Sixth Sunday of Easter - Dorothy Day

I recently read that if you can name something then you have power over it.  Not so with Love.  If you can name Love then it has power over you. With Dorothy Day’s  conversion into the Catholic church brought on by the birth of her only child, Tamar, Love burst forth like a flower in full bloom; like a dandelion having all its seeds blown to the wind.

On this sixth Sunday of Easter the second reading from I Peter 3:15-18 is missionary preaching.  These could have been Dorothy’s words; ones she would feed to those that lived within her houses of hospitality.  Dorothy was always ready to mount a defense against injustice, but with an attitude, so that truth would be honored, she did it in Love.  And the Love she lived for those she took in was what Jesus commands us in the gospel of John in the last few days and today. “Love one another as I have Loved you. No one has greater Love than this, than to lay down ones life for a friend.” 

People will disappoint us.  Ones we love will hurt us. We will be shunned when we least expect it.  And in these circumstances we are to remember, to Love as Christ did. The way Dorothy did. The Love of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father as a reciprocal, circuitous movement that cannot be broken. It is a Love that remains. It is in this Love that we are drawn into and to live out as this image of Father and Son. It is a Love that we will lay our lives down for to serve our brothers and sisters. It is the Love that becomes Mercy; the greatest Love of all.  Like Dorothy and many of the saints life becomes Loving. What could be more beautiful?

On this Sunday a year ago, Jerry and I were in New York City.  We visited the Mary House (the women’s Catholic Worker House) where Dorothy lived the last years of her life and passed away.  We spent a good deal of time visiting with her granddaughter, Martha Hennessey.  She gave us a tour of the brownstone that included the chapel that held a simple wooden altar where Dorothy’s body had laid in state.  I ran my hand over the smooth wood and imagined those who had stood here. Peace activists, priests and nuns, former residents and Catholic Workers, neighbors and the faithful who had stood by her all the years; those who had been recipients of her Love.

John Loughery concludes his biography of Dorothy with these words. “ These efforts exemplify ‘ the little way’ of Dorothy’s beloved St. Therese of Lisieux. They embody the Fransiscan ideals of compassion and self-sacrifice and the Benedictine belief in simplicity and prayerful community, all of which meant so much to Dorothy Day. They echo as well Peter Maurin’s insistence that, in the end, love, effort, and faith are all that matter.”

In the end… so faith, hope, Love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is Love.

( I Cor. 13:13)