Monday, September 2, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Window overlooking the East River
While Dorothy Day was busy editing her magazine The Daily Worker in the early 1950s, she made time to write a short biography of Thérèse of Liseaux. She wrote with a distinct purpose.
I wrote to overcome the sense of futility in men, women, and youths married and single, who feel hopeless and useless, less than the dust, ineffectual, wasted, powerless. On the one hand Thérèse was “the little grain of sand” and on the other “her name was written in heaven”; she was beloved by her heavenly Father, she was the bride of Christ, she was little less than the angels. And so are we all.
Dorothy Day lived an active, effective life, physically and mentally. She first heard of this French girl from Liseaux while she herself was excited to be having a baby, taking time off from her work with the Anti-Imperialist League in New York City.
The first time I heard the name of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face (to give her whole title), also known as Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, was when I lay in the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Bellevue is the largest hospital in the world, and doctors from all over the world come there. If you are poor you can have free hospital care. At that time, if you could pay anything, there was a flat rate for having a baby—thirty dollars for a ten days’ stay, in a long ward with about sixty beds. I was so fortunate as to have a bed next to the window looking out over the East River so that I could see the sun rise in the morning and light up the turgid water and make gay the little tugs and the long tankers that went by the window. When there was fog it seemed as though the world ended outside my window, and the sound of fog horns haunted the day and the night.
As a matter of fact, my world did end at the window those ten days that I was in the hospital, because I was supremely happy.
Glancing through the beginning of his book I think immediately of Mary the mother of Jesus, who undoubtedly was with her son when he spoke at the synagogue in Nazareth, back from miracles and sermons that shook the world just up the road.
He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down.
He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And all spoke highly of him and were amazed at his gracious words.
As the story unfolds the people listening begin to doubt Jesus’ messianic claims, because he’s just one of them. Isn’t this the son of a carpenter named Joseph? Jesus responded as Dorothy Day probably would have, standing up stronger, speaking up more loudly, defying his listeners to contradict him.
Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
And citing two examples, he stood up straighter still. Elijah did not minister to the widows of Israel, but went to Sidon. And Elisha did not heal the lepers of Israel, but only a noble from Syria.
Jesus watched the fury build. Jesus did not back down. His mother Mary remembered the moment of his birth, of her tearing flesh, his head crowning and then fully appearing, his body slipping into Joseph’s arms, and then handed into hers while he cut the cord. The baby grew into a boy, and the boy grew into a man.
The people rose up, drove him before them out of town to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built.
And she knew it was not to crown him king.
They would hurl him down headlong.
Perhaps Mary the mother of Jesus told this story to Luke, her friend, her doctor, her fellow believer, long after Jesus was killed, resurrected, and carried up to heaven. I imagine her like Therese the Little Flower, indomitable in her small, endlessly patient body while God’s plans to prosper and not to harm her slowed her, caught her, and held her close.
Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
She spoke of this memory to Luke, barely breathing, reliving the fear and the joy to watch her sweet son Jesus look back toward her as he walked through the men breathing their fire of self-righteousness and anger.
Mary, Dorothy Day, and millions of other women have had their babies. Thérèse the Little Flower died at age 24, a nun. No babies for her. Dorothy Day’s ministry to the little ones who felt helpless, powerless, tiny, “less than the dust” includes her book about the one who wanted to be the littlest, and was proclaimed one of the wisest, a “doctor of the Church,” because she did not shrink from her helplessness but gave herself over to her Father. Every bit of her, down as deeply as there was to go.
She passed through them and went away. She was following Jesus.
Jesus did not go far. He came from God and returned to God, and while here he proclaimed for us the kingdom of Heaven. Come and see, he said. This is the world the Lord has made. Rejoice. Be glad.
Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.
(1 Corinthians 2, Psalm 119, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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