“The liturgical movement has meant everything to the Catholic Worker from its very beginning. The Mass was the center of our lives and indeed I was convinced that the Catholic Worker had come about because I was going to daily Mass, daily receiving Holy Communion and happy though I was, kept sighing out, “Lord, what would you have me to do? Lord, here I am.” And I kept hearing his call, as Samuel did, but I did not know what he wanted me to do.”
— Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, March 1, 1966
The liturgical movement, that transformed our understanding and practice of the liturgy, is part and parcel with the Catholic Worker, which transforms our understanding of how to be public Catholics. I have written so much about this (such as here and here), but I just stumbled across this quote of Dorothy Day’s, which says most things she has said before, but just in a different way. She goes on in the rest of the column to talk about their practice of the hours and the monks of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, and it’s just lovely. The world is so awful and algorithmically random, and it is very easy to feel lost, because everything is quite wrong.
When I read a story about a priest abusing nuns (all the more disgusting because the language of the abuse is the sort of spiritual patois of a Precious Moments statuette) it’s hard to feel like the Church that I am a part of is entrusted to fully-baked, capable adults. To say nothing of holy ones.
Do these men with whom I share a common faith actually understand the real problems real people are facing and do they have any sort of clue as to how to fix it (or any clue about anything at all)? They are strangers to me—the sort of men I have encountered in the past and left in the past—because that’s where that sort of childishness and darkness belongs.
Love that is so humble and so self-giving boggles my mind and imagination. But I have tasted its reality on my tongue. By feeding on love and goodness itself, I learn to love as he does, and mold myself into his image.
And he seeks me out to feed me, each and every day, not because I am good, but because he is.
I read the above blog post from eight years ago and was surprised by myself. It’s always interesting to see what our past self was thinking about and wondering about.
And I receive her wisdom with one addendum: I do think the Eucharist is a school of love like none other. But why would I walk away from the feast thinking: this is a school of love like none other, sealed off like a garden instead of: how does the whole world become like this love? How do I make my every interaction mirror the generosity of this moment?
These are the sorts of questions I didn’t answer until I found The Catholic Worker.
When I read the pages of The Catholic Worker, I feel like I have been born into an actual tradition—that all the pieces of my own history and a larger history intersect— and that is what our dear friend Paddy Gilger would call being part of a cosmos. It’s the sort of feeling you get when reading the Gospels while standing in Capernaum or reading the lives of the saints or of mountain climbers. Here are the great things ordinary, scared, insignificant people like yourself have done. Here is the beauty that lies inside of every human being, laid out in the open. Pick up your mat and go, do likewise.
Conversion—yes, of course, we must have conversion. But only for the sake of love. It has to be right on the inside more than on the outside.
The freedom that comes from poverty, is for loving our neighbor. It comes from love and goes back into love.
it is beauty
it is love
make beauty
make love
that is all that matters.
And all of this—garden, chickens, cat, crafts, writing—comes out of the liturgy. Comes from and bears fruit in thanksgiving.
I stop in the sun space and say, over and over again, because they’re the only words I can think of: thank you.
Week of Christian Unity
“Today, more than ever, Christ’s Church must be prophetic, raising its voice to insist on one standard of human rights for all people and implemented by all states. It’s the concept of Imago Dei which gives Christians the evangelical call to defend the dignity of every human being, wherever they are and whoever they are.” — Munib Younan, Bishop Emeritus of Jordan and the Holy Land
Lutheran Bishop Emeritus Munib Younan’s acceptance speech for his Pacem in Terris Award in 2019 is a fitting meditation for today, both to commemorate theWeek of Christian Unity and also on a day in which the Israeli military has attacked one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza.
More than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been destroyed, according to the last assessment by the World Health Organization, one month ago. There have been—at least—364 attacks on healthcare facilities and ambulances (that’s one for every day of the year, basically) in the occupied Palestinian territory since October 7, 2023, according to the United Nations. More than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed.
The Pacem in Terris Award was inaugurated by the Diocese of Davenport the year after John XXIII’s encyclical of the same name, published two months before the pope’s death. The first award was given (posthumously) to John F. Kennedy. Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and Thích Nhất Hạnh have been among the recipients.