In college I painted a portrait of Dorothy Day. Working from
a black-and-white photo, I drew her as I saw her -- an old woman
with a child's expression on her mouth, her eyes large behind
round glasses, her shoulders curled forward, as though to better
listen. My assignment was to underpaint the shadows with vivid
colors, then to smooth over it all with muted skin tones. But
the assignment became a meditation, and the plywood portrait came
out loud: Day with blue streaks in her hair, a maroon mouth, black-violet
eyes, the light high-yellow on her cheeks.
Later, I moved the painting into my South Bend bedroom. The
room was so small that Day's gaze seemed to fall everywhere, so
I spent a year with her there. I brought her the minutiae and
the mysteries -- my lost shoe, my lost love, my first reading
of Moby Dick, my shared rooftop dinners of sweet potatoes
and beer.
I have followed her failingly, but heartily, ever since. I find
her, as perhaps you do, across the newsprint pages she left behind,
in the Houses of Hospitality that seek, as she sought, to live
the Sermon on the Mount, and in the lives of those who love her
and who wash dishes and feet to bring about the Kingdom.
Her story is worth telling again.
At Manhattan's Maryhouse in 1980, Tamar Teresa braided her mother
Dorothy's hair into a wreath around her head and washed her body
for burial. Downstairs, Catholic Workers opened the door, stirred
the soup and swept. Day's body was placed in an unvarnished pine
coffin and set out for a joyful wake. She was buried in a donated
grave on Staten Island. Below an etching of loaves and fishes,
her headstone reads:
DOROTHY DAY
NOVEMBER 8, 1897 -- NOVEMBER 29, 1980
DEO GRATIAS
Day grew up in Chicago reading her father's racetrack reports
and her mother's Dickens and Dostoevsky. At the University of
Illinois, she found her finest professors in Chekov, Gorki, Mother
Jones and Big Bill Haywood.
At 18 she left school for New York, where she reported for The
Call and other socialist publications. She lived cheap on
the Bowery, writing pieces like "Reporter Eats Farina and Cheese
and Reads Wordsworth." Though reporting was her mainstay during
the next decade, she also worked as a nurse, a figure-drawing
model and New Orleans taxi dancer. She served her first jail sentence
at 20 for a suffrage protest. While incarcerated, Day read Psalms.
In her reading and in her work Day sought the place where people
live what they profess. But at 21, she became pregnant by a man
who wrote "don't follow me" and abandoned her after her abortion
was performed. A few months later she married an older man of
letters. The two moved to Europe, where their marriage ended one
year later.
After she sold the film rights to her novel The Eleventh
Virgin, Day bought a cottage on Staten Island. There she
wrote and lived with Forster Batterham, an anarchist who fished
for his supper. He was long and lean and smelled of seaweed and
salt spray. "When he came home, he would rush out to the garden
with his flashlight to see how things were growing," she wrote.
"Winter nights he had charts and studied the stars." His wonder
in creation brought her to "the Creator of all things."
Batterham was a naturalist who could not tolerate religion.
But when Day became pregnant at 28, she longed "to worship, to
adore." She described her labor in New Masses:"I was
in the bathtub reading Agatha Christie when I felt the first pain
and was thrilled, both by the novel and by the pain, and thought
stubbornly to myself, 'I must finish this book.'"
After the "waves of pain" subsided Day was left with "the stupendous
fact of creation." From that joy and a hard, inward struggle,
Day decided to raise her daughter, Tamar, in the "Church of the
Poor." To the surprise of her friends and the sorrow of Batterham,
whom she soon left, Day became a Catholic.
To make a living, Day and Tamar took to the road -- she wrote
for MGM in Hollywood and Commonweal in Mexico. But the
poor called her back to New York's Avenue A, where she put on
a pot of coffee and began her life's work.
Peter Maurin, a French peasant and "troubadour of God," who
owned nothing but the books in his pockets, appeared at her door
to show her this work. Maurin indoctrinated Day in the Catholic
social encyclicals, the monastic rule of Saint Benedict, the Thomistic
doctrine of the common good and a philosophy of manual labor.
He gave her vision form through a threefold program: roundtable
discussions and a newspaper for the "clarification of thought";
houses of hospitality; and "agronomic universities" on the land.
The two began their revolution -- "a revolution," Day called it,
"of the heart."
Day wrote that God trusts us in our petitioning and takes us
at our word. It was fitting, then, that so much of the Worker
Movement simply flowed from her prayer.
"We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in
. . . [and] when lines of people began to form, saying, 'We need
bread.' We could not say, 'Go, be thou filled.' If there were
six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. . .
. We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us.
. . . Somehow the walls just expanded."
The walls continue to expand. Today there are more than 185
Catholic Worker Houses and Farms, 21 abroad. They have no headquarters,
and few claim tax-exempt status. They name themselves: Night on
the Streets, Bread and Roses, Greenlands, Open Door, Seamless
Garment, Saint John of the Cross, Casa Juan Diego, Cesar Chavez,
Emmaus, Amos, Hannah, Saint Isaac of Nineveh Gift of Tears. They
serve illegal immigrants, prisoners, prostitutes, the homeless,
the hungry, the lonely, and college students stopping by for a
week. They hoe beans, they host lectures, they go to jail.
Some argue that the central tenet of the Worker is poverty,
others, community. "But the final word is love," Day wrote. Workers
attempt the messy, mad love that Father Zosima speaks of in The
Brothers Karamazov when he warns that "love in practice is
a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."
To give a reason for the faith that binds them and the folly
that frees them, many houses publish papers. For 47 years Day
edited The Catholic Worker, writing more than 1,000 articles.
She wrote of Sacco and Vanzetti, the atomic bomb, Thérése
of Lisieux, her grandchildren and the proper way to prepare vegetables. She
called for every woman to be her sister's keeper and anticipated
Marx's "withering away of the state." Day defended the Worker's
pacifism, stating that they did not shun soldiers and were, in
turn, willing to endure scorn, "the ignominy of jail, the pain
of stripes," and, if it comes, martyrdom.
Now this scandal to the country and scalding prophet to the
church may be named a saint. Cardinal John O'Connor began her
canonization proceedings in 2000. While living, Day chafed
at this title. She was more comfortable with the FBI report on
her, which called her "very erratic," and "belligerent," saying
she was "consciously or unconsciously being used by communist
groups."
In her canonization there is strange alchemy -- Christian anarchy
gives way to Rome's bureaucracy, degradation to apotheosis. Devotees
of her cause wonder if the sharp angles of her life will be dulled
by a holy card's lines and if the prayerful act of tax refusal
will be cloaked with the innocuous blanket of charity. But the
dross of discord may become concordance. It was O'Connor who said
that "her abortion should not preclude her cause, but intensifies
it" and who preached that Day "saw people turned into tools of
commerce . . . the family treated as a marketplace" and knew "that
the Church herself could become . . . a marketplace."
G.K. Chesterton wrote that saints are an antidote to the age. Day
was such a pinprick and balm. When blacks couldn't order coffee
at Woolworth's, she chose a print of a black man and a white woman
embraced by Christ for the paper's masthead. When every vacant
lot was a Hooverville, Day chose to be poor, living with "rats
. . . roaches, lice." When stable families moved to the suburbs,
Day wrote that heaven was imagined as a city and savored the smell
of bread baking in the ghetto's "ash heap."
While others become the monsters they fight, Day did not. As
a pacifist she shunned peace activists' destruction of property.
As a mendicant she did not become a materialist in reverse. She
delighted in her senses, telling fellow bus travelers to eat "karopecan
pie" in Arkansas and Oklahoma. She liked to listen to opera on
the radio. As an old woman, she wrote, "Woke up this morning with
these lines haunting me: 'Joyous, I lay waste the day.' 'Let all
those that seek Thee be glad in Thee.'"
Catholic Workers gave at a personal sacrifice and welcomed strangers
as angels unaware. Catherine Doherty, founder of the Friendship
House movement, recalled visiting the Worker when there were no
extra cots. Day told Doherty that she could sleep with her. Later
that night a syphilitic woman came to the door. When Day told
Doherty to sleep in the bathtub and took the sick woman into her
own bed, Doherty worried that the syphilis would spread. Day replied,
"You don't understand, this is Christ who has come to ask for
a place to sleep. He will take care of me."
"Jesus Christ is the Fat Lady," J.D. Salinger wrote and Day
repeated. She lived and breathed in the Mystical Body of Christ
and so joins the company of those blazing, curious witnesses who
are transparently good, a few of whom we know to call saints.
I have always loved saints' stories. Nearer than the dark luminescence
of God, I see them in rich illustration. There is Francis, naked,
in love and dancing, there he is in a cave with blood spilling
from his hands, feet, side. There is Claire, chopping her hair;
there is Lucy with her eyes plucked out, serving pastries.
At confirmation I sought out absurd saints -- Dymphna, Elmo,
Roch -- being ironic, being cool. Initially I chose Pelagia of
Antioch for her flare. Pelagia, an actress and courtesan, was
known for the fineness of her pearls. One day she rode through
Antioch on horseback, wearing only perfume and her pearls. She
passed a synod of praying bishops. The men looked away in horror,
save the bishop of Nonnus, who was so taken with her beauty that
the next day he gave a homily that moved many to repentance and
prayer, including Pelagia. Donning the rags of a monk, she climbed
to the Mount of Olives. There she lived in a cave as a hermit
and gave herself a man's name, Pelagius. Known as "the beardless
monk," she lived in austerity and prayed for the life of the world.
Only at her death in 311 did neighboring monks learn that Pelagius
was a woman, and an old dancing girl.
Such stories of radical change are cliché for holy men
-- the Augustinian trajectory of sinning one's way to salvation.
The women that the church names as saints, however, are usually
nuns and virgin martyrs. Flattened by the press of time they lose
their hips and incisive minds. How good, then, to hear of Day,
who "read desperately trying to rescue [herself] from the . .
. silence," who stayed out all night drinking, who smoked, and
lost her temper, who followed a lousy man halfway across the country.
How good for all of us -- such mercy -- how good for me. My
faith was a long time coming, though it came from the start. I
found God best dancing until until my bones seemed to slip, like
buttons from their slots.
My friends and I are variously scarred and variously well. I
think of the girls I know -- women now -- who are versed in roofies
and rape whistles, Planned Parenthood payment options and morning-after
drugs. I think of all of us, complicit in each other's failures,
for we have failed each other, and of how right it would be to
put on Christ, instead of our game faces.
Solomon rose to the throne on six steps, but Day lowered herself
into the dregs of the gracious world. Her ascent, like Christ's,
required a descent. "Low in mind . . . and full of tears," she
wrote in her journal, and "Nothing in the bank and two checks
bouncing." All the while she willed the extraordinary. She surrendered
her life to the Living God, was tinder, was flint, was flame.
We never know what is to come. We loosed a jar of dragons on
the day that Dorothy remembered first as the Feast of the Transfiguration
-- August 6, 1945. Now 30,000 nuclear warheads keep the queasy
balance of "mutually assured destruction." As we answer terror
with terror I see Day holding her placard: "I am Un-American.
I am Catholic."
Born too late to know her, I have been abundantly blessed to
sit down with those who did. An old woman tells me over greasy
soup that everything she could say about Day and the Worker "is
inadequate and would be too little." She is assured, though, by
a memory. She was visiting with Day in her room, and the future
of the Worker came up. Day told her simply, "If this is God's
work, it will continue."
I was staying at Maryhouse, one of many places where the work
continues, when the most recent fighting in the ongoing Gulf War
began. A cold inevitability was in the air. We ate dinner, said
vespers and rolled the TV out of the closet. After the news, a
vigil began in the upstairs chapel, where Day prayed in her last
years.
Late into the night friends of the house came and went. The
room was full with a silence more necessary than words. I was
sitting next to a woman whose days are given to the guests who
come to Saint Joe's Catholic Worker wheezing and swearing and
perhaps -- later -- glad. The nearest sound was her breath, and
this sound, like the witness of her life, lifted me. In that room
were the most startlingly true people, who argue with each other,
and have grit under the fingernails, and mean every last terrifying
word that they pray in the evenings, "God has lifted up the lowly,
and cast down the proud." Like Day, they serve him best in the
vet who stays late to roll cigarettes and mutter to himself; in
the mother who comes early to poke through the clothes room and
get the soup while it's steaming.
Mary Margaret Cecilia Nussbaum is an MFA candidate
and Iowa Arts fellow at the University of Iowa, where she teaches
freshmen. Her poetry appears in the current issue of Salamander.
(October 2004)
