“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
Hebrews 13:2
“Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Matthew 25:40
Dorothy Day’s life reads like a quiet revolution, a relentless protest against the lukewarm faith and spiritual apathy both of her time and ours. A journalist, radical activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day didn’t just believe in the Gospel; she embodied it. In an age when religious practice often becomes entangled with comfort, conformity, and nationalism, Dorothy Day stands out as a Holy Disruptor. She was someone who dared to take Jesus at his word.
In Hebrews 13:2, we are reminded of the sacredness of hospitality; of seeing strangers not as threats, but as vessels of divine presence. Dorothy Day opened her home and heart to the homeless, the broken, the unwanted. She created houses of hospitality where those discarded by society could eat, rest, and be treated as beloved children of God. She lived this scripture not as sentiment but as an imperative. In doing so, she reminded the Church that faith is not primarily about dogma. The church is about love in action.
In our Wednesday meeting we moved into a deep meditation on how important it was to understand that serving others is all a part of God's work. You might initially believe that the "entertained angels" refers to some disguised blessed beings we may encounter. Later, it may come to our minds that this could depend on our recognition of the divine identity that rests in everyone. And, finally, we may see that our act of serving others is what helps us to know that they are the blessed beings.
Pastor Emillie shared an interesting story about deciding to party with her friends after her family's move from the city they lived in to its outskirts in Africa. She planned to be back before dark, but left the bus at the wrong stop. As she walked in a direction she thought might be towards home she encountered a group of boys in the middle of the road. While she was frightened, she heard one boy say, "That girl looks familiar.". It was enough for her to confess she was lost and needed help because she wasn't certain where her home was.
One of the boys said, "Hey, there was a new Congolese family who fed us recently. That might be her family." It was, and they walked her home. Emillie's mother had decided to feed a group of neighbors a few days after they moved. Emillie had protested the idea, but one of these boys was part of that group. That one learned what he knew to become the angel Pastor Emillie needed that night to find her way home.
Matthew 25:31-46 calls us to account: How did we treat the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, the stranger? Jesus tells us that our answer to this question is our answer to Him. Dorothy Day took this passage seriously and personally. For her, Christ was not only present in the Eucharist but in the faces of the poor. This “preferential option for the poor” was not a theory; it was her daily bread. She saw Jesus in bread lines and soup kitchens, in the bodies of the unwashed and the weary eyes. And she called the Church to do the same.
But Dorothy Day was not a saint of easy piety. Her politics were radical. Her pacifism is uncompromising. She critiqued capitalism, war, and any religion aligned more with the empire than with the Kingdom of God. And because of that, she unsettled many. She disrupted. She offended. She called the Church away from its allegiance to power and back to the suffering Christ.
Even when her paper was challenged by church authorities during the 1949 Calvary Cemetery strike, she supported the workers, sticking to her principles and forcing additional negotiations.
Like Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day’s faith was not convenient. It was costly. She invited others to join her not in admiration, but in imitation. “Don’t call me a saint,” she once said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” What she meant was this: if we see her as exceptional, we exempt ourselves from doing likewise. She believed we are all called to radical love. This showed in many of the documentary interviews. She was described as both ordinary and extraordinary at once.
Dorothy Day’s last major public appearance was in 1976, at the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, held from August 1–8, during the U.S. Bicentennial year. It was a remarkable moment that brought her, a radical Catholic pacifist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, into a highly visible spotlight within the institutional Church.
She shared a panel with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was also receiving widespread acclaim for her work with the poor. It was an extraordinary moment: two women, both uncompromising in their devotion to Christ and the least of these, yet so different in tone and approach.
To follow Dorothy Day’s example today is to refuse religious complacency. She is a Holy Disruptor who wants her disruption to become a new status quo. Chris Heard, others who cook for Veterans Village, and those who walk with the Madres habitually carry a part of her will-do spirit at Creator. We must allow the Gospel to disturb us, to reorient us, to set us on paths that may seem foolish to the world but faithful to Christ. It is to believe that hospitality to the stranger is sacred, that solidarity with the poor is holy, and that true Christianity does not accommodate comfort. It compels our transformation.
In this age of spiritual distraction and shallow belief, Dorothy Day calls us back to what matters most: seeing Christ in the poor, serving without condition, and embodying the disruptive love of God.
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