Homily 2/ 20/2000
Father Paul Boudreau
How about if this gospel story takes place in YOUR house? All the people start showing up at your house. They're coming from all around, all the neighborhood people, arriving at the door and pushing their way in. And then they're coming over from Walnut Creek and from Concord. They're all showing up at your house and they're crowding in, filling your living room and spilling over into the other rooms and into the kitchen and they're raiding YOUR refrigerator, and they're using YOUR bathroom and they're putting all their wet coats on YOUR bed. Your whole house is filled with street people, and people who are hungry and who are in need of healing.
How's that feel? Yuck! Well, that's how Jesus demonstrated the Kingdom of God to His followers. He showed it to be a Great Hospitality where all were welcome. And He opened His home to all the people who were in need so that they could participate in the joy of His kingdom. And He gave to them from what he had, even to having his roof torn open. For in the Kingdom of God those who have will have naught, and those who have nothing will be filled. The last shall be first. The first shall be last.
The saints throughout history have taken Jesus at His word, and discovered the great joy of the kingdom. As they, like Francis and Clare, gave away everything they had for the poor, they received great, great riches of life in return. People like Hildegarde whom we heard about two weeks ago, who gave her life in service of those who were in need of forgiveness, received so much in return.
Today's saint is Dorothy Day. She's our third and final saint for the millennium. She, unlike Hildegarde and Francis and Clare, she is a saint of our own lifetime. Because if you're over 20 years old (looks like most of you are over 20 years old), you have lived in Dorothy Day's lifetime. Dorothy was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. They moved to San Francisco where her family survived the great Earthquake of 1906, and then on to Chicago where she was educated and pursued her career as a journalist. She was baptized a Catholic as an adult, and as she lived about in the cities of Chicago and New York during the Depression, during the Depression years, she was deeply moved by the conflict of events. For in the Depression, there were many, many people who were out of work, and they lived in the street where they had, they couldn't afford to maintain, they didn't make a living, they couldn't afford to stay at home, pay the rent and they were living in the street. They had no food. They had no shelter. They had so little. And, in Dorothy Day's mind, that should all be taken care of, for all the people who HAD should be giving to those who HAD NOT, for she understood that to be God's plan. And the words and teachings of Jesus echoed deep within her.
She came to realize that, while God hears the cry of the poor, people were not listening for the call of God. So she herself took it upon herself to do something about the poor and the needy and the hungry and the homeless. And she opened the doors of her apartment to welcome into her life all who were in need, the street people of New York City. "COME ON IN," she said. And she fed them from what she had. She cared for them with her time and her own energy. She gave them her bed to sleep in, and, when there were too many, she went out into the neighborhood and found other beds for them to sleep in. She made her home a great Hospitality House. It eventually became what is known as the Catholic Worker Hospitality House. And the Catholic Worker Movement spread very quickly throughout the United States. We have a Catholic Worker house right in Oakland, which we, at Christ the King Church, support with our donations. So, the work of Dorothy Day lives on among us.
She found out that living the gospel meant, as it meant for Jesus, meant suffering and forgiveness, for if she was going to literally live with the poor, be in constant contact with the poor, she was going to suffer. As you can well imagine in this picture of YOUR house being filled with the homeless and street people of the surrounding cities, so too she suffered a great deal because of that contact with them. You know, poor people are poor for a reason. They suffer not only from economic poverty, but from social and the poverty of human resource. And it makes it very difficult to serve the poor, for it entails great suffering and there is need for great forgiveness. If Dorothy Day was to serve the poor, if we are to serve the poor, she had to be and we must be, forgiving people, who are in constant forgiveness. She said (one of her famous quotes), she said, "Love in action," the kind of love that she professed, the kind of love she put into action, "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing."
As Our Lord Jesus Christ welcomed all, so she welcomed all. And Our Lord Jesus Christ welcomes you and me this day and every day, for you and I are sinners. You and I are sinners. Yet, Jesus welcomes us to His Body, and in doing so, we fill His Body, as the people in the story filled His house. We even tear open His Body. It is the central mystery of our faith, that Jesus Christ suffered and died for you and for me, so that we might have eternal life and our sins might be forgiven. Dorothy Day lived this life, suffering the poor and the needy, the hungry and the homeless. And thus she came to experience the joys of God's kingdom, which is present to us, which is at hand.
"But don't call me a saint," Dorothy said at the end of her life, in 1980, when she died. "Don't call me a saint," she said. "I don't want to be dismissed so easily." See, Dorothy knew that saints like Hildegarde and Francis and Clare that we've been hearing about, are too easily cast in plastic and placed on our dressers or printed on two-dimensional holy cards and tucked away in our prayer books. Well, she doesn't have to worry. Dorothy Day was not like Hildegarde, is not like Francis and Clare. Dorothy Day isn't even a saint, although her cause is being put forward. She won't make it. She won't make the list of saints.
You see, Dorothy is too much like us. She could be seated among us this morning and we wouldn't even notice her. Her life was much too burdened with sin. She had a child out of wedlock. She suffered an abortion. She went through the same struggles with her life as you and I go through with our lives. As she talked about it openly in her autobiography, and she thanked God and praised God for the gift of forgiveness that she had received all her life, a great forgiveness which she constantly shared with other people. But she discovered that poverty, although it is a terrible thing to be endured by some, when it is voluntarily embraced, as she did, can be a freeing and purifying force in life. And so she came to experience that. She came to know what Jesus said when He told His disciples, "I teach you all these things so that My joy may be yours, and your joy may be complete." Dorothy Day, in her lifetime, a lifetime of suffering, came to know complete joy, the joy of the Kingdom of God.
It leaves us with the realization, as we look at this simple woman, that, if she can do it, we can do it. For God has given us that Spirit in our hearts that we can come forward filled with the same grace that filled Dorothy Day. And we can do what the Lord calls us to do. The Spirit is giving, but are we using the gifts of the Spirit, the time and the money and the energy to gather the riches of the Kingdom which is coming, and which will endure forever? Or, are we using those same graces to amass the wealth of the world, a world which is passing away? And all who embrace the things of the world will pass away with it. It's as if you and I were given some money by our mothers and sent off to the store to buy bread for the family. Do we buy candy instead for ourselves? The question remains, and the judgment we will face at the end is quite clear. The Lord will stand before each of us and will ask us quite simply, "What have you done with what I have given you?"
On Thursday, March 16th the
Vatican agreed to consider possible “sainthood” for Dorothy Day, heroine of the
Catholic left, journalist, anarchist and pacifist, ignoring objections from
church traditionalists and possibly Dorothy Day’s own wishes.
Few would shake up traditions
more than Day. She converted to
Catholicism after a youth of reckless adventure; by age 30, she’d had an
abortion, a daughter out of wedlock and a divorce. Most of her friends were socialist intellectuals on the Lower
East Side of New York, and were none too fond of the church.
After becoming a Catholic, she
dedicated her life to New York’s poor and immigrants, building hospitality
houses that operated much like homeless shelters. Her endeavor grew into the national Catholic Worker movement, a
social justice crusade conducted in revolutionary tones new to the church. Some journalists and Catholic historians
have described her as the single most important person in the history of the
U.S. Catholic church.
Cardinal O’Connor who submitted
her cause to the Vatican shortly before his death, wrote “It has long been my contention
that Dorothy Day is a saint. Not a
‘gingerbread’ saint or a ‘holy card’ saint, but a modern day devoted daughter
of the church.”
When asked about sainthood
directly, Dorothy Day once quipped: “Don’t trivialize me by trying to make me a
saint.” Those who pushed her cause
defended the decision. “I’d rather risk
having her tamed than forgotten,” said Tom McGrath, publisher of U.S. Catholic. “She belongs to the ages. She’s a saint for our times, someone who can
help us make sense of the challenges of the time.”