Dorothy Day and the Downward Path to Blessing

In 1933, Dorothy Day stood in a breadline on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, ladling soup alongside the very people most of New York had learned to look past. She had been a journalist, a woman of letters, someone who could have climbed. Instead, she opened the Catholic Worker house on Charles Street and chose to descend.

Day slept on the same thin mattresses as the homeless men and women she served. She ate the same watery stew. When donors offered her a more comfortable arrangement, she refused. "I have to live as they live," she said, "or I am a fraud."

Her friends thought she had lost her mind. The comfortable Catholics of her day kept their distance. Reporters mocked her. City officials threatened to shut her down. She experienced exactly what Jesus described in Luke 6 — hunger, weeping, rejection for the sake of following Him.

Yet Day would later write that those years in the soup kitchen were the richest of her life. Not rich in the way the world counts richness, but rich in the way Jesus meant when He looked at His disciples and said, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."

Jesus was not romanticizing poverty on that plain. He was revealing a truth Dorothy Day discovered with her own two hands: that when we release our grip on comfort, security, and reputation, we finally have room to hold the Kingdom.