Reflecting upon Dorothy Day - Woman of Faith - on the Fifth Sunday of Lent - 7 April 2019

      On this 5th Sunday of Lent, we hear about the confrontation between the crowd and the sinful woman accused of adultery, in which Jesus tells them, let you who is without sin cast the first stone.  Today, as we hear this famous Gospel passage, we reflect upon Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980), an American woman who was a convert to Catholicism and who one day may be canonized a saint.  It is interesting that we reflect on her this weekend as we hear about the woman accused of adultery, because Dorothy Day herself would admit that her journey before her spiritual conversion was anything but holy.  In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow peace and social justice activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent advocacy to help their plight. The Catholic Worker movement published its own newspaper under the leadership of Day, an accomplished journalist.  I remember hearing about Dorothy Day while I was a college student at Wake Forest.  In fact, Day passed away the fall semester of my freshman year of college. It is interesting that Pope Francis named Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King, Jr as models of good citizenship when he spoke before Congress on his visit to the United States several years ago.  Here is a wonderful quote by Dorothy Day that truly represent her faith and her love for the poor: “What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”