Dorothy Day

Today is the 27th anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day. Dorothy was the founder of the Catholic worker movement. A woman who saw in the face of the poor the challenge of God to listen to him. We often think of prayer as something that we do rather than a waiting and an attentivenes to God. This attentiveness is towards God both visible - manifest around us in the lives of people and situations - and invisible, the waiting, often in darkness, for hope and presence.

Dorothy was an ardent defender of people's rights. She continued to speak up for the unprotected when no one else would do that. During World War II, her protests about the internment of Japanese Americans without due process, caused J Edgar Hoover to open his extensive file on her. She fed the poor, which may not be the Christian's final task, but should normally be the first one.

She was the long distance runner of protest in our time, because her agitation was built on serenity, her activism on contemplation, her earthly indigantion on unearthly trust. This or that cause, with its noisy followers, came and went, but she was always there. She showed us that people who stand for others cannot act from a calculus of individual advantage. They must act as they do from a higher urgency, a love beyond what most of us think as loving. So far from distracting them from earth's injustice, as Marx claimed religion did, Dorothy Day's faith made effective radicalism not only possibe , for many people, but imperative. We may not even be able to possess the earth unless we aspire to heaven - like our sister, who is dead and lives.
Garry Wills, The Outsider Column, 1980