The Tribune

By SIMON

IN THE initial decades of the 1900s in New York City, a young bohemian, Dorothy Day, worked as a journalist, deeply committed to social activism. During the 1920s of Depression-era America, she settled on the Lower East side.

Day struggled with the glaring inequality, hunger, and poverty she witnessed. She struggled to find spiritual meaning as an activist seeking to combat injustice. She struggled to find direction as a young woman after aborting her first child.

A chain-smoker, she often engaged in intense debates on national and global affairs with fellow bohemians, as well as communist and anarchist friends.

The birth in 1926, of her daughter, Tamar, fuelled a deeper yearning for faith. Soon thereafter, Dorothy embarked on a journey of conversion more radical than most of her companions, who often did not grasp the spiritual dimensions of the fuller liberation of the human person and community.

On December 28, 1927, she was conditionally baptised a Roman Catholic at Our Lady’s Help of Christians church in Staten Island. Her “conversion marked a new beginning for her life of service and advocacy.”

In the witness and person of Jesus Christ, she found her life’s anchor and the foundation for her commitment to the poor. A companion in this journey of faith and activism was the philosopher and Frenchman, Peter Maurin.

Day and Maurin lived the theology of Christian personalism, emphasising the value and dignity of each person, created in God’s image. They centred their lives on Jesus Christ as the model for human being and flourishing, calling us to service and self-giving love.

Their spiritual and intellectual commitments found concrete root in the Catholic Worker Movement they cofounded in 1933, which included a newspaper dedicated to unyielding advocacy for the poor, nonviolence, and personal responsibility and moral development.

The Movement was also rooted in the great Christian virtue of hospitality. To enflesh this virtue, in the imitation of the God who took on human flesh, Day and Maurin founded Houses of Hospitality and farms to provide food, shelter, clothes, dignity, hope, mercy, and love for the homeless and unemployed.

The Houses of Hospitality served all regardless of faith or no faith. They initially took in women, but over the years welcomed all including those afflicted by war, disease, and abandonment.

The houses were centres of learning and community. The fellowship to nourish and transform souls and hearts was as essential as the food to nourish and heal bodies.

For Day, Christmas was a seismic event, an occasion for joy, the celebration of the incarnation of the God, whose radical love exposes and transforms our narrow lives paralysed by deadly sins, calcified selfishness, and abandonment and indifference to the poor.

Day was not a sentimentalist.

“I am so glad that Jesus was born in a stable,” she once said. “Because my soul is so much like a stable. It is so poor and in unsatisfactory condition because of guilt, falsehoods, inadequacies, and sin. Yet, I believe if Jesus can be born in a stable, maybe he can also be born in me.”

How can Christ be born in us this Christmas and throughout the year?

We often speak of an attitude of gratitude. But what about an enduring attitude of hospitality that moves us beyond our self-centredness and numerous indulgences?

How do we allow Christ, in his many disguises and forms, to enter our homes, our hearts, our churches, our families?

What about the individual who longs for our forgiveness? What about the migrant, the addict, the person whose wounds we can soothe if not always heal, through gentleness and nonjudgement?

The rejection of the Imago Dei (Lt: “Image of God:) and the person of Christ continues this Christmas. We witness it in the vulgar state-sponsored abuse of migrants in the United States of America and across the world.

In the antisemitic attacks on Jews in Australia and worldwide.

In the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

And in the viciousness and greed of war in Sudan, Ukraine, and Central Africa.

Hospitality is a revolutionary act when we recognise and courageously uphold the dignity of all regardless of ethnicity, place of birth, race, gender, economic status, sexual orientation, and any other feature of the diversity of a humanity brilliantly and lovingly fashioned in God’s triune image.

The protection of human dignity and hospitality is always personal, specific, incarnate, relational. The fruitcake from an aunt who passed away suddenly this year will be missed because it was delicious and a sign of her love.

There will be many Christmas gatherings, whose fellowship acts like a balm amidst the struggles of the past year, the anxieties of the moment, and the expectations and worries of a new year.

We all know houses of hospitality. A sister and brother-in-law who open their home with surpassing generosity throughout the year for family and friends.

A regulatory agency that recently blessed the church of Rev Lawrence Rolle with gift baskets, for example, and the beautiful ministry of Rev Rolle, exemplifying the virtue of hospitality and exuberant welcome of the poor and hungry year-round.

There is more room at the inn of our hearts and homes than we recognise, because they are cluttered with selfishness, consumerist excess, and other dankness, dustiness, and desolation.

We hoard vices and things that stymie our capacity to be more hospitable and open to Christ and the images of Christ we see daily, especially the most vulnerable among us.

In a Christmas reflection, the website Reform invites us to come, let us adore Christ with this advice.

“The poor in spirit know that, when we make room for Christ in the stable of our hearts, we will receive the greatest riches. The choice is ours: Will we allow the pace and busyness of this season take over, or will we choose to put things in proper order?

“If we do allow Him to be the centre of our lives, we can find the peace, stillness, and beauty of Christ’s coming—and beyond.”

Dorothy Day lived on the margins of society and the church, both of whom she loved so radically that she dedicated her life to transforming them.

In 2015, the radical who caused holy trouble for many bishops, was hailed as a holy woman by Pope Francis in a joint session of the US Congress. Her cause for canonisation has begun.

We often do not know how our radical, specific, individual acts of hospitality and mercy may transform individual lives and the society more broadly!

Day reminds us.

“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other,” she said. “We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

The last word is that of the late Dutch priest, Fr. Henri Nouwen.

“The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations,” he wrote.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Front Porch returns in January, with Person of the Year for 2024.