Those Who Preach the Raw Gospel

Often get a raw deal--but then the crucifixion must come before the resurrection.  Excerpts:

...Advocating Civil Rights could be as deadly as revolutionary Russia. She was spit at and called a "nigger lover." At a Catholic women's group, she was berated for eating "with dirty niggers." When a woman told her, "You smell of the Negro," Catherine lost her temper: "And you stink of hell!" Once at a lecture in Savannah, she was nearly beaten to death by a group of white Catholic women.

"You have to preach the Gospel," Catherine said, "without compromise or shut up. One or the other. I tried to preach it without compromise." She always ended her lectures the same way:

Sooner or later, all of us are going to die. We will appear before God for judgment. The Lord will look at us and say, "I was naked and you didn't clothe me. I was hungry and you didn't give me anything to eat. I was thirsty and you didn't give me a drink. I was sick and you didn't nurse me. I was in prison and you didn't come to visit me." And we shall say, "Lord, when did I not do these things?" I would stop here, pause, and in a very loud voice say, "When I was a Negro and you were a white American Catholic." That's when the rotten eggs and tomatoes would start to fly!

One of her key supporters was New York's Cardinal Patrick J. Hayes, who was "always worried" about her. After she organized a study group at Friendship House, the local pastor visited her:

"Listen to me, you Russian nitwit. What are you trying to do? Make them think they are loved just because they have become Catholics? You are giving them the raw Gospel and it isn't getting you anywhere. Stop it!" I said, "Father, would you like to come with me to see the Cardinal? If he orders me to stop, I will stop." "Oh, hell," he said. On the way out he slammed the door and smashed the glass in the window."

Later Catherine would remarry and move back to Canada, where she continued to be involved in apostolic work. But wherever she worked, she sought to actualize the Gospel message in the present moment. As she once told a Fordham University Jesuit: "I have never read anywhere in the gospel where Christ says to wait twenty years before living the gospel. The Good News is for now..."

Then there's the life and ministry of Father Augustus Tolton, a black Catholic priest in a day and age where that meant living martyrdom. There's the teaching of Father John Hugo, which spiritually guided the Catholic Worker Movement.  Preaching and living the raw Gospel means sowing yourself fully, pouring yourself out to the last drop, allowing yourself to be buried so that God can raise you up again.  Welcome to Christianity--it's a path to glory through utter gift.  The saints testify that the reward is worth it.

Permanent Versus Perennial

One of the key features of modernity is a desire for permanent and total solutions. We want to deal with a problem once and be done, to completely resolve an issue and place it out of the concern of our old age or the time of our children. We do not simply try to reduce drug use. We have a war on drugs. We don't attempt to mitigate poverty. We go to war against poverty. We don't just talk about proper gun use in the wake of tragedies. We debate whether to ban guns or to have no restrictions on guns at all.

We are impatient this way, thinking in really broad strokes, making vast generalizations, aiming for the stars with all the subtlety and nuance of--well, of all totalitarians and dictators.  We want to triumph, you see.  We want to have our vision of the world win out once and for all, want to demand total surrender from the Nazis we face today, whoever those Nazis may be--conservatives or liberals; sexual revolutionaries or religious folks; them foreigners or the frightening "enemy" next door.  We want a total triumph for all that we believe to be right and true, even if what we believe to be right and true is that there is no such thing as an absolute truth and we are universally called to tolerance by that truth.

We want to win.  Kill those weeds!  All of them!  Let them never return in my garden again!  Those mosquitoes!  End them!  Exterminator!  Exterminator!  Each presidential election is framed in apocalyptic/messianic terms.  Their candidates are the anti-Christ, and our guys are chosen, anointed, destined.  If we win, it is the victory of all that is right and true.  If they win, it will be unspeakable.  But somehow we all survive each victory of the dreaded other side.  Somehow, we live on, watching the nation go further and further into debt under fiscally conservative Republicans and tax-and-spend Democrats alike.

We live in an age whose spirit is that of the via moderna, the modern way.  That way has led to a culture of death, to a culture which pursues the triumph of the will over reason, over truth, over any objective standard.  We have seen the long war of man versus nature, of neighbor versus neighbor, of flesh versus spirit, of man versus God taken to a hyper-efficient end.  To be free, it's every man for himself.  Either I have power or they have power--there is no middle way.

This has been destroying us for a very, very long time--working in these absolutes.  Why?  Because they are the wrong absolutes.

“[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about."--C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 

Put mind over master for a time. Put first principles over power, the intellect over the will, truth over action.  Submit yourself to the mastery of the natural law, of the Creator of all things, of the truth, the good, the beautiful, of life and love, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  It's a road that is as hard as the road to Calvary, as hard as iron nails and the wood of the Cross--but it leads to life through death, to One Threesome who love you eternally.  Love yourself because you are beloved by omniscient omnibenevolent omnipotency, by God, and love those whom your Beloved loves.  Accept the rhythms of the seasons, of human life, of the liturgy, of love, rather than grasping for power and perfect control.  Accept community, and charity, and the love of your "lesser" fellow man--the annoying, the weak, the foolish, the sinful, the sorrowful, the stupid.  Many of these are your betters.   As Pope Benedict once said, part of the reason for the commandment to love our neighbor is that they have to put up with us.  Love, and forgive, and forbear, and find yourself borne up on a great tide of loving, forgiving forbearance in your turn.

Follow the way of the Cross, sowing yourself in love, bearing up underneath the weight of your burden by the abiding power and presence of the Trinity in your heart, by the force and fire of the Holy Spirit.  Life will explode from you like the sun.

Lent Teaches How to Give Yourself Away

At once the Spirit drove him out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.--Mark 1:12-13

Lent often seems like an imposition, an exercise in pointless self-denial and suffering. Why does it matter whether or not I eat chocolate for 40 days? If I wanted to diet, I'd do it rather differently. Why do we put ourselves through this exercise in frustration and little irritations?  What's the point?

The point reaches right outside us into the heart of God.  The Trinity is a communion of persons, whose life at its core consists of eternal, total self-gift.  The Father gives himself utterly to the Son; the Son gives himself utterly to the Father; and the gift given is the Holy Spirit.  This level of self-gift is natural only for the Trinity.  It is truly supernatural--above our nature--for humanity.  When we give ourselves so utterly, we die.

Then he said to all, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself? Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.”--Luke 9:23-27

But to give ourselves so utterly to Christ is to receive life eternal, for Christ is utterly generous with himself, pouring out the last of his blood for us and our salvation.  He offers to graft us onto himself so that we may share in his divinity.

Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.  I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.  Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned.--John 15:4-6

We come to live his life and share in his death. We come to the fullness of life by giving our lives away.

...The retreat examined this connection between sacrifice and agape love by expounding on two images Jesus used, "sowing" and "pruning." Both are practicable ways to follow Jesus's command to lose our lives. The divine way led to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. "The cross is thought to be one of the less pleasing parts of Christianity," Father Hugo said. "But the cross is the most positive part of Christianity. Because Jesus died out of love." In sowing and pruning, we do the same.

Sowing is rooted in the idea of detachment from the love of worldly goods: the decision to let loose the goods of this world in order to clasp the love of God. The retreat treated Jesus's parable of the farmer to show this. We are like the farmer sowing wheat. The wheat is good, just as many of our possessions and activities are good. But the farmer still must throw away the wheat in order to gain a harvest, and the seed must die to bear fruit. Just like Jesus, we must "throw away" the good things of our lives in order to gain something better: divine life. "It is the law of life," Father Hugo said. "To gain life, you must first lose it."

Father Hugo taught that the holy sacrifice of the Mass is central to our work of sowing. The only true response to it is to lose our own lives. If we don't offer our lives along with Christ's sacramental sacrifice, Monsignor Meenan said, "the liturgy for us is, well, kind of phony."--"The Catholic Worker Retreat of Father Hugo changed my Life" by Rosemary Hugo

Houses of Hospitality

"We read in the Catholic Encyclopedia that during the early ages of Christianity the hospice (or house of hospitality) was a shelter for the sick, the poor, the orphans, the old, the traveller and the needy of every kind...

"The fourteenth statute of the so-called council of Carthage, held about 436, enjoins upon the Bishops to have hospices or houses of hospitality in connection with their churches.

"Today we need houses of hospitality as much as they needed them then. If not more so. We have parish houses for the priest, parish houses for educational purposes, parish houses for recreational purposes, but no parish houses of hospitality.

"Boussuet says that the poor are the first children of the Church, so the poor should come first. People with homes should have a room of hospitality so as to give shelter to the needy members of the parish. The remaining needy members of the parish should be given shelter in a parish home."

Later, in writing about Peter, Dorothy put his idea in her own words: "Every house should have a Christ's room....It is no use turning people away to an agency, to the city or the state or the Catholic Charities. It is you yourself who must perform the works of mercy. Often you can only give the price of a meal, or a bed on the Bowery. Often you can only hope that it will be spent for that. Often you can literally take off a garment if it only be a scarf and warm some shivering brother. But personally, at a personal sacrifice, these were the ways, Peter used to insist, to combat the growing tendency on the part of the State to take the job which our Lord Himself gave us to do."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 259.

Dorothy Day on Hippies

...[F]or her, the 1960s had been full of signs of something vital that had gone out of the world--a glue that had held things together no longer worked.  And there was the war in Vietnam, a grotesque torture that depressed the spirits of all and seemed to her to accentuate the discordant and even the grotesque in a world apparently become meaningless.  On May 11, 1969, she wrote to Della [her sister] from St. Cloud, Minnesota, where she was visiting several Catholic Worker families.  She found that that singular effluence of the 1960s, the "hippies," were more numerous there than in New York.  "They are marrying young--17 and 18, and taking to the woods up by the Canadian border and building houses for themselves--becoming pioneers again.  It's as tho they were determined to live--to get out of the war atmosphere they have lived in all their lives--a new generation entirely."  A new generation of pioneers, yes, but Dorothy found them "maddening."  Hippies, in her view, were the offscourings of middle-class affluence who affirmed nothing except the principle of reducing every principle to the absurd.  In view of all the horror of Vietnam, Dorothy could imagine that "the soldiers would like to come back and kill these flower-power, loving people" who had "not known suffering."  What more properly would be in order for them was "prayer and penance" and "fasting."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 491.

Lives of the Saints

He studied the lives of the saints and recommended their biographies to Dorothy as examples of particular qualities of spirit on which a true humanism could be built.  "Peter was always getting back to Saint Francis of Assisi, who was most truly the 'gentle personalist.'  In his poverty, rich; in renouncing all, possessing all; generous, giving out of the fullness of his heart, sowing generously and reaping generously, humble and asking when in need, possessing freedom and all joy."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 235.

Jesus and Peace

[Jesus] died between two thieves because He would not be made an earthly King.  He lived in an occupied country for thirty years without starting an underground movement or trying to get out from under a foreign power.  His teaching transcended all the wisdom of the scribes and pharisees, and taught us the most effective means of living in this world while preparing for the next.  And He directed His sublime words to the poorest of the poor, to the people who thronged the towns and followed after John the Baptist, who hung around, sick and poverty-stricken at the doors of rich men.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 205.