I have entered into the most delightful world, where I shut the door to my apartment behind me and am held captive within. Crossed legs on the cool tile floor, dipping pretzels into cheese. Then pretzels with icing—icing that I made myself, leftover from carrot cake. I am glued to the book in front of me, in the delightful manner I have known my whole life. Forget what they say—there is magic in books that technology will never manage.
This is Dorothy Day, writing about nothing but herself. She thrills me and talks of Lenin as something other than a mass murderer. She was on the other side of the lines that my parents and grandparents were, as they read the stories of marches and demonstrations. She lived them. And I wonder, as I get off the bus, if I could write about my life in a way that would captivate anyone. And if not, where do I find a life that is worth writing about?
She lived in a time where things happened. Where she made things happen. She opens up a page of history—my country’s history—that I never read before. Labor unions and woman’s rights and so much we take for granted: I see the disparities in Brazil and wonder if that is where American’s would have gone if not for the sacrifice and determination of believing in ideas. Ideas that history has shown were probably not even half right—but ideas none-the-less so powerful as to change and move and shake whole generations and histories.
I have never been a very strong grabber of ideas. I love to let them come and go from my life like a tide, washing over me a new feeling of invincibility. The only idea I have managed to keep somewhat is that of God, and yet I do not grasp it half so well as I would like.
“I remember as a girl asking my mother why—why things weren’t better for people, why a few owned so much an many had little or nothing. She kept on telling me that ‘there’s no accounting for injustice, it just is.’ I guess I’ve spent my life trying to ‘account’ for it, and trying to change things, just a little—and that is what I believe people like me ought try to do; we’ve been given a leg up in the world, so why not try to help others get a bit of a break, too!”
“I wanted, though I did not know it then, a synthesis. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life, I wanted it for others too. I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the por. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt, and the blind.”
THIS SCARES ME. I feel like this is what I am walking myself into: “Men who are revolutionaries, I thought, do not dally on the side as woman do, complicating the issue by an emphasis on the personal…And in their constant search after it, they go against their own best interests.”
This makes me sad: “We never met anyone whose personal morality was matched by a social morality or who tried to make life here for others a foretaste of the life to come.”
“Ours was the natural virtue of volunteer poverty. We helped others, it is true, but we did not deprive ourselves in order to help others. We had no philosophy of poverty.”
I want to live in the middle of nowhere. I want to live with my kids, like my kids, as my kids. But I can’t do it alone. I need community. I need someone who would open their home, sacrificing as much as I would be, to let me in. They would be sacrificing more, actually. God, if you open the door to this happening, give me the grace to walk through it.
About Peter, her co-worker: “he did not begin by tearing down, or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice that you burned to change the world. Instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacities for work, for accomplishment. He made you feel that you and all men had great and generous hearts with which to love God. If you once recognized this fact in yourself you would expect and find it in others.”
“He believed in poverty and loved it and felt it a liberating force. He differentiated between poverty and destitution, but the two often came close together in his life, when to give to others he had to strip himself.”
“Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities—all these things marked us as the privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor ad destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion.”
“A woman does not feel whole without a man. The sense of loss was there. It was a price I paid. I was Abraham who sacrificed Isaac. The only answer to this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community. The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him.”
*Don’t worry mom, I am not becoming an anarchist…
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