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One of the things Jesuit novices have to do as part of their training is work with the poor. Early on, I was asked to work with some poor boys in a school on the Lower East Side of New York City. When I was down there, a friend of mine gave me a copy of "The Long Loneliness," which is the autobiography of Dorothy Day.
I opened the book when I was working on the Lower East Side and was surprised to find out that most of her life was really centered on the Lower East Side in New York. I mentioned that to one of the priests I was living with, and he said, "Sure, you're living in her world down here. This is where she worked."
She was born in 1897 to kind of moderately devout Episcopalian parents. She went to the University of Illinois, studied journalism, and then moved to New York in the 1920s. She fell in with a fairly active and famous group of people: John Dos Passos, Emma Goldman, Eugene O'Neill. She was his lover for a while and led a fairly wild life as a journalist.
It was said that she could drink anybody under the table. She took up with lots of different people. She ended up working in a hospital, got pregnant, and had an abortion. She had a common-law husband who lived with her in Staten Island. When she found herself pregnant with her daughter Tamar, she started to feel within herself this kind of religious conversion that drew her to the Catholic Church.
Now, her husband, who was an anarchist, wasn't really in favor of that and left her. But Dorothy continued to draw closer to the church and continued to want to help the poor. In the 1930s, she met a guy named Peter Morin, who was a French intellectual talking about ways of helping the poor through the Gospel message. Together, they started the Catholic Worker movement.
The Catholic Worker movement was a way of using gospel principles, specifically Christ's injunction to care for the poor, to not only help the poor but to create a sense of community between the poor and everybody else. In her book "The Long Loneliness," she says, "We have all experienced the long loneliness," meaning that kind of essential loneliness that comes from just being human. She says that the only answer is found in community.
So for Dorothea, as her friends liked to call her, and her admirers, working with the poor and being with the poor was an essential part of being Christian. She really does hold that challenge up to Christians even today.
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There's a wonderful story that Robert Coles, the Harvard psychologist, uses when he's trying to talk about Dorothy Day's humility and her ability to really identify with the poor and to not see herself as separated from them. He came to visit her at the Catholic Worker house in New York City.
Dorothy Day, at the time, was sitting around a table with a lot of the guests, as she would call them, a lot of the poor men and women who were in the Catholic Worker house at the time. Robert Coles, this psychologist from Harvard, came to see her. He sees her at the table, goes over, and rather than saying, "Oh, excuse me, poor people, I have to visit with this guy from Harvard," Dorothy Day sat there, looked up to Robert Coles, and said, "Oh, is there one of us that you wanted to talk to?"
She really didn't like people who sort of liked to see her as the legendary Dorothy Day. She was just a very down-to-earth person. A friend of mine told the story of her, I guess in the early 30s or 40s, when her daughter was still very young. Someone presented themselves at the Catholic Worker door, basically, and said very dramatically, "I am here to help. Tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it."
She said, "Okay, my little baby needs changing. Want to use a coat? Change her diaper."
Now, many people know that Dorothy Day had an abortion, which makes her somewhat controversial in the church. But I think the wonderful part about that story for so many people is that Dorothy Day did not let even something like that prevent her from leading a useful life. She raised her daughter Tamar, and also she had a common-law husband from whom she separated later in life.
That husband, whose name was Forster, married another woman. The woman became ill and wrote to Dorothy Day, saying, "Would you please come take care of me?" Dorothy Day nursed the wife of her former common-law husband.
So it wasn't just Dorothy Day taking care of the poor; there was Dorothy Day taking care of her family and, by any stretch of the imagination, her extended family. She was a much more complicated woman than someone who was just feeding the poor.
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A few years ago, I was helping to direct a retreat with a mother who was also a retreat director, a married woman who was a mother. She stood up and gave her understanding of Dorothy Day's life, and she said something very beautiful. She said, "Imagine all the wonderful things that would not have happened if Dorothy Day had said, 'I had an abortion. What could I do?'"
Which was very beautiful for me because Dorothy Day, I think, through that, shows us that none of us, no matter what we do in life and no matter what actions we have taken that we might think have been bad or unforgivable, should ever prevent us from getting closer to God and from trying to be the saints that we're meant to be.
Because if Dorothy Day had just sort of shrugged her shoulders and said, "I'm too damaged to do anything," think of all the wonderful things that would have never happened and all the wonderful people that she would have never met and would have never helped.
Robert Ellsberg, who's written a lot about the saints himself, when he was 19 years old, took off five years from Harvard University and went to work with Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker house in New York. I asked him, "What was she like?" He said, "Oh, lots of fun, loved to laugh, loved to read books."
It was surprising because I thought, you know, the saints have to be kind of grumpy and dour. He said, "Yes, she liked to watch TV a lot too." I asked, "What did she watch?" He said, "Oh, Masterpiece Theater all the time."
I thought, well, that's the first time I've ever heard what kind of TV show a saint liked to watch. Dorothy Day, I think, as a result of the Catholic Worker movement, which really took off like wildfire in the United States and still continues today, is one of the most significant figures in American Catholicism.
When she died, Commonweal magazine called her the most interesting, significant, and meaningful figure in twentieth-century American Catholicism. For a lot of people, she stands for a simple lifestyle and work with the poor.
But she's also well known in pacifist circles for her resistance to all forms of war. She was buried out of a Jesuit church in New York City, and even though she used to tell people, "Don't let them call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily," by the end of her life, I think most people thought that she was a saint.
In our culture today, the poor are marginalized. The poor are unseen. They're an embarrassment to us. Dorothy Day tells us not to be afraid of the poor. The poor are our friends. The poor are our brothers and sisters.
Her experience shows us that community has to include the poor, and these are not people that we can forget if we want to be good Christians.
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