“Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.”
“The final word is love.”
“God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them”
“Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.”
“As Dostoevsky said: ‘Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
“Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.”
“There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.”
― Dorothy Day
These are just a few of the quotes by Dorothy Day that have endeared me to her for quite some time now. I remember the first time I heard of her. I picked up a book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie many years ago. It was subtitled “An American Pilgrimage,” and that simple line jumped out at me and I had to buy it. I remember not reading it right away though for some reason. Maybe because it was a pretty hefty book and an undertaking of that magnitude at the time wasn’t appealing.
Of the four people’s pilgrimages it chronicled, only one I had heard of, Thomas Merton, and only quite vaguely. So the book sat for some time as I read other topics of less life-altering concern.
Then one day I started to read it and quickly, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Conner and Walker Percy began to pale in importance as major subjects in the biography and Dorothy took center stage.
Her upbringing in New York City; her move to San Francisco and Chicago; her college years and journalism years: all of this began to draw me in more and more into her personhood.
She began as an agnostic suffragette, but that didn’t last very long as she saw a more pressing concern about the plight of the poor. She worked for radical newspapers and ran with the socialistic and communistic likes of Eugene O’Neil, Floyd Dell, and Mike Gold.
During the time, she had somewhat of a relationship with Lionel Moise, who got her pregnant, convinced her to abort the child, then left her high and dry and moved to Chicago, most likely, since that was what he planned on doing before Dorothy dropped the news about his future fatherhood.
So she aborts the baby, ever regretting it, moves around and settles in a cottage on the shores of Staten Island and meets Forster Batterham. They begin a relationship eventually and she gets pregnant again. She tells Batterham she isn’t going to go against her instincts again for a man so she’s having Tamar (her new baby) baptized a Catholic and she wants Forster to marry her and be a father or leave. He leaves because he is against the institution of marriage and isn’t going to settle down like Dorothy wants.
Fast forward Dorothy’s story a few years and basically you have the remainder of her life: when she had Tamar baptized into the Catholic Church, she herself was baptized as well. This moment in her life changed lots of things about her.
She already had a deep-seated concern for the poor from her time living in Chicago and seeing the slums in the city, the meatpacking district, and the immigrant sections. She was even already writing about these things in the newspapers she worked for, including The Call and The Masses. Her mind and heart already went there over these and other issues, namely the plight of the working classes and the working poor, but when she became a Catholic, she began to see them differently. She began to see Christ in His people.
When Dorothy and Tamar were living with Dorothy’s younger brother, John, and his wife, she was introduced to Peter Maurin. This introduction, this moment, probably more than any other in her life, changed her the most profoundly. It was Maurin’s idea to start the paper that became so prominent in her day. It was Maurin’s idea to start the Houses Of Hospitality that begun in New York City and beyond. Maurin, more than maybe even God Himself, changed the course of Dorothy’s life forever.
If she were reading this, she may disagree or say that God brought Peter into her life for that purpose, and I’d agree with her, but Peter, the French peasant-turned-homeless American, spoke of these radical ideas that were meant to change the heart of everyone it associated with, Dorothy first and foremost.
The rest of Dorothy’s life is one story after another of how she marched with migrant farm workers for their rights, marched with civil rights campaigns, sat in parks illegally during air raid drills, went to jail from time to time to make a point. She would protest wars and nuclear plants. She would go toe to toe with the archdiocese when they wanted her to take ‘Catholic” out of the name The Catholic Worker because it was causing an uproar with the community because Dorothy, Peter and the CW were saying and doing the things Jesus said and did and it flew in the face of what people only ‘wanted’ to hear, basically they wanted a watered down, surface-level gospel that didn’t include helping the poor, didn’t include opposing wars, didn’t include becoming uncomfortable in any way to stand up for truth.
Dorothy went against the status quo of the day, and today that status quo isn’t any different really, and she would be as marginalized and scandalized today as she was back then.
Dorothy Day is someone everyone needs to know about. They need to know her story, but not only that: they need to do as she did. She loved people so well at a personal cost of losing friends and family; she stood up for what she knew was right when everyone around her was staying quietly in their pew; she took the gospel down from the altar, down from the cross, and brought Jesus to the people without shoving His name down their throats. She just did as she believed Jesus taught: to love well and welcome the oppressed, to go to the margins of society and be Jesus where everyone else feared to go because their comfort was being infringed upon.
Dorothy didn’t back down from anything if she believed it to be a worthy cause. We need more people like her, and we need her being talked about more and more.
