She was a Bohemian and a political radical. Her first arrest came just after her 19th birthday; she was jailed with other feminists who’d gone to the White House to protest the exclusion of women from politics. Her last stay in jail may have been at age 75, when she traveled to California to support Cesar Chavez and the unionization of farm workers.

The daughter of a journalist, she became one of the youngest newspaper reporters in New York City and one of the few females writing something other than society columns or cake recipes. One paper she worked for was shut down by the U.S. government for having argued against America’s entry into World War I.

She was well-acquainted with poverty. When she was 8 years old, her family, having been wiped out by the San Francisco earthquake, moved into a six-room tenement flat over a tavern in New York. Their father was without a job. The curtains, made from remnants, were hung from fishing rods. Fruit crates served as book cases. Nail kegs became kitchen stools. She was so ashamed of her home that, returning from school, she would enter the door of a better building so that her classmates wouldn’t know the kind of circumstances she was living in.

Besides that, she was an avid reader. As a girl she read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, and The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. These books both gave her an awareness of injustice in the world and also offered images of sanctity.

And so, by the time she was 15, she saw the world with a compassionate eyes and a vulnerable heart. Seeing people living in these hard-pressed neighborhoods gave her a vivid sense of who she would become. "From that time on," she said, "my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests would be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in life."

Yet, this call would be complicated by her private life. She had an affair with a fellow journalist that ended after an abortion. She was briefly married to a literary figure. Another affair led to the birth of a daughter. That relationship failed when she decided to have the child baptized. Yet this, and her own subsequent entry into the Church, would mark the turning point in her life.

In 1933, in the depths of the Depression, she and a French immigrant named Peter Maurin formed an outreach known as the Catholic Worker. It was a newspaper that heralded the social teaching of the Church in the face of the many injustices of the day. It was a movement that embraced living in community, in voluntary poverty, in "houses of hospitality" open to anyone in need. It was to be her vocation until she died in 1980.

Her name was Dorothy Day, and she might possibly be a saint. In 2000 John Cardinal O’Connor advanced her cause for canonization.

St James says that "every perfect gift is from above" (1:17). For most of the Sundays of August we’ve been meditating on the tremendous gift of the Holy Eucharist. And so we’ve come to understand that this sacrament, which is the true body, blood, soul, and divinity of our blessed Lord, is given to us so that we can come to share God’s own life.

Now we must ask: what are we doing with this gift?

Dorothy Day came to value this gift so much that she went to Mass and received Communion every day. She confessed her sins to a priest every week. She prayed the Rosary regularly. Many of you do the same.

But, because she often meditated on the Scriptures she probably also came across this injunction in the Letter of Saint James: "Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves" (1:22). And so, she handed herself over totally to the service of the poor. She did this by fighting for their causes in her newspaper, The Catholic Worker; by providing them food, clothing, and shelter in her "Houses of Hospitality"; by demonstrating and going to jail for them; by the unconditional love she extended even to the most ungrateful, denying herself even the most ordinary of pleasures and conveniences for them.

"Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves." How do we delude ourselves? When we leave our Christian observance in church. If we do this we’re like the Pharisees in Mark’s Gospel that our Lord condemned for being satisfied with the externals of religion.

"Be doers of the word and not hearers only, . . .." Just how do we do this? St James gives us the bottom line: "Religion that is pure and undefiled is this: care for orphans and widows in their affliction . . .."

This is it then; the "acid test" of whether the Holy Eucharist is really having effect in our lives: how do we care for the least among us? Do we, individually and as a parish, make it our priority to feed and clothe the poor, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick and imprisoned, to console those who mourn? If we can answer "yes" to this question, then we’re "doers of the word;" if we answer "no," then we might just be deluding ourselves into thinking that we’re Christian.

The Holy Eucharist is our food for the journey to eternal life. We just experienced in our parish the joy of a birth and baptism; two more are on the way. And so I have the image of a baby at the breast. Think of it – the nourishment that the infant receives is absolutely essential to her life – yet, no one will argue that her purpose life is not merely to receive nourishment. Rather, the food is meant for her growth to maturity, when she can live and love as an adult.

Along these lines, someone who’s in a position to know once said that, in a typical parish, 70 percent of its energies and resources are directed inward, to self-maintenance we might say, while only 30 percent is left over for outside apostolate. Think that over for a moment. When I came to Sitka, I was told that we have some 28 churches in town. I sometimes wonder to myself, "If I were straight off the ferry and seeking to join one of these churches, what would set St Gregory’s apart? Why would I choose this church instead of the others?"

As I see it, what really draws people to a given church and gives true life to those who are members is how they live out the gospel on the six days they’re not in church. Anyone can carve out an hour a week to "inoculate" themselves with religion. But if it’s true religion, religion that’s capable of converting others to Christ and saving ourselves, we must "take it to the streets." Nothing less than our eternal salvation depends upon our service to the least among us.

And so I extend to you this invitation and challenge. We are a people who have been extraordinarily blessed. We’ve shown ourselves capable of much generosity. At the same time, many of our neighbors in Sitka have no homes to live in, or are otherwise struggling financially, or with addictions, or other dire circumstances. And so, by the time this liturgical year ends in November, I would like to have a plan in place that concretely addresses some of these needs. At the same time, I’m not going to presume to dictate this plan – you know this community and its resourced better than I – so I will rely on your suggestions is crafting this outreach the needy. But, just by way of a starting point, we have spoken about forming a St Vincent de Paul conference, which would accept requests from those in need and work with other social service agencies to provide rent and utility assistance, clothing and food, and similar aid. We’ve also considered using our kitchen to feed the hungry, perhaps on weekends when the Salvation Army’s soup kitchen isn’t serving. And we’ve spoken to of resurrecting our outreach to pregnant women.

My hope is that, by the time that our catechumens enter the Church at the Easter Vigil, these new Catholics will be able to say that they are joining a parish whose priority is to serve those most in need and whose people are "doers of the word and not hearers only."

Will you help make this a reality?