If you
had to guess whether she was wheat or weed, you’d probably have guessed
weed. A college dropout, who’d become a
journalist and gotten mixed up with the Communists, who had fallen for a sorry
excuse of a man who told her he’d leave her if she didn’t get an abortion and
then left her anyway when she did. If
our eager servants had gone out, ready to pluck weeds, they’d probably have
taken one look at this ne’er-do-well, and plucked her. But the master bids the servants wait,
because God knows better.
God
knows the seed he’s planted in her, the leaven that was quietly waiting till it
was her time to bloom. God knows that
this woman, though she rejected it in college, had practiced the faith as an
Episcopalian in childhood. God knows
that this woman was thirsting for justice, the kind of thirst Christ had
proclaimed blessed, that she loved the poor but couldn’t find her way to help
them. She was looking for justice and
for love in all the wrong places, but she was looking. And the leaven was rumbling and waiting for
its time to bloom.
When
she was first arrested, for participating in a protest for women’s suffrage,
she found a Bible in the jailhouse and was fascinated by the Psalms of Lament,
hearing her cries, her moaning she could not put into words, articulated by the
psalmist, writing in the Spirit, directing all their pain together to God. But fascination didn’t quite lead to faith,
not yet. The germinated seed kept
pushing towards the top of the soil but couldn’t quite break through, not yet.
Then
she fell in love again: A less irresponsible man, this time, Forster, by name,
but a committed atheist. He looked
around at the world, a world still reeling from the horror of Trench Warfare,
and could see only horror, pain and sadness.
He could see only weeds. No good
God could have planted weeds, so he rejected any kind of notion of God. Then, they had a child together: Tamar
Theresa Day. She was given her mother’s
last name, because as soon as she was born her mother became convinced and
amazed by the presence of an abiding goodness in the world and knew that this
would lead to Forster leaving her. Yes,
Dorothy Day was convinced of the goodness of creation by the look of love in
her baby’s eyes. Yes, there were weeds
in the world. She was still passionately
committed to fighting against the weeds.
But, there’s wheat. And the one
who planted the wheat will eliminate and consume the weeds. So, she had her daughter baptized: Roman
Catholic, because that was the church of the poor. And, as she had predicted, Forster left
her. And, before Tamar’s first birthday,
Dorothy herself was confirmed and received into the Catholic Church.
She
turned her journalistic talents to a new newspaper project, the Catholic
Worker, in an effort now to promote the Church’s social teaching, to dare to
dream of a new social order in which it would be easier to be good. The paper didn’t stop at critiquing the weedy
world as it is but, trusting in God to eradicate the weeds and tend the wheat,
it encouraged its readers to make a personal response, participate in God’s
harvesting work. She had encountered the
leaven in her, that had begun to blossom, to lead her to turn her life around
and walk the path Christ had prepared for her, that he has walked ahead of each
of us. And she dreamed that everyone
would encounter that leaven that God has hidden in each of us, even those we
might think that most unlikely for, even ourselves. And she dreamed that in encountering the
leaven inside us, we might (as the council fathers at Vatican II would later
put it) become leaven in the world.
Leaven that turns dead flour into a source of nourishment and life, true
life. Leaven that can only work by
contact. Seeds that let themselves be
planted in the field that is the world, and transform. In the hiddenness of a germinating seed, out
of which new life will spring.
God
didn’t let the Catholic Worker movement remain just a newspaper for long. Six months after circulation began, winter
came to New York. And the homeless
started knocking on Dorothy’s door. The
ancient Christian practice of hospitality, of responding to Christ who cries
out “I was a stranger and you took me in,” that Dorothy had written so
passionately about was called out of her.
The tiny seed had grown and became a tree, maybe not mighty yet, but
always with room enough for ‘just one more’ to nest in its branches. Within three years, there were over thirty
Catholic Worker houses of hospitality all over the US. Today, there are 217 worldwide, and Dorothy
has been declared a Servant of God by the Church.
God’s seeds grow. God’s leaven acts and produces nourishment and new life. God’s tiniest of seeds are en route to becoming trees with room for all on their branches. God will pluck the weeds and all that is not good will pass away. And that’s what the kingdom of Heaven is like.
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