Brian Terrell
Maloy, Iowa
14 September 2022
Forwarded by Tina Leonard
On September 6, the world and the worldwide Catholic Worker movement in particular, lost a great friend with the death of Rachel Howell in Edinburgh, Scotland. Rachel was 48 years old and died only a few weeks after being diagnosed with cancer.
Rachel first met the Catholic Worker at St. Francis House in Oxford, England, visiting in 1993 while she was in her second year at Durham University where she studied mathematics. After graduating and spending three years with the Student Christian Movement, Rachel joined the Oxford Catholic Worker community in August 1998.
In 2001, she traveled to the United States to visit Catholic Worker communities, including Strangers and Guests Farm in Maloy, Iowa, where I live. The following summer Rachel returned to Maloy and except for a three-month residency at Pendle Hill (a Quaker study center in Pennsylvania in the winter), she lived with our family and our guests for about a year.
In Maloy, Rachel learned to milk goats, weave rugs, joined us in prayer, singing, dancing, cooking and gardening. She made friends in our little town and in the broader Catholic Worker movement in the states, attended the annual Midwest CW retreats at Sugar Creek, Iowa, twice, winning the coveted “Football Mary” talent show trophy in 2001.
She joined us in protests at the School of the Americas in Georgia, at the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, the Iowa Air Guard in Des Moines, then flying missions in the no-fly zone over Iraq.
After returning to England and to St Francis House, Rachel resumed her studies in 2006, getting a Masters and then a PhD, eventually becoming a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and an “interdisciplinary Environmental Social Scientist specialising in human dimensions of, and responses to, climate change.”
Photo provided by Brian Terrell
I returned Rachel’s visits several times, seeing her in Oxford, in Birmingham and the last time in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 2013 when she was in grad school there. She understood the perils of climate change before most of us and was convinced of the urgency of humans changing our behavior patterns. After returning from the states in 2002, Rachel made and kept the commitment not to fly again.
Rachel was one of my most honest, persistent and loving critics, but she did not judge me for my burgeoning carbon footprint in the last years of our friendship; speaking tours, my repeated trips to Afghanistan, to protests at Jeju Island in Korea, resistance at various NATO nuclear weapons bases in Europe. Last summer, Rachel wrote to me: “So, keep flying for as long as you discern that the symbolic/practical/spiritual worth of the thing you have to fly to do outweighs the symbolic/practical/spiritual harm of flying. I really do understand that it’s possible for us to come to different conclusions about our own behaviour without either of us necessarily being wrong.” I will be forever grateful for having such a friend.
Two days after Rachel’s death, Queen Elizabeth II died, also in Scotland as it happened. The media circus around the death of a 96-year-old monarch would have been irksome to me in any case, but it was a painful distraction while mourning the loss of a dear young friend.
Rachel would not have minded, though, and her love for her queen was for me her most puzzling attribute. On the Christmas Day that Rachel was with us in Maloy, she downloaded the queen’s annual address and read it aloud to the assembled celebrants in her poshest accent, with a green crepe paper crown on her head.
For those friends of Rachel who are only now finding out about her illness and death that transpired so quickly, I am sorry. Raised a Catholic, Rachel came to recognize that she was a Quaker.
On August 31, Rachel sent an email to some of her friends, “those of you for whom ‘God’ is a meaningful concept will perhaps know the saying ‘With God there is no time’ i.e. it really doesn’t matter when prayers are offered, and I’m sure the same is true of loving thoughts – I’m very grateful for them any time.”
Prayers and loving thoughts for Rachel are still in order, all the more for her parents, Geraint and Kathleen Howell, her five siblings, her students and her many friends.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 522 • October 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
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