"Christian faith centers around who Jesus is and not what He said." "The great creeds, for example, never mention the words of Jesus, but they are desperately interested in articulating His identity with exactness." "Having said this, however," "I'd be loath to give the impression that the teaching of Jesus is a matter of indifference to Christians." "Once they clearly understood that Jesus was Yahweh moving among His people, the first Christians were keenly interested in remembering, understanding, and propagating Jesus' teaching." "Wherever they've been heard, the words of Jesus have proved fascinating, disorienting, sometimes confounding, deeply transformative, and always unforgettable." "Would the end of slavery have happened without Jesus' command to love one's neighbor as oneself?" "Would Gandhi's liberation of India or the collapse of Communism have been possible without Jesus' summons to non-violence?" "How many, locked in a stance of resentment and wounded pride, have been changed by Jesus' story of the father of the prodigal son?" "How many social reforms have been prompted by Jesus' devastating line," ""Whatsoever you did to the least of my brothers, you did it to me"?" "Jesus Himself, rather consistently refused the title of Messiah, but He assumed readily enough the mantle of prophet, or speaker of the divine truth." "The crowds flocked to Him because of His miracles to be sure, but also because of the sweet discourse that came from His lips." "That preaching was central to Jesus' mission can be seen in the fact that one of the commonest refrains in the Gospels is," ""And He taught the crowds."" "They say that even during His lifetime, people were taking down His sayings, memorizing them, passing them on." "At a particularly difficult point in His ministry, almost all of Jesus' followers abandoned Him." "He turned to the twelve and He plaintively asked," ""Are you going to leave me, too?"" "Peter, speaking for the whole apostolic band said," ""Lord, to whom shall we go?" "You have the words of everlasting life."" "I can't imagine a clearer witness to the sheer power of Jesus' speech." "The Gospels were written within a few decades of the events of Jesus' life and many of Jesus' sayings were probably preserved, even in His own lifetime." "And there was a very well developed tradition of oral communication and oral transmission where you'd pass down the sayings of a wise figure very accurately, and if you got it wrong, people would correct you." "The same way, like if you're telling a story today, and someone goes," ""No, no, that isn't it." "You got that detail wrong."" "They would correct people who were passing on the tradition in an illegitimate way." "So, you know, there was a very strong oral tradition spiritually, where a great master, for example, who would preach or he would teach, people would sit at his feet and they would pass on his teaching" "often in that oral way, until, at a much later date, it might be written down." "Now, some of them wrote sermons and -- or gave sermons -- and then secretaries wrote them down at the very time, so we have that." "But a lot of the spiritual stuff" "I think was passed down master/disciple." "I'm standing on the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus gave His great programmatic sermon," "Iaying out the form of life for the gathered people, Israel." "Jesus was seen as the new Moses." "Moses went up the mountain, Mount Sinai, to bring down the Ten Commandments." "Here's Jesus, the new Moses, on this mountain." "I know what you might be thinking -- laws, rules, regulations." "Weren't ten enough?" "Now we have eight more." "It seems as though at times, the Catholic Church is obsessed with rules and regulations." "But look at the first word that Jesus says from this place." "The first word out of His mouth in the Beatitudes is "happy."" "He said, "Blessed, happy are the poor in spirit."" "Jesus' life is about joy." "He says at the Last Supper, "I've come that you might have joy." "You might share my joy, then it might be complete."" "How do we relate "joy" to the law?" "Two things that seem, often, at odds with each other." "Part of the problem is we have a very modern sense of freedom." "Freedom means, "l can do what I want." "I find joy when I determine my own life."" "But there's a different view of freedom in the Bible." "You might call it freedom for excellence." "It means, the disciplining of desire, so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless." "So I stand before you as a relatively free speaker of English," "I can say whatever I want." "Is that because I just decided I'll speak anyway I feel like?" "No, no, I was disciplined by a whole series of laws and rules, regulations." "What's Jesus telling us here on the Mount of Beatitudes?" "He's telling us the laws, the rules, if you want, that will place within our bodies and our minds and our spirit the capacity for joy." "That's why on this place of the law, the new lawgiver, the new Moses is the great place of joy, of "Beatitudo."" "I would like to suggest a reading of the eight Beatitudes that looks, first, at the more "positive" formulations." "Jesus says, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."" "This stands at the heart of the matter, for mercy, or tender compassion, is God's most distinctive characteristic." "St. John would give this same idea a New Testament expression in saying, "God is love."" "To have the Divine life in you, therefore, is to be conformed to love, to become love." "And, therefore, when you receive the Divine life as a gift, you must give it as a gift." "And then by a kind of spiritual physics, the Divine life increases in you." "We turn now to the closely related Beatitude," ""Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."" "This means that you will be happy if there is no ambiguity in your heart about what is most important." "The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that the saint is someone whose life is about one thing." "He didn't mean that the saint lives a monotonous existence." "He meant that a truly holy person has ordered her heart toward pleasing God alone." "And thus, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."" "We want many things, but what, most fundamentally, do we want?" "What is the hunger that defines and orders the secondary hungers of your life?" "What, in Paul Tillich's language, is your "ultimate concern"?" "If it's anything other than the will and purpose of God, anything other than righteousness, you will be unfulfilled." "The last of the "positive" Beatitudes is this," ""Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."" "Since God is the Creator," "He is that power through which all creatures are connected to one another." "God is a gathering force, the unifier of all that He has made." "Therefore, the one who has fundamentally ordered his life to God becomes necessarily a peacemaker, for he channels the metaphysical energy that links all things and all people." "One of the most recognizable signs of sanctity -- you can see it in all the saints -- is the radiation of just this reconciling power." "That's why a peacemaker becomes, ipso facto, a child of God, and therefore happy." "With these more positive Beatitudes in mind, we can turn with greater understanding to those Beatitudes that might strike us at first as a bit confounding or counterintuitive." "We sense within ourselves this infinite longing for God, but we attempt to fill it up with something less than God." "Thomas Aquinas named these four classical substitutes as wealth, pleasure, power, and honor." "We know that we need God, but we try to fill the void with something less than God, some combination of those four things." "In point of fact, it's only the emptying out of the ego in love that paradoxically fills us up." "Now, the classical spiritual tradition refers to this errant desire as "concupiscence,"" "but I think we could translate the idea very effectively with our more modern term of "addiction."" "And here's why." "We're hungry for God, but we try to fill the hunger with something less than God and so necessarily we are frustrated." "In our frustration, we convince ourselves we need more of that finite good, and so we strive and strive and strive, and we get it, and find ourselves necessarily frustrated." "At this point, a kind of spiritual panic sets in, and we find ourselves obsessively turning around some finite good that can never in principle make us happy." "We are very happy" "We are very, very happy" "We are very happy to see you" "All right, all right!" "We love you much!" "We are very happy to see you." "Thank you for those songs." "Beautiful." "Thank you." "The first of the "negative" formulations is," ""Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."" "This is neither a romanticizing of economic poverty nor a demonization of wealth, but rather a formula for detachment." "Might I suggest a somewhat variant rendition, how blessed are you if you are not attached to material things, if you have not placed the goods that wealth can buy at the center of your concern." "When the Kingdom of God is your ultimate concern, not only will you not become addicted to material things, you will, in fact, be able to use them, with great effectiveness, for God's purposes." "Under this same rubric of detachment, we should consider the Beatitude," ""How blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted"." "Now, I know this can sound" "like the worst kind of masochism, but we have to dig deeper." "I think a very legitimate translation would be how "lucky" you are, how happy and blessed you are if you are not addicted to good feelings." "Good feelings, pleasant sensations -- physical, emotional, psychological -- are wonderful, but they're not God." "And if we turn them into God, they become in short order the focus of an addiction, which can be seen clearly enough in the prevalence of drug abuse and pornography and conspicuous consumption in our society." "Again, this has nothing to do with Puritanism." "It has to do with detachment, and therefore, with spiritual freedom." "Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth"." "Once more, Jesus is not so much passing judgment on institutions of power as He is showing a path of detachment." "How lucky you are if you are not attached to the finite good of worldly power." "J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, experienced it firsthand, the horrors of the first World War, and witnessed those in the second." "It's no accident that in his great work, he proposed as the most tempting talisman precisely a ring of power." "But when you're detached from worldly power, then you can follow the Will of God even if it means walking a path of extreme powerlessness." "Meek, unaddicted to worldly power, you can become a conduit of true divine power to the world." "And the last of the "negative" Beatitudes is," ""Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."" "We must read this once again in light of Thomas Aquinas's analysis." "If the call to poverty holds off the addiction to material things and the summons to mourn counters the addiction to good feelings and the valorization of meekness blocks the addiction to power, this last Beatitude gets in the way of the addicting attachment to honor." "In the late 1 9th century," "Charles Lwanga was the chief of pages in the court of King Mwanga, who governed the region of what is now Uganda." "When the king demanded sexual favors from Charles, the young man refused, even at the cost of his life." "Charles and many of his companions were burned to death at Namugongo, the site which today is the very focal point of African Christianity." "Charles' radical detachment from worldly honor unleashed the Divine life in an incomparably powerful way." "I'm standing in front of Matthias Grunewald's great painting, the Isenheim Altarpiece." "It's one of the most spiritually powerful and brutally realistic depictions of the Crucifixion in Western art." "Look at Jesus' mouth, just agape in speechless anguish." "Look at the terrible wounds in His hands and His feet, the blisters and wounds all over His body." "There's nothing the least bit sentimental about this portrayal." "I'm here because of something Thomas Aquinas said." "Thomas said, "lf you want the perfect exemplification of the Beatitudes," "look to Christ crucified."" "He specified, "lf you want to be happy, despise what Jesus despised on the cross, and love what Jesus loved on the cross."" "What did He despise?" "Those four things in which we typically seek our happiness." "Wealth?" "He has none of it." "He's stripped naked." "Pleasure?" "He's at the limit of psychological and physical suffering." "Power?" "He has none." "He's nailed to the cross." "He can't even move." "Honor?" "They mock Him as He's publicly displayed crucified at the end of His life." "Jesus is detached from the four things in which we typically seek our joy." "And what did He love on the cross?" "He loved doing the Will of His Father." "He was on the cross the single-hearted one." "He was on the cross the one who hungers for righteousness." "And, therefore, on the cross, He was the ultimate peacemaker." "He was on the cross the ultimate bearer of the divine mercy." "Though it's very strange to say, though it's a very high paradox, if Aquinas is right, that is a picture of a happy man." "And there's more." "Notice, please, how John the Baptist to the right indicates Jesus, but in this odd contorted way." "It's as though all of our expectations have to be turned around and then we can see that that indeed is a picture of freedom." "That indeed is a picture of joy." "The main point is always detachment." "It's not whether you have it or not." "It's how you have it." "I find in the spiritual life, it's very often a question of how, not what." "It's how you hold your possessions." "So if someone has a lot of possessions but knows they're from God and they're there to serve God's purposes, then fine." "Maybe God is using you and your wealth to do His work." "So let's say someone who has made a lot of money and knows how to use it well and knows how to invest it and then knows how to spend it effectively, well thank God for that person, you know?" "So, it's how we hold onto our possessions, not so much whether we have them or not." "Now we can engage, and we should engage, in certain acts of letting go precisely as an exercise in detachment." "So, for example, during Lent, you might get detached from food." "You might get detached from certain types of pleasure." "We give alms so as to be detached from material things, but it's always the how that matters, not the what." "I've spent a good deal of time interpreting the opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount, for it's most important to be clear on the priority of joy in the teaching of Jesus." "However, the Beatitudes are perhaps best thought of as a kind of overture to the entire sermon, as a preparation for what is, in fact, the rhetorical and spiritual high point of Jesus' programmatic speech," "namely, the teaching on non-violence and enemy love." "In words that still take our breath away," "Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said," "'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" "But I say to you," "Iove your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."" "In order to understand this radical teaching, we have to be clear on what Jesus means by "love."" "Love is not a sentiment or feeling." "Love is actively willing the good of the other as other." "And this is why enemy love is the surest test of love." "If I am good to someone who is sure to repay me, then I might simply be engaging in an act of disguised or indirect self-interest." "But if I am generous to someone who is my enemy, who is not the least bit interested in responding to me in kind, then I can be sure that I have truly willed his good and not my own." "Jesus wants His followers to aspire to the way that God loves." "God loves those who love Him and those who hate Him." "He loves His friends and His enemies." "He gives good things to those who deserve them and those who don't deserve them." "If we are truly free from our attachments, especially from the attachment to approval, then we can become "sons and daughters" of this God and hence conduits of His peculiar grace." "The already radical teaching on enemy love becomes even more intensely focused as Jesus turns His attention to the practice of non-violence." "Giving voice to the common consensus among law-abiding Jews," "Jesus declares, "You have heard it said," "'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'" "But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer." "But if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also." "And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well."" "This can sound like passivity in the face of evil, but it's not." "It's the proposal of a new and very effective means of resistance." "Classically, there are two responses to violence, fight or flight." "We can respond with counter-violence or we can acquiesce." "But we all know, in the long run, neither of those is an effective method." "You fight violence with more violence, you tend to make the situation worse." "You acquiesce to violence, you confirm the violent person in his tyranny, in his evil." "What Jesus proposes is a third way." "And look at His example." "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and give them the other." "Again, it sounds like passivity, but look, in Jesus' time, you would never have used your left hand." "It was considered unclean." "So, if someone strikes you on the right cheek, it means they were striking you with the back of their hand." "It was a gesture of contempt, the way you treat a slave or an inferior." "So what's Jesus saying?" "If someone treats you that way, don't fight back, but by God, don't flee." "Don't acquiesce." "Rather, stand your ground and turn the other cheek." "You're saying, in effect," ""You will not treat me that way again." "I refuse to cooperate with the world that you're living in."" "You're mirroring back to the violent person his violence, hoping thereby to lure him into a different moral and spiritual space." "Let me give you two contemporary examples of this method." "The first concerns Bishop Tutu of South Africa." "When he was a young priest in Johannesburg, he was making his way one day along a raised wooden sidewalk over the muddy street." "He came to a narrow spot of the sidewalk, and was met by a white man who was a racist." "The white man said," ""Get off the sidewalk." "I don't make way for gorillas."" "Tutu got off the sidewalk, gestured broadly and said, "l do."" "Second one concerns Mother Teresa, the great Saint of Calcutta." "She was holding a starving child by the hand, took her to a baker's shop and begged for a loaf of bread for the child." "The baker spat full in Mother Teresa's face." "The saint stood her ground, smiled and said," ""Thank you for that gift for me." "Perhaps something now for the child?"" "In both cases, Tutu and Mother Teresa, they didn't fight back, but by God, they didn't acquiesce." "They didn't run." "Rather, they stood their ground, and in this humorous, provocative way, mirrored back the violence of their aggressor, hoping thereby to lure that person into a different spiritual space." "That's turning the other cheek." "If someone had told me when I was a kid in the 1970s that the Soviet Union and its Communist empire would collapse with barely a shot being fired, and that one of the principle instigators would be the Pope of Rome," "I would never have believed it." "Yet, that's precisely what happened." "John Paul ll came to this square," "Victory Square in the heart of Warsaw, and he celebrated Mass in front of hundreds of thousands of people." "During the homily, the Pope spoke of God, he spoke of freedom, he spoke of human rights, and as he delivered the homily, the crowd began to chant, "We want God, we want God."" "The Pope continued and the chant went on," ""We want God, we want God."" "Then it was picked up rhythmically by everybody in the square," ""We want God, we want God."" "Perceptive people at the time knew that the Soviet control over Poland, the Communist empire was effectively finished." "This move of John Paul ll is one of the most remarkable examples in our time of provocative non-violence." "Sometimes in our fallen, conflictual world, all we can do is to resist violence with violence, so that's true." "That's why the Church, for example, has a Doctrine of Just War." "Sometimes it's all we can do in the face of overwhelming violence, just as sometimes, all we can do is run away or to acquiesce, so I acknowledge that." "We don't live in a perfect world and sometimes we have to make those compromises." "Nevertheless, I think we can marginalize Jesus' teaching way too much and say," ""Oh, it's just a high ideal that no one can really exemplify."" "False." "False." "You see Gandhi in the 20th century, who learned it from Matthew, Chapter 5." "Gandhi didn't learn that from his own Hindu tradition, but when he came to London and he read the Gospel of Matthew, and he said, "This is an extraordinary thing."" "And his Christian friends would say," ""Oh, well, you know, no one takes that very seriously."" "And Gandhi said, "Well, I take it seriously."" "And by God, he made it work in India." "Martin Luther King, of course, who followed Gandhi and knew those texts as a Christian preacher, also knew that they could be very powerful." "John Paul ll, who read the same text and saw their power, exercised it." "Now, they found their propitious moment." "All three of those people knew in this circumstance and in this time, it could work, but I think we're way too quick to say," ""Oh, that's only a high ideal that could never really work in our world."" "No, false." "In the 20th century, we have these three powerful examples of enormous evil being overcome through non-violence." "So far, we have been considering the teaching of Jesus as it is articulated in the Sermon on the Mount." "But we would be greatly remiss if we did not attend to the instruction that emerges from those startling, funny, off-putting, and strangely enlightening stories that Jesus loved to tell." "I'm speaking, of course, about the Parables." "There are dozens of such stories sprinkled throughout the Gospels, but I'd like to examine what most consider to be the greatest of them," "the story of the father and his two sons, better known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son." "Jesus tells the story of a father and his two sons." "The younger of the two sons comes to his father and makes a request that is breathtaking in its rudeness," ""Father, give me my share of the inheritance that's coming to me."" "You'd expect to receive an inheritance upon the death of your father, therefore, he was saying not too subtly," ""Why don't you hurry up and die?"" "And then with a triple emphasis, he's asking for something to have on his own," ""Give me my share coming to me."" "The God whom Jesus consistently proclaimed is a God of tender mercy, a God of super-abundantly generous love, whose very nature is to give." "And the right relationship to that God is to receive His life as a grace and then give it away as a gift, allowing even more of it to flood into one's heart." "The younger son in this Parable, in a word, has all of this precisely backward." "Having taken his inheritance, the son wanders off into what's usually translated as "a distant country,"" "but the original Greek, choran makran, is instructive, for it means, literally, "the big emptiness."" "In very short order, the prodigal finds himself destitute, starving, and alone." "In fact, so desperate that he hires himself out to keep and feed the pigs, a task of unsurpassable indignity for a Jew." "Coming to his senses at last, the young man reasons," ""How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, and here I am dying of hunger."" "He resolves to return home and confess his sin to his father." "What we are meant to grasp is that closeness to the one who gives" "leads to sufficiency and even abundance, for the infinite life of God never runs out." "The father sees his son from a long way off and then, throwing caution and respectability to the winds, he comes running out to meet him." "This detail in particular would have caught the attention of Jesus' listeners." "In His time, it was considered unseemly in the extreme for an old man, for a patriarch, to run to anyone." "People were expected to come to him and pay obeisance to him." "But the old man runs to his son." "He embraces him, he puts a ring on his finger, symbolizing a sort of spiritual marriage, and he puts shoes on his feet, restoring his son to dignity." "When the son commences his carefully rehearsed speech of confession, the father cuts him off and declares a general celebration because," ""This son of mine was dead and is alive again." "He was lost and is found."" "This, of course, is Jesus' brilliant and deeply moving portrait of his heavenly Father, who does not play games of calculation and recompense, but makes His sun to shine on the good and bad alike," "and who doesn't know how to do anything but love." "Now, all this time, the older brother is out in the field, which is to say, in his own kind of exile." "Though he has remained close to his father physically, we promptly see just how far he is from him psychologically and spiritually." "He hears the sound of the celebration." "He's told that a feast is on for his long-lost brother, but he refuses to come in, and he smolders with resentment." "His father, never easily put off, comes out to meet him, as he had come out to meet his brother." "But the older son refuses the entreaties of his father," ""Listen!" "For all these years, I've been working like a slave for you, and I've never disobeyed your command." "Yet you've never given me a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends." "But when this son of yours comes back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!"" "The older brother's language betrays him." "He says to his father," ""For years, I've slaved for you, obeying all your commands."" "There is nothing of giving and receiving in that language, none of the joy of reciprocal love." "Everything is mercantile calculation." "The father tries to lure him back into the circle of celebration with words that are among the most important and moving in the New Testament:" ""Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours."" "This is the key to the entire Parable, true for both sons, though neither of them realize it." "Everything that God has is given to us." "God's whole being is for giving." "The problem is we fall into this illusion born of our fear that we have to grasp and cling and deserve, when, in fact, everything is grace." "St. Irenaeus of Lyons, the 2nd century spiritual master, summed up the whole of Christianity with this phrase " "Gloria Dei homo vivens " ""the Glory of God is a human being fully alive."" "God wants us to be alive." "Therefore, and I think this is the whole point of the Parable," "let's stop playing self-serving games of grasping at God, and let's learn how to surrender to grace." "Once, a rabbi inquired of Jesus which of the many laws, well over 600, that governed Jewish life was the most important?" "With disarming simplicity and directness, Jesus responded," ""This is the greatest," "'You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul.'" "And the second is like it," "'You shall love your neighbor as yourself."'" "The absolute love for God is not in competition with a radical commitment in love to our fellow human beings, precisely because God is not one being among many, but the very ground of the existence of the finite world." "Perhaps the most powerful evocation of this principle in the teaching of Jesus is found in that haunting parable in the 25th chapter of Matthew's Gospel." "Jesus says, "At the end of time, the Son of Man will come to judge the living and the dead." "He will separate people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." "To those on His right, He will say," "'Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food," "I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me.'" "In their puzzlement, the righteous will wonder," "'Lord, when did we treat You with such love?"'" "And He replies, "Amen I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me."" "Then comes the reversal." ""To those on His left, the Son of Man will say," "'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire." "For I was hungry and you gave me no food," "I was thirsty and you gave me no drink," "I was naked and you did not clothe me, ill and in prison and you did not visit me.'" "As puzzled as their counterparts, the accursed will say," "'Lord, when did we neglect You so thoroughly?"'" "Comes the devastating response," ""As often as you failed to do it to one of these least brothers of mine, you failed to do it to Me."" "To love Christ is to love those whom Christ loves." "It's as simple and as deeply challenging as that." "The very drama of this Parable is meant to stir us out of our complacency and to beguile us out of any confusion on this score." "A man who understood the theology and ethics of Matthew 25 in his bones was Peter Maurin, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement." "He knew that the Church had codified that section of Matthew as The Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy, among which were feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, burying the dead, counseling the doubtful," "and praying for the living and the dead." "He wondered what society would look like if those ideals were the foundation of the political and social order." "He wanted to build a society in which, in his words," ""lt would be easier for men to be good."" "Maurin recognized Matthew 25 as "dynamite,"" "from the Greek dynamis, power, a favorite word of St. Paul, by the way." "This dynamis is meant to animate all of society." ""But," he famously complained," ""we have taken the dynamite of the Church, have wrapped it up in nice phraseology, placed it in a hermetic container and sat on the lid."" "Peter Maurin saw his purpose as blowing up the dynamite of the Church, to transform the society." "He wanted to change us from a society of "go-getters"" "to a society of "go-givers."" "In 1 932, Peter Maurin came here to New York just as the Great Depression was getting underway." "He met a young social activist and spiritual seeker, recently converted to Catholicism." "Her name was Dorothy Day." "Dorothy had been a political radical and friend to some of the leaders in the cultural avant-garde of the 1 920s, including the playwright Eugene O'Neill and the political agitator John Reed." "But she had become fascinated with the Catholic Church, especially after the birth of her first child, when she said she felt "a gratitude so great that it corresponded to nothing in this world."" "When she met Peter Maurin, she was looking for a way to combine her radical political commitment to her new-found Catholic faith." "The vagabond philosopher was the answer to her prayers." "Dorothy was entranced by Peter's vision for a renewal of American society and his recommendation that the revolution should start with the founding of a newspaper that would present Catholic social teaching and the establishment of "houses of hospitality"" "where the poor would be welcomed and where the corporal and spiritual works of mercy would be practiced." "And that's precisely what she did." "On May the 1st, 1 933," "Dorothy Day came here to Washington Square Park, and she distributed the first edition of The Catholic Worker newspaper, selling it for one penny a copy." "It's the same price today, by the way." "Not long afterwards, she and Peter Maurin established the first of the Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality on the Lower East Side, a place where the corporal works of mercy were practiced." "What I want you to see is that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were far more than social workers or political activists." "Their love for the poor was grounded in their passionate love for God, and that's why they embody the dual command of the Lord Jesus." "Someone who operated very much in the spirit of Dorothy Day was a figure to whom we have already alluded," "Mother Teresa of Calcutta." "Much of Mother's Day was taken up with prayer, meditation," "Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, the rosary, but the rest of her time, as we well know, was spent in the grittiest work among the poorest of the poor, practicing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy," "blowing up the dynamite of the Church." "Father Paul Murray, the Irish Dominican spiritual writer and sometime advisor to Mother Teresa, relates the following story." "He was one day in deep conversation with Mother, searching out the sources of her spirituality and mission." "At the end of their long talk, she asked him to spread his hand out on the table and touching his fingers one by one as she spoke the words, she said," ""You did it to me."" "In his inaugural address as reported in the Gospel of Mark," "Jesus announced the arrival of the Kingdom of God." "And thereupon, He immediately called people to change," ""Repent and believe the Good News."" "The word that we typically render as "repent"" "is metanoiete in the Greek, a term which is based upon two words" ""meta," "beyond," and "nous," "mind."" "With the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, we must change our attitude, our way of thinking, our perspective on things, the manner in which we see." "We have to see the world differently." "And in light of that new vision, we have to change the way we act." "Once we envision our own existence as the gift of a gracious God, we gladly resolve to give our lives away as a gift in love." "And when we do that, we find ourselves increased thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold, the Divine life continuing to flood into us." "Once we see that God is love, we are no longer afraid to risk the path of love." "The teaching of Jesus is all about this new vision and this summons to change."