Impact
Torn between competing demands and vocations, Day was restless through much of her adult life. At times she even thought of leaving the newspaper. “The world is too much with me in the Catholic Worker. The world is suffering and dying. I am not suffering and dying in the CW. I am writing and talking about it.”41 She also thought about becoming invisible, about getting a job in a hospital as a maid, about finding a room to live in somewhere, preferably next door to a church: “There in the solitude of the city, living and working with the poor, to learn to pray, to work, to suffer, to be silent.”
In the end, she decided not to leave. She built a series of communities, around the newspaper, the hospitality houses, the rural communes. The communities provided her with families and joy.
“Writing,” she wrote in one column in 1950, “is an act of community. It is a letter, it is comforting, consoling, helping, advising on our part as well as asking for it on yours. It is part of our human association with each other. It is an expression of our love and concern for each other.”42
She returned to this theme again and again, wrestling with her divided self: her solitary nature and also her craving for others. “The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community,” she wrote. “The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him.”43 At the end of The Long Loneliness she cries out, in one of her great bursts of gratitude,
I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty to delight. The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say. The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is community, others say. We are not alone anymore. But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.
We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.44
It may seem from the outside as if Day was doing the sort of community service that young people are called upon to do these days—serving soup, providing shelter. But in fact, her life rested on very different foundations and pointed in very different directions than the lives of many do-gooders today.
The Catholic Worker movement was meant to ease the suffering of the poor, but that was not its main purpose or organizing principle. The main idea was to provide a model of what the world would look like if Christians really did lead the lives that the Gospels command and love. It was not only to help the poor, but to address their own brokenness, that people served. “Going to bed at night with the foul smell of unwashed bodies. Lack of privacy,” Day wrote in her diary. “But Christ was born in a [manger] and a stable is apt to be unclean and odorous. If the Blessed Mother could endure it, why not I.”45
As the journalist Yishai Schwartz has written, for Day, “every significant action only attains its significance because of its relation to the Divine.” Every time she found somebody a piece of clothing, that was an act of prayer. Day was revolted by “the idea of doled-out charity,” which denigrates and disrespects the poor. For her, each act of service was a gesture upward to the poor and toward God, and the fulfillment of an internal need. Day felt it was necessary, Schwartz writes, to “internalize poverty as a private virtue,” to embrace poverty as a way to achieve communion with others and come closer to God. To separate community service from prayer would have been to separate it from its life-altering purpose.
The loneliness, suffering, and pain Dorothy Day endured have a sobering effect on anybody who reads her diaries. Does God really call for this much hardship? Did she not renounce too many of the simple pleasures that the world provides? In some sense she did. But in some sense this is a false impression left by overreliance on her diaries and her own writing. Like many people, Day’s mood was darker in her journals than it was in her daily life. She didn’t write when happy; she was engaged in the activities that made her happy. She wrote when she was brooding about something and used her diaries to contemplate the sources of her pain.
The diaries give the impression of someone in torment, but the oral histories give the impression of someone who was constantly surrounded by children, by dear friends, by admiration and a close community. As one admirer, Mary Lathrop, put it, “She had an enormous capacity for close friendships. Really quite extraordinary. Each friendship was unique, and she had many, many of them—people who loved her, and people that she loved.”46
Others remembered her intense love of music and the sensual things of the world. As Kathleen Jordan put it, “there was Dorothy’s deep sense of beauty…. I’d interrupt her during the opera time [while she was listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio]. I’d walk in and see her almost in ecstasy. That taught me a great deal about what proper prayer meant to her…. She used to say, ‘Remember what Dostoyevsky said: “Beauty will save the world.” ’ We would see that in her. She didn’t separate the natural and supernatural.”47
Nanette
By 1960, more than three decades had passed since she had left Forster Batterham. He had spent almost all of those years living with an innocent and charming woman named Nanette. When cancer struck Nanette, Forster called on Dorothy once again, to minister to her as she died. Of course Day responded without a second thought. For several months she spent much of each day with Nanette on Staten Island. “Nanette has been having a very hard time,” Day recounted in the diary, “not only pressure but pain all through her. She lay there and cried pitifully today. There is so little one can do, except just be there and say nothing. I told her how hard it was to comfort her, one could only keep the silence in the face of suffering, and she said bitterly, ‘Yes, the silence of death.’ I told her I would say a rosary.”48
Day did what sensitive people do when other people are in trauma. We are all called at certain moments to comfort people who are enduring some trauma. Many of us don’t know how to react in such situations, but others do. In the first place, they just show up. They provide a ministry of presence. Next, they don’t compare. The sensitive person understands that each person’s ordeal is unique and should not be compared to anyone else’s. Next, they do the practical things—making lunch, dusting the room, washing the towels. Finally, they don’t try to minimize what is going on. They don’t attempt to reassure with false, saccharine sentiments. They don’t say that the pain is all for the best. They don’t search for silver linings. They do what wise souls do in the presence of tragedy and trauma. They practice a passive activism. They don’t bustle about trying to solve something that cannot be solved. The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct.
Forster, on the other hand, behaved terribly through the ordeal. He kept running away, leaving Nanette with Dorothy and the other caregivers. “Forster in a sad state,” Day wrote in her diary, “resolutely refusing to spend time with Nanette. Nanette in a sad state all day, legs swelling badly, also stomach. Later in the evening she cried out she was losing her mind and screamed continually.”49