He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.
(Luke 1:51-53)
The words of scripture at the top of this page are from what has come to be known as Mary's Magnificat. They are simply the words of praise and humble worship offered by a Jewish peasant girl realizing that Christ is to be born from her flesh. Mary's words speak of the social revolution at the core of the gospel, here made clear from the first moments of the incarnation.
It seems fitting to us, during the season in which we especially celebrate the incarnation, to focus our attention on another woman and the movement which she helped to spread for over forty years.
The radical character of Mary's Magnificat has been simply, but profoundly, reflected in the life of Dorothy Day and in the mission of the Catholic Worker movement. That the Lord has shown strength with his arm among the Catholic Workers is evident in the quiet spiritual determination which marks their daily activities. Through the movement's persistent public testimony against the purposes of privilege and power, the proud and the mighty have indeed been confronted and confounded.
To exalt those of low degree has been the calling that has most shaped the life of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. Because of the way Workers have lived their lives, countless numbers of hungry people have been filled with good things. The poor have come to know that the Catholic Workers can be turned to for a bowl of soup, a place to stay, and a listening ear.
The rich have been sent empty away, not by harsh words, but by a style of life that confronts them with their own spiritual mediocrity.
Remarking on the occasion of Christmas, Thomas Merton once said, "Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him, Christ comes uninvited."
So it is with the true message of Advent. The very life of God takes flesh among us. It is a scandal, an offense, a disruption to this world. And yet, for those who would make that life their own, it comforts, nurtures, transforms, and beckons us to the side of the poor, the forgotten, the powerless -- with whom the message has always been most at home.
The time spent with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers in preparation for this issue was for me a deep reminder of the simple things. It was a confirmation of the fact that love and compassion are the strongest things, the truest things, the most powerful things, the most revolutionary things. The testimony of the Catholic Worker movement reminds us that the Christian life begins with love, that it also ends with love, that there is nothing we can do as Christians, nothing that we must become, that is prior to love. As we come to faith, we begin to love.
Sharing with those who cook the soup, make the beds, clean the floors, and care for the people at St. Joseph House and Maryhouse brought to mind the words of the apostles: They suggested that love is the activity of faith and that one who does not love does not know God.
As Christians we are continually asked about love; all that we are or do is appraised by that norm. In John 15 Jesus tells us, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in love." Only in love is the truth honored; only in love is faith fed; only in love is the church established and built up.
The Catholic Workers remind us that the love of Christ must be dynamically related to the fact of a society in which you can chart the life plan of a child before it is born if you know the color of its skin; a society in which the script has already been written for a whole segment of the population, in the endless spectacle of poverty and misery; a society which creates work for a young man in prison after he commits a crime, but not when he needs it, before he commits that crime; a society which commits its resources to war making while robbing people of the most basic necessities of life.
How is it that we love? How can our love be sustained with humility, with endurance, and with strength?
We love only because we are loved. We are called a beloved people. Although there is nothing in the Christian life which precedes love, the love of God for men and women precedes the Christian life. The love of God toward us, made flesh in Jesus Christ, becomes the only real basis of our love. In fact, our love is simply an answer to God's love for us.
In scripture love has nothing to do with mere feeling, sentiment, or opinion. On the contrary, it consists of relationship and action. It is shaped by the quality of God's love for us. The Catholic Workers seem to understand that their love is merely a reflection, a response to the way they are loved by Christ. To forget that is to fall victim to some idea of love in general, to some human emotion, and to thus derive our definition of Christian love from a false source.
Jesus' great command to love God and to love our neighbor as the sum of the law is directed to the community of faith, to those who have known and received God's love for them. Loving becomes an obvious corollary to hearing the voice of the Lord. Love comes as a gift to be shared.
To love, then, means to become what we already are -- those who are loved by God. To love means a daily choice to live the life of faith and obedience. To love is to accept and confirm our calling, our vocation, our identity as God's people.
The more our love increases, the more we discover our inability and unwillingness to love fully. The love of God and our neighbor is poured into our lives by the Holy Spirit.
There are marks of God's love within us. The signs are seen in the way we sorrow as we find our hearts so full of hostility to God and our neighbor, so full of love for sin and the world, so empty of desire for God and his love, so cold and sluggish when we are called upon to give of ourselves sacrificially. The mark of God's love in us is the humility that comes of being crushed by the world's great need of love. The fact that we are overwhelmed by that continual claim upon our lives is a sign that the love of God is present within us and among us.
To love God is to seek him in the midst of our quite conscious lovelessness; it is to seek the one who has found us; it is to find our humanity in the fact of God's love for us, and thereby be "translated into the kingdom of the Son of his love." That we should always seek God is what the commandment to love God means, and it is such a love which fulfills the law.
The commandment to love our neighbor teaches us what shows our love for God. Always in the scriptures, serious love of God, true praise of God, breaks out in compassion directed toward the concrete needs of men and women.
The love of God is a total claim upon our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We are called to live out of that love that claims us absolutely. There can be no question of any reserve; response is a work of thankfulness, grace, or praise -- not of fear, as in the law.
It is such a love which one finds among the Catholic Workers. Such a love provides the only sure foundation for a radicalism that can be called Christian. It is what the rootless movements of the '60s often lacked, and the established churches still find difficult to come to terms with. Churches organize themselves around proper doctrine, religious experience, numerical expansion, or whatever will help their institutions survive. By contrast, the gospel message is about this radical kind of love.
Love means to reconcile ourselves to identifying "neighbor" as all men and women. It is to resist those who refuse to grant to all the status of neighbor, but would rather consign human beings to the categories of the enemy, the exploitable, the expendable, the inferior, the unimportant. A concrete demonstration of love for men and women radically proclaims Jesus Christ.
The long pilgrimage of Dorothy Day still testifies to the same simple thing with which she began: to refuse to kill, to serve the poor, to give one's life to compassion and love. She has been a loving adversary of every political regime under which she has lived. Hers has been a radical position. It is such a position which ultimately has the greatest historic significance. Other responses -- more moderate, more reasonable, more responsive to political reality -- are always more tied to the culture and will therefore die with it.
The influence of people like Dorothy Day always trickles in from outside the cultural mainstream. Yet it seems that lives like hers are the ones which affect the culture most, certainly more than those lives comfortably bordered by the values and structures of their society. She has remained convinced that the way to build a new society is to build it in your own life, among those with whom you share your life, in the situation in which you find yourself. Her vision has been and continues to be a new society growing up within the shell of the old. As she enters her eightieth year, she has not lost sight of that city.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!