by Mary E. Johnson
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Prayer: Shepherd me, O God, from all my wants and all my fears – from death into life. Amen.
I was called to see a patient who had just had a difficult conversation with her oncologist. The news the doctor was delivering wasn’t good. I anticipated that I would sit with her while she let things sink in. As soon as she saw me she said, “We have to pray.” In my seasoned and pastorally astute mind I thought I understood her need. Then she said, “We have to pray for my oncologist who just had to come in here and tell me this really awful news.”
I would guess that most of us have received bad news at one time or another in our lives. Perhaps news of a concerning diagnosis for yourself or someone you love? Or maybe the news of an untimely death of someone with whom you worked or lived for years? Or maybe bad news that – for one reason or another – was going to change the course of your life?
Numerous studies have been done on the art of breaking bad news.
What isn’t in the professional literature is evidence about reactions to the reception of bad, life-changing or life-transforming news. I will offer that the question Why is this happening to me? runs through most human minds when faced with crisis – regardless of faith or self-understanding or emotional maturity. Most people entertain the question – Why is this happening to me?
In my experience as a spiritual care provider, I would say that many people allow that existential query to quickly pass through their minds. They move on because either the question just isn’t helpful or, on some level, they have already answered the question for themselves. Other folks need to spend time pondering that question, usually because it is part of a larger question about the meaning of their life or their relationship with a power greater than themselves. Some folks die trying to answer that question. It haunts them and they struggle to reconcile their understanding of God or the universe with their current circumstance.
In today’s gospel the question Why is this happening… takes on a cultural/theological caste. Jesus’ disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The disciples were holding onto a story that they had received about sin being the cause of blindness at birth.
It seemed easier for them to have the comfort of a simple, culturally accepted answer to a complex question than to wrestle with the reality that the blind man had just been miraculously healed.
Jesus corrects the disciples, letting them know that sin was not the cause of the man’s blindness but that instead, his blindness was a prompt for God’s power to be displayed to the people – an invitation to come out of the spiritual darkness and into the light.
Even the man’s own testimony about his own experience was marginalized by his own community. How many times was he asked to repeat the story of his healing and how many times was he disbelieved?
The Pharisee’s were also spiritually blind to the miracle. The evidence was right in front of them and was a sort of counternarrative to what they’ve known and understood about God and how God operates. This new story of God’s action in front of them – a story of liberation – conflicts with the story of God they have known and the story they feel has been revealed to them in their sacred scripture.
How often do you and I experience testimonies – stories of God – that push against our understanding of how God has been revealed to us through scripture or through our own experience? How do we handle these conflicting narratives?
We live in a world of conflicting narratives. How do we know what we know about ourselves and about each other? Who gets to tell the story of our lives?
Dorothy Day lived in a world of conflicting narratives. You probably recognize her name. It is synonymous with Catholicism, social justice, worker’s rights, labor unions, protesting, pacifism, piety, radicalism, even communism and anarchy. Images of Dorothy Day – like the one in front of us this morning – project a sweet old lady in a funny little hat, fist raised in protest or in solidarity. This photo was likely taken around the time of Dorothy’s last arrest at age 75 as she attended a farm worker’s rally in California in support of the work of Caesar Chavez.
But let’s talk about the 50+ years of Dorothy’s public witness that came before this photo – a half-century of total dedication to the gospel and the nurturing of a new movement.
Dorothy was born at the end of the 19th century into an Episcopal family of journalists. She, herself, was a writer and journalist. As a journalist Dorothy saw that everyone didn’t have the same opportunities, that the playing field was not level, that – as we say in our liturgy – some had unearned privilege while others had unearned oppression. It was this sense of systemic injustice that guided her life and choices as a young woman, often the only woman at the table.
Dorothy became involved in the labor movement at a time when protesters were reviled and had no rights and protections. You could be assaulted with a billy club or attacked by a police dog and hauled off to jail. No legal representation, no one blowing whistles or recording what happened to you on their cellphones.
I want to highlight two events in Dorothy’s early years – her incarceration and her conversion that would shape her life and ministry going forward.
One evening Dorothy and another woman were attending a meeting at the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World – in Chicago. In the evening police conducted a raid on the I.I.W. headquarters and Dorothy and the other woman were arrested. Dorothy had been arrested before while protesting – in and out of custody in a few hours – but this was different. Police took the two women to jail and charged them with prostitution. After all, what else would the women be doing at the union headquarters? The pair were incarcerated for 30 days in a small, dirty, overcrowded cell.
The woman with whom Dorothy was jailed was older and more seasoned and helped her get through what, for Dorothy, would be a “dark night of the soul” in that jail cell – an experience of vulnerability and powerlessness that would connect her with the countless numbers of unhoused, poor, mentally ill, destitute people she would seek to serve over her lifetime. This incarceration was her spiritual awakening.
As a young adult Dorothy’s fervor for justice only grew. And so did her spiritual hunger. She longed for something deeper, something grounded, rooted. She felt a calling that she didn’t not completely understand.
Dorothy’s religious conversion began with curiosity. She met people who encouraged her to continue seeking. She was drawn to holy places where she felt the presence of God – churches, temples, chapels, monasteries and in prayer and conversation with other seekers. She began to understand that she was seeking the face of Christ in others. She later wrote, “I joined the Church to find out who I was meant to be.” She would later describe her religious conversion as “a lifelong process.”
Around this same time Dorothy had fallen in love. The man with whom she would bear a daughter would be the only man she would ever love. According to Eileen Egan, one of Dorothy’s biographers, “The man Dorothy loved, with whom she lived in a common law marriage, was a man of unbending dedication to his own principles. He would have nothing to do with a formal wedding ceremony, and he made it clear to Dorothy that he would have nothing to do with religion or with her if she embraced it. She would have to choose and she chose the Church. Hence the title of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness in which she wrote, “Becoming a Catholic would mean facing life alone. I did not want to be alone. I did not want to give up human love when it was dearest and tenderest.” But she did.
Separation from the man she loved was the first test of her acceptance of Jesus and the Catholic Church, but it was only part of the separation she would have to endure. The other separation was from the many friends with whom she had shared the revolutionary ferment of New York’s young writers, artists, and activists. Her friends did not understand Dorothy’s need for religion nor did they understand her spiritual hunger.
In 1933, as the Great Depression ground on, Dorothy co-founded The Catholic Worker Movement. She envisioned the Movement as an intentional community – members choosing to live together and share resources based on common values and a shared purpose.
In the Movement Dorothy believed that the opportunity to work, to earn, to provide for was an important component of human dignity. Dorothy wrote, “The whole of the Catholic Worker Movement is this: finding your vocation; finding the part where you can work best and go there to work at it.”
The Movement began with the production and distribution of an eight-page tabloid newspaper, The Catholic Worker. It was “for those who think there is no hope for the future and who find no recognition of their plight.” Keep in mind that this message of hope was going out to literally millions of persons ruined by the Depression. Many were immigrants. No money. No food. No housing. No work. No hope.
From the kitchen of the first Catholic Worker Hospitality House in New York City 1000 people ate every day. Not one of the diners was ever asked why they were unemployed, poor or hungry. St. Joseph House in Manhattan is still open and still feeding people every day.
Dorothy claimed the Sermon on the Mount as the manifesto of the Catholic Worker Movement. She believed that the essence of Jesus’ teaching is found in Matthew 5-7. She wrote, “We are trying to lead a good life – to follow Jesus’ teaching and it is most astounding the things that happen when you start trying to live this way. To perform the works of mercy – feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, visiting the sick, visiting the imprisoned, burying the dead.”
Also central to the Movement was the practice of voluntary poverty – the choice to live simply. For Dorothy and others this was a spiritual act and a form of resistance against what we now call consumerism. She believed that Christianity and capitalism were incompatible. She never owned a new piece of clothing or a car that had all of its parts. She never lived in or owned a house with indoor plumbing, heating or electricity until later in her life. During much of the year the only available food came from the Movement’s gardens or charitable donations. Dorothy believed that voluntary poverty opens us to seeing rightly; unclutters our lives and opens us to living rightly.
The Catholic Church had become Dorothy’s beloved spiritual home. She was devout and quite pietistic. She loved the liturgy, the sacraments, the rituals, the theology, and the saints. She trusted the pastoral counsel of the clergy. But the Church was not exempt from her scrutiny when it came to issues of social justice.
Over the course of her life in the Movement Dorothy held Church leadership’s feet to the fire when they were soft on Nazis’ and antisemitism, when support for farm workers’ rights and unions was lukewarm, when response to the poor was underwhelming, and even in our lifetime when the Church failed to condemn the cruel regimes in Central America and the production of nuclear weapons.
The Church, in Dorothy’s view, also missed the boat regarding pacifism. She believed that making war was also incompatible with Christianity. She testified before Congress about the moral imperative of conscientious objection. Keep in mind that this was happening during WWII when much of the world was united against a common enemy and serving your country was considered to be your patriotic and moral duty.
Dorothy Day died in 1980 in her one-room accommodation at Maryhouse, a respite home for women that she had founded in New York City some years before. The room had a bed, a chair, and a small desk where Dorothy wrote her last journal entries. Also on the desk was her tattered copy of The Imitation of Christ, the classic devotional by Thomas A’Kempis given to her at her baptism.
Dorothy Day is now known in the Roman Catholic Church as a Servant of God – the first recognition toward canonization or sainthood. Dorothy, herself, had strong feelings about this. In a 1977 interview she stated, “That’s the way people try to dismiss you. If you’re a saint then you must be impractical and utopian, and nobody has to pay attention to you. I don’t want to be dismissed.”
In Proverbs we read, “When Wisdom is embraced righteousness, justice and fairness are known, all paths are illumined, and you need fear no detour. When Wisdom enters your heart and knowledge your soul, you will perceive the order of the universe and never despair.”
Today we live in a world of conflicting narratives. What would Dorothy say about today? What would she say about the Occupation, about the presence of armed agents bounty hunting on our streets, in our schools, hospitals and homes, about the snatching and detainment of our neighbors in inhumane conditions?
What would she say about Minnesotans coming together to grieve, to call out the cruelty, to document and resist the injustice, to feed the hungry and the scared, to watch a new community of love and support emerge?
I think her sentiments might be echoed in the words of James Martin, SJ, longtime Editor of America Magazine. “Despair takes us away from God in the present. It keeps us focused on all the terrible things that may happen in the future, and that means that we can be blind to all the ways, even if they are small, that God is communicating with us now.”
Viva la Revolution!
Amen.
The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist, Dorothy Day, 1952.
Dorothy Day and the Permanent Revolution, Eileen Egan, 1983.
Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of my Grandmother,
Kate Hennessey, 2017.
The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature. Rabbi Rami Shapiro (translation and annotation), 2014.
