Lent 2025 Day 45

Dorothy Day, Worker
James 2:14–17 | John 18:1–19:37
 
On Good Friday, we enter the stillness and sorrow of the crucifixion. We stand at the foot of the cross and bear witness to Jesus—beaten, betrayed, mocked, and murdered. The passion narrative in John 18–19 is unrelenting: a story of empire’s violence, religious complicity, and the crushing of Love himself. It is a story that continues to unfold.

Dorothy Day (1897–1980), co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, understood that the crucifixion wasn’t just a historical moment but a present reality. “It is no use saying that we are born 2,000 years too late to give room to Christ,” she wrote. “Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.” She saw Christ in breadlines, in the freezing tenement, in the trembling hands of the sick, in the exhausted bodies of striking workers. She recognized the Passion not just in the sanctuary but in the streets.

The cross, for Dorothy Day, was not an abstract doctrine—it was incarnated in the lived suffering of the poor and oppressed. “Where are the saints to try to change the social order, not to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” she asked. Her radical Catholic faith called her not only to charity but to solidarity. She opened houses of hospitality where the hungry were fed, the sick were cared for, and the lonely were welcomed. But she also marched, protested, was jailed for her convictions, and called the Church to account for its silence.

This is the faith that James 2 insists upon—a faith that moves, that labors, that risks. “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” Dorothy Day’s faith was very much alive. “Love in action,” she wrote, “is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” And yet she chose it, over and over, believing that love must take flesh in soup kitchens, picket lines, and jail cells.
 
On Good Friday, we often focus on the pain of Christ. But Day would remind us to focus also on his presence—on where Christ continues to be crucified in our midst. In children in detention centers. In houseless neighbors ignored on the sidewalk. In the mother holding a sign at a strike line. In the addict, the refugee, the incarcerated. She wrote, “The mystery of the poor is this: that they are Jesus.” To love Christ, we must love him in these.

The cross in the streets is not shiny or clean. It is heavy. It is splintered. It is stained with real blood and real tears. It demands that we, like the women of Jerusalem, do not turn away. Day believed in staying present to suffering—not to glorify it, but to resist the powers that cause it. “The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor,” she said. The crucifixion abolishes those categories. Christ’s outstretched arms hold all.

And yet, even amid so much pain, Dorothy Day’s faith pulsed with joy and hope. She believed that the love which carried Christ to the cross would also raise him—and all of us—from the tomb. Her vision of the Kingdom of God was intensely concrete: a world where no one was left behind, and where the works of mercy were the true liturgy of the Church.

Good Friday is not about rushing to Easter. It is about staying with the crucified Christ—wherever he is found. It is about refusing to look away from the sites of suffering in our world and insisting that redemption can be found there too. Dorothy Day challenges us not to sentimentalize the cross, but to shoulder it. Not to pity the poor, but to join them. Not to mourn Jesus from afar, but to draw close, even when it costs us everything.

Reflection:

• Where is Christ being crucified in your neighborhood, your city, your country? 
• How can your faith take on flesh through acts of compassion, justice, and resistance? 
• What does it mean to love in action, not in dreams, this Good Friday? 

Breath Prayer: Inhale: Christ is crucified… Exhale: In the streets, I find him.

May this Good Friday awaken us not just to the suffering of the cross, but to the call to carry it—with courage, with community, and with fierce love.

Amen.