For the anniversary of her passing, (November 29)

Bill Wylie-Kellermann

(Reprinted from A Common Reader, a Journal of the Essay, Washington University, November 7, 2021)

“She lived as if the gospel were true.” Daniel Berrigan[1]

Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness[2], was placed in my hands fifty years ago by Dan Berrigan, Jesuit poet and prophet of nonviolence. Fresh from federal prison for burning draft files as a protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he was my teacher at Union Seminary in New York, and then, in a way I’d not yet understood, my “spiritual director.” The book and conversation weekly over mint tea, were my first exposure, as a young Protestant, to Dorothy and her Catholic Worker movement of hospitality houses and nonviolent resistance.

In his own autobiography, Daniel has two extended reflections on Dorothy. The first is in childhood recollections, predicated simply on the regular presence of the Catholic Worker newspaper in their Minnesota home, but it reads from a view of that seed bursting full bloomed in his life. “She became my friend and the friend of my family; and the friendship was to spur our moral and spiritual development.”[3]

Continue reading ““An Act of Prayer:” Dorothy Day’s Influence on Daniel Berrigan (and Even Vice Versa)” →

By Fran Westwood. First published in Geez 62: Dismantling White Theology.

Outside in the street someone’s grandfather stoops,
sweat beads home to road dust. A bent hanger
rusted. Only a handful of bread. These mornings
not yet countries of belonging & from our apartment balcony

a survey of fraught provinces & city lines. The waters surrounding,
a borderlands. My people, we traffic in hunger: we know

& know & feast on knowing
& do not walk with, toward healing. I am still crossing

this street. Which is to say I weep for the living
as for the dead. Which is to say I have a thousand grandfathers

& they elder the streets, scattering bread for the bird – O ears,
bow. Seek what cannot be conjured. Only birthed

Continue reading “Bodies Rest on This” →

By Kerr Mesner, Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, and Kateri Boucher. First published in Geez 62: Dismantling White Theology.

May this symbolic action catalyze us into ever-deeper action to remove the nationalism and white supremacy still living in our communities and our world.

We hope that this liturgy can be used in both Canada and the United States (and indeed anywhere else), but we know that the histories and symbols are unique. Let this be an offering that can be edited, amended, altered, and made stronger in your own beloved community.

OPENING PRAYER
We gather in this sacred place,
declaring that symbols matter.
They reflect our dreams, our joy,
our courage, and our work.

We have come here today to remove
the flag from our worship space.
It is time. It is past time
to say that nationalism has
no place in our church.
Our allegiance belongs to God.

Continue reading “A Liturgy for Removing the Flag from your Sanctuary” →

From Geez’s magazine’s Dirty Prayers: Pocket Prayers to Read in your Garden.

By Lynice Pinkard and Nichola Torbett. This article first appeared in Geez 62: Dismantling White Theology.

The two of us have kicked off countless antiracism and anti-oppression trainings by asserting, not half in jest, that “diversity trainings ruin well-meaning white people.”

But it’s not the trainings, really. It’s the whole moralistic ethos that focuses on getting everything right and avoiding what is wrong: Never use this word. Always use that word. Say “BIPOC,” not “people of colour.” Never cry in a mixed group. Intervene in instances of oppression, but remember that you are not a saviour. Speak up and stand up, but also, step back and yield the mic. These injunctures yield stiff, stilted white people who may successfully “perform” antiracism for limited periods of time but have little capacity for joy or genuine relationship across lines of difference.

Continue reading “We Need the Funk” →

A sermon by Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Given at the Homecoming Service at North Central College, Naperville, IL commemorating 50 years since graduating in 1971.

“To a Young Activist” A Reading from the Letter of Thomas Merton to Jim Forest:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the righteousness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

Gospel Reading: Luke 4: 16-21

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,    
to bring good news to the poor,
Sent me to proclaim release to the captives  
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

In the Name of the One who was, who is, and is to come, Let all of this be…

All of us, to one extent or another can identify with the Homecoming of Jesus to Nazareth – returning to where he began. He’s back to the shul where he learned Hebrew and its texts, back to his synagogue, from which, first as an infant, then as a young person, he made the pilgrimages to Jerusalem. On one occasion to sit with the rabbis and learn from them; or if Luke has it right to astound and teach them.

I’ll wager another pilgrimage in his student days: to the ruins of

Continue reading “All the time in the world” →