Encountering Dorothy Day

From her earliest years, Dorothy Day has believed that the place for people to be is on the barricades. She has been there with them.

As a young journalist, she shared empathetically in the despair and the hopes of the poor. She joined forces with those who championed the cause of the oppressed in the early 1900s -- communists, socialists, anarchists, and others. In 1917 she went to Washington to protest with the suffragettes, seeking the right of women to vote. The trip resulted in the first of several jailings for her beliefs.

Dorothy Day’s pilgrimage sent her searching for more transcendent solutions to questions that the ideologies of that day left unanswered. She was drawn to the wisdom of the church, reading such works as The Imitation of Christ by St. Thomas a Kempis. Then, through circumstances whose workings are ultimately a mystery, Dorothy Day was converted and baptized as a Catholic.

Her heart remained with the poor; her politics were deeply imbued with a growing radicalism; her passion for justice now put down roots in the transcendent.

In 1932 she marched on Washington once again, this time with the hungry and the unemployed. In her simplicity of spirit she asked why the church was not leading the cause of those who were without food and work. And she prayed for a chance to work on behalf of the poor.

At the end of that year she met Peter Maurin. It was a “providential” encounter, she said. Together they grasped how the gospel was at the heart of their commitment to the poor, motivating their advocacy of radical social change. The 34-year-old Catholic Worker movement was born out of this shared vision.

Dorothy Day is meek. She rehabilitates the meaning of that biblical word.

Hers is a genuine humility. There is a modesty about her, a simplicity of spirit. All this is undergirded with profound inner strength and clarity of purpose.

Surprising that a day spent in the presence of this radical saint, this former communist and socialist, this perpetual practitioner of public resistance to evil, should leave one so touched with the power of her openhearted humility.

Perhaps it is the daily laying down of her life for the poor, the outcast, and the destitute which has infused such a gentleness into her spirit. Dorothy Day’s radicalism is saturated with a disarming simplicity.

She does not want to be interviewed, she says, greeting us on our arrival. A few weeks before she had suffered a mild heart attack; she was resting at the Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli, New York, and recovering well. We had been encouraged to come. But she was shy: entering her 80th year, she is still childlike.

The thought of being interviewed, we were told, makes her nervous. She had thought of saying that she wasn’t feeling well that day. Her humanity only endeared her all the more to us.

Small children dash through the room, three of them Dorothy’s great-grandchildren (she has 10 others). She can’t concentrate when children are around, she tells us. And it is so; she is naturally attuned to their needs, worried about their tears, and amused by their joys.

She excuses herself to rest -- she must do some writing, and she has promised her doctor that she will finish reading the book he gave her. She introduces us to her visiting nephew as “the two people I’ve been avoiding all day.”

Finally her love for talking and reminiscing overcomes her anxiety about being interviewed. She suggests that we sit down for a cup of tea to chat. Others come and go, joining and diverting the talk -- she includes them all.

Dorothy does not acknowledge the microphone and the tape recorder; all she wants to do is sit and recollect, as if with old friends.

And that she loves. The only way to teach, she says, is by telling stories. Hers flow into one another, punctuated with musing insights and observations.

A friend finally suggests that Dorothy may want to rest. She protests that she’s only been having some tea, and a wonderful talk, for just an hour. Actually it has been two, and it’s nearly time for dinner.

It appears that her strength is rooted in her spirituality. To rise at six each morning and spend two hours reading the Bible, meditating, and praying is as natural to her as eating breakfast. She mentions it only incidentally, after you pointedly ask. But the influences of this contemplative life are transparent.

She tells us of how she recently had to pray for inner healing. Two people had come, among the many, to partake in the unconditional hospitality of the place. Their uncooperative attitudes caused Dorothy to pray for her own spirit’s healing. After she did, she said, the changes in them were remarkable.

After dinner we are saying grateful farewells. She looks at our October issue on presidential campaigns and the “seduction of the church” and jokes that the church certainly has seduced her. Then she reflects that there are so many positive and hopeful things going on that need to be reported. Miracles are always happening.

She is filled with such hope. This passionate disturber of the peace, this agitator for justice, wants, as another said, not to denounce as much as to announce.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.