{"id":3333,"date":"2022-03-27T11:00:55","date_gmt":"2022-03-27T15:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3333"},"modified":"2022-03-28T12:47:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T16:47:02","slug":"lenten-series-2022-the-work-of-dorothy-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2022\/03\/27\/lenten-series-2022-the-work-of-dorothy-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Lenten Series 2022: The Work of Dorothy Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

<\/a>Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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We listen to St Luke this year.\u00a0 We do so, one step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one episode, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one beloved, venerable parable. at a time. \u00a0Still, there are some outstanding features of the Lukan horizon, which we may simply name as we go forth. \u00a0\u00a0First, Luke displays a commitment to and interest in history, and orderly history at that. \u00a0Both Luke and Acts are cast in a distinctive historical mode. \u00a0Second, Luke employs and deploys his own theology, or theological perspective, including this emphasis upon history and the divine purpose, or better said, divine meaning, in history\u2014on this more in a moment. \u00a0\u00a0Third, Luke highlights the humanity and compassion of Jesus in a remarkable way. \u00a0The Christ of St. Luke is the Christ of magnificent compassion, embodied in the humility of a birth among shepherds. \u00a0The poor, women, the stranger, the injured, those in dire need all stand out in Luke, as the recipients and subjects of Jesus\u2019 love, mercy, grace and compassion. \u00a0Fourth, Luke carries an abiding interest in the church. \u00a0Ephesians says that \u2018through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers.\u2019\u00a0That catches the spirit of the author of the third gospel and of the Acts to follow. \u00a0\u00a0It is this feature of Luke, the Lukan passion for compassion, upon which our passage has centered this morning. \u00a0So, we are taught: \u00a0know history, think for yourself, love the church, have compassion.\u00a0 Dorothy Day, our Lent 2022 theological conversation partner, would have agreed.<\/p>\n

Now I put it to you:\u00a0 how long has it been since you have had a prodigal thought?\u00a0 The prodigal son is prodigally reckless in departure.\u00a0 But he is prodigally excellent and ecstatic in return.\u00a0 His negative prodigality in descent is eclipsed by his positive prodigality in resurrection.\u00a0 How long has it been since you have\u00a0come to yourself?<\/em><\/p>\n

Though no one says so, and to my knowledge no one has yet so written, Luke 15 may be the most Gnostic of chapters in the New Testament.\u00a0 It is about gnosis, self knowledge,\u00a0coming to oneself.<\/em> As the Gnostics taught, we are trapped in a far country, a long way from our true home, like a man who has squandered his birthright, and moved from light to darkness. \u00a0As the Gnostics taught, we are meant to get home, to get back home, to get back out from under this earthly, fleshly, pig slop bodily existence, and back to higher ground, to heaven, to the heaven beyond heaven, to the land of light, to the loving father, like a prodigal son returning to the home that is truly his.\u00a0 As the Gnostics taught, there is just one way to get back home, one key to the magic door.\u00a0 That way and that key is knowledge, self knowledge, <\/em>the knowledge of one\u2019s own self\u2014whence we come, wither we go.\u00a0 As the Gnostics taught, salvation comes from this sort of esoteric, personal, soulful knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0When he came to himself\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

It is jarring, I give you that, to admit that this most traditional and most popular and most orthodox of parables may well have grown up outside the barn, outside the fences of mainstream Christianity.\u00a0 But there is nothing orthodox about the prodigal and his coming to himself.\u00a0 His is truly a\u00a0prodigal <\/em>thought.\u00a0 I need to get back home.\u00a0 Back to the land of light.\u00a0 Back to the pleroma.\u00a0 Back to the God beyond God.\u00a0 No \u2018Christ died for our sins\u2019, here.\u00a0 No \u2018lamb of God\u2019, here.\u00a0 No settled orthodox Christology here.\u00a0 No cross, no gory glory, no Gethsemane, no passion of the Christ, here.\u00a0 It all comes down to self awareness, to awakening, to a moment of clarity.\u00a0\u00a0When he came to himself. <\/em>The parable of the Prodigal Son is the most Gnostic, most heterodox, most Johannine of them all.\u00a0 Stuck here in the middle of Luke, read here in the middle of Lent, interpreted here in the middle of March.<\/p>\n

The Gospel challenges us to come out from hiding.<\/p>\n

You cannot hide behind a distrust of organized religion today.\u00a0 The prodigal thought soars beyond that.\u00a0 You cannot hide behind a disdain\u2014often altogether true and righteous–for clergy, for formality, for robes and choirs and altars and candles.\u00a0 This prodigal thought pierces all that.\u00a0 You cannot hide behind the hideous moments in religious and Christian history\u2014many there be\u2014as a way to fend off the gospel, at least not this morning.\u00a0 The knife cuts deeper, to the deeps, to your very soul.<\/p>\n

Nor can you even hide behind a critique of Roman Catholicism today.\u00a0 Prodigal thought soars beyond that.\u00a0 You may reject the celibacy of the priesthood, the sacrifice of the mass, the subordination of women, and the infallibility of the pope.\u00a0 But many, very many, Catholics do the same.\u00a0 No, the gospel undercuts your smart but narrow critique, and asks about your soul.\u00a0 You do have one you know.<\/p>\n

Luke 15 asks whether you are coming to know yourself?\u00a0 Are you?\u00a0 This is the parable, oddly enough, that calls the seekers\u2019 bluff.\u00a0\u00a0 Today the Gospel attacks where you have finally no ready defense.\u00a0 It moves to your mind, your soul, your own most self.\u00a0 Dorothy Day would emphatically agree.\u00a0 In this very hour, we are caught in an awful dilemma, a tragedy of global proportions today.\u00a0 We pray for those seasoned sober leaders, President Biden and others, seeking somehow to balance a rigorous resistance to heinous, unprovoked warfare and slaughter in Ukraine, with a measured restraint to keep this horror from becoming a global conflagration.\u00a0 At the least we can find ways, say through UMCOR, to support refugees, now with our means, and perhaps later with our spaces.\u00a0 Dorothy Day would admonish us to do so.<\/p>\n

The Work of Dorothy Day<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

How surprised, stunned, even, we were to learn that the Roman Church itself has this winter proposed her for consideration for sainthood, after 20 years of study.\u00a0 Not only her life, troubled as it was, nor only her faith, radiant as it was, has brought this consideration of canonization.\u00a0 More than either of these, it was Day\u2019s work that did so.\u00a0 Hers was a work life of continuous experimentation.\u00a0 In a way, she embodies our parable today.\u00a0 We think of her obedience, as with the figure of the older son at the end of the parable.\u00a0 But her life began much closer to the waywardness of the younger son with which the parable begins.\u00a0 In a way, as with the prodigal, and strangely, that early prodigality somehow quickened in her a prodigious generosity, a prodigality of work.\u00a0 Our biographer guides, Loughery and Randolph, often cited in these sermons, <\/em>have taught us so.<\/p>\n

For instance, after WW II, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers began to experiment with farming, with country living, including a purchase in Newburgh, NY.\u00a0 She was a 21st<\/sup> century soul, ahead of her time in world consciousness, in \u2018thinking globally, acting locally\u2019, in communal living, in critique of technology, in continuous experimentation, and, in Newburgh and elsewhere, in love of nature and regard for the natural world.\u00a0 And she wanted people to learn and go, to grow and move.\u00a0 Of the Catholic Workers Houses she said, This is a school.\u00a0 No one is meant to stay here forever. (251)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>For instance, later in her life, Dorothy Day received a visit from the famous author Evelyn Waugh.\u00a0 A friend had encouraged him to enjoy all the great good things in New York, but also to make sure to see the poor of the city, and especially to visit with Day.\u00a0 He offered to take her to a fine restaurant, one she in fact had known well over the years, but she declined, inviting him rather to a simple restaurant, and then to visit the hospitality house nearby.\u00a0 Waugh\u2019s biographer later wrote: \u00a0Waugh encountered in\u2026Day a personality as tough and autocratic as his own, yet infinitely less selfish\u2014a disarming combination.\u00a0 Confronted by this genuine ascetic whose entire working life was devoted to practical charity, he discovered a more sympathetic version of a close friend\u2019s argument:\u00a0 that the aims of Christianity and capitalism were fundamentally opposed.\u00a0 It was not an idea he cared to ponder for long, but he retreated to the Plaza somewhat chastened (238).\u00a0 <\/em>Sometimes a single, personal experience of someone\u2019s sacrificial living and giving can make a lasting, transformative impact.\u00a0 And sometimes, perhaps Lent 2022, an encounter with a truly radical spirit, with whom you and I may not always agree, can cause oen, you?, to come to himself.<\/em><\/p>\n

For instance, The Catholic Worker<\/em> began as a newspaper, but fairly quickly expanded into a movement.\u00a0 The movement, with Dorothy Day at the head was devoted to hospitality, and hospitality in particular for the poor.\u00a0 Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were committed to radical hospitality for the poor.\u00a0 \u2018Voluntary poverty brought into living practice the radical egalitarianism preached by Jesus\u2019. (150)\u2026\u2019There are three things you have to accept about very poor people who have lived on the street\u2026they don\u2019t smell good, they aren\u2019t grateful and they are apt to steal\u2019 (152).<\/p>\n

The work with and among the poor, it should be emphasized, was every bit as much about the spiritual development of the worker, as it was about the care of the needy.\u00a0 The houses of St. Joseph offered hospitality to the guests, and spiritual formation to the workers.\u00a0 And the conditions in these houses were very rough.\u00a0 As the Catholic Worker movement, publication and hospitality and all, began to expand, so did Dorothy Day\u2019s work in public speaking, which would consume much of her life over the next forty years or so.\u00a0 Hers was a wide angle vision, a high hope, a global voice: If working men and women were solely concerned with better wages for themselves and not with larger ideas about community, societal change, and our God-ordained obligations to one another, the labor struggle would mean nothing in the long run (181).<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>For instance, an especially striking outgrowth and outcome of her earlier work with the Catholic Worker emerged with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.\u00a0 For Progressive Catholicism worldwide, the Spanish Civil War produced the horns of a very difficult dilemma.\u00a0 On side were the republicans of Barcelona and elsewhere, like Hemingway\u2019s Robert Jordan, committed to liberty and justice and progressive treatment and care of the poor. On the other side were those who supported the Church, the Catholic Church, and its traditions and clergy and history and culture.\u00a0 One Progressive.\u00a0 The other Catholic.\u00a0 Spain tore American Progressive Catholicism in half.\u00a0 Support the Church and stomach Franco, or support freedom and stomach Stalin.\u00a0 She and her communities were torn apart from both sides.\u00a0 She largely sided with the republicans, but not enough to satisfy everyone.\u00a0 Still, the Catholic Worker movement and paper, like Allan Knight Chalmers and others, voiced and continuously retained a strong, clear utterly pacifist position through the Spanish War, the Second World War, the Korean Conflict and the War in Vietnam. This split the movement.\u00a0 The Detroit, Cleveland and Boston houses agreed with her; the Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles houses did not (199).<\/p>\n

For instance, by the 1950\u2019s, Day and The Catholic Worker were involved in opposition to nuclear war, arms and weaponry.\u00a0 Some of us grew up with weekly air raid drills, in which all in the elementary schools were sent to sit underneath our desks in preparation for a nuclear attack.\u00a0 Day and her community chastised this (in hindsight clearly misguided) practice because it purpose, she asserted, was allowing the government and the military-industrial complex to render the unthinkable thinkable and therefore less in need of an immediate solution (264).<\/em>\u00a0 Our own experience of January 6 is similar, to take what would be utterly unthinkable, the assault on and desecration of the nation\u2019s capital, and to normalize, or accommodate, or make space in the mind and the culture for such travesty.\u00a0 In a year, already, we have seen just how successful that kind of project can be.\u00a0 One ongoing, continuous aspect of her work came through acceptance of many invitations to speak, lecture, occasionally to preach.\u00a0 And she had influence.\u00a0 After Michael Harrington wrote The Other America (1962), <\/em>he included in the preface: It was through Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement that I first came into contact with the terrible reality of involuntary poverty and the magnificent ideal of voluntary poverty (297).<\/em><\/p>\n

Born, recall, in 1897, Dorothy Day was vibrantly active in the late 1960\u2019s, in opposition to the war in Vietnam, the ultimate heartbreach for Dorothy Day the citizen as well as Dorothy Day the Catholic, shattering hopes formed fifty years earlier that her country would ultimately use its power and prestige for greater ends (308).\u00a0 <\/em>Born in 1897, her view of the youth of the 1960\u2019s was anything but starry-eyed\u2026(including) acerbic comments about the long haired, sexually active, drug-indulging young women and men she encountered so frequently in New York and on her travels (315).\u00a0 <\/em>She made time to visit, and admire Haley House, here in Boston, and said in ringing oratory: Our present capitalist, industrialist system is inhuman and wicked (330)\u2026we don\u2019t measure our success, we don\u2019t despair and we don\u2019t judge; we simply do the work God intends us to do.(336).\u00a0 <\/em>These are steadying late pandemic words for us, in 2022.\u00a0 Do the work God intends us to do.\u00a0 Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.\u00a0 And she found time every Saturday afternoon to listen to the broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.\u00a0 The work with the poor continued on: A Catholic Worker house, unlike a Salvation Army shelter or city shelter, would expect nothing, demand nothing from (the poor).<\/em>\u00a0 Many of us, myself included, might well have difficulty with this.\u00a0 Yet she was not a 21st<\/sup> century feminist, at least not in the standard sense.\u00a0 Poverty, race and religion were more important to her that gender (349).\u00a0 She spoke in public for the last time in 1976, suffering a heart attack that year, the same autumn some of us began seminary, up the street at UTS.\u00a0 St Joseph House and Maryhouse remain, four decades after Dorothy Day\u2019s death, exactly where they have always been, but surrounded now by chic eateries, high price co-ops, boutique hotels and chain stores (360). <\/em>\u00a0One wonders.\u00a0 Could Dorothy Day cause us to come to ourselves?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>We give Day the last word: \u201cWe must practice the presence of God. He said that when two or three are gathered together, there he is in the midst of them. He is with us in our kitchens, at our tables, on our breadlines, with our visitors, on our farms. When we pray for our material needs, it brings us close to his humanity. He, too, needed food and shelter; he, too, warmed his hands at a fire and lay down in a boat to sleep.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
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Click here to hear the full service Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Click here to hear just the sermon We listen to St Luke this year.\u00a0 We do so, one step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one episode, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one beloved, venerable parable. at a time. \u00a0Still, there are […]<\/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\/3333"}],"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=3333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3334,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3333\/revisions\/3334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}