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Receiving Jesus and the One Who Sent Him

  • DOROTHY DAY

Always the glimpses of God came most when I was alone. 


Dorothy Day 1916Objectors cannot say that it was fear of loneliness and solitude and pain that made me turn to him.  It was in those few years when I was alone and most happy that I found him.  I found him at last through joy and thanksgiving, not through sorrow.

Yet how can I say that either?  Better let it be said that I found him through his poor, and in a moment of joy I turned to him….

A mystic may be called a person in love with God.  Not one who loves God, but who is in love with God.  And this mystical love, which is an exalted emotion, leads one to love the things of Christ.  His footsteps are sacred.  The steps of his Passion and Death are retraced down through the ages.  Almost every time you step into a church you see people making the Stations of the Cross.  They meditate on the mysteries of his Life, Death, and Resurrection, and by this they are retracing with love those early scenes and identifying themselves with the actors in those scenes.

When we suffer, we are told we suffer with Christ.  We are "completing the sufferings of Christ."  We suffer his loneliness and fear in the garden when his friends slept.  We are bowed down with him under the weight of not only our own sins but the sins of each other, of the whole world.  We are those who are sinned against and those who are sinning.  We are identified with him, one with him.  We are members of his Mystical Body….

Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.  Feeling this as strongly as I did, is it any wonder that I was led finally to the feet of Christ?

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

dayServant of God Dorothy Day. "Receiving Jesus and the One Who Sent Him."  Dorothy Day Selected Writings (Marynoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).

Reprinted with permission. 

The Author

dday1Servant of God Dorothy Day († 1980) was a convert to Catholicism and the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. She is the author of The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following JesusThe Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, From Union Square to Rome, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes, On Pilgrimage, and Wisdom from Dorothy Day: A Radical Love.

Copyright © 2005 Orbis Books