An Open Door
(Ex.19:2-6; Rom.5:6-11; Mt.9:36-10:8)
Dorothy Day was a feisty, plain‑spoken woman, a journalist and Catholic convert.
In 1933, with her partner Peter Maurin, she opened a small kitchen in New York as a radical experiment in Christian care. People came for soup and left with changed lives.
One day, a reporter visited one of her first houses of hospitality. He expected to find quiet and orderly charity, but instead found an open door with people coming and going, food cooking, children laughing, others arguing, and a man dozing at the table.
At one point a bedraggled woman arrived, soaked and shivering. Someone gave her a blanket; another ladled soup. No-one passed judgment, for all were welcome, whatever their story. The door was always open.
Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement grew to include a newspaper and 75 houses of hospitality, where anyone in need was offered a meal, a bed, and human dignity. Today there are over 240 such communities around the world.
Dorothy lived simply, loved fiercely, and always insisted on welcoming the poor before anyone else. She strongly believed that you love God just as much as the one you love least.
Her approach, she said, was ‘living from day to day, taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, and trying literally to follow the Gospel.’ If the door to Jesus’ mercy is always open, she thought, then her door should remain open, too.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus sees a crowd of people looking helpless and dejected, ‘like sheep without a shepherd.’ But it’s not just pity he has for them; it’s compassion. And compassion is recognising someone else’s pain, and then doing something about it.
So, Jesus commissions his disciples to help these people. He sends them with authority, but knows they can’t do it all on their own. That’s why he tells them to ‘Pray to the Lord of the harvest.’ They will need the Holy Spirit.
Someone else who boldly answered Christ’s call was St Benedict of Nursia (d.547), the father of Western monasticism who founded the monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy. His Benedictine rule balances prayer, work and communal life, and has since guided religious communities all over the world.
St Benedict believed that the monastery door is a place of encounter with Jesus himself: ‘Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ,’ he said. For him, every open door is a sacramental threshold.
Under the discipline of ora et labora (prayer and work), he trained his monks to see ordinary tasks like washing dishes, tending fields and greeting travellers, as both acts of worship and opportunities for mercy and service.
Today, St Benedict reminds us that a consistently warm welcome delivered with genuine care is the essence of Christian mercy. It turns an ‘open door’ into a place of encounter with Jesus Christ.
St. Martin of Tours (d.397) also answered Christ’s call. One day, as a young Roman soldier in Gaul, he met a freezing beggar and gave him half of his cloak. That night, in a vision he saw Jesus wearing that half-cloak, and he realised that serving the poor means serving Christ.
He left the army, got baptised and dedicated his life to the Church, working to protect the poor and vulnerable. He established hospices and monasteries where travellers and the needy were always welcomed.
St Martin saw prayer and practical mercy as deeply intertwined, and regarded charity as ‘prayer in action’.
Dorothy Day, St. Benedict, and St. Martin understood Jesus’ concern for the helpless. Dorothy Day’s kitchen kept its door open to whoever knocked. Benedict’s Rule turned every guest‑door into an encounter with Christ. St Martin’s cloak reminds us that a single act of mercy can open a life to service. And all three show us how compassion moves from feeling to faithful action.
‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few,’ Jesus says. He’s calling us to join him in having real compassion for those who struggle.
Some years after Dorothy Day opened her first house of hospitality, a young man arrived at mealtime. He was a quiet man with rough hands and a face that knew all about shut doors. He sat down, ate quietly, and then, as the plates were cleared, stood and handed the volunteer a note. It simply said: ‘Thank you.’
He returned the next week, and the week after that, and before long he was helping in the kitchen himself – washing dishes, putting out chairs, and greeting newcomers.
What began as an open door and a single meal became a whole new life.