Reading Dorothy Day

Lately as part of my prayer, I’ve been reading the diaries of Dorothy Day, published in a volume entitled “The Duty of Delight.” I ordered it at the Catholic Worker conference I attended in July. As a founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Day lived in voluntary poverty with those in need and traveled among the “houses of hospitality” founded by the movement. The newspaper, “The Catholic Worker” that she started advocated for equitable working conditions, pacifism, and the Catholic faith through the thirties and forties, to much social opposition. Day spent her time with communists and longshoremen; priests and alcoholics. Her radical interpretation of the Gospel was hard, her politics were uncompromising—and there’s a lot about what she advocated that I strongly disagree with. But reading her is still a little like spending a few minutes with a saint every morning.

A saint, but not, well, a “saint.” She was not perfect. The gift of reading someone’s diaries is that you really get to see what they were like—their frustrations and irritations, impatience with themselves and with others. The holiness of her life was that she was constantly on a path toward God, but never lived her life in such a way as to insulate herself from those who were not. She never separated herself morally, or even bodily. She lived with the people she served, sharing grimy kitchens and cold winters because she believed that Jesus would have done so.

I am very aware of how comfortable my life is—vacations with family, pleasant bike rides to my well-furnished office, delicious food on my dinner table. The beauty of Day’s writing, though, is that she helps you to move beyond the paralysis of “I’m a bad person for not living like that” and into a wider, more grace-filled space of love and forgiveness for others. There is nothing particularly holy about being obsessed with one’s sins. The holiness comes in when your awareness of your own faults opens you to forgive the faults of those around you. Day summarizes it this way; “It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.” (June 25, 1938) Indeed.

We are all on the journey toward God—sometimes halting and stumbling, and sometimes running with abandon and joy. Day quotes St Catherine of Siena: “All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said I am the way.” Jesus Christ has already reconciled us to God, and we are loved more than we now. The light of God’s hope reflects back on us already, even in the darkest moments of the present.

Thanks be to God!