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On Pilgrimage (Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought)

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Many of Dorothy Day's sabbaticals from the Catholic Worker houses are chronicled in "On Pilgrimage," which was also the title of her long-running column in her monthly newspaper, The Catholic Worker. Ever the journalist, Day would record the most minute aspects of her trips--usually by bus and with a jar of instant coffee and prayer books in her small bag--and give her newspaper readers insight into the social struggle in the South, in Okie migrant camps or Indian reservations. Her compassion and observer's eye didn't conflict; she wrote about injustice with passion, but felt compelled to temper her anger at issues such as the mistreatment of black tenant farmers. Her distinctly Catholic perspective on poverty (indeed voluntary poverty was her lasting contribution to 20th century Christianity) and suffering as well as her feisty personality are evident in these essays detailing her trips. Even though efforts have begun toward Dorothy Day's canonization, she will never be a plaster saint...not as long as these warm and utterly realistic accounts are read. She comes across as a committed Christian who believes in the essential dignity of every human being, oppressed and oppressor alike. The only fault with her pilgrimage essays is their essentially hurried nature. Dorothy Day could be careless with punctuation and transitions in her efforts to get her thoughts on paper. The essays when she's visiting her daughter and attempting to help with the growing number of children are my favorites. Dorothy Day continues to be one of my prime spiritual mentors, precisely because of homey, faith-filled essays like those, where the grandchildren are climbing on her lap and preventing her from writing. The real woman--warts, moments of exhaustion and all--is in these pages.

I would suggest this as the third book by Dorothy Day that you read-- after "loaves and fishes" and "long lonliness", however, the introduction to this book justifies the purchase for anyone. The introduction is lengthy (over 25 pages), and is written by two people that know the movement (they run Casa Juan is Houston). The book by Day is very touching.... but not an introduction to someone unfamiliar with her work. Often I suggest that someone new to Dorothy Day read the introduction, and then "Loaves and Fishes", and then returns to this book.

This remarkable volume draws from Dorothy Day's 1948 diaries, first published that year by the Catholic Worker, and thus presents her many concerns, joys and reflections in that immediate post war era. Fortunately we also have here in this fresh reprinting some sixty years later an excellent and comprehensive and lengthy introduction which places in context these personal reflections. As mentioned elsewhere, these saintly, scholarly and comprehensive introductions are well worth the slight price of the whole book, while Dorothy's thoughts and prayers fill us with priceless and eternal peace, compassionate consolation and strength for these long, lonely times.

Dorothy writes beautifully, and well, with great insight and merciful compassion for the oppressed and the poor to whom we are unquestionably sent by the Gospel to share the very real good news of our liberation. We read her words as if from a different time and place, a different culture, and yet we see our own time, now sixty years later, and the present bitter enormous fruit whose coming she astutely and prophetically cautioned us would ocme should we not repent and convert and practice compassion as God commands.

Please read this book, with the excellent introductions, and discover why many believe her canonization process must inexorably advance, not to bury her words but to give them the authoritive power which may finally have them listened and enacted. Discover as well here her comfort for your soul, a strong straight path to peace and to prayer opened by the words and witness of Dorothy Day, companion on our long journey back to God, with her serving us and our Church as prophet, storyteller, guide and very good friend.

Another amazing aspect of this reprint is its place of honor now in the Eerdman's Catholic Publishing House Ressourcement series of Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought. The theological strategy of Ressourcement holds that in order to discover where we are and how best to proceed we do well to investigate deeply our earliest ecclesial writing, to return to the Sources. Thus in this series we encounter mainly authors who are specialists in Patristics, as well as the great American saint Dorothy Day.

Indeed, the only woman and the only American currrently represented in this series is Dorothy Day, in this present volume. This alone should convince you of the serious and great value of this book. Read these very real Dorothy Day Diaries, once more, in peace and prayer for compassion and conversion as a nation and as a person.

I find it as impossible to offer you a representative sampling from this multi-faceted work, as impossible as offering you one typical wave from the changing sea in all her ineluctable modality, yet we might discern an underlying theme from this passage written in her diary in April:

"Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife, which may at any moment become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself, 'What else is the world interested in?' What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships? God is Love. Love casts out fear. ( . . . page 123)"

This book, a journal of one year in Dorothy Day's life (1948), is so incredibly beautiful and powerful. Day's spirituality, her deep sense of the sacred in all that she touched, her understanding of the lay apostolate, and of the dignity of marriage comes shining through in these pages. As I read this book, I thought, "If only more people had internalized what Day was saying here, the post-Vatican II crisis would have been much smaller in scope." It is amazing how Day anticipated and lived out so much of what the Second Vatican Council called for. Her profound sense of marriage and how the marriage relationship was an image for the Church and Christ, her understanding of divine friendship, and so many other things were before their time.

In these pages it becomes clear that this woman was a saint. She loved the poor, really loved the poor. She lived with them. She clothed the naked, fed the hungry, helped the lame, visited the prisoner. She and her work were an embodiment of Matthew 25. An incredible book, by an incredible woman.

Also, Mark and Louise Zwick, who run the Houston Catholic Worker House, give a thorough and good introduction to the journal.

If you wish to examine a life that truly sought to live in obedience to Christ, a life which took His words seriously in the midst of people who could only be nominally called "Christian", then this is the book for you.

I am a convert to the Catholic Faith, and after I read this book, I found myself wishing that I could have known Dorothy and Peter in my younger days. What a challenge to our complacent and self-centered Western idea of "Christianity" their lives presented to the world as they sought to truly live out the Gospel message of care for the downtrodden and most needy of the world -- those to whom the members of most churches won't give the time of day.

This is a challenging read, and it is so because it jolts one out of the soft "Christianity" we have formed as a nest around us to keep us from experiencing any discomfort. Christ's call to discipleship is just as demanding today through Dorothy Day as it was 2000 years ago to the first men and women who heard it.

The book is divided into two parts: the first is commentary on Dorothy's life by Mark & Louise Zwick. The second part is Dorothy's diary for a year, giving us a tremendous insight into the life and thinking of this woman, a convert herself, who took Jesus' words seriously in a world that fairly well ignores what He said about the poor. It is no wonder that she made enemies in high places. Her life was a rebuke to their plush lives of greed, deceit, and war for profit.

And now, more than ever, we need our God to give us yet another Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin on the world stage. In the midst of the vapid intellectual snobbery of Calvinists, the greed actuated doctrines of Charismania, the moral meltdown of the "mainline churches", we need a multitude of such folks as Dorothy and Peter to call the world back to sanity. I hope you will read this book and consider afresh the challenging message of self-giving love to which we are called by Christ.