We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
—Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
When I first saw the photo on the cover of her autobiography, I knew I had to know more about her. A gaunt woman strides through the woods. Pulled down over her pure white hair is a dark woolen cap, the cheap kind we used to wear in high school, the kind you could buy at a flea market or in an Army-Navy store. It is either late fall or early winter, for the sky is gray and the trees are bare, and the muddy ground is blanketed with dried leaves. Her hands are thrust into the pockets of an old tweed overcoat. The coat is blown open—it looks as if it’s missing a button—and reveals a drab dark dress underneath.
And on her face is the oddest expression: lips pursed, head down, eyes closed. She appears to be thinking about something very important.
It seems crazy to say, but when I saw that book jacket photo I felt that I wanted to follow this woman, to know her story, to be like her—a person about whom I knew nothing! The image seemed to indicate an attractive way of life. I wanted not to care about what I looked like or what I wore, and to live a simple lifestyle. I wanted not to worry about how my actions appeared to others. I wanted a sense of resolve about my direction in life. I wanted to marry the active (it seemed that she knew exactly where she was going) with the contemplative (I knew somehow that she came to the woods to pray). I wanted to be like Dorothy Day, and I had merely seen her picture.
My first introduction to a saint is often through an image: a photo, a mosaic, a fresco. Sometimes these images, pregnant with meaning and symbolism, transcend anything I later read about the saint. I find this to be true especially with photographs. Something of the saint’s situation is communicated by what she wears. Something of her soul is communicated in her face. And something of her message is communicated in her gaze.
Kathryn Harrison, in her incisive biography Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, discusses an arresting photograph of Thérèse taken toward the end of the saint’s short life. “She looks amused, almost,” writes her biographer. “Her small, prim mouth resists an actual smile, and her eyes express merriment: she is party to a wonderful secret.”
About another photo Harrison says, “The manner in which she returns our stares without wavering from the shining path she sees before her, bright as sunlight on water—all these announce Thérèse as one of the elect.”
This is what those images of Thérèse said to Kathryn Harrison. To another person they would be unremarkable photos of an unknown nun. But to the believer, or the admirer, such representations distill the essence of the person so effectively that the saint’s message is received in the seeing of the image. The image becomes an icon.
On the frontispiece of a book called Hearts on Fire, a history of the Maryknoll sisters, is a photo of their foundress, Mother Mary Joseph Rogers. She is a large woman swathed in a voluminous black habit and a billowing cape. Exiting a church, caught in midstride, she turns toward the viewer with a book gripped firmly in her right hand. Her left hand is blurred; it makes an expansive, outward gesture. On her face is a hearty smile: Mother Mary Joseph seems in the middle of a booming laugh. A distinctive spirituality is communicated—expansive, welcoming, confident. Having met many Maryknoll sisters in the years since I first saw that picture, I know that the photo is surprisingly accurate. Each of the Maryknoll sisters I met was in fact expansive, welcoming, and confident.
Often, no matter how much I read or learn about a saint, that initial image remains imprinted on my soul as the truest portrait of the person.
Here is how Dorothy Day seemed to me in the picture on that book: intelligent, resourceful, dedicated, straightforward, kind, hardworking, holy. Everything I have read about her since I first saw that photo has only confirmed those initial impressions.
Dorothy was born in Brooklyn to a nominally Episcopalian family in 1897, and at a young age she moved to Chicago with her family. (Her father was a newspaperman always on the lookout for a good job.) As a student at the University of Illinois, she became interested in a career in writing, as well as in the pressing political issues of the day: poverty, radical social change, and organized labor. But she was not interested, significantly, in religion. With the clear-eyed reasoning that would come to characterize her writing (and her thinking), she described this period in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. “I felt at the time religion would only impede my work,” she wrote. “I felt it indeed to be an opiate of the people, and not a very attractive one, so I hardened my heart. It was a conscious and deliberate process.”
Eventually Dorothy dropped out of college to make her way as a journalist in New York City. She plunged into the bohemian world of Greenwich Village and took assignments with radical papers like The Call and The Masses, covering socialist movements, syndicalism, the International Workers of the World, “bread riots,” unemployment, protest marches on city hall, and child labor laws. “I met Trotsky in New York,” she wrote in passing, “before he returned to Russia.” During a suffragist march in Washington, DC, she was arrested and thrown into jail alongside many other women protesters.
Her sojourn in jail left a lasting impression. During their incarceration, she and her companions began a hunger strike to protest the treatment of those imprisoned, and Dorothy deepened her identification with an even larger group: the poor and abused in society. The Long Loneliness recounts how jail prompted her to meditate on how her own sinfulness contributed to suffering and evil in the larger world. In the language of Ignatian spirituality, Dorothy was engaging in the meditation on sin of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises.
That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation, and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty. . . .
Is this exaggeration? There are not so many of us who have lain for six days and nights in darkness, cold, and hunger, pondering in our heart the world and our part in it.
Dorothy’s intellect and growing concern for social justice brought her in contact with a host of prominent New York intellectuals and activists, among them Emma Goldman, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, John Reed, and Eugene O’Neill. Around this time she fell in love with a man named Forster Batterham, with whom she lived as a common-law wife in a ramshackle house on Staten Island. (Only a few years ago the house was torn down to make room for new construction, to the dismay of Dorothy’s latter-day admirers.) In 1926, Dorothy became pregnant, an event that gave rise to a kind of natural religious conversion.
Her pregnancy awakened something new in Dorothy: an appreciation of creation and a desire to be in relationship with God. These feelings arose in the midst of a life filled in many ways with sadness. Just a few years before she had had an affair with a man she had met while working in a local hospital. Dorothy became pregnant and had the child aborted. She never directly spoke of this episode, except to close friends (though in her book The Eleventh Virgin, a novel loosely based on her life, the main character has an abortion). After the affairs, hard-drinking days, and other excesses (staying in a flophouse one night, she was mistakenly arrested as a prostitute), Dorothy came to see herself as one person in a long line of forgiven sinners. Her pregnancy helped her feel washed clean by God and able to start life anew. And in the soil of her gratitude grew the seed of faith.
“I was surprised that I found myself beginning to pray daily,” she wrote. During her pregnancy Dorothy began reading The Imitation of Christ, a fifteenth-century devotional manual she had picked up many years before. As one biographer notes, from her youth Dorothy sought out books that might provide a pattern for life: the Psalms, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, James. Now she was ready to resume the path of her youth in earnest. “The Imitation of Christ simply made the process explicit,” writes Paul Elie in his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own. “It identified her approach to life as religious.” In the process, she decided to have her child baptized.
Living near Dorothy on Staten Island was a Sister of Charity named Sr. Aloysia, who worked in a house for unmarried mothers and their children. The sister’s simple life fascinated Dorothy. One day Sr. Aloysia asked Dorothy bluntly, “How can your daughter be brought up Catholic if you don’t become one yourself?” Dorothy took her point, and so, after her daughter Tamar Teresa was baptized, Dorothy was received into the Catholic Church.
Dorothy Day had had little contact with the Church—any church—since her childhood. But her background and interests would make the Catholic Church a natural home for her. Not surprising for someone committed to so many “causes,” she had been searching for an ethical code that called for a demanding, even heroic response to the world’s needs. And while she found among her radical friends a love of community and the “brotherhood of man,” their philosophies lacked the coherent moral worldview she saw in Catholicism.
Also leading her to the door of the Catholic Church was a heartfelt identification with the poor and immigrants. During her days in Greenwich Village, she would often drop by St. Joseph’s Church, where she found not only her beloved poor but also an atmosphere of prayer. Finally, Dorothy sought a path of humility and obedience to God that was expressed most fully for her in traditional Catholic spirituality—for example, in the devotion to the saints. The Catholic Church bound together Dorothy’s love for the poor, her desire to be in communion with God, her search for moral clarity, and her hope for a life of humility and obedience.
So for Dorothy Day, as for Thomas Merton, it was this large and mysterious church, sure of itself and its place in the world, that satisfied her idealism and her desire for a new life with God.
Forster, on the other hand, was an anarchist with absolutely no interest in organized religion, or organized anything, for that matter. “It was impossible to talk with him about religion,” wrote Dorothy sadly. “A wall immediately separated us.” Dorothy described the day of Tamar’s baptism as tense. After the brief ceremony Forster left the celebration to set lobster traps for the evening meal. He returned to dinner, only to quarrel with Dorothy. A year later the two finally parted, a painful experience for Dorothy, who feared being left alone with her child. It was a stiff price to pay for her conversion.
But even as she embraced Catholicism, Dorothy was troubled that the Church, though often a haven for the poor, nonetheless seemed blind to the systemic causes of poverty. Why, she wondered, did the Communists seem to be the only ones helping the poor? On a more personal level, she began to wonder whether there was a way for her to marry her concern for social justice with her new Catholicism.
An answer came in 1932, with her meeting of Peter Maurin, a self-described French peasant who had been educated by the Christian Brothers. Maurin was a lively man about whom Dorothy wrote affectionately, “He was one of those people who could talk you deaf, dumb, and blind.” In The Long Loneliness she describes his ideas for a world where, rather than seeing themselves as slaves to an industrial machine, men and women would take part in the production of a good life.
Peter rejoiced to see men do great things and dream great dreams. He wanted them to stretch out their arms to their brothers, because he knew the surest way to find God, to find the good, was through one’s brothers. Peter wanted this striving to result in a better physical life in which all men would be able to fulfill themselves, develop their capacities for love and worship, expressed in all the arts.
The basis for this utopian vision was the gospel. And Peter’s understanding of it captivated Dorothy Day.
Peter Maurin, whom Dorothy would always call her mentor, encouraged his new friend to use her journalistic talents to found a newspaper. The paper would offer solidarity with the workers and a critique of the status quo from the perspective of the Gospels. The first issue of the Catholic Worker was distributed, fittingly, on May 1, 1933: May Day and later the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. It sold for a penny (and still does). That issue sold twenty-five hundred copies. By the end of the year, circulation was up to one hundred thousand.
Along with publishing the paper, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin opened “houses of hospitality” for the poor in New York City. These centers offered food and shelter during the Depression for hundreds of men and women. Dorothy and Peter also began communal farms for the poor as another way of building community. “It is strange to live in a world of so many strangers,” she wrote in The Long Loneliness. While the communal farms proved difficult to replicate elsewhere, the houses of hospitality and what became known as the Catholic Worker movement gradually began to spread throughout the United States.
Dorothy’s life at the Catholic Worker house and on the farm in upstate New York was varied and exciting. For the next several decades, she worked in her own house alongside other volunteers and traveled extensively, visiting Catholic Worker houses around the country. She also spent much of her time as a journalist, writing articles and editorials for the paper, while serving as a model for her followers through her presence and prayer.
Days were busy for everyone living in a Catholic Worker house. Early in the morning someone would rise to begin boiling water for the soup that would soon serve the many visitors at lunchtime. For a few hours the poor men and women would drop by to eat and relax, all the while talking to the volunteers. Afterward some of the volunteers, many of them young college graduates, would wash the pots and pans, while others might run to the post office, venture out for food, spend time paying bills and keeping the books, or tidy the house. In the evening came dinner, a Vespers service, and again more people to be met at the door, before the house was finally locked up for the evening. Friday nights were given over to public meetings and discussions, open to whoever wished to come. At some point in the day came Mass, perhaps at a local church or celebrated by a priest in the house.
One of the many volunteers to work with Dorothy Day was Robert Ellsberg, author of the book All Saints. In the 1970s, Ellsberg took a five-year leave from his undergraduate studies at Harvard College to spend time at the Catholic Worker house in New York City. During that time he got to know Dorothy well. I asked him to describe what it was like working with her. Although I had read a good deal about her, I found it difficult to get a sense of her personality. I knew that she was prayerful, generous, and hardworking, but in her autobiography she can come across as dour. The grim-faced photo on the cover of my copy of The Long Loneliness underscored this impression for me. So when Ellsberg described her as “fun to be around,” I was surprised.
“Dorothy could be funny,” he said, “and a good storyteller who told funny stories about herself.” I thought of the French novelist Léon Bloy’s comment about joy being the surest sign of the Holy Spirit. She enjoyed company of all sorts, said Ellsberg, from the college-age Catholic Workers to the elderly homeless people from the neighborhood, who held her in great respect, calling her “Miss Day.” She took a genuine interest in people, he continued, and appreciated individuals for their own gifts. Yet she was a real person who could occasionally grow discouraged and exasperated at life’s problems. Finally, he said, she disliked “being venerated” and had little time for people who treated her as The Legendary Dorothy Day.
Overall she was warm and accessible. “And she took a real interest in me,” Ellsberg remembered fondly.
I asked him what she liked to do. “Oh, Dorothy loved to read,” he said. “She enjoyed everything from classic novels to detective stories. And from time to time she liked to watch TV.”
What did she watch?
“Masterpiece Theatre,” he said. I laughed when I heard this. It was the first time I had learned what TV show a saint liked to watch.
Throughout her long life, Dorothy Day adhered to a practice of voluntary poverty, living simply, wearing clothes that had been donated to Catholic Worker houses, traveling by bus, and striving to have as few possessions as possible. But she was careful to distinguish between the dignity and freedom of such a choice and the bondage of destitution that enslaves so many of the poor. The latter type of poverty was not a way to freedom but a form of injustice and oppression, a sign of institutional sin to be combated.
In keeping with her understanding of the Gospels, Dorothy also became a tireless advocate for peace. For her, the message of the Sermon on the Mount led to an unshakable commitment to nonviolence. Her stance on nonviolence and her willingness to engage in campaigns of civil disobedience began shortly after World War II (protesting the civil defense drills of the 1950s) and continued through the Cold War and Vietnam.
As a result of this work she was shot at, imprisoned, and was investigated by the FBI. This did not deter her. “The servant is not greater than his master,” she would say. She received criticism even from some of her staunchest Catholic supporters, who admired her work with the poor but found her pacifism a bitter pill to swallow, especially during times of war. Neither did this deter her. And in the 1960s, when public social protest became more commonplace, the witness of Dorothy Day was a potent symbol to a new generation of advocates for social justice.
In 1973, at the age of seventy-six, she was arrested and jailed for her participation in a United Farm Workers rally supporting Cesar Chavez and the rights of migrant workers. A striking black-and-white photograph taken that day shows the birdlike, gray-haired woman wearing a secondhand dress and sitting on a folding chair. Dorothy gazes up calmly at two burly police officers, armed, who tower over her. It is a portrait of a lifetime of commitment, the dignity of discipleship, and the absolute rightness of the gospel.
For all of her radical causes, Dorothy Day boasted a surprisingly traditional piety. In 1960, she authored a slim book about one of her favorite saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, whose Little Way of doing small things out of love for God gave Dorothy’s work with the poor an added dimension. And while she remained faithful to the Catholic Church, as a journalist and an intellectual she also remained critical of its failings and limitations, particularly concerning issues of social justice. This devout Catholic liked to quote the twentieth-century theologian Romano Guardini’s dictum: “The church is the cross on which Christ is crucified today.”
With her good friend Thomas Merton (with whom she disagreed from time to time), Dorothy enjoyed a deep prayer life, seeing mysticism as something available to all believers.
And like Merton, she had an expansive view of prayer. “Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that he expects each of us to follow?” she asked. She answered her own question bluntly: “I doubt it.” She maintained that people can pray through the witness of their lives, the friendships they enjoy, and the love they offer and receive from others. As sickness and age began to wear on her, and Dorothy could no longer maintain as active a schedule, she was increasingly confined to her room. During those difficult times she would say, “My job is prayer.” She died on November 29, 1980.
Dorothy Day stands for many values: the importance of solidarity with the poor in living out the gospel, the value of nonviolence as a way of promoting peace, the importance of community in the life of the Church. She also stands for those who think themselves too damaged or sinful to do anything meaningful for God. Her frustrating experiences with casual sexual affairs, her abortion, and her tumultuous relationship with Forster prompted her to search even more earnestly for meaning. They also seem to have enabled her to receive the blessings of a child and her vocation with increased gratitude. In this way, she also mirrors Thomas Merton, whose own past—he had fathered a child while still a young man—moved him to find his place in the world of grace. Sometimes the most grateful pilgrim is the one whose road has been the rockiest.
This side of Dorothy’s life was illuminated for me while I was helping run a parish retreat some years ago. The theme of the retreat, held at a ramshackle Jesuit retreat house north of New York City, was “Praying with the Saints.”
During a talk on her favorite saints, the other retreat director—a laywoman and mother—movingly recounted the life of her great hero, Dorothy Day.
At the end of her presentation she spoke about Dorothy’s past. “Imagine,” she said, “if Dorothy Day had thought to herself: I had an abortion. What could God do with me? Imagine all the wonderful things that would never have gotten done.”
My first year as Jesuit novice was one of exhilarating new experiences: discovering prayer and Christian spirituality; working with the poor and living in a religious community; encountering the joys of the liturgical year; and, not incidentally, learning about the saints.
It seemed that each novice entered the novitiate with a favorite saint or holy person. For the most part, it was easy to tell who the favorite saint was. Occasionally you were told outright. But usually the means of discovery was subtler: sometimes you could tell by the way a particular saint kept popping up in conversation, or by the way a person seemed almost imperceptibly happier on his saint’s feast day, or by spying a holy card falling silently from his Bible as he turned a page while in chapel.
Within a few weeks of entering the novitiate, I was introduced to Dorothy Day by a second-year novice named George. George was something of a Dorothy Day nut, drawing inspiration from her work with the poor, her advocacy for social justice, and her simple lifestyle. One September evening I accompanied him to a Catholic Worker house in downtown Boston for one of their Friday night lectures. These were called “clarification of thought” meetings, a phrase that sounded suspiciously Maoist (or at least Marxist) as well as vaguely threatening. But the Catholic Worker volunteers couldn’t have been more inviting. Moreover, their work with the homeless in Boston, their efforts on behalf of social justice (in the States and abroad), and their exceedingly simple style of life were inspiring to a young novice. The talk that night was on the need for nonviolence in the conflicts then raging in Central America.
When we returned home that night, George gave me his copy of The Long Loneliness. “If you lose this,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
“So much for nonviolence,” I said.
I didn’t begin reading the book for some time. There were so many other things we were supposed to read that year—all those biographies of St. Ignatius. So George’s book sat on my desk for many months. Every once in a while, I would pick it up and stare at the cover photo of the old woman in the woods. Her expression seemed to grow more reproachful each time I looked at her: When are you going to read my book?
It wasn’t until the following year that I read her autobiography and came to know Dorothy and her world. In January, we second-year novices were sent away on the “long experiment,” a four-month period where we would work in a Jesuit ministry away from the novitiate. This was one of a variety of “experiments” that novices undertook: in hospitals, in homeless shelters, in the developing world, and so on.
At the time, I had been hearing a good deal about a Jesuit middle school in New York City for boys living in the poor neighborhoods on the Lower East Side. The Nativity Mission School, housed in a former tenement building, seemed an exciting place for a young Jesuit. My novice director agreed and sent me to work there.
I was astonished by the dedication of the teachers, many of whom were recent college graduates and members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Classes began at 8:00 a.m. and continued until 3:00 p.m., with a short break for lunch and recess. After classes students stayed for the tutoring that many desperately needed as well as something simpler: a place to study. Many of their families’ small tenement apartments were crowded and noisy, making it difficult for the students to concentrate on homework. The kids went home for dinner and returned again to school for still more tutoring. The day finally ended at 10:00 p.m. The now-exhausted teachers loaded up the battered school van with children who lived in especially dangerous neighborhoods and drove them home. For both teachers and students it was a long day.
The combination of teaching, tutoring, and the overall attention that Jesuit educators call cura personalis (care for the person) meant that the Nativity School students received an extraordinary education. Not surprisingly, their parents—many of them recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Ecuador, and Vietnam—were exceedingly grateful. Most graduates continued on to high school. Some went to college, and quite a few went to the best schools in the country.
One freezing February evening, I crawled into bed and finally started the book that George had lent me a few months before. To my complete surprise, after only a few chapters it dawned on me that Dorothy Day had begun her work of running houses of hospitality in this very neighborhood, just a few blocks from where I was now living.
The next morning, when I mentioned this to a Jesuit in the community, he laughed.
“Of course,” he said. “You didn’t know that? She worked right around the corner! You’re living in her world!”
That day I wandered over to the Catholic Worker houses, just two blocks away, and stood in the cold, staring. In the mid-1960s, St. Joseph’s House was founded for men, and Maryhouse in the 1970s for women. Both were unremarkable brownstones. Neither sported any indication of their historical significance. I suppose I expected a little brass plaque saying something like “Dorothy Day, Founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Lived Here.” But in a sense there was no need: the buildings were still operating as houses of hospitality and serving the homeless on the Lower East Side. The only sign needed was the sign of the poor men and women who gathered on the icy sidewalks outside.
Soon afterward, I began hearing stories from the local Jesuits about Dorothy. As it turned out, she had attended the daily 5:15 p.m. Mass at the Nativity Parish on a regular basis. “Dorothy was a tough old bird,” said one Jesuit. “No nonsense.” Another Jesuit told me that during a time of painful anxiety in his life as a priest, he confessed his concerns to Dorothy. In response, she took his hands in hers and said, “You are meant to be a priest.” I remember thinking, if Dorothy Day were to say that to me, any vocational doubts would evaporate instantaneously.
But it wasn’t simply the physical surroundings that reminded me of Dorothy Day; it was the work of the teachers—long hours in spartan conditions, dedicated service in the name of the Church, largely unrecognized labor with little pay, all on behalf of the poor.
Most of all, I was reminded of Dorothy in the Mass.
At the end of the day (or, for the teachers, in the middle), Mass was celebrated in our small house chapel. Ancient wooden pews, nicked and scraped, surrounded a simple wooden altar covered by a plain white cloth. Affixed to the wall were tall, slender wooden carvings of Mary and Joseph. Joining the schoolteachers at 5:15 was an assortment of people from the neighborhood, some elderly, some poor. Usually there came two ancient women, including one who prayed each day for “my son, Alexander, the priest”; a few parishioners; and the odd passerby or homeless person. For some reason (grace, probably) I found Masses in that warm chapel on cold days intensely moving. I felt bound together as much with the teachers with whom I had grown close as with the homeless man I knew not at all.
Near the close of my time at Nativity, I reached the end of Dorothy’s autobiography, where she talks about the antidote for the “long loneliness,” the feeling of longing and desire that dwells within all of us. It’s pretty simple, she says: community. I thought about the teachers, students, and parents at the Nativity School, of the Jesuits with whom I lived, of Maryhouse and St. Joseph’s House and the homeless men and women, of the Catholic Worker volunteers in Boston, and of the novitiate, and I thought: Yes, she’s right, of course.
After her death in 1980, Dorothy Day was lionized by both secular and religious commentators. Writing in Commonweal magazine, the Catholic historian David O’Brien called her “the most influential, interesting, and significant figure” in the history of American Catholicism. But, as Robert Ellsberg noted, she was always uncomfortable with her legendary status. “Don’t call me a saint,” she said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
Perhaps, then, she might be annoyed that she is already being considered for canonization by the Vatican. On the one hand, Dorothy Day is a traditional brand of saint. She was someone who espoused voluntary poverty and proclaimed the necessity for peacemaking, as was Francis of Assisi. She was a person whose vocation was to work directly with the poor and alleviate their suffering, as was Mother Teresa. She was a woman whose life of prayer animated her good works, as was Thérèse of Lisieux. And, like the apostle Peter, she didn’t let her sinfulness stand in the way of her responding to the call of God. So she seems a very traditional saint.
But she is more likely a nontraditional one. Unlike many canonized saints, she combined her service to the poor with a slashing critique of the political and economic systems that give rise to contemporary poverty. In retrospect, it’s clear that this was a natural outgrowth of her career as a journalist: she understood where money came from and where it went. (Unlike Mother Teresa, she was vigorously opposed to accepting money from those she felt had earned it off the backs of the poor.) She not only stood with the marginalized, but she stood against the systems that would keep them in the margins. She was the bearer of what Robert Ellsberg has called a political kind of holiness, which makes even some devout Christians uncomfortable.
It doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. In her writing I find a realistic look at the world, and her comments on the plight of the poor are, sadly, all too relevant today. Still, I am less interested in Dorothy Day’s astute political analyses than in her personal witness of poverty. Since I first read The Long Loneliness, the most prosaic aspect of her life has become the most meaningful to me. She never professed a vow of poverty, yet she lived more simply than I ever have. Her witness is both goal and goad for me as a Jesuit. She says to me, “Do you really need to buy this? Do you really need one more possession in your life? Wouldn’t this money better serve the poor?” And “How is your work benefiting the poor? How are they in your prayers? How much do you love them?”
For me, Dorothy Day represents a sort of telos, an earthly endpoint in my desire to live simply and work among the poor, as Jesus of Nazareth did.
Once again I return to the photo on my old copy of The Long Loneliness. In a world that tells us that we are what we buy, what we wear, where we live, what we eat, what we drive, and where we vacation, Dorothy Day puts her head down, thrusts her hands into that used overcoat, pulls the knit cap over her white hair, shakes her head to all that nonsense, and goes about her business. For this reason alone, I think, she is already a saint.
I am far from alone in my estimation. Her “cause” for canonization, as of this writing, has begun. And recently I was talking to a Jesuit priest who had worked at the Nativity School during the time when Dorothy was a fixture in the parish. He astonished me by telling me that Dorothy Day’s funeral Mass was, in fact, held at Nativity Parish. And there were, apparently, several odd happenings on that day. A light fixture high in the ceiling exploded dramatically during the Mass. After the Mass, as her coffin was carried out onto Second Avenue, a homeless man ran down the street, burst through the large crowd, and threw himself on the coffin, weeping.
That day my friend gave his class at Nativity the morning off, telling his students something Dorothy Day may not have wanted to hear.
“Go to church today,” he said, “and see the funeral of a saint.”