At yesterday’s #DorothyDay symposium at Maryknoll both her granddaughter Kate and I spoke about the lessons we had learned from her. In my case those lessons began when I went to work with her when I was 19. Here was my list:
1. From Dostoevsky: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” Dorothy was not sentimental—she knew the sights and smells of life among “the insulted and injured. It was exhausting and unrelenting.
2. And yet you had to learn to see beneath the surface of things. There is beauty everywhere, a dimension of truth, goodness. Dorothy could recognize that—in sunlight, on the waves on the bay, in a tree, in an act of kindness. Her underlying attitude was gratitude.
3. I learned about the importance of the will. Loving people who are not intrinsically loveable is hard work. She believed if you tried hard enough you could do it—you could see Christ in them.
4. I learned that such love doesn’t just come naturally. For Dorothy it was cultivated in spiritual discipline: prayer, meditation on Scripture, the sacraments.... she reckoned that this discipline took about 3 hours a day.
5. Though I was drawn to the CW by the stories of her heroic deeds of resistance—protesting nuclear war, arrested with the farm workers, etc—most of her life was spent in ordinary ways. Her spirituality was exercised in daily acts of charity, patience, forgiveness.
6. I learned what it means to act without concern for results—not to measure our deeds by worldly criteria of success. She showed the power that is hidden in apparent weakness, failure, the planting of seeds. “Unless the seed falls into the ground and dies it bears no fruit.”
7. I learned that being a radical is not just about calling attention to everything wrong in the world—but in modeling a different set of values, announcing that another world is possible, and showing the way.
8. I learned from Dorothy that to live this way can be a tremendous adventure. When you were with her you didn’t feel gloom or hopelessness. You felt energized, joy, ready to begin. She constantly reminded you of “the Duty of Delight.”
9. I learned that we are all called to be saints—not necessarily canonized, not to be put on a pedestal (she deplored that). But to confirm our lives to the pattern of the Bestitudes—the manual of holiness that Jesus left us. It is easy to read the Beatitudes thru Dorothy.
10. Not only did Dorothy live the Beatitudes—she enlarged our understanding of what they mean: Blessed are the poor in spirit (those who join the poor in solidarity); the meek (who reject big plans and worldly power in favor of the little way); who mourn ...
(who refuse to become desensitized to the sufferings of the world); the merciful (who combine the works of mercy with a passion for justice); the peacemakers (Dorothy did more than any Catholic of modern times to recall the peace message of Jesus); the persecuted...
(her willingness to endure rejection, humiliation, to be considered crazy, impractical, foolish, to stand up for what she believed without counting the cost)....
11. From Dorothy I learned—if there was any doubt—that saints are human beings, flawed, imperfect. We know her flaws because she called attention to them: anger, impatience, judgmentalism... The call to holiness is always a call to go farther, deeper.
12. As I grow older I learn from D’s spirit of youthfulness, her readiness to learn, to begin again, to take on new challenges. “No matter how old I get...my heart can still leap for joy as I read and suddenly assent to some great truth enunciated by some great mind and heart.”
Those are some of the things I learned from Dorothy Day. Such lessons are never really finished.
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