Today is Jan. 18, Saturday of the First Week in Ordinary Time.
At today’s Mass we read, “Let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help” (Heb 4:16).
In this month’s issue of Our Sunday Visitor magazine, we feature a pilgrimage to Servant of God Dorothy Day’s New York. Valerie Stivers guides us through the Big Apple, narrating the landmarks dear to Dorothy.
Seeing the beautiful article, for me, was a reminder of how radical Dorothy’s life was. Her life was profoundly marked by the grace that comes to offer timely help. Confident that her projects were in the hands of God, her life was marked again and again by surrender.
One of my favorite moments of the article recalls Dorothy’s first moments of prayer in a Catholic Church on her way home from long nights in the Golden Swan pub. Stivers writes, “Standing outside on the misty avenue outside the bar, she saw St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village a few blocks away and followed the Irish and Italian laborers in for early morning Mass.” In those quiet moments in St. Joseph’s, Dorothy approached the throne of grace and God lovingly called her to himself.
‘Love demands renunciation’
Dorothy writes, “We have been raised above ourselves by baptism, and the law of this supernatural life is love, a love which demands renunciation.” To run to the throne of mercy, to find grace for timely help, we need to set aside those things that hold us back. “Love demands renunciation,” Dorothy says, and she is right. We have to leave behind our fears, our sorrows. We have to cast off anything that binds us to this world, everything that holds us to the spirit of this age.
But in doing so, we will discover again, as Dorothy did, the freedom of grace. “I had thought all those years that I had freedom,” Dorothy writes just after her conversion, “but now I felt that I had never known real freedom nor even had knowledge of what freedom meant.” Don’t hold back. Run to the throne of mercy today, as Dorothy once did on the streets of New York, and find grace for timely help!
Let us pray,
Attend to the pleas of your people with heavenly care, O Lord, we pray, that they may see what must be done and gain strength to do what they have seen. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
