LOVE IS LACED liberally through this compendium, skillfully edited by Robert Ellsberg, of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns from The Catholic Worker, the newspaper of the movement Day co-founded. Love for God, especially as it lives in the poor whose burdens of poverty she tried to share, shines through Day’s accounts of her travels and her life at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in New York and the community’s farms. Seeing examples of living love seems even more important today as our country faces the same problems as in the ’60s: racism, poverty in a land of plenty, and endless wars that consume needed resources.
Day writes of these issues, but love as lived through acts of mercy is what unites the essays. She describes Catholic Worker houses of hospitality across the country where, daily, the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, the dead are mourned and buried, and the sick and the imprisoned are visited. In these essays, these acts are presented in opposition to works of war and racism. She documents that the latter are fueled by an out-of-control U.S. military whose expenditures rob the poor.
Coming in for special notice are prisoners of conscience, Day’s colleagues who are imprisoned for resisting the draft that fueled the Vietnam War, including, in 1968, burning draft files in Catonsville, Md., and Milwaukee, in nonviolent destruction of what Jesuit priest Dan Berrigan called “improper property.” These nonviolent trespasses against the law by the anti-war and civil rights movements were in obedience to God’s laws. After several good recent biographies of Day, reading again the words that first introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement brought back memories of those days when Day helped so many commit to nonviolence as a way to make a world where, as her mentor Peter Maurin would say, “it’s easier for people to be good.”
Also receiving attention in this anthology are Day’s visits to Rome to fast for a strong peace message in the documents of Vatican II, a trip to London, and, most interestingly, a trip to Cuba. In late 1962, Day devoted four columns to her visit, worrying that people might think she saw only what she wanted to see, or what the revolutionary government wanted her to see. She explains that once she had been schooled in seeing Christ in the most destitute of New York’s Bowery, it was easy to find “that which is of God in everyone.” She admits that Cuba is “an armed camp” and says she remains as opposed to war and capital punishment as ever, but prays the grace of God will grow in Castro and that the church in Cuba will be free to function.
When reading her monthly columns, we realize Day didn’t compartmentalize her life into the spiritual and the political. Her spirituality flooded into all of life, uniting it under the command of love. Don’t dive into this book as one does a novel. Read it slowly, musing on an essay for a week, with a pencil in hand. For Day challenges us to make the connections between a spirituality of love for God and a love for all.
Rosalie G. Riegle is a Catholic Worker oral historian and the author of Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her.
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