En Nomine Patris — Notes from an East LA Parish

On the first Sunday of Advent, the same pews hold the woman who rents a back house on Folsom and the man who owns the fourplex on Cesar Chavez. They pass the sign of peace to each other. They both say the Confiteor. Neither of them is the villain of this homily, and neither of them is off the hook.

The examination of conscience is a strange and useful thing. It asks the person with power to name their own failures before anyone else names them. It does not wait for a lawsuit, a picket, or a code inspector. It happens in the quiet, in the presence of God, with the specific facts of your own life in front of you. That is why it belongs to landlords as much as to anyone else in the parish. The Church has always taught that the examination is not a performance of scrupulosity but a truthful accounting — and the truth, for a landlord in East Los Angeles, is partly written in ordinance numbers and rent tables.

This is not a sermon on greed. It is a self-audit. The questions below are the ones a landlord can answer honestly before God and before the County. They are drawn from the actual rules that govern rental property in unincorporated East Los Angeles, and they are paired with the spiritual practice that sustains each one. If you own property in the City of Los Angeles — Boyle Heights, for example — some of the rules differ, and the first question is precisely about that.

First question: Which ordinance covers this property?

Before any other question, a landlord must know the jurisdiction. Unincorporated East Los Angeles — the county islands and unincorporated pockets along the Whittier Boulevard corridor, in City Terrace, Belvedere, and the unincorporated blocks that sit between the city boundaries — falls under the Los Angeles County Rent Stabilization and Tenant Protections Ordinance (RSTPO). The County’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs describes the RSTPO as a local law that limits annual rent increases for rent-stabilized units based on changes in the Consumer Price Index and protects tenants from eviction without a valid reason, known as just cause, in unincorporated Los Angeles County (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program).

Boyle Heights, by contrast, is inside the City of Los Angeles and is governed by the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, a separate law with a separate rent table and separate notice requirements. The two ordinances do not apply to the same properties and do not impose identical rules. A landlord who cannot say which one covers the building has already failed a basic duty of care.

How to check: the County’s Rent Registry at rentregistry.dcba.lacounty.gov allows owners and tenants to verify coverage by entering the property address or Assessor Parcel Number. The County also points to the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s district map lookup to confirm whether an address is in unincorporated territory (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program).

The spiritual practice: Before you send a notice, sit with the address. Say it out loud. Ask whether you actually know whose rules govern that door. The examination begins with the humility of not assuming.

Second question: Is the unit registered, and is the rent increase within the allowable table?

For County RSTPO properties, the maximum allowable rent increase is set on a rolling schedule. For the period July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026, the County lists 1.930% for general rent-stabilized units, 2.930% for qualifying small property landlords, and 3.930% for luxury units (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The table changes each year. A landlord who raised rent by a round number because it felt fair, without checking the table, may have overcharged — and an overcharge is not a rounding error. It is a debt.

Small property landlords who claim the additional one percent must submit a Small Property Landlord Self-Certification to DCBA annually and must include a disclosure in the rent increase notice stating that they meet the requirements (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The disclosure is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the difference between a lawful increase and an unlawful one.

If a landlord increases rent beyond the limit, tenants may submit an Application for Adjustment, which allows them to apply for a decrease due to improper rent increases, reduction in housing services, or habitability issues (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program).

The spiritual practice: Restitution. If you find that you have overcharged, the examination does not end with sorrow. It ends with a repayment plan. The Church has always understood that contrition without restitution is incomplete. DCBA offers free mediation to help tenants and landlords reach a mutual agreement on repayment (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). Use it.

Third question: Was the notice given with the required disclosures?

A rent increase is not just a number. It is a document with required contents. For County RSTPO properties, the notice must include the disclosures described above where applicable. For City of Los Angeles RSO properties, the City requires landlords to post a Rent Stabilization Notice in a conspicuous location — the lobby, near the mailboxes, or near a public entrance — in English and Spanish and any other language the Department requires. The City’s notice form states that landlords may only collect rents for units registered with the Los Angeles Housing Department, that a reduction in services may constitute an unlawful rent increase, and that foreclosure or sale of a property is not an allowable reason for eviction (LAHD, Rent Stabilization Notice, form #45).

Posting the notice is not decoration. It is the tenant’s means of knowing what law protects them. A landlord who has never posted it has kept the tenant in the dark about the very rules that bind the landlord.

The spiritual practice: Transparency. The examination asks not only “did I follow the rule” but “did I make the rule visible to the person it protects?” A notice taped inside a closet is not a notice.

Fourth question: Is the unit habitable, and have I responded to repair requests?

Habitability is not a favor. It is the baseline. The City’s RSO notice states that all rental properties in the City of Los Angeles must meet the minimum habitability requirements set forth in the Building Code and the California Health and Safety Code (LAHD, Rent Stabilization Notice). The County’s RSTPO provides a process for tenants to seek a rent decrease for habitability issues through the Application for Adjustment (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The County also operates a Rent Escrow Account Program (REAP) as an enforcement tool to facilitate compliance with state and local habitability standards for rental housing in unincorporated Los Angeles County (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program).

A landlord in the pews who has ignored a leaking ceiling for two winters, or a broken heater since the last Santa Ana winds, should hear this question plainly: the condition of the unit is part of the examination. The tenant who lives under that ceiling is your neighbor, and the Church does not allow us to treat the neighbor’s home as a matter of indifference.

The spiritual practice: Visitation. Before you respond to a repair request with a text, go and look at the unit. The examination of conscience is not an abstraction; it is a visit to the place where someone lives.

Fifth question: Is there a just-cause basis for any termination?

Under the County RSTPO, tenants in covered units may be evicted only for one of the just-cause reasons listed in the ordinance, divided into at-fault and no-fault categories. At-fault reasons include failure to pay rent exceeding the monetary threshold, material breach of the rental agreement, nuisance or illegal use, failure to sign a substantially similar lease, and certain other listed grounds. No-fault reasons include landlord or family move-in, withdrawal of the unit from the rental market, and government or court order, and may require relocation assistance (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program).

The County also sets a threshold for nonpayment terminations: a landlord may terminate a tenancy for past-due rent only when the amount owed exceeds one month of the Fair Market Rent for the unit, with a scheduled increase to two months effective April 16, 2026 (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The notice must state the FMR amount and the number of bedrooms.

For City RSO properties, the City’s notice states that the RSO limits the reasons for which a tenant may be evicted, that relocation assistance may be required for certain evictions, and that foreclosure or sale is not an allowable reason (LAHD, Rent Stabilization Notice).

The spiritual practice: Ask before you act. The examination question is not “do I have a legal right to terminate?” but “is the reason I am about to give the real reason, and would I be willing to say it aloud in front of the tenant and in front of God?”

Where conscience becomes paperwork

An examination that ends only in the confessional is incomplete. Contrition has to go somewhere. For landlords in unincorporated East Los Angeles, the place is the DCBA Rent Stabilization Program. The County operates an East Los Angeles County Hall office at 4801 East Third Street, open Wednesdays only, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The main office is at 320 West Temple Street, Room G-10, Los Angeles, CA 90012, and the phone number is 800-593-8222.

DCBA offers free mediation services to help tenants and landlords reach a mutual agreement (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). Mediation is not a legal threat. It is a room where two people who live on the same block sit down and try to reach an agreement. That is a spiritual practice as much as a procedural one. It requires the landlord to sit with the tenant as a neighbor rather than a defendant, which is the same posture the examination of conscience demands.

For landlords in Boyle Heights and other City of Los Angeles properties, the Los Angeles Housing Department is the point of contact. The City’s RSO notice lists the LAHD hotline at (866) 557-7368 and directs tenants and owners to lahd.lacity.org for information and complaints (LAHD, Rent Stabilization Notice).

And for those who want to know what the City’s planning rules say about the corridor itself, the Boyle Heights Community Plan implementing ordinances go into effect August 20, 2026 (Los Angeles City Planning, Boyle Heights Community Plan). That is a land-use question, not a rent question, but it belongs to the same examination: the neighborhood is changing, and the landlord who owns property on Whittier Boulevard is a participant in that change whether or not they attend the meetings.

A short examination for the landlord in the pew

Before you send the next notice, sit with these questions. Answer them honestly. If you cannot answer one, that is the one to bring to confession, to mediation, or to the DCBA counter on Third Street.

• Do I know which ordinance covers this property, and can I show the paperwork?
• Is the unit registered, and is the rent increase within the current table?
• Did I include the required disclosures, and did I post the notice where the tenant can see it?
• Is the unit habitable, and have I responded to every repair request?
• Is there a just-cause basis for any termination, and is the reason I am giving the real reason?
• Have I overcharged, and if so, have I begun to make restitution?

The woman on Folsom and the man on Cesar Chavez will pass the sign of peace again next Sunday. The examination is what happens between now and then. It is not a threat. It is a way of telling the truth about the power we hold, in the presence of the God who sees the back house and the fourplex alike.

Frequently asked questions

Does the County RSTPO apply to my property in East Los Angeles?

It depends on whether the property is in unincorporated Los Angeles County and whether it meets the coverage criteria. The County’s Rent Registry at rentregistry.dcba.lacounty.gov allows you to verify coverage by address or Assessor Parcel Number (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). If the property is inside the City of Los Angeles, the City’s RSO applies instead.

What is the current maximum rent increase for a County RSTPO unit?

For July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026, the County lists 1.930% for general rent-stabilized units, 2.930% for qualifying small property landlords, and 3.930% for luxury units (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The table changes each year, so check the current figure before sending a notice.

What happens if I overcharged rent?

Tenants may submit an Application for Adjustment, which allows them to apply for a decrease due to improper rent increases, reduction in housing services, or habitability issues (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). DCBA offers free mediation to help landlords and tenants reach a mutual agreement on repayment.

Where can I get help in East Los Angeles?

The DCBA East Los Angeles County Hall office is at 4801 East Third Street, open Wednesdays only, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (DCBA, Rent Stabilization Program). The main office is at 320 West Temple Street, Room G-10, Los Angeles, CA 90012, and the phone number is 800-593-8222.

Does the Boyle Heights Community Plan change my obligations as a landlord?

The Community Plan is a land-use document, not a rent ordinance. The implementing ordinances go into effect August 20, 2026 (Los Angeles City Planning, Boyle Heights Community Plan). Landlords with property in Boyle Heights should consult the plan and the City’s zoning resources for land-use questions, and the City’s RSO for rent and eviction questions.

Four root vegetables smile up from the soil. A carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion — each one drawn with its taproot visible, the part we usually cut off and throw away. Around them, in a ring of capital letters, the shirt reads: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW.

The pun is doing two jobs at once, and the second job is the one worth sitting with. To root for someone is to cheer them on from the sidelines. To root is also to send a taproot down into the dark, to take hold of the ground you are standing on. The shirt puts both meanings in the same sentence and lets them lean on each other. That is not just wordplay. It is a small argument about what support actually looks like.

Look at the vegetables again. They are not in a row. They are not arranged by height or color or harvest date. They are clustered, roots down, faces up, each one drawn with the same simple smile. The carrot is orange, the radish red, the beet deep purple, the onion pale. Nobody is the main character. The design does not put one vegetable in front. It does not rank them. It just shows four different things growing in the same patch of soil, and it asks you to notice that the soil is what they have in common.

That is the first thing the shirt gets right. Rooting for each other is not the same as rooting for the same outcome. The carrot does not grow into a beet. The onion does not aspire to be a radish. They are all in the ground together, and the ground is doing the work of holding them. When we say we are rooting for someone, we usually mean we want them to succeed at the thing they have chosen. The shirt’s version is quieter and harder: we want them to stay rooted, to keep growing in their own direction, and we are willing to be the soil for that.

The second thing the shirt gets right is the word watch. Not make. Not manage. Not measure. Watch each other grow. There is a patience in that word that most of us do not bring to the people we love. We want to see the growth on our schedule. We want the radish to be ready when we are hungry. The shirt suggests a different posture: you plant, you water, you wait, and you pay attention. The growth is not yours to command. It is yours to witness.

I have been thinking about this in the context of the block. On Whittier Boulevard, on First Street, in the pews at Sunday Mass, there is a lot of rooting going on that nobody calls rooting. A neighbor watches another neighbor’s kids while she goes to a hearing at the Board of Supervisors. A merchant lets a street vendor leave her cart in the back of the shop overnight. A parishioner sits with a family in the rent registry office and helps them fill out the form line by line. None of that is cheering. It is soil work. It is the unglamorous business of holding ground so that someone else can put down roots.

The shirt is not a political statement. It does not name a campaign or a candidate or a cause. It is a garden pun, and it knows it. But the pun has a spine. It distinguishes between the kind of support that wants to be seen and the kind that wants to be useful. It suggests that mutual growth is not a slogan but a practice — one that requires you to stay in the same patch of dirt long enough to notice what is happening underground.

If you are looking for the shirt itself, it is the Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden design from Quirky Cotton Collective. The artwork is simple and legible: four smiling root vegetables with their roots visible in soil, surrounded by the words in capital letters. It is the kind of shirt you can wear to a garden club meeting or a parish work day without having to explain it. The message is plain enough for a child to read and strange enough for an adult to think about.

What I keep coming back to is the onion. It is the least glamorous of the four. It makes you cry when you cut it. It grows in layers, and you cannot see the layers until you slice it open. In the drawing, it is smiling just like the carrot. That is the part of the shirt I trust most. It is not asking you to be the carrot. It is asking you to be the onion, or the beet, or whatever you are, and to let the person next to you be what they are, and to trust that the ground is wide enough for both of you.

So here is the assignment, if you want one. Pick one person in your building or your pew or your family who is trying to grow something — a small business, a recovery, a GED, a garden, a truce with a sibling — and do one soil thing for them this week. Not a cheer. Not a text that says you got this. A soil thing: watch their kids, bring a bag of groceries, sit with them while they make a phone call they have been dreading, show up at the thing they invited you to three weeks ago. Then watch. Do not measure. Do not ask for a progress report. Just pay attention to what comes up.

The vegetables on the shirt are smiling because they are in the ground together. That is the whole design. The rest is up to us.

This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The Queen of the Shuls and the Question of Who Keeps a House of Prayer

On Breed Street, just north of Cesar Chavez, there is a building with round arches and dichromatic brick that most people in the neighborhood pass without knowing what it is. Some think it is a church. Some think it is closed. For decades it was both almost true. The Breed Street Shul — Congregation Talmud Torah — was the last of some thirty Eastside synagogues to remain open, and its final services were held in 1996 (Los Angeles Conservancy, Breed Street Shul).

That single fact is the whole lesson. A sacred building outlived the congregation that built it. What happened next is not a preservation story first. It is a question about constituency: who claims a house of prayer after the people who prayed in it have moved away?

I write as a parish priest, not as a preservationist. But the parish and the shul share a block-level problem. Buildings of faith in this neighborhood have repeatedly outlasted the ethnic communities that raised them. The shul’s documented record — decline, volunteer stabilization, nonprofit ownership, public funding, permitted restoration — is the clearest local case we have of how that problem gets answered, and of how it can go wrong for twenty years before it goes right.

What the Record Actually Shows

The congregation was established in 1904 and met in private houses near First Street before purchasing the Breed Street lot in 1915 and building a wood-framed school and small synagogue (Los Angeles Conservancy). The current sanctuary was dedicated in 1923, designed by Abram M. Edelman — whose father was Los Angeles’ first rabbi — in Byzantine Revival style, with round arches, bas-relief ornamentation, and dichromatic brickwork. The interior walls carried illustrations reminiscent of Eastern European folk art. Locals called it the Queen of the Shuls.

The shul was not only a prayer hall. The Breed Street Shul Project’s own historical page notes that the United Jewish Welfare Fund and other institutions used the building as a launching point, and that in 1945 Rabbi Osher Zilberstein opened Los Angeles’ first Jewish parochial elementary school on the site (Breed Street Shul Project, Historical Information). The same page records that from 1910 to 1950 roughly 75,000 Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants made Boyle Heights the largest Jewish community west of Chicago — and that Latinos, Japanese-Americans, and White Russians were part of the same neighborhood.

That last point matters for how we tell this story. Boyle Heights was never a single-ethnic neighborhood that changed overnight. It was a dense, mixed, working-class district where different communities negotiated shared streets. The shul’s own historical account describes “a remarkable degree of intergroup tolerance and understanding” — a phrase I would treat as the institution’s self-description rather than a sociological finding, but one consistent with the political record it cites: in the 1940s, Jews and Latinos campaigned together to elect Edward R. Roybal as the first Latino member of the Los Angeles City Council.

The Decline Was Not a Mystery

After the Second World War, freeways cut through the neighborhood and the Jewish community moved west. The shul became the last Eastside synagogue still open. Beginning in the 1980s the building suffered neglect, vandalism, and earthquake damage, and by the 1990s it was unusable and in real danger of demolition (Los Angeles Conservancy; Breed Street Shul Project).

I want to be unsentimental about this. Buildings do not decay because people stop loving them. They decay because the legal and financial structure that maintained them has dissolved. A congregation that disperses takes with it the dues, the trustees, the insurance, and the person who knows which valve to shut off before winter. What remains is a shell and a title.

The shul’s rescue began with volunteers. The Breed Street Shul Project, Inc., a nonprofit, acquired the property in 2000 with the stated goal of rehabilitating the buildings to meet the needs of the current community in Boyle Heights (Los Angeles Conservancy). In 2005 the Los Angeles Conservancy gave the project a Preservation Award for a first phase that included seismic stabilization of the sanctuary and restoration of its historic stained glass windows.

Notice the sequence. Stabilize first. Do not restore the ornament before you have secured the walls. The 1915 building reopened in November 2011, and according to the Shul Project, the first minyan and Bar Mitzvah in nearly a quarter century took place there weeks later. A building that had held no service since 1996 held one again because a nonprofit had taken legal ownership and spent a decade on structural work before anyone talked about programming.

The Money and the Mechanism

Stabilization is not restoration, and volunteers cannot carry a full rehabilitation. The public record shows the next step plainly. When Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Budget Act of 2021 on July 12, it included $14.9 million to the City of Los Angeles for restoration of the Breed Street Shul (California Legislative Jewish Caucus, news release). The release credits Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, chair of the Jewish Caucus, and notes that Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, who represents parts of Boyle Heights, was instrumental in securing the funding — with support from both Latino and Jewish members of the Legislature.

That coalition is the argument. The 2021 appropriation was not a Jewish community funding a Jewish building. It was a Latino legislator from the district and a Jewish legislator from Encino assembling a multi-ethnic majority for a building that now belongs to a neighborhood neither of them prays in. The 1940s Roybal campaign and the 2021 budget line are the same political practice at different scales.

In 2024 the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety issued a construction permit for the restoration at 247 N. Breed Street. The permitted scope, as reported by Urbanize LA, includes facade renovation, new entrance gates and fences, replacement of existing canopies, new stairs, elevators, and access ramps, plus new office space, exhibit space, and renovation of the main sanctuary, in a Gensler-designed project (Urbanize LA). The same report, citing LAist, describes plans for a cultural center showcasing neighborhood history and providing space for local nonprofits and service providers.

I will not tell you the shul is finished. The sources describe a final phase of rehabilitation and an issued permit, not a completed building. What they establish is enough: the legal owner is a nonprofit, the money is public, the permit is real, and the stated use is the current neighborhood.

What This Teaches a Parish

Every Catholic parish in Boyle Heights, City Terrace, or Belvedere carries a version of this question in its ledger. The church was built by one community; the pews are filled by another; the roof does not care which. The shul’s record offers three transferable lessons, and I offer them as my own reading of the documents, not as findings of any study.

First, separate the building from the congregation early. The shul survived because a nonprofit with a neighborhood-serving mission took title in 2000, before the structure failed. A parish that waits until the sanctuary is red-tagged to think about who holds the property has already lost years.

Second, stabilize before you program. Seismic work and stained glass came first; the 1915 building reopened in 2011; the cultural center plans came after the permit. Capital campaigns that promise programming before engineering are asking donors to fund a hope.

Third, name the constituency in writing. The Shul Project’s stated goal was to rehabilitate the buildings “to meet the needs of the current community in Boyle Heights.” That sentence is doing legal and moral work. It tells a funder, a city council office, and a neighbor what the building is for. A parish that cannot write that sentence will find others writing it for them.

Here is a hypothetical, clearly labeled as such: a parish facing a deferred-maintenance decision could borrow the shul’s order of operations — commission a structural assessment, secure a mission-driven institutional owner or sponsor, then pursue public and tax-credit funding for full reuse. I am not claiming any parish has done this. I am saying the sequence is documented at 247 N. Breed Street and is worth studying before the next capital campaign letter goes out.

The Spiritual Practice That Pairs With the Civic One

Preservation is a civic mechanism. It has hearings, permits, tax credits, and budget lines. None of that keeps a house of prayer holy. What keeps it holy is the discipline of keeping it open for people who did not build it.

The shul’s own history gives the image. The 1915 building reopened in November 2011, and within weeks the first minyan and Bar Mitzvah in nearly a quarter century were held there. A minyan is ten Jews. Ten is not a crowd; it is a quorum. The building did not need to be full to be a shul again. It needed ten people willing to stand in it.

That is the practice I would set beside the permit and the appropriation: the willingness to show up in a sacred space that belongs to someone else’s memory and make it yours by using it. In Advent we wait in buildings we did not light. In Lent we strip them. At Guadalupe we fill the parking lot with roses and danzantes, and at Las Posadas we knock on doors that are not ours and ask for room. The shul’s restoration asks the same question the posada asks: will you open the house to the ones outside?

The Queen of the Shuls was full once, in a way the sources do not let me quantify. What they do let me say is this: it was full again, in a smaller way, in 2011, and it is being rebuilt now with public money and a coalition that crosses the ethnic lines of this neighborhood. That is not a sentimental ending. It is a mechanism, and it is one the parish down the street can learn from before its own roof starts to fail.

Questions Readers Ask

Is the Breed Street Shul open to the public now?

The sources describe the restoration as being in its final phase, with a construction permit issued in 2024. They do not establish that the building is fully open as a completed cultural center. Check with the Breed Street Shul Project before planning a visit.

Who owns the shul?

The nonprofit Breed Street Shul Project, Inc. acquired the property in 2000, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy.

Is it a historic landmark?

Yes. The shul is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and the Los Angeles Conservancy lists it as locally designated as well.

Why did the Jewish community leave Boyle Heights?

The shul’s own historical account points to the postwar period, when freeways bisected the neighborhood and the Jewish community moved to other parts of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Conservancy describes the same population shifts following the postwar era.

What can a parish learn from this?

The documented sequence — nonprofit ownership, seismic stabilization, phased reopening, then public funding for full reuse — is a model for ordering a capital campaign around structure before programming, and for naming in writing which community the building will serve.

The shirt shows a word so small you have to lean in to read it. Centered on a dark ground, lowercase, with a period: meh. No animal. No flag. No slogan. Just four letters and a full stop, printed at a scale that seems almost embarrassed to be there.

That scale is the whole argument. A large meh shouts. A small one mutters. And a mutter, unlike a shout, requires a listener who has chosen to come close.

I keep thinking about what that asks of the person standing next to you. In a parish, we spend a lot of time on invitations. The posada roster, the petition for a rent registry entry, the sign-up sheet for the pantry. All of them assume a yes. But the small meh assumes something else: a no that is not a rejection, a boundary that is not a war.

What the period does

Look at the punctuation. The period is not decorative. It closes the sentence. It says the matter is settled, at least for now. Without it, meh is a shrug that trails off, an opening for negotiation. With it, the word becomes a small verdict.

I have sat in too many meetings where a parishioner says yes when she means meh, and then disappears for six months. The period is a kindness. It tells the room: do not keep asking. The answer is not enthusiasm, but it is also not absence.

That is a hard thing to teach in a culture that treats every invitation as a test of loyalty. The small meh on the chest is a visual aid. It says: I am here, I am not thrilled, and I am not leaving.

The introvert’s grammar

The listing calls it a meh shirt, and the related searches run toward introvert and sarcastic. I understand why. But I want to be careful. The shirt does not diagnose anyone. It does not prove a personality type. It is a piece of printed cotton with a word on it.

What it does do is give a name to a posture that many people in our pews already carry. The auntie who comes to Mass every Sunday and never joins the choir. The young man who fixes the church boiler and declines every committee. The meh is not laziness. It is a way of saying: my yes is small, but it is real.

If you are the one wearing it, the shirt is a boundary you do not have to explain. If you are the one reading it, the shirt is a reminder that not every silence is an opening.

What to do with a small no

Here is the practical part, the part I would give from the ambo if I could. When someone gives you a meh, do not try to upgrade it. Do not say, “But you’d be so good at it.” That is not an invitation. It is a negotiation with a closed sentence.

Instead, ask a smaller question. Not “Will you lead the committee?” but “Can you bring ice?” Not “Will you commit to the campaign?” but “Can you make three calls on Thursday?” The small meh often hides a yes that is the right size.

And if you are the one wearing the shirt, practice saying the word out loud. Meh. With the period. It is a spiritual discipline, in its way. It is the practice of telling the truth without drama, of declining without disappearing.

The shirt itself

The garment is a standard t-shirt, sold under the Quirky Cotton Collective brand. The design is what I have described: very small, centered, lowercase meh. on a dark shirt. No animal illustration. No pride variant. If you want to see the exact scale, the listing is here.

I am not going to tell you it will change your life. It is a shirt. But it is a shirt that says something true about the way many of us actually live: quietly, with a full stop, waiting for someone to come close enough to read.

A blessing for the small no

Tomorrow, when someone asks you for something you cannot give with a whole heart, try the period. Try the small word. And when someone gives it to you, receive it as a gift. It is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of an honest one.

This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The shirt says it plainly, in the flat capital letters of a municipal notice: NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH. Above the words sits a yellow caution triangle, the kind you see on a wet floor or a high-voltage panel. Inside the triangle, a hand is crossed out — a palm reaching in, a diagonal bar through it. The whole design borrows the grammar of public warning signage and wears it on a chest. It is not a joke about introversion so much as a boundary written in the language of the street.

I have been thinking about that crossed-out hand. In the parish, we spend a great deal of time teaching people to touch — to lay hands on the sick, to embrace the grieving, to hold a quinceañera’s shoulders while you bless her. The Church is a religion of contact: la paz, the sign of peace, the anointing with oil. And yet the same tradition knows the language of the guarded threshold. The sanctuary has a rail. The tabernacle has a door. Even the burning bush required Moses to remove his sandals before drawing near. A boundary is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is the shape love takes when it is trying to protect something fragile.

What the shirt does, visually, is make that boundary public. The caution triangle is not a private feeling; it is a sign posted where others can read it. The crossed-out hand is not a rejection of any particular person; it is a general instruction, addressed to whoever is standing close enough to read the letters. That is a different thing from coldness. It is closer to what a tenant leader does when she posts the meeting rules on the door of the hall: no shouting, no side conversations, one person speaks at a time. The rules are not there to keep people out. They are there so the people inside can do the work without being trampled.

I think about the block. On Whittier Boulevard, the vendors have their tables arranged so you can see what they are selling before you reach them. The señora with the elotes cart has a rhythm — she will hand you the cup, but she will not let you lean over the comal. That is not unfriendliness. It is a working boundary, learned over years, and it keeps the line moving and the hands unburned. The shirt’s warning sign belongs to that same family of gestures: a small, legible notice that says this is how close you may come, and this is how you should approach.

The design is also funny, and the humor matters. A caution triangle on a t-shirt is a mismatch of registers — the solemnity of industrial safety applied to a human mood. That mismatch is what makes it readable at a glance. If the shirt simply said I am not friendly, it would be a confession. With the triangle and the crossed-out hand, it becomes a sign, and a sign is something you can point at. It gives the wearer a way to say something difficult without having to say it out loud, and it gives the person standing next to them a way to laugh and then adjust. Humor is often the grease that lets a boundary be received without offense.

There is a temptation, in a parish like ours, to read a shirt like this as a symptom of a lonely age — everyone sealed off, no one willing to be touched. I do not think the design supports that reading. The shirt is not a wall; it is a notice. A wall does not bother to explain itself. A notice assumes a reader, assumes a relationship, assumes that the person approaching is capable of understanding a boundary and honoring it. That is a more hopeful anthropology than it first appears. The crossed-out hand is not saying you are unwelcome. It is saying you are close enough that I need to tell you something.

In the peacemaking circles we run out of the parish hall, one of the first things we ask people to practice is naming their own limit before someone else crosses it. When you raise your voice, I shut down. When you bring up my brother, I need to stop. It is harder than it sounds. Most of us were taught to endure, to smile, to let the hand rest on the shoulder even when it burns. The shirt is a cartoon version of that skill, but it is the same skill: the ability to post a sign before the damage is done. A caution triangle is a small act of prevention. So is a boundary spoken early.

I would not want every parishioner to wear one. There is a season for the sign and a season for the open door, and the liturgy keeps both in view. But I am glad the shirt exists, and I am glad it is legible. It gives people a way to practice a truth the Church has always taught: that the body is not public property, that consent is not a formality, that the person in front of you is a mystery who may need to be approached slowly. The crossed-out hand is not the end of the conversation. It is the condition for having one.

If you want to see the design for yourself, the shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective and listed on Amazon as the Not Friendly Do Not Touch warning-sign tee. The listing shows the caution triangle and the crossed-out hand clearly. I have not worn it; I am describing what the artwork asks of a reader, not reporting on the fabric.

This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

Look at the rectangle first. On the shirt, a black-and-white speckled field sits inside a dark binding strip on the left, and a white ruled label is headed with the word COMPOSITION. Inside that label, an outlined ghost and a pumpkin. The whole thing is printed to read as a composition notebook cover, not a physical notebook. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A notebook is a tool you hold; this is a surface you wear. The design asks the body to become the object that usually sits on a desk, and it asks the people around that body to recognize the object before they recognize the joke.

I keep thinking about what a composition notebook actually is in a parish hall. It is the cheap, sturdy thing you buy in a stack at the start of the school year. It is where a catechist writes the names of the children in the first communion class. It is where a tenant organizer writes down the case number from the county inspector and the date the notice was taped to the door. It is not precious. It is not leather-bound. It is the book you can lose and replace. That is the first thing the shirt gets right: it borrows the authority of a plain, ruled page.

The second thing it gets right is the group. The retail title calls this a teacher group Halloween costume, and the visual observation confirms the notebook cover is the whole design. There is no slogan about being a teacher, no apple, no chalkboard. The ghost and pumpkin are small, outlined, almost marginal — the kind of doodle a student might add to the corner of a label. The shirt does not say I am a teacher. It says I am one of the notebooks. That is a different claim, and a more interesting one. It invites a row of people to stand together as identical objects, each with the same speckled cover, each with the same small ghost, and let the repetition do the work.

I have seen enough group costumes to know that most of them fail because they ask the group to perform a hierarchy. One person is the teacher, another is the student, another is the principal. The composition notebook shirt avoids that. Everyone wearing it is the same notebook. The only variation is the body inside it. That is a small act of humility, and it is also a small act of wit. The costume says: we are not here to be the main character. We are here to be the supplies.

There is a temptation to read the ghost and pumpkin as a comment on the school year — the ghost of assignments past, the pumpkin of autumn — and I want to be careful there. The visual observation gives me an outlined ghost and a pumpkin inside a ruled label. It does not give me a history of the design, a meme origin, or a claim about what the artist intended. What I can say is what the image does: it places two Halloween marks inside a school supply, and it lets the school supply carry them. The notebook is the frame; the ghost and pumpkin are the decoration. That is a modest arrangement, and it works because it does not overexplain itself.

For a parish, the useful question is not whether the shirt is funny. It is what kind of invitation the shirt makes. A costume that says we are a group is an invitation to belong to something visible. It is the same logic as a matching guayabera at a quinceañera, or a row of women in the same color rebozo at a posada. The uniform is not about erasing the person. It is about making the group legible from across the room. The composition notebook shirt does that with a school supply, which is a strange and gentle way to say: we are the people who write things down.

If you are thinking about the shirt for a teacher group, the practical thing to notice is that the design is a printed cover, not a physical notebook. That means the joke depends on the silhouette and the label, not on a prop you have to carry. It also means the shirt has to be read from a few feet away. The speckled field and the dark binding strip are doing most of the work; the ghost and pumpkin are the small reward for looking closer. That is a good ratio for a group costume. It reads at a distance and rewards the second glance.

You can find the listing here: Composition Notebook Costume Teacher Group Halloween. I am not going to tell you it will make you a better teacher or a closer group. I have not worn it, and I do not know how it fits. What I can tell you is what the artwork asks: it asks a group to agree to be the same plain, useful thing for an evening, and to let a small ghost and pumpkin be enough.

That is a decent discipline for any group, parish or faculty. The notebook does not pretend to be a ledger. It is a composition book, the kind you can buy three for a dollar. The shirt does not pretend to be a costume with a plot. It is a cover with a label. The invitation is small and clear: stand together, be recognizable, and do not take yourself too seriously. If you are planning a group costume this October, that is a better assignment than most.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.