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30 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
was given a sort of sacramental sense about life. This sense of the holy is what
made her a restless wanderer until she found her home in the church. She came
home to the Blessed Sacrament, as she always called it, and everything else
flowed from that.
This has been true to our experience and journey as well. Everything about
our work with the homeless poor, and much of our work with prisoners, began
with sharing meals together.
I do not come from a sacramental tradition. In the Presbyterian Church of
my youth, we celebrated communion four times each year. But when we began
to work with and among poor and suffering people, we began to experience the
need for the sacrament. And Dorothy’s theology was basic to understanding that
our solidarity, our hospitality, and our journey into community must be rooted
in the experience of being fed at the table. We came to learn from her that table
companionship, the eucharistic vision, would provide the basis for everything
else.
In the eucharistic vision, the bread and the cup are at the center, and diverse
companions are gathered around. At the table we are bound together and find
our identity as sisters and brothers. The first thing that happens is that we circle
up and we are fed—a gracious plenty! At the table we are invited and empowered
to bind our lives to the lives of the others—most of whom are poor and oppressed.
At the table we are invited to make covenantal vows to struggle against
the powers that kill and maim and oppress our companions, our friends.
This is how the table companionship becomes a basis for solidarity. Solidarity
is our affirmation—our assent—our Yes—to life in the Mystical Body of
Christ. One of the most important gifts of the Eucharist is receiving the eyes of
faith to see God in our midst. Matthew 25 teaches us that what we do for the
least of our sisters and brothers, we do for God. When we are fed by God, we
are given the eyes to see God—especially in the suffering of those who are poor
and forgotten and condemned. This is the basis for solidarity, the basis for a
preferential option for the poor, the basis from which the poor and oppressed
can begin to set agenda in our lives.
Jerome Bowden was one of the memorable characters of our twenty years of
visiting on death row. Jerome was a clinically retarded African American man
who had grown up in Muscogee County, Georgia, where his mother worked as
a maid for the county sheriff. Jerome and his sister grew up eating surplus commodity
food because his mother was not paid a living wage. His whole life was
something of a death row even before he got to prison. There he remained for a
number of years before he was executed in June 1986.
Jerome had a simple, childlike approach to life. And the way he saw what
was going on inside the prison was always so basic, that I often learned from
him. I loved the time he told us about the Bible study they were having in his
cell block, on the Book of Revelation. Jerome wanted to understand Revelation