{"id":3321,"date":"2022-03-13T11:00:38","date_gmt":"2022-03-13T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3321"},"modified":"2022-03-14T11:46:40","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T15:46:40","slug":"lenten-series-2022-the-life-of-dorothy-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2022\/03\/13\/lenten-series-2022-the-life-of-dorothy-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Lenten Series 2022: The Life of Dorothy Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Luke 13:31-35<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Bring to our troubled minds<\/em><\/p>\n

Uncertain and afraid<\/em><\/p>\n

The quiet of a steadfast faith<\/em><\/p>\n

Calm of a call obeyed<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes an encounter with a radically committed person, one like Dorothy Day, can free up a part of a person in soul and spirit in a way that frees up the rest of him or her.\u00a0 One wonders whether that might happen for some, for some of us, this Lent?\u00a0 These three weeks we converse with Day, her life and her faith and her work, even as we listen for the Gospel in Luke.<\/p>\n

No other Lukan passage, nor any in the Gospels together, so firmly as ours today fixes Jesus and his Word, the church and its Gospel, in the waves, swells, eddies and swirls of politics.\u00a0 Amid much happier parables, chapters 8-18, blessed and beautiful and exclusive to Luke\u2014Samaritan, good; Son, prodigal; Steward, dishonest yet somehow noble\u2014Jesus accosts us and upbraids us today in full cultural mien.\u00a0 The governmental power of the day is Herod, whom Jesus dresses down, insults even, as \u2018that fox\u2019.\u00a0 The warning about power and its move against truth comes, perhaps with a strange motive, but cast by Luke in the affirmative, comes from Jesus\u2019 opponents, the Pharisees.\u00a0 Jesus is fearless, here, though not so such in the garden of Gethsemane later.\u00a0 He places Himself, or rather, Luke places himself placing himself, in the centuries\u2019 long tradition of the Hebrew Prophets, a tradition pristine, golden, unlike any other in religious history, four the greater and twelve the lesser.\u00a0 All found their way, or their voice, or both in Jerusalem, the religious and political center.\u00a0 Jerusalem whom Jesus loves, loves so much, loves like a mother hen, loves like a momma, like a hen gathering her chicks.\u00a0 A striking, feminine image of the divine, strong and true.\u00a0 The Gospel is social through and through, as Luke here today reminds us.\u00a0 Read the Bible and Luke and Luke 13:\u00a0 Jerusalem! Jerusalem!\u00a0 Or for us today:\u00a0 Pollution! Pandemic! Politics! Prejudice! Pocketbook! Peril!\u00a0 Jerusalem! Jerusalem! There is no holiness save social holiness, taught Mr. Wesley.\u00a0 None. No other Lukan passage, nor any in the Gospels together, so firmly as ours today fixes Jesus and his Word, the church and its Gospel, in the swells, eddies and swirls of politics.<\/p>\n

What do we find in Luke?<\/p>\n

Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 85 or 90 of the common era (in fact, possibly much later). \u00a0Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us. \u00a0We know him only through the writing itself.<\/p>\n

Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients. \u00a0First, Luke uses most of Mark. \u00a0An example is the memory of a part of our passage today, Luke 13: 34ff. \u00a0Like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earlier gospel of Mark. \u00a0But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases. \u00a0This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need. \u00a0In fact, we are summoned and ordered to do so, and not free not to do so. \u00a0Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew. \u00a0An example is our Lord\u2019s Prayer, later in the service. \u00a0Luke\u2019s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the beatitudes and other teachings, found in the \u2018sermon on the plain\u2019, rather than the \u2018sermon on the mount\u2019. \u00a0Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere. \u00a0The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, where we find ourselves this morning, are all his. \u00a0 Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.\u00a0 And what does Luke say? \u00a0Ah, this will take us the rest of the year and more fully to unravel, including our work this Lent.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>For our Lenten Sermon Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with Dorothy Day, a Lukan Christian if ever there was one.\u00a0 In this Marsh Chapel pulpit, from 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition, so important to the first 200 years in New England.\u00a0 In the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England. \u00a0With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years\u2014voices <\/em>like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), John Calvin (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin)(2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes<\/em> like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016). \u00a0Then in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turned left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020), and St Patrick (2021).\u00a0 In future years, it may be Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, or others, one per year.\u00a0 Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?\u00a0 For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.\u00a0 Yet something about this past year and its hurts, something about Covid life in Boston it may be, something about the events and outcomes of late autumn, something about immersion in the home of the bean and the cod for several years, something, a connection say with our many Roman Catholic friends, listeners, correspondents, partners in the fellowship of the Gospel, brought her forward.\u00a0 Day was viscerally engaged in the political struggles of her era, out of her hard won understanding the rudiments of Christianity.\u00a0 Hers may be a very timely voice for us in late Covid, winter, 2022.\u00a0 Today we mark two years of Covid, costly, costly years.\u00a0 Right now, we are viscerally engaged in our own struggles.\u00a0 We are seeking to support, for instance, what is right and best in Ukraine, with measures both of resistance and restraint, resistance to merciless brutality, and restraint before the prospect of nuclear conflagration.\u00a0 One pastoral word, among others, might be today to keep us focused on our own circles of influence, the places where we can actually make a difference, over against the global and endless circles of concern which we carry. (One such is the United Methodist Committee on Relief, UMCOR.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Today, perhaps, we can begin to converse with Day, in connection to her sense of spirit throughout the course of her long, troubled, and difficult life.<\/p>\n

In Covid autumn, 2020, our son gave as a birthday present a book,<\/p>\n

(Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century.<\/em> John Loughery and Blythe Randolph.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Simon and Schuster, 2020.). <\/em>\u00a0Initially, it lay unread, but still at hand.\u00a0 Books have a way of staying around, of quietly reaching out to us.\u00a0 Its first chapters, about her raucous wayward early life, were at the first off-putting, even as much as they were news or unknown, so again, it moved back in the pack.\u00a0 Somehow, though, the tome came on and proposed, even insisted, to be read.\u00a0 Read it was.\u00a0 And what a gift, one of the quiet Covid gifts that kept us going through two years, marked this day, two years of rot, of loss, of diminishment, of worry, of hurt, of anxiety, depression, loneliness and deadly wreckage, especially for the least, the last and the lost. We have miles to go in recovery before we sleep. And what better document to peruse in Covid?\u00a0 It became read because it demanded to be read and should have been read.\u00a0 And was.<\/p>\n

Born in 1897, Dorothy was raised in vaguely Episcopalian home, with two brothers, a philandering father, and a devoted mother.\u00a0 What is striking to the average revisitation of her early life is just how chaotic, tempestuous, conflicted and hard it was. (It seems, at least to this observer, that she spent much of the rest of her life trying to escape her youth\u2014its emptiness, its infidelities, its spiritual sterility, its abandonment of faith and church and God.)\u00a0\u00a0 She was raised for a time in Chicago, went to college in Champagne Urbana on her own steam and dime, and for some decades lived a bohemian life.\u00a0 She drank heavily, loved widely, moved frequently, and befriended generously.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of us know her, if at all, through the lens of The Catholic Worker<\/em>, which is fair enough.\u00a0 But prior to the advent of that publication, she had already developed an experienced writing life, largely in New York City, which included community, consort and conversation with some of the leading cultural, theatrical, musical and political leaders of the time.<\/p>\n

Dorothy was a convert to Catholicism, drawn heavily, as are so many seminarians today, to the biblical and historical Christian commitment to justice, and for the poor.\u00a0 Wrote her biographers Loughery and Randolph: The belief that material comfort\u2014and, in particular, wealth\u2014might actually be dangerous, putting a distance between God and one\u2019s fundamental humanity, wasn\u2019t a notion Americans were or are comfortable with.\u00a0 She came to believe that the true objects of devotion in Western culture\u2014security, affluence, national pride, an enthrallment to innovation and technology\u2014were the sources of our undoing as a moral society, and she was impatient with anyone who made religions seem reassuring rather than demanding and transcendent.\u00a0 The New Testament called on all believers to fight racism, war and poverty, or it meant nothing at all.\u00a0 Faith was less about solace than a call to action and disruption.\u00a0 Piety and conformity to social norms had little to do with each other. (2).<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Following her younger years in the mid-west, Dorothy Day primarily lived in New York City, in and near the Bowery.\u00a0 She wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin<\/em>, which had some critical success and modest sales.\u00a0 The reading and re-revisitation of her younger adult years is simply harrowing.\u00a0 She embraced a series of, frankly, violent men, who after a time each left her, one leaving her pregnant which led to an abortion.\u00a0 The homes were harrowing, the circumstances harrowing, the labor required harrowing.\u00a0 One Greenwich Village apartment engulfed her in a gas leak, leaving her unconscious, and almost leaving her dead.\u00a0 Yet she read widely and knew many of the great writers of the age\u2014Maugham, Wolfe, Lawrence, Wharton, James, Merton, Anderson, Auden, O\u2019Neill (one of her consorts), London, Dell, Fitzgerald, Monroe, Merton, Berrigan, Crane, Porter, Chesterton, Maritain, Sanger, all–and wrote for various radical publications:\u00a0 The Call, the Masses, The Liberator, others. <\/em>\u00a0In 1926 she gave birth to her daughter, Tamar, (Hebrew for Palm Tree) (106).<\/p>\n

One of the ways, it seems, that over time Dorothy Day could handle and withstand the kind of stress and difficulty of her activist life, had to do with the regular use of retreats.\u00a0 How else would she be able steadily to speak out, as she did in a letter in Commonweal <\/em>in 1948:\u00a0 Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his brothers\u2026and the Russians are our brothers, the Negro is our brother, the Japanese are our brothers, the Germans, the Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Jews and Arabs. <\/em>\u00a0(235).\u00a0 In the same issue, the editors of Commonweal<\/em> wrote a strong critique of Day and her letter.<\/p>\n

Dorothy Day\u2019s life, work and faith are described in her best-known book The Long Loneliness, 1952.\u00a0 <\/em>Asked her biographers:\u00a0 How much of Christ\u2019s message were Christians really willing to accept? (256) (She was) committed to building a new society within the shell of the old (258). <\/em>\u00a0A new society within the shell of the old.\u00a0 Hm. It is striking just how faithfully, consistently, sacrificially and fully Day combined a dual allegiance:\u00a0 both to her progressive ideals, and to the Roman Catholic Church, though she acquired many critics from both communities.<\/p>\n

She was buried on December 2, 1980, following a funeral service at the Church of the Nativity on Second Avenue.\u00a0 The readings in the service included Isaiah 58: 6-12, 1 John 4: 11-18, Matthew 5: 1-12.\u00a0 The recessional hymn was \u2018A Mighty Fortress.\u00a0 Her eulogy included her own motto, or statement, or credo: All my life I have been haunted by God. (369)<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes an encounter with a radically committed person, one like Dorothy Day, can free up a part of a person in soul and spirit in a way that frees up the rest of him or her.\u00a0 One wonders whether that might happen for some, for some of us, this Lent?\u00a0 One in one such moment prayed, Lord make me common as sagebrush, then set me on fire for the Gospel.\u00a0 <\/em>She and others point us to the living Christ, who promises today, \u2018Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service Luke 13:31-35 Click here to hear just the sermon Bring to our troubled minds Uncertain and afraid The quiet of a steadfast faith Calm of a call obeyed Sometimes an encounter with a radically committed person, one like Dorothy Day, can free up a part of a person […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[59,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3322,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3321\/revisions\/3322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}