Editor's note:
October, 2025. It's with both sorrow and joy that we share a new short story featuring an only slightly fictionalized version of a dear friend who died. Author D.A. Hosek's short story, out in the fall 2025 issue, begins with a description of a legendary Southern California peace and social justice activist. Father Chris Ponnet was omnipresent in so many communities, all at once. He was here at anti-nuclear, anti-war, immigrant rights, and death penalty abolition movement gatherings, meetings, and nonviolent protests. As celebrated in the short story "Elijah's Funeral," he also participated in interfaith ceremonies for the burial of unclaimed remains in Los Angeles County. Ponnet's life and work integrated, elegantly, pastoral care, public witness, and education on Catholic social teaching. Rest in power, Father Chris!

Elijah’s Funeral

by D. A. Hosek

We buried Elijah today. Well, really the county buried him along with the other unclaimed dead, while we attended the interfaith service at the county cemetery in Boyle Heights. A short, bearded, bald-headed priest offered prayers while county workers poured the contents of the cannisters of the cremated remains of the dead into this year’s mass grave. Elijah was one of nearly two thousand unclaimed dead this year.

I feel odd calling myself part of the “we.” I was there with the Catholic Workers, but I’m not sure I have the right to say that I’m part of them. With only a couple other exceptions, the others live

in the community in Hennessy House, an old Victorian mansion at the top of a hill in Boyle Heights. The other non-community members there were volunteers who spend so much time at the Catholic Worker that they might as well be living there. I just show up on Saturday mornings to help prepare and serve a meal to the people on Skid Row. If I don’t have to work late, I might drive down on Wednesday evening for their Mass and potluck dinner. My culinary contribution involves going through the El Pollo Loco drive thru to pick up an eight-piece chicken-only.

The Catholic Worker is a strange entity, what Paul calls “the fundamentalist left-wing fringe of the Catholic Church.” Paul kind of runs the Catholic Worker, but would claim he’s just one community member of all of them. He’s been there the longest and used to be a priest back in the ’80s. He doesn’t talk about it much other than to periodically joke that only an ex-priest is known primarily by a job he used to have.

I first came to the Catholic Worker two years ago. I brought a carload of kids from my parish in San Dimas one Saturday morning for their confirmation service project. Father Casey at Our Lady of Mount Carmel can always obligate me to do this sort of thing. I’ve probably taken kids to every single soup kitchen, food pantry, and homeless shelter from Alhambra to Rancho Cucamonga. I assumed the Hippie Kitchen was going to be more of the same, just a slightly longer drive. 

I assumed wrong. The other places always had a cold, institutional feel to them. The men at the soup kitchens and the families at shelters ate their meals seated on metal chairs or benches at easily cleaned plastic tables in windowless rooms with fluorescent lighting. An “inspirational” Bible verse might be painted on the wall, or in the worst cases, a minister loomed at one end of the room preaching to his captive audience through an overpowered P.A.

At the Hippie Kitchen, things were different. Some of the men who came through the kitchen brought their own plastic containers to allow them to take the food away to eat elsewhere, but just as many stayed to eat in the garden, where a high wall blotted the bleak neighborhood streets from view while trees provided much-needed shade. Parakeets sang from perches in a couple cages, and a fountain burbled water. With real dishes and high cuisine served at the tables, this could have been the al fresco dining area of a hip restaurant a mile west, where downtown gentrifies by fits and starts.

On the drive there, I knew none of this, so I brought a book while the kids checked off another box on their road to confirmation.

Monica, one of the Catholic Workers, had other plans for me. She grabbed me and showed me how to chop the cabbage for the salad. “Be sure to cut it finely; a lot of our guests are missing teeth, so they can’t chew the big pieces.”

She stood close enough to me that I could smell her hair. I decided I wanted to come back to the Catholic Worker.

Before the kitchen opened to serve the meal, the volunteers formed a big circle to recite a prayer of St. Vincent de Paul, in which we reminded ourselves that only through love could the poor forgive us the bread we gave them. Afterwards, I was assigned the job of passing out bottled water with another volunteer.

Eventually the ladles scraped the bottoms of the enormous soup kettles, the tubs of salad and bread held only scraps, and the men dispersed. We helped clean up, and Paul gave us a quick tour of the Hippie Kitchen grounds. Afterwards, he sat with the kids at one of the tables, and they asked the usual questions. Where do they get the food from? How much soup do they serve? Was it always like this? Why were these people homeless?

“This is really nice,” one of the kids, Ken, said, waving a hand around the garden. “But couldn’t you have used the money you spent on making it nice to be able to help more people?”

I gave a sharp look at Ken. He was always a bit of a thorn to me, disrupting confirmation class as he counted down the days until he was eighteen and he could declare himself free of his parents’ demands that he go through the motions of Catholicism. 

Paul smiled. He leaned back, which I would come to learn was the sign that he was about to go into story mode. “At the original Catholic Worker soup kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, a wealthy woman once came to see Dorothy Day and the rest of the people at the Catholic Worker serve long lines of hungry people. She was so impressed with what she saw, she took the diamond ring from her finger and gave it to Dorothy. Dorothy said, ‘Thank you’ and immediately placed the ring on a finger of one of the women waiting in line for soup.”

A couple of the kids actually gasped.

“‘Are you crazy?’ the woman said to Dorothy. ‘That ring is worth hundreds of dollars! Think of what you could have done with that money!’”

“Dorothy just looked at her and said, ‘The poor deserve things of beauty too.’

“That’s the spirit behind us having this nice garden for the people we serve to eat in.”

Ken nodded at the story. I was surprised when he offered no further objections. Had he had an internal conversion? If he did, I never saw it in the months that followed. He was still a shit to me in the rest of the confirmation classes I taught that year.

I looked around for Monica before we left to say goodbye to her. She handed me a copy of The Catholic Agitator and said I should come back.

“I think I will,” I said.

As I drove up Alameda to the 10, Lauren said from the back seat, “Mr. Kaucic has a crush.”

“He’s divorced,” Ken said. “He can’t. The church won’t allow it.”

“I’m sure that won’t stop him,” Jenny said.

“Oh look,” Lauren said, “Mr. Kaucic is blushing!”

“Enough,” I said. “It’s bad enough I had to get up early on a Saturday morning to drive you lot downtown for your service project. I don’t need to be abused by you on top of that.”

“That’s right,” Ken said. “He prefers to abuse himself.”

The kids erupted in laughter. I turned up the radio to try to drown them out with Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! for the rest of the ride.

I was irregular in my visits to the Hippie Kitchen at first. On the one hand, Saturday mornings were my only chance to sleep in. On the other hand, Monica. 

Monica won. 

I didn’t get to spend as much time with her as I would have liked when I volunteered. Still, even just being in the same building with her was an improvement over my previous Saturday routine of laundry and television, alone in the apartment that Nancy told me to keep after the divorce. Often I dug through Nancy’s Facebook posts and comments, trying to alleviate the pain of solitude. The solitude that helped me give up my Saturday morning lie-in. 

The apartment we once shared was a poisoned chalice of a gift. I had no need for a two-bedroom apartment for myself. The rent was a burden to pay, and Nancy took most of the furniture leaving the apartment bare. Worst of all was the second bedroom, which was intended as a nursery for the baby who never came. Nancy had selected a wallpaper design of cascading gender-neutral teddy bears for me to hang. It later peeled free at unpredictable intervals, leaving streaks of dried paste on the beige walls underneath. Every minute I spent in the apartment was a reminder of what I had lost. But for no good reason, I kept renewing the lease every year, choosing inertia over volition.

One Wednesday dinner, the fact that I was alone in a two-bedroom apartment came up as I was at a table with Monica and a couple other volunteers. 

“Ooh, you could have a Christ room!” Monica said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You use a room in your home to welcome Christ in the guise of a person who has nowhere to live.”

I raised my eyebrows before I could stop myself. I couldn’t see myself doing this. Who would be coming into my apartment? What if they stole my microwave or television or computer? What would they do while I was at work? What would the neighbors think?

“I think I’m a bit too suburban for that,” I confessed.

Monica laughed. “Okay, if you ever change your mind though — ”

“I don’t know, it just seems a bit, well, much.”

“That’s fine. It’s not for everyone.”

Monica got up to talk with Paul and some of the other Catholic workers, and I picked at the pasta salad I’d brought as my own contribution to that night’s potluck dinner. I’d made it myself, thanks to my workday shortened by an internet outage. My Pyrex salad bowl was still almost full. Maybe I should have just brought my usual drive-thru chicken. Would having a Christ room make me non-suburban enough for Monica? It didn’t matter; it wasn’t something I could do.

That Saturday, I considered not driving down to the Hippie Kitchen in the morning, afraid that Monica might bring up the idea of the Christ room again. I was torn between wanting to be someone she could admire and the fear of such a big change in my life.

That was the day that I first really noticed Elijah. He was a mess of contradictions. He wore a suit and tie, his clothes immaculately cared for, but he had a body odor you could smell a couple yards away. He tended to ignore anything said to him with a few exceptions — he listened to Paul and Monica and one gray-haired woman who volunteered Saturday mornings. If you asked him to take only two bottles of water, he would grab four and turn his back on you. But he insisted on being listened to — that day, he grabbed hold of my wrist while I was passing out waters and subjected me to a five-minute rant about how the LAPD would destroy the belongings of the people camping on the streets for no reason. 

I assumed this was a paranoid rant until I asked Monica about it while we were cleaning up. She told me that this was, in fact, a common practice and one that the Catholic Worker had protested on numerous occasions to no avail. It didn’t matter who’s the mayor. The police harass the denizens of Skid Row because nobody cares to stop them, and many of the politicians in City Hall encourage it. In fact, the Catholic Workers were planning a protest at City Hall on Tuesday, possibly with a civil disobedience action, and she asked if I wanted to participate. 

“I don’t think I can get off work,” I said. “We have a few high-profile projects with deadlines this week.”

Monica nodded and asked me what it was I did for work again, and I told her about my job, working as a project manager for a company in Pomona that produced e-books for many of the big publishers. “A lot of it is dealing with quality control on the output of our automated software. Making sure that special formatting the publisher may have put in the files for the print edition doesn’t end up messing up the e-book. I spend a lot of time writing up specs for the tech guys to improve our conversion software, which they never implement.”

Monica nodded. 

I’m sure she was only feigning interest. I like my job, but even I don’t think it’s all that interesting other than the fact that I occasionally get a chance to read interesting books before they are officially released. Still, there was a lingering electricity in the aftermath of our conversation that left me stimulated for the whole evening. I wondered if I could somehow manage to make it to the protest after all, but decided against it when I considered the possibility of getting arrested as part of a civil disobedience action. Would I lose my job if I did something like that?

I would never know: I didn’t have the courage to commit to something like that, Monica or not.

The next Saturday, Elijah collared me again. Having learned from Monica that he could be trusted about the actions of the police, I listened as he told me about how the police had taken him to the hospital and planted a microphone in his teeth, but he fooled them and pulled it out so they wouldn’t be able to track him.

“Why would they put a microphone in your teeth?” I asked.

“Man, they want to track everyone down here, make sure that we don’t rise up against them. It’s what they do.”

I nodded. “What did it look like?” I asked him.

“It was just a piece of metal, silver-like. And now my tooth hurts like hell. They owe me big time for the pain.”

I pulled a little packet of two aspirin in a from my pocket. I’d started bringing these to the Hippie Kitchen because I’d heard a lot of the guys mention bad headaches and the like. “Here,” I said, “this can at least help with the pain until you can get to a dentist.”

Elijah looked at the pills like I was offering him cyanide. “Nah, man, I’m good,” he said and walked away.

I told Monica about my conversation with Elijah when we were cleaning up. “He was clearly in pain, but he didn’t want the aspirin I offered.”

“Oh, he won’t take any sort of medicine. I do wonder who it actually was who took him to a dentist though.”

“Is that what happened?”

Monica smiled and laughed. “We used to offer dental services here, but we haven’t had a volunteer dentist for a while. I’m guessing maybe someone who works in Skid Row heard him talking about a tooth ache and took him to a dental clinic somewhere and — well, I’m a little nervous about going to the dentist and I’m not inclined to paranoia like Elijah. It doesn’t surprise me that he interpreted it the way he did. But more importantly, it seems like Elijah has decided to trust you.”

“Is that a big deal?”

“It’s huge. There are only a few of us he listens to, and a few more that he’ll do more than do more than talk at, but it sounds like he’s decided you’re someone he can trust. You don’t want to squander that.”

Most of the time after that, Elijah paid no more attention to me than he did to the sidewalk, but sometimes he would tell me about things happening on the street. I relied on Monica to help me sort out delusions from reality, which was often a challenge because reality on the streets of Skid Row often bordered on the surreal. 

Back then I still held the suburban white man’s casual trust in the goodness of the police. The problems that showed up on the news were, I believed, just the result of a few bad eggs, but Elijah’s tales were beginning to shake my trust. One Saturday after we finished cleaning up, for no particular reason, I decided to take a walk through the streets of Skid Row. The sidewalks provoked a feeling of revulsion. There was an overwhelming stench of piss, shit, and unwashed flesh permeating the air, and the sidewalks were often blocked by tents and shopping carts forcing me into streets littered with refuse. I turned a corner to see two policemen confronting one of the men who I recognized from the lines at the Hippie Kitchen.

“You can’t take this cart. It’s got everything that I own in it,” the man said.

“Sure we can. You got no right to have this cart,” one of the cops responded.

“At least let me get my medicine — ” the other cop slapped the man’s hand away from the cart and sneered.

The first cop saw me standing at the corner watching. He touched his partner’s shoulder and nodded in my direction.

“We’ll give you a break today,” the cop said, “but that cart ain’t yours, and if you still have your shit in it tomorrow, it’s all going into the trash.” The two cops got into their car, turned on the lights and pulled away from the corner. I left feeling an uncomfortable mix of pride, shame, and guilt for my role in the incident. Why should my presence be necessary to help this guy? And why didn’t I do more?

I mentioned this incident at lunchtime at work the next week. One of the programmers, Bill Rueff, scoffed, saying that the police did the best they could, and it was all the criminals they faced threats from that were to blame. Two of my co-workers sitting at the table were Black men, and out of curiosity, I asked everyone about their last experience getting stopped by the police.

All the white people at the table had similar stories. They were speeding or blew a stop sign or had some other moving violation, were given a ticket and sent on their way. Dina Butler said she’d never actually been stopped by the police. Most of the incidents were months or years earlier.

The two Black men, however, related near-identical experiences. They had both been stopped in the last month (and said they typically got stopped two or three times a year at least). The officers searched their cars, and when they didn’t find anything told them they were going to let them off with a warning and sent them on their way.

“See,” Bill said, “that shows the police don’t treat Black people worse — they didn’t even give them tickets.”

“Are you serious?” I said. “You got stopped — I got stopped — for committing moving violations and got tickets we deserved. They didn’t search our cars or do anything else like that. We don’t get stopped for no reason.”

“Yeah, well, if you don’t have anything illegal in your car, what’s the big deal about getting searched? Same with that bum you saw downtown. If he hadn’t stolen a shopping cart, the police would have left him alone.”

I shook my head. I glanced at the two Black co-workers. They looked at me with a touch of amusement. I was ashamed to realize I didn’t know their names. It felt too late to learn them.

That Saturday morning traffic to downtown mysteriously vanished as if there had been some sort of evacuation order that I had missed. I arrived at the Hippie Kitchen twenty minutes before any of the Catholic Workers would arrive. Elijah was sitting on the sidewalk beneath the mural of Christ of the Breadline painted on the wall of the Hippie Kitchen’s main building, his legs drawn to his chest and his head resting on his knees. I pulled out my phone and spent the time waiting for everyone else scrolling through Facebook and growing slowly depressed at how racist so many of my “friends” were. At least Nancy replied to one of the worst posts expressing her disapproval.

When the Catholic Worker van pulled in behind me, I got out and went to wake up Elijah. I was startled to find him cold to the touch when I put my hand on his shoulder.

The rest is a blur. Somebody must have called 911. An ambulance and police car arrived. The cops were the same pair as I saw a week earlier, although they didn’t show any sign of recognizing me. Paul suggested that I go home, and I was too much in shock to argue.

I ended up taking a couple weeks off, and the next time I went to the Hippie Kitchen, Monica wasn’t there. She wasn’t around on Wednesday night either.

“Are you looking for Monica?” Paul asked me as he helped me fold the chairs that had been set up for the Mass at the Catholic Worker house.

I shrugged.

“She’s on a ‘Come and See’ retreat at a Franciscan convent in Santa Barbara.”

“A what?”

“It’s an opportunity for women considering becoming nuns to see what life is like at the convent.”

I had no answer. I had no idea that Monica was considering religious life. 

I saw her again the next Wednesday. When I asked her about her retreat, she looked a little embarrassed.

“It was good, I suppose. There were three other women there with me. One was an older woman, maybe fifty? And there were two younger women about my age, although I don’t think either was that serious about becoming a nun.”

“Do you think you’ll go through with it?”

Monica was silent for a moment and then nodded. “Yes, I think I will. It feels crazy, but I think it’s what God is calling me to do. The two other women around my age were pretty clear by the end of the retreat that this wasn’t the life for them, but I think the older woman is going to join. I still have to let them know officially, but once I do, I’ll be beginning my postulancy in September.”

September. That was only two months away. “And this is in Santa Barbara?”

“Yes. The convent is connected with the old mission church there.”

“Well, congratulations. I hope this goes well for you.” I tried to make myself believe what I said. It may have been selfishness that wanted Monica not to join the Franciscans, but is selfishness always bad?

“Is this because of Elijah?” I asked.

“No, no. I don’t think so. No.”

The funny thing is that those last two months were when my relationship with Monica felt it’s fullest. We talked more than we had before. A couple times after the Wednesday Mass and dinner, she took me upstairs to the community room on the third floor and tried to teach me how to play guitar, but I could never manage to make my fingers move between one chord and the next fast enough to actually play a real song.

The Saturday before she was going to start her novitiate, the Catholic Worker held a party for her at the community house. While Paul and I stood on the back porch watching some neighborhood kids banging at a piñata, I said that I was considering the priesthood.

“You definitely shouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Why not? Is it because you used to be a priest?”

“No, it’s because you don’t have a vocation. You have vocation envy.”

I felt my face burn red.

“Monica’s entering religious life and you’re close to her, and so you think maybe it’s the right thing for you too, but that’s not a vocation, that’s playing follow the leader, even though the leader doesn’t realize she’s leading.”

Paul was right. There was no need to say anything more.

I assumed that was going to be the last time I ever saw Monica. What would be the point of driving up to Santa Barbara to visit? Monica had mentioned that visits with outsiders actually took place through a grille like it was the Middle Ages. So I was surprised when I arrived at the county cemetery for Elijah’s funeral to see her there with the rest of the Catholic Workers, not in a nun’s habit but wearing a T-shirt and jeans like the rest of the group.

We didn’t talk at the cemetery. It seemed the wrong place for a casual conversation. I drove to the Catholic Worker house alone, engaged in a series of imagined conversations with Monica the whole way. I was charming. I was clever. I was debonair. In short, I was not me.

I pulled in between two other cars in front of the Catholic Worker house and sat in my car unable to persuade myself to get out. I didn’t understand why Monica was back or why she was dressed the way she was.

A knock on my window brought me back to the present. It was Monica. I smiled sheepishly and opened the door.

“Are you going to come in or were you planning on spending the whole afternoon in your car?” Monica said with a laugh.

I got out and she gave me a hug. 

“Should I be hugging a nun?” I asked.

Her expression changed in an instant. “I decided not to stay in Santa Barbara.” She volunteered nothing more. I felt as if I had said the wrong thing.

The community was having lunch in the big common area on the first floor. Monica and I sat at a round table in the corner. As if by some tacit agreement, the other two chairs remained empty.

“Did you move back in with the Catholic Worker?” I asked.

Monica shook her head. “I need a break from religion-centered life for a while. I have a job at Target. I’m staying with a college friend in Cypress for now.”

“Will I see you Saturday mornings?”

“Probably not. I’m the newest employee, so I end up with all the crappy shifts no one else wants. Evenings and weekends mostly. I had to lie and tell them I was going to my cousin’s funeral to get today off. If they’d known the truth, I don’t think my manager would have let me have the day.”

“I can only imagine what the conversation would have been like if you told him the truth.”

Monica laughed. It was good to see her smile.

“I should get your number,” I said. “We should get together sometime.”

Monica was silent a moment then said, “I’m not really looking to date right now.”

Was I that transparent? I felt my face burn. “I understand,” I said. I paused a moment and then decided that honesty would work best. “I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed to hear that, but maybe we can just hang out. It hasn’t been the same around here since you left. I’ve missed you.”

Monica thought a moment. “Okay, that sounds good.” I gave her my phone for her to put her phone number in, and we talked about what our lives had been like over the past few months. I mentioned how I’d become much more aware of the police treating the people on the streets of Skid Row badly and even seen some signs of similar attitudes from the San Dimas police.

“Paul is planning a civil disobedience next weekend to protest police violence in Skid Row,” Monica said.

“Are you going to participate?”

“I can’t. Not with the new job.”

I considered it a moment. Paul and other members of the Catholic Worker had been sent to jail a few times for civil disobedience actions since I had been connected to the Worker. I had never been present at any of these protests. I’d always been afraid for my own job. 

“I think I might take part,” I said.

“What about your job?”

I shrugged. “Hopefully, they’ll be understanding if I’m out for a while. I do have some unused vacation time.”

“You aren’t doing this to impress me, are you?”

“No,” I said without hesitation. I was a little surprised myself to realize that I didn’t feel the slightest embarrassment at Monica’s question. “I think maybe I’m doing it for Elijah.”