Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: Perfect patience

Think of a farmer: how patiently he waits for the precious fruit of the ground until it has had the autumn rains and the spring rains! You too have to be patient; do not lose heart, because the Lord’s coming will be soon.

James 5: 7b - 8

Patience is a virtue in short supply. Everything is instant! Goaded by our addiction to shopping, we have no need to wait until our next pay. Instant gratification it is called. TVs, clothes, toys and even cars are bought to satisfy our needs, but our satisfaction is short lived. There is always something else on our lists that must bought.

Australia’s first of the new French Barracuda submarines selected in April this year by the Australian Government will not be delivered until 2030 and the other 11 will be delivered over several more years. To qualify for a degree takes a minimum of three years (although UTAS offers a 2 year nursing degree for students in NSW, and Bond University on the Gold Coast offers accelerated degrees), and training for many occupations is also rolled out over several years. This apparent patience is at odds with our need for ‘stuff’.

This tension is no more apparent than in the first Pauline communities of the first century AD, particularly Rome. Again the writer James (5:7) exhorts: Be patient, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. The sense of urgency, impulsivity, ‘do it now’ was leading the first Christians into grave error.

The sense of anticipation and anxiety that develops as young children’s birthdays approach, the desire to have time move quickly can often mean that decisions made in haste leave too much room for long term regret.

The Jews had been told by the prophet Isaiah some 700 years before Jesus’ birth to expect a messiah. Jesus was not the only ‘messiah’ of that time. And it is most probable that they were expecting a warrior-king who would release them from the bondage of Rome. When the imprisoned John heard what deeds Jesus was performing, he sent a disciple to ask if he, Jesus, was the one for whom they were waiting. Jesus sent his reply: The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, lepers are made clean, the dead are raised and the good news is proclaimed to the poor (Matthew 11:2 – 6). While this was a revelation for John, most Jews would think Jesus, a carpenter of Nazareth, an unlikely choice.

Salvation is played out over, in, through and beyond time. If we measure the time from Creation to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to Jesus, from Peter to Francis the constant and unending message is the same: be patient.

As James so beautifully writes: Let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect, wanting nothing (1:4)

Yet there is still much to be done. Don’t let ‘stuff’ get in the way, nor allow regret to rule your life. We wait. In joyful hope. Next Sunday is the 3rd Sunday of Advent.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

A SAINT FOR OUR TIME, NOW IN THE MAKING

Dorothy Day

17 November 2016 | by Vicky Cosstick | The Tablet

As the United States enters a period of unprecedented uncertainty, the canonisation of a radical peace activist who was imprisoned several times is becoming increasingly likely.

She truly was a saint, a saint for our time, those who knew her believe – although the canonisation of this complex and intensely human woman is no fait accompli, and they retain mixed feelings about it.

Dorothy Day was ambivalent herself. “I don’t want to be a saint,” she famously said, “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” She would also say: “I wish they might wait until I am dead.” Day never wanted the focus to be on her, as Pat and Kathleen Jordan, who helped to care for in her last years, confirm. She always wanted it to be on the Gospel.

What happened to me, when I phoned to ask to visit St Joseph’s, on New York’s Lower East Side, where Day lived and which is now the motherhouse of the Catholic Worker movement, has happened to many others – I am simply invited to come and help.

The men in the queue outside direct me to bang on the door of 36 East 1st Street, just off the Bowery, once New York’s “Skid Row” but now populated by trendy bars, artisan boutiques and art galleries. I am put straight to work by Nathan, who is 26 and has been living in the community for a year. Once the hour-and-a-half shift starts at 10 a.m., it goes quickly – the 28 places filled and refilled as the hungry are served with a nutritious soup, prepared fresh by Geoffrey every day.

They get fresh coffee, bread and margarine, and an endless supply of donuts and pumpkin pie, donated by local bakeries and served by volunteers, some singing cheerfully or playfully splashing the hot water in vast sinks as the plates and mugs are washed and reused. There is no time to talk, just endless requests – “more coffee please, miss” – until about 120 have been served.

St Joseph House, together with Maryhouse around the corner on East 3rd Street, which serves a daily meal to a smaller number of women, and a communal farm upstate, make up the New York City Catholic Worker community, which includes six decision-making members and a constant stream of temporary residents, volunteers and guests.

Dorothy Day was born in 1897 into a non-practising Episcopalian family; she died on 29 November 1980, aged 83. She became a journalist, activist and suffragette, living a bohemian life among socialists and anarchists, actors and artists in New York and Chicago.

From her earliest days, as she recounts in her autobiography The Long Loneliness, she was on a spiritual quest. She had several lovers, including the editor and writer Lionel Moise, the father of the child she aborted; possibly, too, the playwright Eugene O’Neill. She was also briefly married to Berkeley Tobey, founder of the Literary Guild.

She fell in love with the anarchist Forster Batterham, and had an overwhelming experience of God’s love through her love for him and in giving birth to their daughter, Tamar – whom she had baptised as a Catholic before being conditionally baptised herself. Later, she made a total commitment to the Church and its teaching, and gave up Batterham, whom she apparently loved until the end of her days, because he did not believe in marriage.

She agonised about how to lead a fully Christian life in response to the injustice and suffering she saw all around her as the Depression took hold. In 1932, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December, when she was covering the Hunger March in Washington, she prayed in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for guidance, and back in New York found the eccentric French itinerant philosopher Peter Maurin on her doorstep.

He had the vision for houses of hospitality, the communal farms, and the newspaper, and a deep knowledge of Catholic Social Teaching – but he was a man of theories. Day was a practical woman, the “cipher” for Maurin’s abstract ideas; they founded the radical newspaper The Catholic Worker and worked together until his death in 1949. Day refused to pay taxes or take government funding. She protested against the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Vietnam War. She went to jail many times.

Wherever Maurin or Day went and spoke about the Catholic Worker movement, around the country further communities sprang up – there are now 245 worldwide, including 216 in the United States and three in the United Kingdom. Day never wanted the movement to be large, but as her granddaughter, Martha Hennessy, says, it continues to be about “cells of good living, mustard seeds of hope amongst the current destruction”.

Catholic Worker community members still protest – for example, against the training of drone operatives in upstate New York and Nevada, against Guantanamo Bay outside the White House, and in support of the current strike of some 48,000 US prisoners against their factory pay of 1-2 cents an hour.

Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, had met Day and became convinced she was a saint. He called a meeting in the late 1990s of people who had known her well. There was, says George Horton, New York archdiocesan director of social and community development, an unforgettable spirit in that room. In 2000, shortly before O’Connor died, she was declared a Servant of God by the Vatican.

Under Cardinal Edward Egan, the Dorothy Day Guild was established to support the cause, which received a dramatic boost when Day was one of the four “great Americans” cited by Pope Francis in his September 2015 speech to Congress, along with Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Merton. Earlier this year, under the current cardinal, Timothy Dolan, the local canonical inquiry was formally launched.

The canonisation procedures are designed to prove a life of sanctity and heroic virtue, explains Horton. Day was a prolific writer, always explicit about her faith, producing books, articles, unattributed editorials, letters and diaries. It must all – “right down to the shopping lists” – be examined by two theological censors, appointed secretly by the archbishop. The published writings are also reviewed, by a separate “historical commission”. Fifty people who knew her are being interviewed in confidence, in a formal canonical procedure. Just now, with half the interviews completed, there is a hiatus: “We are being a bit cautious at the moment, to ensure we follow the protocol,” says Horton. But the pressure is on, as those who knew Day get older. Horton hopes the local phase might be completed within a couple of years; then the reports of the commissions and the transcripts of the interviews, along with her writings, will all be sent to Rome.

“We need her to be canonised,” says Horton. “She holds up a model to the laity to live the works of mercy. She’s an orthodox, obedient daughter of the Church. She had a devotion to the Rosary and the Eucharist. She was a ‘reader of souls’. She loved beauty … and loved abundance, and wanted it for everyone. She lived a life of total selflessness and spoke out against anti-Semitism and racism … The biggest challenge is to do right by her and to see that she is translated faithfully.”

Nonetheless, Day’s family and friends have concerns. Martha Hennessy comes and goes between Maryhouse, her family in Vermont, and her schedule of giving talks about Dorothy. Her grandmother was, she says, an incredibly integrated person who relied on the will of God. Her whole life was a pilgrimage. She was a lay person, in and of the world, and Hennessy fears that this could put her “beyond the clerical institution’s understanding” – and specifically that the Church “might focus too narrowly on her conversion and sex life and ignore the most important thing, her stance of voluntary poverty and non-violent opposition to all war”.

On 6 August 1976, aged 79, Day addressed the Philadelphia Eucharistic Congress. That day, a Mass to commemorate the military was scheduled by the bishops, who had apparently forgotten it was the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. She spoke about her work with the poor and her conversion, and went on to admonish the bishops, calling for an act of penance. It turned out to be her last public appearance. For sure, however her canonisation proceeds, it will be difficult to make of her a plaster saint.

Vicky Cosstick is a former assistant editor of The Tablet and a freelance writer.

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/9189/a-saint-for-our-time-now-in-the-making