Day describes several conversions in her life, as Augustine does, and most formative for her was a conversion to the poor. While living in Chicago as a youth, she read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which fictionally but realistically displays the grotesque and awful working conditions of industrial workers in Chicago. She couldn’t look at the world the same. “I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life,” Day writes.10 Despite Jesus’s regular injunctions to care for the downcast and “least of these” (Matt. 25:40), she noticed that precious few Christians cared for the poor. Day saw them as too concerned with “pie in the sky” spirituality rather than the practical call to care for material needs on earth. So, she joined the Socialist Party. There, Day found her people and had an awakening with deep Christian sensibilities.
Day writes of her coming of age that “my freedom intoxicated me.”11 In New York City, she was involved with the Greenwich intellectuals, an avant-garde and free-spirited group that was involved in all sorts of debauchery—legendary drug use, sexual experimentation, and other countercultural activities. It was said that even in this crowd Dorothy could drink her companions under the table—a fact that, if mentioned after her conversion, would bring out her anger. She didn’t like to talk about her life before Jesus. She fell in love, got pregnant, had an abortion, and attempted suicide on two occasions. Her freedom may have been intoxicating, but it was a freedom leading her to death. She experienced the slavery that comes with negative freedom.
SEEDS OF CONVERSION
The catalyst for Day’s transformation was a baby. She became pregnant again by a man named Forster, with whom she was in a common-law marriage. Forster had no interest in traditional morals or commitments. He didn’t want to be a father, but Day wanted to be a mother. So, she kept the baby this time. In the days leading up to the birth, she was in regular prayer. She believed religion to be an opiate of the masses yet was praying not out of desperation but out of joy. She was praying not to soothe her unhappiness but because she had found a kind of happiness.
Then the moment of birth transformed her. Birthing her daughter, Tamar Teresa, generated a thankfulness she couldn’t account for. Who could she be thankful to? Mother Earth? The universe? These weren’t sufficient answers. One can’t be thankful to impersonal forces.
In her hospital room, days after giving birth, she wrote an article for a communist magazine called The Masses to explain her incredible joy. Reflecting on the experience, she acknowledged, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms. . . . No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”12 Day realized that in her gratitude there had to be a personal being to be thankful to. So she started going to Mass regularly on Sunday mornings. Tamar was baptized, and not long after, Dorothy joined her daughter in the Catholic Church.
COMMITMENT TO THE CHURCH
Dorothy Day had a fraught relationship with the church from the very beginning, yet she continued to love the ecclesial community—“not for itself,” she insists, “because it is so often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.”13 Day lived with that dissatisfaction.
From the beginning, joining the church required sacrifice. She was in an illicit relationship with Forster, and he had no interest in religious life. Joining was no easy decision. Commitment to the church would “mean facing a life alone and I clung to family life. It was hard to contemplate giving up a mate in order that my child and I could become members of the Church.”14 She went about her participation “grimly, coldly, making acts of faith, and certainly with no consolation whatsoever.”15 She doubted. She wrestled. Was Christianity supposed to feel so cold? Could it require this much sacrifice? When do the emotions catch up? To start, Day went through the motions. To continue, she found the value of routine, especially daily Mass. She asserts, “Without the sacraments of the church, primarily the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, as it is called, I certainly do not think I could go on. . . . I do not always approach it from need, or with joy and thanksgiving. After 38 years of almost daily communion, one can confess to a routine, but it is like the routine of taking daily food.”16 In a recent commentary on routine and liturgy, Tish Harrison Warren compares the Eucharist to eating leftovers.17 Most people cannot remember what they ate for lunch last Tuesday. It was likely not a life-changing experience. However, these forgettable meals are what sustain us. They transform us—slowly and without notice or fanfare. Daily routines are like that. They are small and unremarkable, yet they make a significant difference.
Day saw these ordinary, eucharistic acts as hope for the poor. Reflecting on Day, Timothy O’Malley writes, “Most of all, she knew that the presence of the flesh and blood poor, the scandal of social injustice, was a Eucharistic problem. She celebrated the Liturgy of the Hours and the Eucharistic liturgy each day. She spent time in adoration before the Eucharistic Lord. From the Eucharist, from the grace she received, she became an accidental icon of love for all those who knew her.”18 The Eucharist is a symbol of incarnation to the poor. It is a picture of Philippians 2 love, which comes down to us. Day’s commitment to the church allowed her to love the poor in tangible and deep ways. The habit of adoration allowed her to see things that she could otherwise not see and to become a person she could otherwise not become. The church and the poor were in tension for Day, but she could not reject either.
COMMITMENT TO THE POOR
After Day joined the church, the next big move in her life journey was meeting Peter Maurin. A third of her autobiography is about her relationship with Maurin, who was the cofounder of the Catholic Worker. Maurin was an eccentric and aloof intellectual who desired to form a society and culture in which it was easier for people to be good. “He wanted them to stretch out their arms to their brothers, because he knew that the surest way to find God, to find the good, was through one’s brother.”19 This program was to cultivate an imagination of seeing and loving Christ in the other and especially in the poor, the naked, the sick, and the hungry.
Day’s conversion to Christianity only sharpened her social conscience, prodding her to a deeper commitment to the poor of the world. She was not merely caring for the exploited by talking about it or sharing ideas, but now she had deeper reasons for caring for the impoverished. She did not merely march or picket or organize or give. To adequately love the poor, “one must live with them, share with their suffering, too. Give up one’s privacy, and mental and spiritual comforts as well as physical.”20 Christ incarnates himself on earth—he gets in the messy details of our daily lives. If we desire to love the world as Christ did, then Day instructs us to live among those we are called to love. She was a love warrior, and she invites us into such an eternal life.
Day and Maurin were driven by a philosophy of personalism. In a culture that wants to change the world, personalism insists on starting with small acts of love for the person closest to oneself.
Being a virtuous person starts with the immediate community. Personalism asks how people treat their moms and dads, their roommates, their spouses and children. David Brooks comments, “Personalism holds that we each have a deep personal obligation to live simply, to look after the needs of our brothers and sisters, and to share in the happiness and misery they are suffering. The personalist brings his whole person to serve another whole person.”21 The Catholic Worker movement exemplified such values. There were no “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor.” There were the poor, and Christians were called to care for the vulnerable among them.
To be sure, Day was no idealist. She lived in the difficult tensions of caring for the vulnerable, to the ire and dismay even of her colleagues. When young people would come to volunteer at her soup kitchen, she would inform them, “There are two things you need to know about poor people: they are ungrateful, and they smell.”22 In modern terms, service is not fit for Instagram. Mercy is not for likes or clicks. It won’t make you feel good. But it is our duty, and we are called to such a life of love.
Day asked what kind of people we are meant to be and worked hard to help others achieve that virtue. She shared Maurin’s goal of cultivating a community in which it was easier for people to be good. Referring to the issue of abortion, Myles Werntz summarizes Day’s philosophy this way: “And so Day’s consistent approach to abortion can be summed up in this way: if you want a law to be undone, make it meaningless to have it. Rather than try to legislate it out of existence, cultivate a world in which abortion is unthinkable because of the love we share with one another, and—when pregnancies happen unwanted—make it possible for children to be received into loving communities.”23 Day was motivated by the law of love rather than the laws of the land. She wanted to cultivate a community in which vice becomes increasingly unthinkable, where we don’t need laws to regulate virtue. Of course, we will need laws to guide us when our flesh is weak, but if we took the law of love seriously, laws would become extraneous. We would begin to act with our neighbors’ best interests in mind.
Referring to Jesus’s miracle of multiplication, “loaves and fishes” was a phrase Dorothy repeated from Peter Maurin. As D. L. Mayfield writes, Dorothy knew that “both came through prayer and also pounding the pavement.”24 She followed the wisdom of ritual in Philippians 2:12–13. She worked out her faith “with fear and trembling” (pounding the pavement), knowing it was God who was working in her (prayer). Loaves and fishes, indeed. It’s all we have.
CONCLUSION
Day lived a remarkable life. She believed in obedience and submission to the church even though the church frustrated her. She loved the poor till the end. Day also ended up on the FBI watchlist for addressing the moral issues of her day: from speaking against Japanese internment camps to burning military draft cards to protesting nuclear bombs to advocating for racial justice. She was an equal-opportunity offender. She wasn’t safe, but she lived a life of goodness.
In her autobiography Day writes, “Faith that works through love is the mark of the supernatural life. God always gives us a chance to show our preference for Him. With Abraham it was to sacrifice his only son. With me it was to give up my married life with Forster. You do these things blindly, not because of your natural inclination—you are going against nature when you do them—but because you wish to live in conformity with the will of God.”25 And Day saw the importance of ritual for living in conformity with God. “Ritual, how could we do without it!”26 She compares ritual to a husband unthinkingly and unreflectively kissing his wife before leaving for work. “That kiss on occasion turns to rapture, a burning fire of tenderness and love. And with this to stay her she demands the ‘ritual’ of affection shown. . . . We have too little ritual in our lives.”27 Day knows the power of practice. She knows that love thrives with habits.
In the moments when we feel most disconnected, when we feel that we need church the least, when it’s hard to enter the church’s doors, showing up is the first step toward grace. Even when—especially when—she didn’t feel like it, Day came to church out of duty. She showed up. And through the fulfillment of her duty, she was transformed.
Currently, Dorothy Day is in the long process of being canonized, or “sainted.” Eventually, she may be Saint Dorothy. She wouldn’t have liked it. To be a saint, according to her, is to not be taken seriously. It puts her life out of reach—“Well, of course she can do it, since she’s a saint. But I can’t. I’m ‘normal.’” Ironically, perhaps that mentality of Day’s, that reluctance to be a saint, is what makes her fit for sainthood. Righteousness without self-righteousness.
PRACTICES
CREATE A RULE OF LIFE
“Rule” does not carry its usual meaning here. It refers to a pattern. Based on the goal or vision of who you want to be, what habits can get you there? With a mentor, it can be very helpful to plan daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual patterns. What things do you want to commit to every day, every week, every season, every year? You can divide your life into different categories: vocational, relational, familial, spiritual, bodily. Completing this process with a mentor or spiritual director can be a helpful way to keep you accountable as well. Remember: start small. Keep things manageable instead of trying to do everything right from the beginning. You can add more later. Be realistic.
FASTING
Fasting helps us long for God, as mentioned in chapter 5, and it reveals the way we depend on created things rather than the Creator. There’s nothing sinful about food or social media or cellphone use or sleep, yet by prying our hands off these good gifts, we open ourselves up. Fasting empties the self so it can receive more of God.
SELF-EXAMINATION
There’s an Ignatian practice called “examen,” in which the participant reviews their day in the presence of God, looking for consolations and desolations. Where did God seem present in a way that brought joy, comfort, and peace? What things during the day made the person feel drained, sorrowful, or angry? This regular practice of reflecting on the day, acknowledging where God was, can be a helpful practice for both gratitude and repentance.
SERVICE
Service is a great formative practice that helps us love our neighbor. Sometimes, acting the part shapes us to enjoy the part. A regular rhythm of serving neighbors—whether through a block party, regular hospitality, or service at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter—can help us love God by loving our neighbor. All spiritual formation that forms us vertically, with God, has horizontal implications with our neighbors.28
RESOURCES
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Vintage, 2013.
Cassian, John. The Conferences. Translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
Herdt, Jennifer. Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Mattison, William, III. Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008.
1. Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 61.
2. “Aftermath,” The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill (podcast), 1:23:55.
