Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on Dorothy Day)

"One of the heroes of the book [that Brooks was writing] is Dorothy Day. She led this morally strenuous life all of her life, self-criticizing and writing and praying over her sins. But at the end of her life, she had achieved an impressive fullness, a centeredness and an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

“One day she sat down to write a memoir. She told Robert Coles what happened next: ‘I wrote down the words, “a life remembered,” and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most — but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!’”—Dorothy Day quoted in David Brooks and Gail Collins, “Happy New Year, Politicians. Seriously,” The New York Times, January 5, 2014

Yesterday would have been the 120^th birthday of Dorothy Day, journalist and social activist.  Her devotion to the poor and nonviolence, as exemplified in the Catholic Worker movement, sparked a movement for her canonization following her death in 1980. Anne Stricherz discusses her conversion story in this blog post.