Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and though not formally canonised as a saint in the Catholic church, is recognised by many to be one. I first heard of her when I was pointed to a series of YouTube videos called 'Who Cares About The Saints?' by Loyola Productions and saw the below video: After a quick Google about her, I was challenged and amazed by so many Dorothy Day quotes, like the one at the top of this post - and her autobiography is now on my "to-read list"! Born in Brooklyn in 1897, her family later moved to San Francisco and Day was baptised Episcopalian. When she left college from the University of Illinois, she became a journalist in New York City particularly writing on social action type subjects, and getting involved in women's suffrage and peace movements. In her personal life, she went through numerous love affairs, a failed marriage, a suicide attempt and an abortion. But with the birth of her daughter, Tamar, in 1926, Day converted to Catholicism (ending her marriage at the time) and embraced faith and religion. She then increasingly sought to fuse her life and the importance she saw of social action and standing up for the disadvantaged, with her faith. In 1932 she met Peter Maurin and together they started a publication called the Catholic Worker and opened a house of hospitality during the Great Depression, eventually growing into many similar houses and farm communities across the US and elsewhere. Dorothy Day was hot-headed, sarcastic, ferocious, passionate and, above all, trying her very best to love with ever more love. In reply to someone who told her she was hot-headed, she replied, "I hold more temper in one minute than you will hold in your entire life." I like her. She saw that there were problems and she sought to love and help as she could - making more and better ways that she could when needed. But she also refused to stay quiet about what caused those problems and fought against the systems and injustices imprisoning people in poverty, vulnerability and helplessness. She knew what it means to love God with all her heart and soul and mind and strength - using every skill she had, and every way she could think of to show that God's love meant the world shouldn't be how it is, but needs to be different. "What we would like to do is change the world - make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do....We can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbour, to love our enemy as well as our friend." ~ Dorothy Day To those who knew her, and even to me today after reading only so briefly about her, she challenges, scolds, impassions and encourages to love more fully. She asks me what I'm doing; how I'm living out my faith; who I'm loving despite the difficulty and the effort in doing so; who and what I'm standing up for; who and what I'm standing up against! By declaring someone a saint, the church 'holds them up as an example of authentic Christian discipleship for a certain time and place' [1]. This is Day's impact on Christianity and the difference she made, not just during her life, to all the people involved in and reached through the communities she built and the love she encouraged and enacted, but also to Christians today. She gave an example of someone who didn't let anything she'd done in the past, or anything people said against her, or even the immense task that loving radically posed in front of her, get in her way. She sought always to follow God's call to love, regardless of where that took her. A lesson we all need to take on board today if we are to be authentic disciples of Jesus Christ. [1] DEACON TOM CORNELL, quoted in article in Crux, Friends of Dorothy Day applaud progess in sainthood cause. Available at: https://cruxnow.com/church/2016/04/26/friends-of-dorothy-day-applaud-progress-in-sainthood-cause/ [Accessed Jan 2017]
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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