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Dorothy Day - Saint and Troublemaker

  • JIM FOREST

If Dorothy Day is ever canonized, she will be the patron saint not only of homeless people and those who try to care for them, but also of people who lose their temper.


people/daydDorothy Day, Obl.S.B.
1897-1980

If Dorothy Day is ever canonized, the record of who she was, what she was like, and what she did is too complete and accessible for her to be hidden in wedding cake icing.  She will be the patron saint, not only of homeless people and those who try to care for them, but also of people who lose their temper.  Dorothy Day was certainly not without her rough edges.

To someone who told her she was too hot-headed, she replied, "I hold more temper in one minute than you will hold in your entire life."  To a college student who asked a sarcastic question about her recipe for soup, she responded, "You cut the vegetables until your fingers bleed."  To a journalist who told her it was the first time he had interviewed a saint, she replied, "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily."

I was 20 years old the first time I saw her.  She was ancient, that is to say 62 years old, seven years older than I am today.  This means for 35 years she has been scolding and encouraging me on a daily basis.  The mere fact of her having died 17 years ago doesn't seem to get in the way.

I met her at the Catholic Worker Farm on Staten Island in the days when the island still had rural areas, its only link to the rest of New York City being the ferry.  People sometimes think of her as the personification of the simple life, but in reality, her days tended to be busy, complicated, and stressful.  Often she was away traveling —visiting other Catholic Worker communities; speaking at colleges, seminaries, local parishes; getting around by bus or a used car on its last spark plugs.

Her basic message was stunningly simple: We are called by God to love one another as He loves us.  If God was one key word, hospitality was another.  She repeated again and again a saying from the early Church, "Every home should have a Christ room in it, so that hospitality may be practiced."  "Hospitality," she explained, "is simply practicing God's mercy with those around us."  "Christ is in the stranger, in the person who has nowhere to go and no one to welcome him.  Those who cannot see the face of Christ in the poor are atheists indeed," she often said.

A day never passed without Dorothy speaking of the works of mercy: Feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, caring for sick, visiting prisoners, burying the dead, admonishing the sinner, instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, comforting the sorrowful, bearing wrongs patiently, forgiving all injuries, praying for the living and the dead.  She helped us understand a merciful life has many levels: There is hunger not only for food, but also for faith; not only for a place at the table, but also for a real welcome; not only for assistance, but also for listening; not only for kind words, but also for truthful words.  There is not only hospitality of the door, but also hospitality of the face and heart.  As she said, "We are here to celebrate Him through these works of mercy."

For all her traveling, most of Dorothy's life was spent in New York City.  Before her conversion in 1924, when she was 28 years old, she had bought a small beach house on Staten Island that remained part of her life until she too weak to make the trip any more.  It was a simple structure with a few plain rooms and a cast iron stove.  Walking on the beach or to the post office, rosary in hand, she prayed her way through an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, prayed her way through the Baltimore Catechism; prayed her way to her daughter Tamar's baptism in a nearby Catholic parish; prayed her way through the collapse of a common-law marriage and to her own baptism; prayed her way through the incomprehension of her atheist friends who regarded all religion as snake oil.  Years later it was mainly in the beach house that she found the peace and quiet to write her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.

If she was one of the freest persons alive, she was also one of the most disciplined.  This was most notable in her religious life.  Whether traveling or home, it was a rare day when Dorothy didn't go to Mass, while on Saturday evenings she went to confession.  Sacramental life was the rockbed of her existence.  She never obliged anyone to follow her example, but God knows she gave an example.  When I think of her, the first image that comes to mind is Dorothy on her knees praying before the Blessed Sacrament, either in the chapel at the farm, or in one of several urban parish churches near the Catholic Worker.  One day, looking into the Bible and Missal she had left behind when summoned for a phone call, I found long lists of people, living and dead, whom she prayed for daily.

Occasionally she spoke of her prayings: "We feed the hungry, yes.  We try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, but there is strong faith at work; we pray.  If an outsider who comes to visit us doesn't pay attention to our prayings and what that means, then he'll miss the whole point."

She was attentive to fast days and fast seasons.  It was in that connection she told me a story about prayer.  For many years, she said, she had been a heavy smoker.  Her day began with lighting up a cigarette.  Her big sacrifice every Lent was giving up smoking, but having to get by without a cigarette made her increasingly irritable as the days passed, until the rest of the community was praying she would light up a smoke.  One year, as Lent approached, the priest who ordinarily heard her confessions urged her not to give up cigarettes that year, but instead to pray daily, "Dear God, help me stop smoking."  She used that prayer for several years without it having any impact on her addiction.  Then one morning she woke up, reached for a cigarette, and realized she didn't want it and never smoked another.

Dorothy was never too polite to speak about God.  Nothing we achieved was ever our doing, it was only God's mercy passing through us.  Our own love wasn't our love.  If we experienced love for another person, whether wife or child or friend or enemy, it was God's love.  "If I have accomplished anything in my life," she said late in her life, "it is because I wasn't embarrassed to talk about God."

One of the miracles of Dorothy's life is that she remained part of a conflict-torn community for nearly half a century.  Still more remarkable, she remained a person of hope and gratitude to the end.

People sometimes tell me how lucky I am to have been part of the same community that Dorothy Day belonged to.  They picture a group of more or less saintly people having a wonderful time doing good works.  In reality, Catholic Worker community life in Manhattan in the early sixties, had much in common with purgatory.  The staff was made up of people with very different backgrounds, interests, temperaments, and convictions.  We ranged from the gregarious to the permanently furious.

Not everyone was all thorns, but agreement within the staff was as rare as visits by the President of the United States.  The most bitter dispute I experienced had to do with how best to use the small amounts of eggs, butter, and other treats that sometimes were given to us for the line (people we often didn't know by name who lined up for meals) or the family, as had been the custom.  Though we worked side by side, saw each other daily, and prayed together, staff tension had become too acute for staff meetings.  The final authority was Dorothy Day — not a responsibility she enjoyed, but no one else could make a final decision that would be respected by the entire staff.  In this case, when Dorothy returned from a cross-country speaking trip, she told the two people running the kitchen that the butter and eggs should go to the family, which led to their resigning from kitchen work and soon after leaving the community trailing black smoke, convinced that Dorothy Day wasn't living up to the writings of Dorothy Day.

One of the miracles of Dorothy's life is that she remained part of a conflict-torn community for nearly half a century.  Still more remarkable, she remained a person of hope and gratitude to the end.

Dorothy was and remains a controversial lady.  There was hardly anything she did which didn't attract criticism.  Even hospitality scandalizes some people.  We were blamed for making people worse, not better, because we were doing nothing to reform them.  A social worker asked Dorothy one day how long the down-and-out were permitted to stay.  "We let them stay forever," Dorothy answered.  "They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial.  We pray for them after they are dead.  Once they are taken in, they become members of the family.  Or rather they always were members of the family.  They are our brothers and sisters in Christ."

What got her in the most hot water was her sharp social criticism.  She pointed out that patriotism was a more powerful force in most people's lives than the Gospel.  While she hated every kind tyranny and never ceased to be thankful for America having taken in so many people fleeing poverty and repression, she was fierce in her criticism of capitalism and consumerism.  She said America had a tendency to treat people like Kleenex; use them, and throw them away.  Our problems stem, she said, from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

She had no kind words for war or anything having to do with it war.  It was simply murder wrapped in flags.  She was convinced Jesus had disarmed all his followers when he said to Peter, "Put away your sword, for whoever lives by the sword will perish by the sword."  A way of life based on love, including love of enemies, left no room for killing.  You couldn't practice the works of mercy with one hand and the works of vengeance with the other.

No stranger to prison, she was first locked up as a young woman protesting with Suffragettes in front of the White House during World War I and was last jailed in her seventies for picketing with farm workers.  She took pride in the young men of the Catholic Worker who went to prison rather than be drafted — a good way to visit the prisoner, she pointed out.  Yet she also welcomed back others who had left Catholic Worker communities to fight in the Second World War.  They might disagree about the best way to fight Nazism, but as she often said, there is no party line in the Catholic Worker movement.

Dorothy was sometimes criticized for being too devout a Catholic.  How could she be so radical about social matters and so conservative about her Church?  While she occasionally deplored statements or actions by members of the hierarchy, she was by no means an opponent of the bishops or someone campaigning for structural changes in the Church.  What was needed, she said, wasn't new doctrine, but our living the existing doctrine.

Pleased as she was when home Masses were allowed and the Liturgy translated into English, she didn't take kindly to smudging the border between the sacred and mundane.  When a priest close to the community used a coffee cup for a chalice at a Mass celebrated in the soup kitchen on First Street, she afterward took the cup, kissed it, and buried it in the back yard.  It was no longer suited for coffee; it had held the Blood of Christ.  I learned more about the Eucharist that day than I had from any book or sermon.  It was a learning experience for the priest as well.  Thereafter he used a chalice.

Dorothy Day's main achievement is that she taught us the Little Way of love, which it so happens involves cutting up a great many onions.

Dorothy Day's main achievement is that she taught us the Little Way of love, which it so happens, involves cutting up a great many onions.  The path to heaven, it seems, is marked by open doors and the smell of onions.  "All the way to heaven is heaven," she so often said, quoting Saint Catherine of Siena — "because He said, I am the Way."

It was chiefly through the writings of Saint Therese of Lisieux that Dorothy had been drawn to the Little Way.  No term, in her mind, better described the ideal Christian way of doing things.  As she once put it, "Paper work, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently — which is to find some meaning in all that happens — these things, too, are the works of peace and often seem like a very little way."

It's a century since Dorothy Day was born and nearly twenty years since she died, but she continues to touch our lives, not only as a person we remember with gratitude, but also as a saint, if by the word "saint" we mean a person who helps us see what it means to follow Christ.

It is the living from day to day, she once said, taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, and trying literally to follow the Gospel that resulted in this work.

This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.

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Acknowledgement

forestForest, Jim. "Dorothy Day Saint and Troublemaker." Canticle Magazine (Winter, 1998).

Reprinted with permission of Canticle Magazine.

Canticle: The Voice of Todays Catholic Woman is published quarterly by Urbi et Orbi Communications. For subscription information visit their web site at http://www.canticlemagazine.com/ or call 1.800.789-9494.

The Author

forest2forest1 Jim Forest is secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and editor of its quarterly journal, In Communion. He lives in the Netherlands. He is the author of All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, Love is the Measure, a biography of Dorothy Day, Praying With Icons, Loving Our Enemies: Reflections on the Hardest Commandment, and, with Tom Cornell and Robert Ellsberg, co-edited A Penny a Copy: Readings from the Catholic Worker. His website is here

Copyright © 1998 Canticle