled and worldly journalist who converted to Christianity just before encountering Mother Teresa of Calcutta. His book about her, Something Beautiful for God, effectively introduced the future saint to the world. Muggeridge later became Catholic.

Our wide-ranging conversation at supper included an exchange about “process theology.” Muggeridge said he didn’t like the term. “Life is not a process,” he exclaimed, “it’s a drama.” Then Tessa asked him if simply living is a struggle. He reached across the table to grab her hand and insisted, “Oh, it’s an arduous business!”

I recalled this recently because I’m reading a book with a pretty appalling title: Decolonizing Development and Religion: Theoretical Frameworks, Case Studies and Theological Models. It includes a chapter on cooperative ventures in Indonesia, Central America, and Palestine. Wouldn’t you know it: I found it captivating.

Why? Partly because it’s hard to breathe in the fetid air of our descent into authoritarianism, xenophobia, and the toleration of genocide here in the United States. I need to step back from daily news of masked assailants, mass deportation, and child amputees, to breathe, to listen to an owl before dawn. To let my heart ache and listen in the dark.

I seek outside and “outsider” voices that give perspective and help explain how we came to this, voices that may offer alternative and promising futures. I look for a fledgling Phoenix that may rise from the ashes. If you’ve read me before, you know that I look to the poor and the Poor People’s Campaign to guide me. And, as I encounter so many brown people when I travel to celebrate masses throughout the American West, I look to their experience. I find Miguel de la Torre’s The Politics of Jesús helpful.

I even re-read Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes’ Massey Lectures, delivered in 1984! He may have been the first person I heard suggesting during the Cold War that the world is not a two-sided war between Communism and Capitalism. Other voices, wise and experienced, sing from the “margins,” the Nazareths, from which Good Trouble springs and foments freedom.

But back to cooperatives. I’m interested in them because now may be a good time to consider some big life changes, as our democracy cracks and capitalism begins to walk and talk with a fascist accent. From the “margins” of Indonesia, Central America, and Palestine I discovered accounts of healthy, humanizing working conditions.

According to Jamin Andreas Hübner, Research Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Economics at LCC International University in Lithuania, co-ops can thrive in various economic systems, including capitalism. Whereas the economic goal of a capitalist enterprise is personal profit, the co-op’s goal is holistic flourishing.

Sounds a little airy-fairy? Well, it works. At least until disciples of Adam Smith show up, as they did in Indonesia in 1964. Since there were communists in Indonesia, “the US and anti-communist forces used this as an opportunity to ruthlessly kill over one million people after an organized coup. … Western corporations planted their feet all over the country and capitalism was officially installed.” But co-ops were not destroyed. Today, there are 212,000 cooperatives and 37.7 million co-op members in Indonesia.

In 1951, Guatemala’s democratically elected President Árbenz launched an early attempt to distribute land to landless people in Guatemala. The land was unused but owned by the United Fruit Company. It seemed fair, since two percent of the people owned 76 percent of the land. But Árbenz had communist friends. The U.S. Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, worked for United Fruit and believed that even democracies should be overthrown if they threaten corporations’ independence. The U.S. invaded, intervened, and/or assassinated leaders of over a dozen countries in Latin America and Central America, beginning in Guatemala in 1954 and continuing into the present day.

Nevertheless, through the application of liberation theology, the cooperative spirit continued. Promoting workers’ dignity, Hübner writes, “was apparently one of the most terrifying things to the economic and political ruling class.”  Many clergy and religious promoted a preferential option for the poor, which led to the assassination of El Salvador’s St. Oscar Romero in 1980. That’s a milestone I well remember.

I was studying with the Trappists at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. In their silent cloister they set aside wall space for a bulletin board, and I saw the newspaper report: a death squad gunned down the archbishop—a bullet through the heart—as he celebrated mass. He had just said, “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grain of wheat that die.”

As for Palestine, Great Britain governed this formerly Ottoman territory after the first World War. The British tried to drive wedges between the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian inhabitants to secure British control of the population. Despite this divide-and-conquer strategy, Palestinians, Jews, and other Arabs established the first trade union in Haifa in 1920. Although they later formed separate Palestinian and Jewish unions, they sometimes joined forces to strike for better working conditions right up until Britain withdrew and hell broke loose in 1948.

Jews and Palestinians had also established agricultural cooperatives in the 1940s. But with the birth of modern Israel, these anti-British-colonial alliances broke down. Deprived of a common enemy, these erstwhile allies fractured into violent opposition as Israel’s ethno-state launched the colonial project known to Palestinians as the Catastrophe (Nakba) that continues today.

Despite Israeli oppression in the West Bank, cooperatives continue in Palestine. One example of this “resistance economy” is called The Land of Despair Sprouts with Hope (Ard al-Ya’s). As illegal settlements expand in the West Bank, threatening access to land and water, some young people refuse to seek work in capitalist Israel or in the illegal settlements. Instead, these small groups plant crops and share the produce and sometimes must settle for breaking even. (If you wish to support these brave young souls and their movement of cooperation and agroecology, visit Palestinian Social Fund to learn more.)

And if you are looking for more meaningful work or are a young person considering starting a business committed to sustainable and just human flourishing rather than to self-interest and profit, you may find inspiration and practical help from The Southeast Center for Cooperative Development in Nashville, Tennessee.

Some of us were formed by an image of Jesus as the heavenly Word, the Second Person of the Trinity who could not really suffer since suffering indicates imperfection. And we never name our children “Jesus.” Miguel de la Torre suggests that this is a white European Jesus. But the Word that becomes Jesús of the barrio of Nazareth, Nogales, or Los Angeles has a different vibe. He’s a construction worker, a community organizer, and your favorite uncle may share his name.

According to Genesis, God is primarily a worker. God builds. God gardens. God is a potter. Later God shows up as a shepherd. God does not take flesh as Caesar or Herod or a CEO. God takes flesh as a carpenter, a teacher, a healer, a lover whom Caesar and Herod exploit and eventually kill.

But, as the gospel song testifies, no grave can hold Love’s body down. Love rises, gets to work and gets in trouble laboring for freedom.

Photo above includes workers at Nashville Foodscapes, LLC, a worker-owned cooperative specializing in creating and maintaining edible and ecological landscapes and gardens.