Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on Working for ‘Joy and Peace in a Harried World’)

“What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.” ― American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Catholic Worker, 1946

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on ‘The Sense of Our Small Effort’)

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”—American political and social activist—and Roman Catholic convert—Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (1952)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on How People Pray ‘Through the Witness of Their Lives’)

“Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that he expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people—lots of people—pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?” — American journalist, social activist and Catholic Worker Movement founder Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus, edited by Carolyn Kurtz (2017)

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.

Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on Identifying With the ‘Stricken and Abandoned’)

“All through those weary first days in jail when I was in solitary confinement, the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines in the Psalms that expressed the terror and misery of man suddenly stricken and abandoned. Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit — these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was man. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed, I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover.”—Dorothy Day (1897-1980), social activist and founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and candidate for sainthood, From Union Square to Rome (1938)

Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on How ‘God Meant Things To Be Much Easier’)

“We are not expecting utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter. A certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life. A family needs work as well as bread. Property is proper to man. We must keep repeating these things. Eternal life begins now. ‘All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said, “I am the Way.” The cross is there, of course, but ‘in the cross is joy of spirit.’ And love makes all things easy. If we are putting off the old man and putting on Christ, then we are walking in love, and love is what we all want. But it is hard to love, from the human standpoint and from the divine standpoint, in a two-room apartment. We are eminently practical, realistic.”—Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (1948)

(Thanks to Keara O’Dempsey for bringing this quote to my attention.)

Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Dorothy Day’s Fundraising)

“Under Miss [Dorothy] Day's guidance, the Catholic Workers have devised an inexpensive and effective technique of fund-raising: they pray to Saint Joseph, their patron saint.”—Dwight Macdonald, “The Foolish Things of the World,” The New Yorker, October 4, 1952

Readers of The New Yorker were likely to have gazed in amazement at the profile of peace and anti-poverty activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) and the Catholic Worker movement when they picked up their issue of the magazine 60 years ago today. After all, the leftist journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) made no bones about his lack of religious belief (“I didn’t go through the ‘crisis of belief’ most of my teenage contemporaries did because, not only didn’t I believe, I didn’t muster up the interest to doubt,” he said in an interview with Paul Kurtz years later).  

Yet here he was, in this first of a two-part profile, writing without condescension about a Catholic convert whom, he noted, many regarded as a saint. On one level, Day’s simple moral luminosity appealed to him, as he noted that she “has no 'presence' at all, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, she is impressive to meet or hear, communicating a moral force compounded of optimism, sincerity, earnestness, and deprecatory humor."

Yet, as a contrarian whose thinking might be best summed up in the title of his essay collection, Against the American Grain, Macdonald also found something profound in Day’s belief in nonviolence and a preferential option for the poor: “Politically,” he observed, “the Catholic Workers are hard to classify. They are for the poor and against the rich, so the capitalists call them Communists; they believe in private property and don't believe in the class struggle, so the Communists call them capitalists; and they are hostile to war and to the state, so both capitalists and Communists consider them crackpots."

Thirty years after his death, Macdonald is not read widely, but his influence during the 1950s and 1960s was considerable. The profile of Day brought the Catholic Worker movement to a larger, often secular audience previously unaware of it. His praise of James Agee’s A Death in the Family gave to that posthumously published novel enough ballast to propel it toward the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and his demolition of James Gould Cozzens probably did more than anything else to shrivel that novelist’s previously considerable critical reputation. Most important, his extended New Yorker review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America brought that work to the attention of the Kennedy Administration, which, inspired by the book, launched the War on Poverty.

(Photo of Dorothy Day from 1916 by an unknown photographer.)