Dorothy Day - Talk at St Bride's by Dr. Chris Allen
The Radical Challenge of Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was involved in many things - direct action, civil disobedience, campaigning. She was the subject of FBI monitoring and a recommendation, from J Edgar Hoover, that she should be imprisoned in the event of a ‘national emergency’. Regardless, she was imprisoned several times for peace activism and siding with strikers.
However, this post is not going to focus on what we can learn from her campaigning activities because the implications are obvious – break into a missile base, get arrested, go to prison and get some publicity for your cause. We know that. It focuses, instead, on the personal challenges that Dorothy throws at those that seek to develop a radical Christian project. It starts with a brief biographical background of Dorothy before looking at some of the challenges that she issued.
‘Made in Chicago’
Dorothy grew up in a literary family Chicago. This exposed her to urban literatures such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle which, in turn, drew her to Chicago’s slums. The pull she felt towards the slums meant that she spent copious amounts of time walking through them where she saw, at first hand, the misery of poverty. She did not have to reach far in her search for the answers to urban poverty. The labour movement literature lying around the family home, along with the works of the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, shaped her early ideas.
Although she initially felt drawn to anarchist and communist groups she later came to feel that they did not provide the complete solution to urban poverty. In her search for this complete solution she was eventually drawn to the Christian faith. Dorothy’s faith grew at several points in her life but notable points were after the birth of her daughter and during her periods of imprisonment. During one of her imprisonments as a suffragette she came to realise that women would vote for war, too, and began to feel depressed. What would the suffragette movement ultimately achieve? It was not the answer. There was so much more to do. Meanwhile she was surrounded in prison by people that were guilty of nothing other than being poor. She began to question her political commitments and so asked for a bible.
On her release from prison Dorothy began to feel drawn to the church. However, at the same time, she also felt distant from it. She was drawn to the gospel narrative and, in particular, to the man who stood up to the powerful and wealthy on behalf of the poor and marginalised. On the other hand she felt repelled by the Christians of her day who made donations to charity “but they did not raise a cry against those who piled up fortunes at their expense”. Her biggest complaint was that “the rich were smiled at and fawned upon by church goers”.
Despite feeling caution towards a politically impotent church (“here I was going over to the opposition because the church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with capitalism and with all the forces of reaction”) Dorothy started to attend mass every Sunday because it was there that she found a mysterious peace. But that was not the only reason. She also felt that, as a radical, she should associate with other Christians in the church in the service of realising God’s radical project. But how was she going to fulfil this radical project if the church goers she was seeking association with were too busy fawning over the rich and powerful?
The answer lies in the next turn of events. The Great Depression of the 1930s was met with increasing mobilisation on the left which, in Dorothy’s words, saw “radicalism thriving amongst all except Catholics. [As a Catholic] I felt out of it. There was Catholic membership in all these groups but no catholic leadership”. The key event that crystallised her views in this regard was the Hunger March from New York to Washington. She was indignant that the march had been organised by communists and not Christians. Moreover she felt alone amongst the marchers: regarded as a traitor by communists that saw religion as ‘opium’ yet with no real friendships in a conservative church that she felt distant from. Feeling alone, on Dec 8th 1932, Dorothy went to church in tears and anguish to pray for her vocation - to find a way to use the talents she possessed for the poor. On Dec 9th she received a visit from Peter Maurin who had been told by a communist friend to look her up: They were both Catholics of similar outlook. They were to form the Catholic Worker Movement.
The Theology of Dorothy Day
The election of Pope Francis has brought the relationship between the Vatican and liberation theology back into focus. The pre-Francis Vatican was generally hostile to liberation theology – sometimes viciously so. It accused liberation theologians of producing political interpretations of the Gospels that, ultimately, resulted in their embrace of Marxist epistemology and abandonment of Gospel truth.
Looking through the eyes of Dorothy Day, the attitude that the Vatican took towards liberation theology from the 1970s onwards becomes ironic. This is because the charge of abandoning the Gospels is precisely the accusation that Dorothy levelled at the Catholic Church, much earlier, in the 1930s. She was amazed that parish priests did not insist on measuring life against the Sermon on the Mount. They seemed to reserve it for nuns and monks only! For everyone else, the Church considered it enough to be a loyal, practising Catholic – baptised and confirmed, attending confession and mass etc. Conformity was sufficient.
For Dorothy, the problem was this: She was simply unable to see the gospel as a two-tiered book with the harder part of its contents reserved for those living under vows of poverty in religious communities. She felt that the uncompromising gospel message was for all Christians. In this she was influenced by Peter Maurin who argued that the more demanding aspects of the gospels simply could not be ignored. The Gospels set radical challenges that were there to be met, not avoided. They demanded a politics based on love: ‘Love is the measure by which we shall be judged’. This required the liberation of the poor.
So how was love going to achieve this liberation? First and foremost Dorothy’s view was that a liberating politics of love could not be accomplished by trying to reorganise capitalist society (reformism) or by building a socialist society (revolution). The first would involve unacceptable compromises with a system based on greed whereas the second would be to work with a set of political ideas that (however laudable) were external to the Gospel tradition. More importantly, Dorothy argued that neither capitalism nor socialism were capable of love because they are political ‘systems’. Systems cannot provide love. Only people are capable of providing love.
Rather than challenging the old order to behave in a way that it was incapable of, then, she believed that the old order should be left to die from neglect – by ignoring it and building a new order based on love in one’s own life. This Christian task to “build a new society within the shell of the old – [starting] in one’s own life” required Christians to meet the following three challenges: to take personal responsibility, to issue hospitality and to voluntarily embrace poverty.
1: The Radical Challenge of Personalism
Dorothy rejected revolutionary political movements and progressive reformist movements because both relied on the state to create a new ‘just’ order. She rejected the state for two reasons. First and foremost the state is incapable of love yet the Gospel demands it. Since only people are capable of love, the new society must be built by people themselves rather than the state. Second, reliance on the state simply abrogates Christians from the requirement to learn to love and take personal responsibility for the poor which is necessary to the creation of a new social order.
Now this could lead to the conclusion that Dorothy was an advocate of Charity. But such a view would be mistaken. For Dorothy, Christian charities were hardly better than government agencies - heavy with bureaucracy and lacking in human touch. Worse still, she felt that Christian charity was condescending. It reinforced inequality by emphasising the privilege and philanthropy of the wealthy whilst saying and doing little or nothing about inequalities of wealth. A proper love, such as Jesus’ love, was intolerant of such wealth inequalities because their tolerance reduced Christians to “caring for the victims of the existing social order without trying to help create a society that didn’t throw people away like used Kleenex”. Dorothy’s strength of feeling on this issue is best captured by her own words: “I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum of catholic institutions”. Charity was undignified. Love was the great equaliser.
All this added up to one thing - personalism: “we must act personally and at personal sacrifice to combat the growing tendency to let the state do the job which our lord himself gave us to do” which was to act consistent with “the life of Jesus on earth who came to serve rather than be served”. The personalism that she advocated, however, was very different to the Christian charity that she held in contempt. This is because it demanded a ‘revolution of the heart’ and, through the personal transformation that this implied, a transformation of social relations such that it was easier for people to be good and equal in relation to each other. So how, exactly, would this revolution of the heart leading to egalitarian goodness happen? Dorothy argued that a revolution of the heart could only happen by (a) Christians opening themselves up to the poor in ‘hospitality’ and (b) Christians embracing voluntary poverty.
2. The Radical Challenge of Hospitality
Dorothy was preoccupied with Matthew 25 – such that she spent her life trying to put flesh onto its bones. That she should have taken such an interest in Matthew 25 is useful because the very same biblical passage has recently come into its own amongst Christians in the debate about foodbanks. In a nutshell, Matthew 25 has been used by Trussell Trust and others to emphasise the charitable idea of foodbanks as a calling: ‘I was hungry and you have me food’. Dorothy, on the other hand, read something entirely different into it. She did not take from it a ‘calling’ to provide charity. She read into it an altogether different call to hospitality: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’, ‘you invited me in’.
There are two things to note here. First, the charitable reading fails to question the idea that we rightfully possess things which we can then freely choose to ‘give’ to others. Dorothy’s hospitality reading, on the other hand, emphasises a community of sharing in which the privileged (charitable) ethic of possessiveness makes no sense. Dorothy believed that our doors should simply be opened and that what is inside is there to be shared in hospitality. Second, Dorothy was nevertheless wary of reducing of the ethic of sharing to its practicalities: “We are so busy with the corporeal works of mercy that we often neglect the spiritual ones”. For this reason she advocated what she referred to as “spiritual hospitality” which was based on her recognition that “it is so much easier to throw people the clothes, food or whatnot that they need and so hard to sit down with them and listen patiently”. Hospitality involved sharing our lives as well as things.
Dorothy argued that spiritual hospitality was axiomatic to the personal transformation that was required to achieve a ‘revolution of the heart’. This is because it brought Christians into direct contact with “Christ [who] remains with us not only through the mass but in the distressing disguise of the poor. To live with the poor is a contemplative vocation, for it is to live in the constant presence of Jesus”. This is the Jesus that would look us in the eye to confront us with the challenge most necessary to achieving a revolution of the heart, i.e. to require us to learn to love our neighbour no matter how hard that might be.
Dorothy’s life provides us with an exemplar of this ethic of hospitality. Her apartment became the first house of hospitality – truly open – and there are now many more, especially in the USA. Typically, though, Dorothy always wanted more hospitality from Christians that, she believed, should abide by even the most difficult challenges issued by the Gospels: “every house should have a Christ room”. Sadly, Dorothy’s example has remained just that – an example that exists on the margins of Christianity. The only Catholic Worker Houses in the UK exist in London, Oxford and Glasgow. Dorothy would have her own explanation for this. The main impediment to hospitality, she argued, was not lack of space but an excess of fear which cancels out love and thereby the revolution that needs to start in the heart. Moreover an excess of fear is borne of a lack of faith in the ultimate source of love - Jesus. In a nutshell, our refusal to provide hospitality reveals a lack of love and a lack of faith.
3. The Radical Challenge of Voluntary Poverty
An apparent paradox in Dorothy is that she saw and experienced the horrors of poverty yet her houses of hospitality were based on the idea of ‘voluntary poverty’. To understand this we need to understand a bit more about her experiences and her thinking.
We already know that the young Dorothy was surrounded with books that were to provide her first encounter with poverty. But words on a page only delivered to her a literary understanding of poverty. So the young Dorothy decided to spend lots of time walking through her city’s slums in order to understand them experientially. This changed the direction of her life: “from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine. I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in my life”.
She took her experiential learning about poverty another stage further when, on leaving college, she sought work as a journalist with the socialist daily newspaper in New York, The Call. Although the paper did not have much money to employ another reporter, Dorothy convinced them that they needed a woman reporter. To make this a realisable proposition, she requested only a factory girl’s poverty wage believing she could better write about poverty from a radical perspective using her own experiences of poverty. So she went to live in the only place she could afford to live - the slums.
Living in the slums exposed Dorothy to the beauty that existed amidst the misery of poverty. She found this beauty in the people, their relationships and even in the physical environment of the slums themselves. This first-hand appreciation of beauty amidst poverty was to prove significant in her subsequent thinking about poverty, as was her reading of books such as The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Like Dorothy, James also saw beauty amidst poverty. In fact he went even further. He argued that the ideal of wealth had inflicted such damage on society that the only way to undo this damage was to begin to respect poverty:
“The praises of poverty need to be more boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble we deem him spiritless and lacking in general ambition. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient realisation of poverty could have meant, the liberation from material attachments, the un-bribed soul”.
As a Christian Anarchist that rejected capitalism (“our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system”) Dorothy was deeply attracted to James’ thinking. His thinking came to fundamentally influence the older Dorothy and her Catholic Worker Movement: She and Peter Maurin embraced what they called ‘voluntary poverty’ in which they rejoiced as the source of their material freedom. They led lives unencumbered by possessions of which they were free: “the less you have of Caesar’s the less you have to render to Caesar”. Perhaps more importantly, they regarded a possession free life to be the source of their spiritual freedom. Freedom from the pursuit of possessions provided ample time for prayer which enabled Dorothy to ‘put off the world and put on Christ’. We can appreciate the significance of this aspect of Dorothy’s spirituality by consulting the words of Jim Wallis. Like Dorothy he similarly thinks of prayer as an act of resistance against power and the illusions that it creates which represent accumulation and possession as the ultimate source of freedom
“Jesus’s freedom from the fear and control of the powers was rooted in the deep knowledge of who he was and to whom he belonged. His communion with God was his constant source of strength and power. Prayer is the act of reclaiming our identity as the children of God; it declares who we are and to whom we belong. The action of prayer places us outside the realm of the powers and principalities. As prayer declares our true identity, it destroys our false identities. In prayer we act upon who we really are, and thus prayer has the effect of diminishing the illusions that have controlled us. It is therefore an act of revealing the truth and unmasking the lie. Prayer allows us to step out of our traps and find ourselves again in God …. Thus prayer and the results of prayer are the most revolutionary of acts. The powers and principalities of this world are aware of this; that is why they consider those who pray in this way to be a threat” (Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion, pp101-102 and p103)
The extent to which Dorothy and some of her Catholic friends embraced voluntary poverty amazed people. They did not take salaries for running the Catholic Worker Houses. They took only food, board and a small amount of pocket money so, as Dorothy explains, they had very little: “We are willing to clothe ourselves in the donations of clothes that come in, we are willing to eat the plainest and most meagre of meals and to endure cold rooms and lack of privacy and we feel work gains by it”. Moreover they were militant in their attitude to what they regarded as excess. This attitude is probably best exemplified in the words of Dorothy’s friend, Father John Hugo: “Don’t use what you don’t need and have as little as possible. The cost hanging in your closet on a winter day belongs to someone who is freezing without it. Give it away. Do without. Do it for the love of others especially the poor.” They were so committed to their voluntary poverty, in fact, that one of Dorothy’s fellow Catholic Workers once described how “people were shocked when they came down and found us living in the slums .... They’d come and they’d see the simple diet and the rooms ... and feel sorry for us”.
That said, voluntary poverty was not simply a means of securing material and spiritual freedom from capitalism so that a new world could be built in which it was easier to be good. This only addressed one side of the equation, namely, how the agency of people such as Dorothy could create this new world by embracing voluntary poverty. It says nothing about the question of involuntary poverty, i.e. the poverty of those that are without economic agency and therefore do not chose it. This second aspect greatly concerned Dorothy who wanted to build a world in which voluntary poverty was universal. In the interim, between the demise of the old world of involuntary poverty and the creation of this new world of voluntary poverty, she believed that the condescending nature of ‘charity’ could only be avoided if Christians sank to poverty themselves. In other words, she believed levelling down – in the form of voluntary poverty - to be axiomatic to the achievement of an egalitarian justice that provided people with dignity and worth. Voluntary poverty, then, was about more than just the material and spiritual freedom of those with economy agency. It was also about justice and dignity for those without economic agency.
Our challenge?
As we have seen the radical challenge that Dorothy Day throws down to us is not simply to protest in the face of injustice. The harder part of the demands she makes involve the following
That we take personal responsibility for injustice
That we open our doors in hospitality to those who are oppressed
That we let go of our possessions and live in voluntary poverty
These are not easy things to do and Dorothy would be the first to admit it. But, as she always argued, there is no such thing as a two-tiered Gospel in which the difficult parts are reserved for monks and nuns. The radical challenges of personalism, hospitality and voluntary poverty are therefore issued to all of us. We simply cannot ignore them as if they are matters of choice. On the contrary, Dorothy would argue that ignoring or refusing these radical challenges involves a lack of love. So there is our challenge in a nutshell.
Bibliography
Day, D. (2011) The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. New York, Image Books
Coy, P. (1988) A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker. Philadelphia, Temple University Press
Forest, J. (2011) All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day. New York, Orbis Books
James, W. (1985) The Varieties of Religious Experience. London, Penguin Classics
Wallis, J. (1983) The Call to Conversion. Oxford, Lion
Zwick, M. and Zwick, L. (2004) The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins. New York, Paulist Press