On the 99th Birthday of Dorothy Day

I learned somewhen in the early morning hours that today, in addition to being Election Day, and the feast of Bl. John Duns Scotus, and the Eastern Christian feast of the Holy Archangel Michael and all the Bodiless Powers of Heaven – is also the 99th birthday of Dorothy Day. (Just wait- maybe before all is said and done it will turn out to be The Day the Saucers Came too.)

Regrettably, I don’t actually have much of anything to say about Day. I just don’t know too much about her. This is a lamentable omission especially as this blog often addresses issues of social justice and since she made Pope Francis’s short list of exemplary Americans for her tireless striving “for justice and the cause of the oppressed”.  I will be taking due steps to remedy my defect and I look forward to writing to you again after I have.

Thankfully, you readers won’t have to wait for me to do that, because today I can direct you to an excellent post on Day from Rebecca over at Suspended in Her Jar. While I hope you kindly leave me in the dust and go read her post, I want to draw your attention especially to two passages from it before you do.

Rebecca writes:

“I met Dorothy when I was a baby, too young to remember, when my father used to visit her in New York, and argue with her. “She was an anarchist,” he reminisced. “He never made her people weed the gardens there.” Dad always made me weed his gardens, but now that I am a gardener myself, I can’t help but note, ruefully, when I look at the end-of-season mess, that I’m a bit of an anarchic one. Dad always warned us of the dangers of niceness and Dorothy, he said, was not “nice.” She was cantankerous and impatient, and loved her cigarettes. This may tempt me to think that it’s okay for me, too, to be cantankerous and impatient, and love my cigarettes, but if I’m not following Dorothy in her love of the poor and commitment to justice, these traits are not especially glorious, though it’s also true that one can ignore the grumblings of those who say “it’s not ladylike.” Being ladylike is a waste of time. So is smoking, for that matter. How tempted we often are to latch onto the failings of the saints, to justify our own, while ourselves failing to be open to their inspiration.”

Also especially pertinent on this Election Day, this Day Birthday, this Saucer Day are the conclusions she draws from Day’s example:

“Voting is only a tiny part of the political process. It may, according to your calculations, be a largely fruitless one, too, but don’t let that dissuade you from passionate engagement in the task of that revolution of the heart. Every day, you light the lamp again, and guard the flickering flame; every face you meet, seek to see Christ there – Christ hidden, persecuted, violated, poor, raped, addicted – Christ beneath the greed and rage and lust and fear. Whatever revolutions are televised or tweeted, the one that matters most is happening now and again tomorrow: it will be written, over and over again, in letters of fire upon our hearts.”‘

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)