A sermon on Luke 10:38-42 by Chris Anderson,
Catholic deacon, poet, and retired English professor from Corvallis, Oregon, USA.

When Dorothy Day died in 1980, at 83, this prayer from St. Ephrem was found next to her bed, tucked into her journal.

Lord and master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust of power, and idle talk.  Give rather to your servant a spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love.  Yes, oh Lord and King, grant that I may see my own faults and not to judge my brothers and sisters, for Thou art blest from all ages to ages.

     It’s an ancient prayer, out of an ancient and traditional piety, and it doesn’t seem to fit at first with Day’s activism and commitment to social justice.  

     Day founded the Catholic Worker’s movement and established Catholic Worker houses all over the country, she marched and protested and was thrown in jail, she wrote tirelessly, and yet she didn’t want to be called a saint.

     Once she snapped, “don’t dismiss me like that”—don’t idealize me, I think she meant, as a way of letting yourself off the hook.

     We all want to know what we can do in this difficult time, we’re desperate to know what to do, when nationalism and fascism are on the rise and the poor and the migrant are being oppressed and meanwhile the planet is dying all around us and no one seems to care anymore—when the world before us looks like the wasteland that Amos describes today–and this, I think is what Day would say:  pray for chastity, humility, patience and love, don’t judge others but look within, and praise God, first and always.

     You can see this faith, and this realism, and this humility again and again in Day’s notebooks and diaries.

     “I need to overcome a sense of my own impotence,”she writes in 1940, after struggling for almost a decade to make a difference:  

I need to overcome a sense of my own failure, and an impatience at others that goes with it.  Such a sense of defeat comes from expecting too much of one’s self, also from a sense of pride.  More and more I realize how good God is to me to send me discouragements, failures, antagonisms.  The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways.  To bear our own burdens, do our work as best we can, and not fret because we cannot do more or do another’s work.  

What should we do?  Bear our own burdens.  Do the work we’ve been given day to day, the best we can.  Not fret because we can’t do more.  Let go.

     What should we do?  Recognize that our discouragements and failures are in their own way a terrible grace, continual lessons in our own limitations, in our need for God, for grace.  

     Jesus always seems to be unfair to poor Martha in the parable of Martha and Mary.  Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to his words while Martha is stuck out in the kitchen doing the dishes, but it’s Mary Jesus praises.  She has the better part.  She understands the “one thing necessary.”

     But someone has to do the dishes, and someone has to cook the food to begin with, and someone has to grow the food, for that matter, and make sure there’s food enough for others and that the water is clean, too, and everyone can get to it, and someone has to take care of the dishwashers themselves, and the farmers, and all the laborers, protect their rights, hold them up. 

     But this is a parable, of course, not a treatise.  It’s a story meant to “tease us into thought” as C.H. Dodd says of all parables, and in the end we need to be both, both Mary and Martha, they are both necessary and important, they represent the two poles of our lives as Christians, the active and the contemplative.  

     Dorothy Day was Martha all her life, out in the kitchen, feeding the guests, doing the hard, physical, tedious day to day work.  But she was also Mary, early in the morning when she prayed the Hours, at the end of the day when said compline, alone in her room.

     Years later, on Easter Sunday, when she was 71, Day describes another moment in her life, a moment of dying and rising again.

Always when I awaken in the morning it is to a half-dead condition, a groaning in every bone, a lifelessness, a foretaste of death, a sense of quiet terror, which hangs over us all.  I turn desperately to pray.  “O God make haste to help me,” and there are always those magnificent psalms, the official prayer of the church.  And I am saved.  

We never escape from the terror, we are never free of the ache in our bones, especially as we grow older, and we have to face that and acknowledge that, because it’s only then that we can do what we most have to do, and that’s turn to God

     And then the entry continues:

This consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day.  I am turned around, away from the world of sin and death to the reality of God, our loving father.  In those moments “all the way to heaven is heaven” to me, as St. Catherine of Siena said.  The sun has risen, the air is warmed, the birds are singing outside, and I go outside to sit by the dead-calm river, which flows by.  The testimony of our hearts shows the truth.  We experience, no matter how briefly, the sense of salvation.

The testimony of our hearts shows us the truth that must be the basis of all our actions, these quiet moments, these moments in our own given lives, when, however briefly, we experience the reality of our salvation.

     What can we do?  Go down to the river.  The dead-calm river, always flowing by.

   We can sit at the feet of Christ, who is flowing in the river as he flows through all things, for all things were created through him.  In him all things continue in being.

     Something there is that remains.  Something vast, and something right in front of us.  Something miraculous, and something perfectly ordinary, plain as day.  All the way to heaven is heaven, and to say this isn’t to evade political and social action but to justify it.  Heaven is the reason we act.  Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven:  heaven is our justification, heaven here and now and heaven in some unimaginable future.   Be not afraid.  I am with you always.  

     What can we do?  What should we do?  Pray for chastity, humility, patience and love.  See our own faults.  Not judge others.  Give praise to the Lord of all the ages.  What can we do?  Rejoice and be glad, for this is our duty, the hardest thing of all, to rejoice in the face of all that we see, to stand fast, to keep remembering who we really are.  This is our vocation and our discipline, this is our duty, what Dorothy Day called the duty of delight.

     I think of a picture of Mother Teresa in her simple habit sitting next to Dorothy Day.  Day is wearing a bandana around her head.  They are both old.  Two old, beautiful, wise women.

     The great icon of traditional Catholic piety, and the great icon of radical Catholic activism.

     These great, tireless, saintly, entirely flawed and human advocates for the poor.

      Mother Teresa, who said we are not called to be successful, we are called to be faithful; who for most of her life suffered in a spiritual darkness, who in the letters published after her death cried out to God for the joy again of his presence; who insisted again and again that we don’t have to go to India to follow the Lord.  The poor are all around us.  Do what’s at hand.  Be where you’re re at.  Do what you can.

     They seem to be sitting in student desks.  Are they in a classroom?

     They are leaning towards each other, their heads close together.

   Mother Teresa is now a saint, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, as one day I’m sure Dorothy Day will be beatified and canonized, too, despite her resistance to that idea.

      Near the end of their lives, St. Teresa sent Day a short, handwritten note, scribbled on the bottom of a prayer that had been typed up on an old-fashioned typewriter and then mimeographed.

     This is the prayer:

If we pray, we will believe.
If we believe, we will love.
If we love, we will serve.
Only then we will put our love for God
into living action,
through the service of Christ
in the distressing disguise of the poor.

     Only then.  First prayer, then everything else.  

     And this is the note scribbled on the bottom of that mimeograph—this beautiful, wise, loving note.

     Dear Dorothy, my love, prayer and sacrifice are close to you. 
     If you go to Jesus first, tell him I love him. 
     If I go, I will tell him you love him.  
    God bless you.

What can we do?  

If you go first, you can tell Jesus I love him.  

If I go first, I will tell him you do.