International Women's Day honours the contributions of women to society around the world, as well as lifts up the rights of marginalised women. To commemorate women, there are several feminist angles my message could take this morning --

1. I could tell you stories of phenomenal women in the Bible, starting with Eve - the mother of all generations; Sarah, Hagar, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah – the mothers of Israel; Rahab, Ruth – famous for their courage; Mary of Bethany, who anointed Jesus' feet, Mary of Magdala who was the first to announce the Easter news, “I have seen the Lord”; Tabitha, Phoebe, Lydia, Priscilla … and closer to home, Jean, Jaime, Peggy, Sammi, Cephas, Kel, Christine, .. Eileena, Clare .. and the many, many other nameless “women of high standing”. But I imagine you have heard their stories before.

2. The other approach I could take is to explore with you the feminine images of God. We are most comfortable with God as Father, King, Lord and He. Don't we always assume that God, like Jesus, is male? So, I could then show you the many places in the Bible where feminine language is used for God. How God is a “woman in labour” and a “mother who comforts her child” in Isaiah, a “mother bear robbed of her cubs” in Hosea or “a hen who gathers her brood under her wings” in Matthew. But again, what can I tell you about feeling feminine images -- some of you are better attuned to the feminine than I!

3. Or I could talk about marginalized women. How Jesus lived in "a man's world," yet he often went against the norms of the patriarchal culture by treating women as persons equal with men. In general, we miss this when we read the Gospels and we fail to grasp the radical nature of Jesus' actions because we lack knowledge of the oppressive conditions suffered by women of that day. Here, again, dare I talk to you about being marginalized, about living on the fringes of society, about being oppressed? No, I dare not.

So what to do? We have completed our series on The Apostle's Creed and are embarking on a new sermon series called “Experiencing God”. Upon Jean Lee's advice, I decided to explore how one particular woman experienced God in her life. (by the way, that's exactly what Feminism is about – a woman's experience, a woman's perspective on life – its not about bra-burning!).

It was December 8, 1932 , Washington DC . After completing her reporting assignment – on the Hunger March demanding relief and jobs --a woman ducked into a chapel. And kneeling in the dark, she began to pray. This 35-year-old journalist and single mother was at a crossroad. She had spent her youth among communists and bohemians, crusading for the downtrodden and seeking her purpose in the world. Now a Catholic convert, she still felt helpless to change anything. "There I offered up a special prayer," Dorothy Day would later write, "a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor."

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897 into a non-religious family but one that valued reading, writing and education. She was a voracious reader of literary classics, but had little exposure to religion during her childhood. By the time she was in college she had read Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Tolstoy and had devoured everything of Dostoevsky, her favourite Russian author who wrote about the depths of human suffering and poverty. During her college years, Dorothy rejected the idea of religion in favor of a more radical cause. She dropped out of school and worked as a journalist in New York with a variety of radical papers and took part in the popular protests and demonstrations of her day. Her friends were communists, anarchists, and an assortment of New York artists and intellectuals, most of the opinion that religion was the "opium of the people".

Several events led to her conversion to Catholicism in 1927 at the age of 30 and I will highlight a few of them later.

Meanwhile, that fateful December day in 1932 saw her prayer being answered with a providential meeting with a certain Peter Maurin, a philosopher and agitator, who encouraged her to begin a newspaper that would give a voice to the millions displaced by the Depression. The Catholic Worker was launched on May 1, 1933 and through it, Dorothy was not content simply to denounce injustice but to announce a new social order, based on recognizing Christ in one's neighbors. In an effort to practice what they preached, Dorothy converted the office of The Catholic Worker into a "house of hospitality" - the first of many to come - offering food for the hungry and shelter for the tired masses uprooted by the Depression. It was an effort to show that the radical gospel commandment of love could be lived. She understood this challenge not just in charity and works of mercy, but in a political form as well, confronting and resisting the social forces which gave rise to such a need for charity.

Dorothy Day represented a new way of serving Christ not only through prayer and sacrifice but through solidarity and struggle with the poor. She maintained a pacifist position throughout World War Two and took part in numerous civil disobedience campaigns against the spirit of the Cold War and the peril of nuclear war. Her rebel spirit and unswerving religious faith caused her to be branded a heretic and a traitor, landed her in jail several times, and isolated her from her biggest supporters. But towards the end of her life, people were calling her a saint.

But what the real enigma for us must be,
how this atheist of a woman came to turn her heart to God,
and how she reconciled her radical social commitment with
a traditional and even conservative piety.

Dorothy Day had an extremely colourful life and much has been written by her and about her, much too much to cover this morning. However, I would like to highlight some of the several events that led to her slowly turning her heart to God.

Before that though, I must tell you that it was Dorothy herself who tells us in her autobiography, that despite circumstances in her early life, she later believed that she was almost from the beginning "haunted by God." She came to realize that the Hound of Heaven was breathing on her in hot pursuit from early childhood. Although she was curious about God and religion, she rejected organized religion because she perceived that it did nothing to alleviate the plight of desperate people. However when she herself tried to explain the causes of her eventual conversion, she said, “sometimes it is one thing, sometimes it is another that stands out in my mind.” She admitted, “No one but God knows how long I struggled, how I turned to Him, and turned from Him, again and again.”

What were some of the turning points in her life then?

Dorothy's first jail experience -- occurred when she was 20 and had accompanied a group of women suffragists to the White House to protest the treatment of other suffragists in jail. While in jail, Dorothy joined a hunger strike and suffered great emotional despair. "What was right and wrong? What was good and evil? I lay there in utter confusion and misery" she writes in her autobiography.

The only book she had access to was the Bible and she took great comfort from the Psalms that expressed her own sorrow and hope. However, she did not want to go to God in this state of defeat. She remembered how a college professor insinuated that religion was for the weak and those who needed solace and comfort, who could not suffer alone but must turn to God for comfort.

Even so, being jailed was a significant experience for Dorothy, one that moved her from being a passionate idealist to action. It dawned upon her that she was no longer the young girl seeking justice for the oppressed, she was the oppressed. Her identification with the masses became real. And she was to spend time in jail again and again. Her last imprisonment in 1973, at age seventy-six, when she joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in California for a nonviolent demonstration against the Teamsters Union (IBT). She was arrested with other protesters and jailed for ten days.

A second turning point was when Dorothy at 21, began training as a nurse in response to the tragic heroin-induced suicide of a friend. She roomed with a fellow nursing student, a Miss Adams, who brought to her joy and enthusiasm that was contagious. She was a Catholic, and Dorothy came to admire her greatly and to associate all her natural goodness and ability with her Catholicism. Miss Adams didn't go to Mass more than once a week and she never spoke of her faith. She had no Catholic literature in her room aside from her prayer book, and she didn't use that except on special occasions. She was the average kind of Catholic whose faith was so solid a part of her life that she didn't need to talk about it. Dorothy said, “I just felt the healthiness of her soul”.

Another turning point in her life came in 1926 at age 29 when she became pregnant by a man she deeply loved. This event sparked a mysterious conversion. The experience of what she called “natural happiness” turned her heart a little more to God. She had moved to a beach cottage in Staten Island, with her common law husband, an anarchist named Forster Batterham, who opened up to Dorothy a new love for nature. Life with the man she loved, in the beauty of natural surroundings, added to Dorothy's sense of peace and the presence of God. She began to feel her religious search begin anew. She began praying daily and going to Mass regularly.

The birth of her daughter Tamar was in her own words, “a physically and spiritually tremendous event” and her love, joy and awe at this fact of creation moved her to worship, to adore. She even decided she would have her child baptized as a Roman Catholic, a step she herself followed in 1927. Forster however, was unsympathetic towards Dorothy's interest in religion and in God and they eventually separated.

She spent some lonely years in the wilderness, raising her child alone, while praying for some way of reconciling her faith and her commitment to social justice. “I had become convinced that I wanted to be a Catholic, and yet I felt I was betraying the class to which I belonged, the workers, the poor of the world.”

Along with these several turning points in her life, I believe there was a consistent way Dorothy experienced God throughout her life, even while she did not realize it in her younger days. It was through her solidarity with the poor and needy. God was present to her then, only that he used a pseudonym! She acknowledged this when she spoke of how she learned much from her communist friends -- “They helped me to find God in His poor, in His abandoned ones, as I had not found Him in Christian churches.”

So, finding comfort from His word in times of despair, seeing Him reveal Himself through people, and especially the poor and oppressed and sensing Him in the beauty of nature and the miracle of birth, were some events that led Dorothy to turn her heart to God. The enigma of how she reconciled her radical social commitment with a traditional and even conservative piety is solved when we realize that her action and concern for the neediest merged with her hunger for God.

This brings us back to that day in December 1932, when Dorothy was to write about the hunger march organized by the communists. As Dorothy stood on the curb watching, her heart swelled with pride and joy at the courage of the marchers, and she felt a bitterness that her conversion had separated her from them. That's when she lifted up a special prayer to God to make her an instrument of His peace and love. And that's exactly how she spent the remainder of her life – as an instrument of God's peace and love.

Does Dorothy Day provide a model for how we can experience God today? I daresay yes. In the depths of the jail of despair we too seek comfort from God through his Word and through prayer. We also experience God in persons, people who may hardly speak of their faith, or those who speak of a different faith, yet propel us towards God. To this day, we still stand in awe at His creation, if only we'd look after it a little better. And most of all she experienced Him in her solidarity with the neediest. Social abuses and economic injustices are still with us today. The poor are still with us today, in fact they at our very doorstep. If you want their address, its Block 31 Toa Payoh Lorong 5. Dorothy quoted many times in her writing, "you love God just as much as the one you love least." This tells of the perfection of love she was seeking. Her whole life was a testimony of her faith that no one is to be excluded from His love.

When I got to this point in my message, I thought to myself, we know all this already! We know we need to study and meditate on God's word, appreciate and care for His creation, look for God in people even our enemies, we know we need to reach out to the needy and oppressed. We know all of this, but we don't do it …. this is our struggle. So how?

Can Dorothy Day inspire us? I believe there are two streams of influence that gave her direction and the courage and strength to persevere. First, she was born into a family that valued books, education and literacy, her awareness and sensibilities were awakened and re-awakened each time she picked up a book. As she matured she returned to her books again and again, and this included the New Testament after her conversion. Each time with new perspectives. So each time became a fresh conversation with deeper insights gained. She said books nourish us, enlighten us and strengthen us – just as Christ does.

The other stream of influence was the traditions of the Roman Catholic church that she embraced after her conversion. The teachings, the sacraments especially the Eucharist, the liturgy, the devotion to and imitation of the saints and mystics all contributed to the spiritual strength. Her spiritual guides included Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Therese of Lisieux and Teresa of Avila. She says, "We feed the hungry, yes; we shelter the homeless and give them clothes, yes; but there is prayer and a strong faith at work behind all this.”

This is what we can learn from Dorothy Day – to feed our minds and to feed our spirit. This synthesis was for Dorothy, and can be for us, the driving force towards not only turning our hearts to God but also to doing what he commands.

Help us to recognise you
In the many ways you meet us.
Continue to feed our minds
Help words become flesh
Continue to feed our spirit
Help us keep the flame alive
Give us courage to live our lives
With a radical love
That will lead us to work
For a more just and loving world.

Dear God
Thank you for waiting for us
and thank you for waiting with us.

AMEN