Falling Into the Hands of God

Dorothy Day in 1916

On Saturday I attended the one-woman play Haunted By God about the life of Dorothy Day. In one scene, after the first issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper had been published, Dorothy answered a knock on the door. A homeless woman wanted to know where she could find one of the houses of hospitality that were envisioned in the paper. Of course, no such houses existed yet, and Dorothy faced a difficult decision: would she turn this woman out on the street, or invite her into her own cramped apartment that she shared with her daughter and Peter Maurin? “You can have the sofa,” she said to the woman. And thus the first house of hospitality changed from a vision to a reality.

After this scene, Dorothy said, “It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Indeed, to see and act as God does means being merciful, for God is merciful. It means being generous, for God is generous. It means setting aside our own ideas about how our life should unfold and responding to the needs of the people we encounter, knowing that this will mean sacrificing our own comfort and desires. A fearsome thing—and yet the path to wholeness, integrity, and joy as we practice what we say we believe: that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, which means loving our neighbor as ourself, for it is in our neighbor (and in ourselves) where the living God dwells.