Dorothy Day and the Bread Line on Mott Street

During the Great Depression, Dorothy Day stood on Mott Street in Lower Manhattan, ladling soup to a line that stretched around the block. She had been a journalist, a bohemian intellectual who knew the inside of Greenwich Village salons. But after her conversion, she couldn't square comfortable Sunday worship with families sleeping in doorways.

In 1933, she and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement — not a charity office with intake forms, but actual homes where volunteers lived alongside the destitute. Day herself slept in the same cold rooms, ate the same thin meals, and scrubbed the same floors as anyone who walked through the door.

Critics called her naive. Church leaders questioned her methods. But Day had read Isaiah 58 and taken it to heart: "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice... to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?"

She refused to fast from food while fasting from compassion. For Day, true worship meant the smell of soup on your clothes and a stranger sleeping in your spare bed.

God's word through Isaiah remains unchanged: the Almighty is not impressed by our religious performances. He is moved when our worship walks out the church door and sits down beside someone who has nowhere else to go.