Dorothy Day Reflection
“Holy Women: Remembering their Words, Celebrating their Wisdom” Retreat
Mercy Center
Summer, 2004
Isaiah 58: 6-9 and Matthew 25: 31-41
We live in a society that, in Dorothy Day’s words, has a tendency to treat people like Kleenexes – it uses them and then throws them away. This is also a society that believes that when we die, the person with the most toys wins; this is a society that loves to hang on to its perceived superiority over belief systems and cultures different from its own, and that chooses to maintain that superiority.
This inherent but unjust inequality among persons has led us too often to have identified with a God who is into power, a God whom we believe adheres to the hierarchical structures found in our society and in our Church. This is a God, we believe, who identifies with the mighty, with the powerful, with the ones who lord it over the weak and vulnerable. But today Matthew presents to us a very different God – a God who identifies not with the strong and mighty, but with the weak and powerless. What are we to interpret from Matthew about a God such as this?
Time and time again, in the biblical stories such as this one from Matthew handed down to us from our ancestors, and in our own faith journeys, God shows us that God is a God who loves to turn our preconceived notions of the way things are topsy-turvy. God is a God of surprises, who wants to lead us to question the supposed way things should be, because in God’s kingdom, this is not the way things are. What kind of a God is it who would promote the killing and wounding of others so that some could maintain their positions of power and control? What kind of a God is it who would see the justice in the fact that the majority of our nation’s poor are unmarried women with children? What kind of a God is it who thinks that only white, middle-class children deserve a good education and that some races are better than others? Not the God that Matthew presents to us today.
Because Matthew tells us that God not only supports and loves the weak and vulnerable, the needy, then hungry, God sees Godself as one of them! And the primary proof we have for this fantastic identification of God with the powerless is the fact that Jesus came to the earth as one of us, as a baby! the most vulnerable of human creatures. God didn’t choose to come to earth as a great and powerful leader, but as a homeless child to an unwed mother.
This is why, perhaps, God chose to send to us as an emissary, as a prophet, an unlikely person: a woman who dabbled in Communism at one point in her life, a woman who in many ways didn’t fit the societal standards in her day of a proper young lady. Dorothy Day, in spite of being brought up in a family where God was seldom mentioned, much less worshiped, in spite of her tumultuous youth, went on to become one of our Church’s great advocates for the poor. Just as God longs to be in relationship with us because of God’s great love for us, so Dorothy Day longed to reach out to the poor and be in solidarity with them because of her great desire for community, a desire she describes most eloquently in her autobiography The Long Loneliness.
And Dorothy was not a person who did anything halfway. Not for her the feeble attempts most of us make to salvage our conscience when it comes to taking care of the needy; no, she had to go all out and live with them in order to make their cause her own. Nor was she content by her decision alone to live and work with the poor, no, their cause was felt by her so passionately that she felt compelled to speak out against what she perceived as the injustices of her day. Because Dorothy Day railed against war long before most of us ever thought about whether or not humans killing other humans fit into God’s plans for God’s children, Dorothy questioned a Church that built beautiful cathedrals and testaments to God’s majesty but failed to open its doors to the poor, Dorothy wrote to the wife of a president in an effort to change a system that exploited those who tended the land.
And she did it all because of her great belief in God’s tremendous love for us, a love that she clung to her whole life. William D. Miller writes of Dorothy that “in the final accounting of Dorothy’s life, her great power was that she believed. She believed in God and she believed, as she said, in the Creed, in the resurrection of the body. It was the force of this belief that over the years seemed increasingly to take over her person and that set her apart from others.”
God’s kingdom is not an exclusive society where one person is better than another, but a kingdom where all are loved, all are cherished and cared for, and Dorothy Day knew that better than most of us. In our lives of faith, may we be given the gift of new eyes so that we can see the needs of the poor and tend to them as Dorothy would have us do, as Jesus would have us do. May we who long to be holy women ask for the spirit of the incarnate Jesus to take hold of us as it took hold of Dorothy, so that we can take care of the least of others, and so, take care of Jesus. Then we, too, as Matthew says, will be able to sit at the right hand of the Father and inherit the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world.