The Dangerous Mysticism of Dorothy Day

[00:00:00]Peace be with you and with your spirit.

[00:00:02]Welcome to another episode of St. Anony's Tongue. I am your host W. Tyler Allen.

[00:00:08]Dorothy Day might be the only Catholic saint ever to be on an FBI watch list.

[00:00:13]But I don't want to start there. Today I want to start with the air raid sirens.

[00:00:19]This sound right here.

[00:00:22]Because during the Cold War, New York City, they would conduct mandatory air raid drills.

[00:00:29]And when these sirens sounded, people were instructed to stop whatever they were doing and enter a building, take shelter.

[00:00:38]And Dorothy Day found this performance absolutely absurd because a nuclear bomb would not become survivable just because you walked into a building all of a sudden.

[00:00:50]But Dorothy also had such a guttural reaction to these drills because they made nuclear war seem manageable, survivable.

[00:01:00]They made nuclear war seem almost normal.

[00:01:05]So Dorothy, she would refuse to hide.

[00:01:08]When these sirens would blare, she would remain outside. She would protest.

[00:01:16]And then also she was repeatedly arrested for that.

[00:01:20]So for most people the air raid siren was a command to hide. But for Dorothy Day it was a call to take a stand.

[00:01:32]So who was Dorothy Day? Dorothy Day was a journalist. She was an anarchist. She was a mother. She was a pacifist. She was the founder of the Catholic worker movement. She was also watched by the FBI, as I noted, probably one of the only Catholic saints to be on an FBI watch list. She was also criticized by people both on the left and the right.

[00:01:57]And she was also a mystic. And that's a word that many people don't often associate with Dorothy Day, but that's what we're going to talk about.

[00:02:07]And she wasn't a mystic because she encountered God and then floated away from the ugliness of the world. No, she was a mystic because she became more aware of God and therefore more disturbed by anything that degraded the human person.

[00:02:24]So, if you've been following the podcast for a while, hopefully you can define mysticism with me because as Catholics, we don't believe that mysticism is just some lofty thing. Mysticism is not just the grandiose experiences. Mysticism is something much more simple. Mysticism is this. a transformative awareness of God's presence in our lives that increases our love of God and love of neighbor. So we become aware of God and then that awareness changes us and then that change becomes visible through our love.

[00:02:59]So Dorothy Day she encountered God and by the way soon I want to read an excerpt from one of her passages in prison where I think you can almost feel when she experienced God one of the many times. But Dorothy, she encountered God and became incapable of looking away from the world and that is what made her a mystic.

[00:03:20]But also acting in the world with this mysticism, with this awareness of God is also what made her dangerous.

[00:03:30]So I know that I'm speaking in generality. So let's zoom out and let's do a very very brief biography of Dorothy.

[00:03:38]She was a radical who wanted God.

[00:03:41]Dorothy's autobiography is titled The Long Loneliness.

[00:03:46]And that really speaks to me because a theme that I use in my own writing is something called the Holy Ache, a longing for God.

[00:03:54]We see that longing all throughout scripture, Magdalene running toward the tomb, our Lady staying with Christ among the passion.

[00:04:05]So many instances of a longing for God, not to mention the Psalms.

[00:04:10]So, she has this longing for God and she was born in Brooklyn in 1897, but she grew up mostly in Chicago.

[00:04:20]And her family was not especially devout. She was raised a little bit Anglican, a little bit Episcopalian, but not very involved.

[00:04:31]But still, she was always drawn toward spirituality. She was drawn towards scripture. She liked reading the Bible.

[00:04:38]She was drawn toward prayer, the saints, and also the beauty of Christianity. And when I say beauty, I don't mean an aesthetic. I can, but not all the time.

[00:04:51]When we talk about beauty in Catholicism, what we're speaking to is we're speaking to something that moves us into awe and wonder. And that is more so what I'm speaking about when I talk about Dorothy loving the beauty of Christianity.

[00:05:07]It's something that is alive beneath the aesthetics. She was drawn to lighting candles in a church. She was drawn to the image of families kneeling together.

[00:05:17]All of that really spoke to her.

[00:05:21]So at the same time she was drawn as a young woman to the visuals of Christianity and scripture.

[00:05:30]She also became drawn to poverty, the problem of poverty, exploitation, the problems of exploitation.

[00:05:40]So before Dorothy knew what to call either one, she was already looking for God and also already looking for revolution.

[00:05:49]So eventually she would leave college and move to New York.

[00:05:54]Her father was an editor and a journalist. So he initially got her some small like book review jobs at papers, but she wanted to write about radicalism.

[00:06:06]She wanted to write about overturning tables and the problems with society. So she began writing and being involved with socialist and radical newspapers.

[00:06:16]And that's how she lived her life. She lived among anarchists, labor organizers, suffragists, writers, artists, and people who believed the world needed to be overturned a little bit.

[00:06:30]At 20, she would be arrested while protesting for women's suffrage, and she would join a hunger strike in prison.

[00:06:36]It's her first arrest of many.

[00:06:40]But Dorothy was also very human.

[00:06:43]And I encourage you to read the long loneliness because you see that humanity shining through.

[00:06:50]She would eventually say in the peak of her popularity, "Don't call me a saint.

[00:06:56]I don't want to be dismissed that easily." And currently she's a servant of God. There is a cause of canonization open for Dorothy. But she wasn't saying she doesn't want to be a saint one day.

[00:07:07]She's saying if you call me a saint, you're going to forget my humanity.

[00:07:12]And in her early life, you see a lot of that humanity. She loved novels, theater, bars, romance, arguments that lasted until the morning hours.

[00:07:23]But her early life also included the pains of humanity, painful and difficult relationships, an abortion that she later carried with sorrow, a suicide attempt, and a brief and failed marriage.

[00:07:42]Dorothy was romantic. She was stubborn.

[00:07:45]She was wounded. But she was intensely alive.

[00:07:49]And during this early part of her life, she was not patiently waiting to become a saint. She was just trying to survive being Dorothy Day. But again, she felt this persistent desire for something more, something bigger than her, especially during her radical years.

[00:08:10]After nights out, she would stop in churches on the way home. She wasn't Catholic. She was barely Christian, but she was drawn to the silence.

[00:08:21]She was drawn to the beauty of an empty church.

[00:08:26]Eventually, she would even attend masses before she really understood why she was drawn to them. But again, she was moved by the silence, the bells, the kneeling bodies, the sense of presence.

[00:08:39]And it's really because God was already appearing to her. He was appearing to her in a different way. He was appearing to her in her hunger for justice, her attraction to prayer, her love for the poor, her loneliness, her desire for communion. So God was already making himself known. She just hadn't put it all together yet.

[00:09:04]So eventually she would fall in love with a man named Forester Batterham. And he was an atheist. She was an anarchist, a lover of nature.

[00:09:13]They lived together in a cottage in Staten Island, and she was genuinely happy with him.

[00:09:20]So, she would convert, as you know, to Catholicism.

[00:09:24]But she did not convert over guilt or even over an intellectual understanding of God all of a sudden or even a disgust for the world. You could see that happening. But what led Dorothy Day to the church was happiness. Because Dorothy became pregnant with her daughter Tamar.

[00:09:44]In Tamar's birth, it overwhelmed Dorothy with gratitude largely because she didn't think she could have another child after her abortion.

[00:09:54]But she experienced such a large joy that she needed someone to thank.

[00:10:01]But she didn't know who except God. So that gratitude for tomorrow, it became prayer.

[00:10:10]And Dorothy would have tomorrow baptized and she would enter the Catholic Church in 1927.

[00:10:16]But for her, he rejected religion, baptism, and marriage. So that ultimately her conversion would ultimately cost Dorothy the relationship and the domestic life that she always wanted.

[00:10:31]So conversion, it did not end Dorothy's loneliness or yearning.

[00:10:38]In some ways, it actually deepened it.

[00:10:40]So with her conversion, Dorothy kind of stood between two worlds because her radical friends, they understood poverty and labor, but they often rejected God.

[00:10:53]And then on the flip side, her fellow Catholics, they possessed the Eucharist and the saints, but they often seemed absent or disinterested from the struggles of workers and the poor.

[00:11:06]So Dorothy, she found the church, but she could not understand why the church seemed so far away from the people Christ had called blessed.

[00:11:18]Politics alone could not contain Dorothy Day's hunger. She wanted more than reform. She wanted more than victory.

[00:11:27]She wanted communion.

[00:11:29]A world where no person could be treated as disposable.

[00:11:35]And I think that is one of the main takeaways, the main fruits from the life of Dorothy Day. She was not a radical who softened when she became Catholic.

[00:11:45]She found a faith that was large enough to contain a hunger that politics could name but never completely satisfy.

[00:11:54]So politics they taught her to recognize exploitation.

[00:11:59]But the gospel told her that the exploited person was Christ. So politics offered comrades but Catholicism offered communion.

[00:12:13]So in 1932, Dorothy would travel to Washington to report on a march of unemployed workers and she admired the marchers, but she noticed something.

[00:12:26]Where were the Catholics? Where was the church? Because again, she was just catechized and formed and grew in a relationship with God through Christ saying that he takes identity with the marginalized. And now here they are at a major march, but the church was nowhere to be seen.

[00:12:48]So afterward, she would pray at the national shrine for a way to unite her faith, her writing, her concern for workers, her love for the poor. She prayed for a way to use everything that she had become.

[00:13:05]And then when she would return home the very next day, she met a man named Peter Moren.

[00:13:14]He was this French peasant intellectual.

[00:13:17]He was a wandering laborer. He was a teacher. He was a voluntary popper. He was a relentless reader. He was kind of part St. Francis, part medieval professor, and kind of part strange man who would just not stop talking. He was a bit older than Dorothy. He came across her writings and her work and knew she was a Catholic and he thought she was the person to help him with his vision.

[00:13:42]So he would teach Dorothy Day Catholic social teaching over the span of a few weeks. Dorothy while she got some instruction on yes as Catholics we need to take care of the poor but she was never told this is actually a thing.

[00:13:56]It's called Catholic social teaching.

[00:13:58]Does that sound familiar? American Catholics. Anyhow, so he would follow her around her apartment teaching her Catholic social teaching as well as his vision. And his vision had three parts.

[00:14:11]One, roundt discussions discussing the faith, discussing labor, disputes, issues. Two, houses of hospitality, places where people could come and get anything they want, food, a place to sleep. And then the last, farming communities. So Peter believed that Catholics have become too comfortable outsourcing mercy and Christians needed to begin living as if the gospel were true.

[00:14:43]So Peter had the vision but he needed someone to give it the voice.

[00:14:50]So together they began with a newspaper.

[00:14:55]So Dorothy and Peter they would form the Catholic worker in 1933.

[00:15:00]In the first issue, it appeared on Mayday and it costs one penny and it was distributed in Union Square. I think to this day, it's still only one penny.

[00:15:09]And it place Catholic teaching directly beside the struggles of workers and the poor. And the paper still is absolutely incredible. It's unapologetically Catholic, proworker, suspicious of wealth and power, committed to nonviolence, centered on the works of mercy. It asked a very uncomfortable question.

[00:15:33]It's not just what should society do about poverty, but what are you going to do about the person standing in front of you?

[00:15:44]So Dorothy and Peter, they began with words. They began with a paper. A paper talking about how Catholics should feed the hungry, house the homeless.

[00:15:54]But hungry and unemployed people, they would start reading those words and they would say, "Hi, Dorothy. I hear that you have a house of hospitality." And Dorothy Day said, "Not yet. I'm just writing about it." Then the woman said, "Well, why are you writing about it if you don't have one?" And as Dorothy tells it, that very day, she takes the woman with her and they find a I believe it was an eight-bedroom apartment and opened up the first house of hospitality in New York.

[00:16:26]So now we have a place.

[00:16:30]Soup lines began to form.

[00:16:34]More apartments became houses of hospitality. Houses would spread into other cities. farming communities were attempted. So that penny newspaper became a movement. It became a movement of these houses across the United States where you could go and get a meal or maybe even find a job for a weekend, find a place to sleep. They became something real. And it all started with that one little newspaper.

[00:17:04]And this is so important for all of us because you can't just write beautifully about welcoming Christ and the stranger and then keep your door locked. You can't just praise the incarnation and then refuse to let your theology be embodied.

[00:17:24]And I think we can learn a lot from that as well. It's one thing to share Christ in the common section, reveal Christ at a distance through our prayers, through our rosary, [snorts] but we are also called to be incarnational with our faith.

[00:17:40]So Dorothy's words, they became something. They became soup, bread, beds, coffee, clothing, farms, protests, and crowded rooms. It's another lovely thing I like hearing about the especially the early Catholic worker movement is the people who would live there. By the way, the Catholic workers lived with these people in these homes or they lived in the homes and offered soup so on and so forth. Every home had a different thing. Some did include housing for like a night but a lot of them they were just like soup kitchens and you would live there. You would live in the kitchen.

[00:18:18]So another lovely story I like to hear too is that especially in the early days you would have scheduled demonstrations.

[00:18:25]So they would need people to go protest for farmers rights or go protest this or that which is very beautiful.

[00:18:33]But the words became action and that's something we all need to follow these days. And I also want to point out that these houses of hospitality, they were not just like charming little religious communes. They were crowded. They were noisy. They were chaotic. There are so many stories, especially in the early days, of Catholic workers who were part of this movement getting harmed by people they were feeding who might be mentally unwell.

[00:19:01]So hospitality it meant welcoming people who smelled, who argued, who relapsed, who overstayed and did not become inspiring success stories.

[00:19:13]So Dorothy, she would become tired and frustrated in the communities. They struggled with money, with order, with privacy, with boundaries. This was difficult work. It's easy to love the poor. It's harder to love the particular person knocking on your door when you are exhausted.

[00:19:32]So, let's go back to Dorothy Day as a mystic because as we define mysticism as Catholics, a transformative awareness of God's presence in our life that increases our love of God and love of neighbor. It's a mouthful to say it fast, but we still have to point back to what does that look like? What does that awareness look like?

[00:19:53]And I think for most including the saints, it's a subtle and gradual awareness of God's presence.

[00:20:01]And sure, we might have the grandiose experience. We might have the Terresa of Avala ecstasy. We might have the sure St. Francis stigmata. We might have those big moments, but often they're very subtle. However, one of my favorite things when it comes to studying the saints is when you see glimpses of that mysticism, glimpses of that awareness of God's presence that is changing them. So, I want to read some writings from Dorothy's diary when she was in solitary confinement during one of her arrests.

[00:20:38]I'll just jump into it.

[00:20:41]All through those weary first days in solitary confinement, the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines in the Psalms that express the terror and misery of man suddenly stricken and abandoned.

[00:20:56]Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrow of those about me. I was no longer myself, I was man.

[00:21:11]I was the drug addict screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was the shoplifter sentenced to solitary. I was the woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was the mother whose child had been murdered. I was the mother who had born the murderer. I was even the murderer himself.

[00:21:39]So you can see the mystical turn here.

[00:21:42]Dorothy's suffering, it sharpens her awareness until the people around her are no longer strangers.

[00:21:50]Their sorrow becomes her sorrow. Their humanity becomes inseparable from her own humanity.

[00:21:59]This is mysticism by our definition.

[00:22:02]awareness of God becoming solidarity with the wounded human family.

[00:22:09]And this reminds me of a lot of mystics Catholic and otherwise. Ticknot Han talking about the Ugandan genocide said that I am the arms dealer. I am those who were killed by the arms. But keeping it Catholic, I want to talk about Santres.

[00:22:29]Santreso of Visu. She, especially during her dark night toward the end of her life, she saw solidarity with the atheist, with the non-believers until she would pray, "May God have mercy on our souls." I could go much deeper into that, but I'll spare you. So Dorothy's life of hospitality, though, it came from that same awareness, that same solidarity that came from her realization in the prison cell. Because to her, the works of mercy, they weren't just social services.

[00:23:04]The works of mercy became encounters with Christ.

[00:23:08]And if Christ was truly present at the altar, he could not suddenly become absent at the front door.

[00:23:17]So Dorothy, she did not merely believe God was present in the poor. She structured her life around the possibility that Jesus was telling the truth.

[00:23:28]So, the Catholic worker is one of the inspirations behind my monthly Catholic publication called The Margins. Uh, it's not because the projects are equivalent, but I think we have a shared belief that Catholic words should become physical and lead us back toward actual people.

[00:23:47]Issue four is called God in the Gutter.

[00:23:49]I do have a brief vignette on Dorothy's work in there as well as just this overall understanding of acts of mercy becoming mysticism. It's available now stanthony tongue.com/margins.

[00:24:03]I hope you check it out. Dorothy's pacifism. It was not separate from her mysticism.

[00:24:09]It came from the same place as the eukarist, hospitality, prayer, the works of mercy. Because if everyone is born in the image of God, that includes the worker, the prisoner, the stranger, the enemy. And Dorothy could not find a footnote beneath love your enemies that said, "Except when the government becomes afraid."

[00:24:34]And she was a very divisive figure. She was too radical for the Catholics, too Catholic for the radicals. She feuded with her bishops. She was always very obedient to the church, but they buted heads.

[00:24:53]But the Christ she fed at the Catholic worker house was the same Christ threatened by war. And her love of neighbor, it could not end at the border.

[00:25:04]And Dorothy did not ask whether loving your enemy was practical. She asked whether Jesus meant it.

[00:25:11]And that is why Dorothy refused the air raid drills.

[00:25:16]She believed that the drills did not prepare people to survive war. They prepare people to accept war.

[00:25:24]The drills were rehearsing more than survival. The drills were rehearsing consent.

[00:25:31]So she was arrested. She lost support.

[00:25:34]The FBI watched her. Her file grew to hundreds of pages. I think it's 900 pages.

[00:25:40]One of the most powerful governments on earth was carefully documenting an elderly Catholic woman who went to mass, printed a newspaper, made soup, and refused to move when a siren told her to hide. The state had files and Dorothy had soup because apparently the soup was dangerous. And I think that is the danger of Dorothy Day.

[00:26:06]She voluntarily lived in poverty. She did not pursue political office. She did not become drawn to any proximity to power. She could not be controlled by promises of respectability or even threatened with his loss. I think that's the bigger issue we have today. People are afraid of losing things, losing their place at the table, losing approval. But Dorothy was dangerous because she had found something she loved more than approval.

[00:26:36]Her awareness of God made certain things impossible for her to call normal.

[00:26:42]She saw the worker beneath the static, the prisoner beneath the crime, the enemy beneath the uniform, the human body beneath the language of war.

[00:26:53]Mysticism did not make Dorothy less realistic. It made her see more of reality than the official story could contain.

[00:27:02]So toward the end of her life, she kept writing. She kept praying. She kept protesting. And she kept living among the Catholic worker community for nearly 50 years. And she remained deeply human.

[00:27:16]Impatient, tired, lonely, but faithful.

[00:27:22]Dorothy's holiness was not that she never became tired of people. It was that she kept returning to love them.

[00:27:30]Dorothy passed away on November 29th, 1980. She was 83. She died at Mary House, which is a Catholic worker resident for homeless women in New York City. And she was buried on Staten Island. And her gravestone reads, "Deo Gratias.

[00:27:48]Thanks be to God."

[00:27:52]So, as we've noted, Dorothy's life, it fulfills our definition of mysticism.

[00:27:56]Her awareness of God transformed her love of God and her love of neighbor.

[00:28:01]And every time she recognized Christ, that recognition demanded something.

[00:28:05]Sometimes it demanded prayer. Sometimes soup, sometimes an open door. Sometimes refusing to move when the siren sounded.

[00:28:13]Dorothy Day did not encounter God and retreat from reality. She encountered God and became incapable of looking away from it. Her mysticism became a newspaper. The newspaper became a house and the house became a movement. And as I said, she appears in issue four of the margins, God in the gutters. And she belongs there because she understood that God is not watching the suffering of the world safely from above it. God is already inside of it, waiting in the hungry person, waiting at the door, waiting beneath the sirens.

[00:28:48]And sometimes recognizing him means refusing to hide.

[00:28:54]Thank you. God bless.