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The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day

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There are few people who have done more to keep Dorothy Day's words before the public than Robert Ellsberg. As both editor of her writings (By Little and By Little, 1983; Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, 1992; A Penny a Copy, 1995) and publisher (Orbis) of books by and about her, Ellsberg continues to remind us of Dorothy's vision of a Christianity that is orthodox in theology and radical (in the deepest sense of the word, as a return to roots) in social activism. His credentials are good: he knew Dorothy for the final five years of her life, and served as managing editor of "The Catholic Worker" for two of them.

Now, in The Duty of Delight, Ellsberg continues to enrich us with an edition of the diaries Dorothy maintained from 1934 to a few days before her death in November 1980. The manuscript of the diaries, housed at Marquette University (my alma mater, by the way) and sealed until 25 years after Dorothy's passing, is over a thousand single-spaced pages. Ellsberg has reduced the material by half by whittling away unessentials. Providentially, Dorothy's diary entries for the final year of her life, missing from the Marquette archives, was discovered after Ellsberg took on the editorship.

Ellsberg's Introduction to the diaries provides a nice overview of their content. Arranged by decades, the entries from the '50s through the '70s make up the bulk of the work. I began reading in the '70s section, since this is the decade in which I first became aware of the Catholic Workers, and gradually worked my way backwards.

Three things especially strike me about Dorothy's diaries.

The first is the sheer richness of the activities she chronicles: serving as the dynamo that kept the Catholic Worker movement energized; raising her daughter Tamar; dealing with Tamar's father Forster and Forster's common law wife Nanette; continuously writing; travels, both domestic and abroad; retreats and daily masses; public demonstrations and peace witnesses; and dancing with officials from both the state and church. In recording her activities, Dorothy not only gives us a good idea of her dedication, but also provides us with cumulative sketches of many of the co-workers (including Ellsberg) and clients with whom she came into daily contact.

The second thing that's impressive about the diaries is the breadth and depth of Dorothy's reading, as well as her love of music. The authors and composers she mentions in her diaries, when compiled, make up an impressive list, and her asides about them (as when, for example, she calls Solzhenitsyn a "holy fool," p. 626, or states that it's actually sloth, not Cassian's avarice, that is "man's abiding sin," p. 364) are frequently insightful.

Finally, the self-examinations, self-recriminations, and resolutions to be more prayerful, patient, compassionate, and nonjudgmental with which Dorothy liberally sprinkles her diaries are fascinating. On one level, they provide a cumulative portrait of a woman who is deeply troubled by what she perceives as her inability to practice what she preaches--a self-doubting that probably both feeds and emerges from her "long loneliness." At another level, though, these passages strongly suggest something that Dorothy perhaps never fully appreciated: that what she took to be spiritual and personal weaknesses in fact were also the very strengths that enabled her ministry.

In August 1952, for example, she writes (p. 177): "When I say, Lord, that I am too sensitive, it is truly that--my senses, exterior and interior are too thin-skinned. I am tormented by people's moods, their unhappiness. I must live more in my own heart, with Thee. Then when I go forth I have at least serenity." But what Dorothy interprets here as a moody over-sensitivity that inhibits contact with God might perhaps more accurately be described as an empathy that connects her with other people's suffering, and consequently with God's as well. Surely it's her "thin-skin" that allows for compassionate entries such as this one from February 1972 (p. 501): "I have been harried and worn out all day by the consciousness that we were inundated by an ocean of unemployed and unemployable, black and white human beings, searching for food, warmth, comfort, momentary surcease from suffering."

The Duty of Delight is yet one more wonderful gift to us from Dorothy, and it will prove to be an invaluable scholarly and spiritual resource. Robert Ellsberg and Marquette University Press are to be commended.
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* Entry from Easter Sunday, 1968 (p. 418) that could easily serve as the epigram for Dorothy's diaries.

This unique tome is worth every penny because it can connect us with Dorothy Day more intimately than I ever imagined possible. She is no longer inaccessible to me. In fact I had been a little afraid of her in the sense I had been afraid like the whiskey priest in one of Dorothy's favorite novels, "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene. I had always been afraid to end up like him, despairing over missing the boat. Here is the scene on the night before he was executed by a Mexican Communist firing squad:

"What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived..It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that in the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint."

Well now after reading 700 pages of "Duty of Delight" I am no longer afraid. Dorothy makes it look possible to be a saint. I believe without a doubt that she is now with God in heaven. What she did to get there, I can do. Reading her diary showed she slogged it out just like the rest of us with doubts, setbacks and sorrows. Through it all she remained faithful to daily prayer and the sacraments, including frequent Confession. She knew that it was in the little things that we find God, something she learned from one of her favorite saints, Therese of Lisieux.

Dorothy didn't always "suffer fools gladly." No matter. She was quick to apologize and always harsher in judging herself than she was other people. She always stayed focused on the pearl of great price, even as she paid her bills and worried just like the rest of us.

This doesn't mean she was an ordinary person. What ordinary person would devote her life to voluntary poverty in order to serve the least among us, literally serve them, with food and shelter? Flannery O'Connor, whose letters she was reading near the end of her life, said one time, "The Truth shall make you odd." Dorothy was never afraid of being thought to be odd if that was the price you had to pay to live the Gospels. And it was and it is the price you have to pay.

During the many days it took me to read this book, she was constantly on my mind. No other book ever did that for me. I wish I had known her like so many did. She affected all of them for the better, whether they were cardinals, famous writers like W. H. Auden, or street people.

Miller's classic biography of Dorothy Day ends wtih her funeral and his final passage tells it all:

"The funeral was on December 2 at the Nativity Catholic Church. An hour before the service people began to assemble in the street. There were American Indians, Mexican workers, blacks and Puerto Ricans. There were people in eccentric dress, apostles of causes who had felt a great power and truth in Dorothy's life...At the appointed time, a procession of these friends and fellow Catholic Workers came down the sidewalk. At the head of it Dorothy's grandchildren carried the pine box that held her body. Tamar (her daughter), Forster (Tamar's father) and Dorothy's brother John Day followed. At the Church door, Cardinal Terence Cooke met the body to bless it. As the procession stopped for this rite, a demented person pushed his way through the crowd and bending low over the coffin peered at it intently. No one interfered, because, as even the funeral directors understood, it was in such as this man that Dorothy had seen the face of God."

This is a very inward look at the life and daily thoughts of the great social and peace activist Dorothy Day. It gives one the realization of just how human this woman was and how very faith filled her thought processes were to keeping her love for the poor and homeless always at the forefront of her existence. How even through the clouded glasses of the hierarchy, the badgering and belittling of those who wanted to sterotype her and her followers as being socialist or communist, she never compromised her principles and her love of God. She became lonely and yes sometimes depressed. Her health suffered greatly. She put up with just about every
humiliation imaginable from being in jail to wiping up the most foul of human excrement. She washed and cooked and cleaned, she spent endless hours on cold trains and stuffy buses carrying the message of those less fortunate, of those succumbed to the wrath of alcohol and despair. And now for many of us, she has become the "kindred spirit", the model we follow in trying to live out her example of true love for all people. A card found in her final journal reads, " O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust of power and idle talk. But give to thy servant rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love. Yea Lord and King, grant me to see my own errors and not to judge my brother, for Thou art blessed from all ages to ages. Amen" (St. Ephraim) I highly recommend this volume for anyone striving to get into the heart mind and soul of a true and humble servant of God.

Diaries can range from the self-serving to the self-revealing. Dorothy Day's diary falls firmly into the second category. Although towards the end of her life, she became aware that her private thoughts would eventually become public property, the fundamental purpose of this diary was to be written rather than to be read.

At first, the diary comes across as a bland and even repetitive record that makes no distinction between the dramatic and the mundane. Family worries, problems at a "house of hospitality" for New York's down and outs, anti-war protests and being sent to prison seemed to be all of a piece: the fabric of her life. Then I realised that this was the point. The warp of her life (of all our lives) was what she' d been given - family, faith, the place and time that she'd been born into: the weft was what she made of it.

As a young woman, Dorothy Day led a wild and unconventional life having, amongst other things, had an abortion and become, in the language of her generation, an "unwed mother" before becoming a Catholic in the 1920s. The real turning point, though, came five years later when she prayed that "some way would be opened up ... to work for the poor and oppressed". The result was a lifetime dedicated to pacifism (from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam), social justice and "works of mercy".

Counter-cultural before it became fashionable, Dorothy Day sought to live, speak and write according to Gospel values even when it brought her into conflict with state and church. Surprising, then, to learn that this feisty great-grandmother with a horror of the cult of the individual was put on the first rung of the official ladder to sainthood in 2000 when she was named by the Vatican as a "Servant of God".

At 600+ pages this diary is most likely to be of interest to people who are already familiar with Dorothy Day or the Catholic Worker movement. As I'd never heard of Dorothy Day before reading a review of this book in a magazine, the smart thing to do would have been to start with a biography, but then I would have missed being able to get to know this remarkable and challenging lady without any preconceptions.

Dorothy Day is the quintessential radical Catholic with a lifetime of arrests and writings to make her stands known. Few can equal her courage, as this book so aptly demonstrates. She chides herself constantly for being critical and speaking up, yet no one has the stamina to do so with her insight gained from experience. A comrade of Mother Teresa, Cesar Chavez and Fr. Dan Berrigan, she is in good company.
Who can not be impressed with her achievments and ongoing diary entries
of a litany of prayers? Life had no soft way out for her. Living among the poor, she endured the company of the homeless, drunks, addicts and insane persons. Likewise, coping with ongoing discomforts of noisy interruptions, lice, and ringworm, she proved her commitment to the otherwise forgotten members of society. She is best known for publication of the socialist newspaper,"The Catholic Worker", but
her personal memoirs and conversion story are not for the feint of heart. Truly she is a saint of our times.

Dorothy Day's diaries extend from the early thirties until just before she died. They reveal a woman driven by love, by desire for social justice, by a passion to struggle with all the experiences of her life in the light of conscience, the gospel and Hebrew Scripture, and what her voracious appetite for reading led her to ponder. He reading included the great masters of spirituality, classic and modern novelists, social commentators and modern spiritual writers.

Robert Ellsberg, current publisher of Orbis Books, edited the diaries and provides valuable historical background for the different periods of Day's life and useful notes to identify people mentioned in the diaries. For this reviewer the diaries were riveting, dealing with Day's remarkable life as a passionate advocate for human rights and the poor, her personal struggles to follow what she sensed was the only course to happiness and true personal fulfillment--the path of Jesus, especially in his love of the poor and call to trust wholly in Him.

Dead now some 30 years Day's experiences and personal struggles seem remarkably contemporary.. She was constantly discerning what she should do in taking care of family and the proper balance to maintain between work and family. She was intimately and physically involved in the upbringing of her daughters' eight children. She raised that daughter as a single parent.

The Catholic Worker Community among whom she lived was a far cry from a Camelot. Rather it was a challenging, exasperating and physically trying life. What continually jumped off the page were Dorothy Day's constant struggle to persevere in that community, to wrestle with her strong judgmental inclinations-- not always controlled, and the accompanying and repeated desire and prayer not to judge others but to love them. Life's tragedies pained her, caused her great sorrow. She saw good friends and family despise and leave the Catholic Church which she loved. She was well aware and critical of the luke-warmness of Christians, of the indifference and blindness-to-the-poor exhibited often by clergy and well-to-do Catholics. Her response however again was primarily to pray for them, to continually look back on her own sins and failings and to trust all to God.

Day was a pacifist. Many if not most of her associates were not. How she dealt with that was to try to persuade them, not condemn them. Her diaries are at times logs of activities and--more often--spiritual journals. As editor Robert Ellsberg remarks in his preface, her writing is prayer. She in effect is talking things over with God, taking to heart what one of her favorite saints and spiritual guides, St., Teresa of Avila, describes prayer to be. Day was surrounded in her Catholic Worker community by what might charitably and euphemistically be termed `characters," people very difficult to live and work with, by any reasonable standard. How she dealt with that day in a day out was what most impressed this reader.

With their frank portrayal of her everyday life, these diaries made Dorothy Day come alive even more to me than much of her other writings, as much as they too deal with everyday life. The reader will be amply rewarded and challenged by this first person account of what many consider a modern day saint.

the new book came in perfect condition, and it arrived promptly. And I'm enjoying the read. Appreciate it.