being on pilgrimage
in Chicago & Indianapolis
“We believe in giving away everything we have and then when we get hard up appealing for help”
— Dorothy Day, 1935
This weekend, we have been at the Eucharistic Congress.1 One week ago, I wasn’t quite sure how it was all going to work. One month ago, I wasn’t sure how we were even going to get here.
It’s not like we didn’t have time to plan something—one year ago, Martha began trying to organize Catholic Workers to attend the Congress and speak, as her grandmother, Dorothy Day, had spoken at the last one in 1976. But I suppose it just took the rest of us a long time to figure out exactly what we were going to do there and how we were to get tehre—since paying $375 for a Congress pass and more than that for a hotel room for the week was not going to happen. Eventually, I just decided I needed to let the act come together, I didn’t have the energy to put it together myself. I just said: “We’re on pilgrimage, let’s see what happens.”
When you are on pilgrimage, you are on something not of your own design: the journey is God’s and you are God’s to take care of.
Sparrows are so sweet: no one thinks they are beautiful. They are seen as worthless, no city bird-watchers care about them. But give them a few minutes notice, and you begin to admire the pert little shapes their bodies make, burrowing in gravel, flicking through puddles or hovering over dropped halal food. They bring light to the concrete “doom castles,” as Barbara Kingsolver calls them, of the city. And no one may notice when one of them falls out of a nest or hits a glass window and dies except God.
Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not keep track of it. Surely, God can be trusted to do the same for me. And God does. Our pilgrimage to Indianapolis was full of generosity on every side: in housing us, feeding us, giving us entry, we were met with hospitality.
In a recent lecture on Dorothy Day and Jacques Derrida, Harry Murray, professor emeritus of sociology at Nazareth College in Rochester and worker emeritus at Catholic Worker communities across upstate New York and New England, spoke about Derrida’s idea of “unconditional hospitality” and his ideal of a kind of hospitality where the divide between host and guest disappears.
Derrida, perhaps, never got the chance to live out this form of Eucharistic hospitality. But Dorothy did. As George Herbert writes in his poem, Love III, Christ the host of the Eucharistic banquet invites each guest to eat of his very flesh, becoming Christ ourselves. The distinction between host and guest melts into a Eucharistic unity where all are brothers and sisters. And Dorothy tried to put that hospitality into action. Not leaving that gift of hospitality on the altar, but bringing it into the world.
On pilgrimage, I stop worrying so much about the details. Because the whole reason you’re going on the journey is God, the destination is God, and so it’s God’s job to take care of you.
What difference, I then wonder, between pilgrimage and daily life?
It’s not every day you go to Mass with a saint.
John is a saint, I’m sure of. Because a saint inspires you to be more alive, more generous, more good (not just better) and more full of light.
John scolds us for taking coffee before morning Masses. Dorothy Day once claimed to an incredulous young man that she had gotten a dispensation from a priest to have coffee before morning Mass. It’s medicinal. I do wonder how John would have responded to that loophold. He keeps a strict fast.
On Sunday, at evening Mass, John also put one dollar into the collection basket. I usually put in nothing, because, well, that’s a longer story. But watching John take a dollar and put it in the collection made us dig through our pockets and purse to join him. John sleeps on the church steps, so you might think he’s paying rent. But he’s really just that good. He is so generous it puts me, anxious, counting pennies, to shame. At Bible Study, when the resident talker began trotting out all his doubts on the existence of God, John’s rebuttal was simply: “Pray to God, ‘Help my unbelief.’” This morning he called James, since he had located a spare bed. Not for himself, he who has no bed, but for a refugee family. I think John is the one Christian alive. He gives at a personal sacrifice. And he embodies that love so fully you get the sense that none of it really means anything to him—he does not make an idol of a dollar or even a bed.
After spending an hour with John, I want to be better. More like him.
“I don’t see why you look back on the days when you got $40 a week. I should think people would rather do what they want to do and get nothing than be slaves to an industrial system and get a fat salary. Who the hell wants to sit behind a glass-topped desk. Why don’t you come down here and sell papers and address envelops and do errands of mercy for nothing? Do drop in more often to see us,”
—Dorothy Day (always closing a deal), Letter to Joseph E. Beller, January 24, 1935
Note: I clearly started writing this a month ago.
I am reminded of the passage in Fulton Sheen’s The Priest Is Not His Own in which he recommends that priests and religious have a cup of coffee before starting the Holy Hour. (He wrote this in 1963.)