Susie Scott and Dorothy Day

Susie Scott and Dorothy Day
A Sermon preached at St. Luke's Church
by The Rev. James B. Craven III
on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 21, 2004

In the name of God - Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Amen.

Until last week I never realized the connection between Dorothy Day and Susie Scott. Somehow I missed Miss May of 1983, the Playboy centerfold that month. I had stopped getting Playboy some years before that, and besides, even then I just got it of course for the interesting articles. What else? Recently though I learned a lot about that playmate of the month, Susie Scott, and I think we can all learn from her example. She has come a long way from being seriously abused as a child and living at age 18 with Hugh Hefner. Heaven knows which was worse.

Ten years ago, Susie, then 30 years old and living in Colorado, had read a good deal about the history of Haiti and poverty in Haiti, when something told her she just had to go see it for herself. My money is on the Holy Spirit as the motivating factor there. Susie flew, by herself, to Port Au-Prince, hailed a cab outside the airport and asked the driver to take her to “where the poor people are.” Susie may have been gutsy, but she was also naïve and innocent. The cabbie took her to as squalid a slum as Haiti has to offer, and she proceeded to walk about in her linen suit and heels until a family of 17 took her in for the night. As Susie put it later, “It changed my life. I knew then why I had been born.” She knew then what her response to Christ’s challenge to her would be, that day and for the rest of her life.

Since then, Susie Scott has built and funded a children’s hospital, six schools, three orphanages, outpatient health care clinics, play-grounds, basketball courts, community kitchens, you name it. She provides K-12 education for 2,000 poor Haitian children and cares for 150 orphaned children, many severely handicapped or terminally ill. American Airlines now flies her to and from Haiti for free, and once lent her an airplane to bring in 39,000 pounds of rice, beans, and milk.

During the recent civil unrest/chaos in Haiti, you might think Susie would have stayed home in Aspen. On the contrary, she felt she just had to be there then. The route to her headquarters in the slum of Cite Soleil, or Sun City, was strewn with the carcasses of stripped and burned cars, pigs rooted through garbage and waded through open sewers filled with slime the color of antifreeze. Bodies lay on the side of the road. Looting and violence were rampant, and Susie’s clinics had lost $7,000 worth of donated rice, beans, milk, and wheelchairs. Whereupon Susie pays a visit to the local thug gang leader and turns him into an ally, in exchange for medical care for one of his underlings who had been shot. As a Haitian government official said, “You need strength and faith to do this in Haiti. The country is made to stop you.” Susie spends half her time fund raising in this country and the other half in Haiti, much of it hugging and holding sick children. She has never given birth to a child, but she has given life to thousands. According to the press, Playboy will be at Duke next week auditioning students for a special Girls of the ACC piece in the fall. I wish all those young women might know the story of Susie Scott.

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) perhaps did more for our poor brothers and sisters than anyone in the last century. She is a good bet for canonization in the Roman Catholic branch of the faith, and would almost surely laugh and decline the honor if she were alive to do so. Together with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker movement and for more than fifty years operated soup kitchens, shelters, and free clinics on the lower east side of Manhattan. When she died in 1980 the New York Times called her a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality, unstinting in her commitment to peace, nonviolence, racial justice, and the cause of the poor and the outcast. She took as her literal texts the Sermon on the Mount and the moral teachings of the Hebrew prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah. Raised in a comfortable home, and in the Episcopal Church, she chose to spend her life with the same poor and hurting folks Jesus hung out with. She loved them unconditionally and learned from them all her life.

What motivated Dorothy Day and what motivates Susie Scott? Love, what else? Do you remember on Ash Wednesday when Michael suggested we read Paul’s great hymn to love, from his first letter to the Corinthians, every day throughout Lent? Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Faith, hope, love abide, but the greatest is love. None of this is rocket science. Love your neighbor as yourself, as God loves us, with a love poured out in Christ.

We need only look around us to see this in action. Members of this parish are in Belize right now, building a school. Teenagers from St. Luke’s will be in Honduras in June doing more building. Many here are busy with Habitat for Humanity. Some rock tiny premature babies at Duke Hospital. Some of our homeless sisters and brothers are housed and fed here. The sick are visited, as are prisoners. We take time to listen to folks who are hurting. Examples of this love in action are endless. We take seriously the mandate to be the hands and feet of Christ.

Notice I have said nothing about giving up things for Lent. I have known people who gave up alcohol, chocolate, sex, and running yellow lights for Lent. I had a dear friend who gave up drinking every year for Lent. He mentioned it every day too. There is, I think, too much silly cultural emphasis on giving something up for Lent. If we must, give up a little more free time and take something on. I have no idea what Susie Scott may have given up for Lent, but what matters is the ministry she took on in Haiti ten years ago. Similarly, who cares what Dorothy Day may have given up. What she did was what counted. We do not have to wait for Easter to feed the hungry, heal the sick, or even raise the dead. Every time we gather around this altar it is Easter. Dorothy Day and Susie Scott welcome the prodigals and feed the hungry with the fatted calf every day.

In the Postscript to her 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day spelled it out for all of us, for all time:

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, “We need bread.” We could not say, “Go, be thou filled.” If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, “Let’s all go live on a farm.”

It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.

The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone any more.

But the final word is love. At times it has been a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on. Thanks be to God.

Amen.