The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day (Hardcover)

~ Robert Ellsberg (Author, Editor)
Key Phrases: holy hour, long loneliness, final diary, Peter Maurin, Catholic Worker, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

These astonishing diaries are a major contribution to Christian spirituality. Robert Ellsberg, a close associate of Dorothy Day, has done an enormous service to Catholics, Christians, and all believers--as well as everyone who cares about social justice, peace and compassion--by carefully assembling the daily writings and meditations of one of the most important persons of our age. This is indispensable reading for anyone who cares deeply about God, about the world, or about humanity--in other words for anyone who wishes to learn how to love. --James Martin, SJ, author of My Life with the Saints

Product Description

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has been called the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism. For almost fifty years, through her tireless service of the poor and her courageous witness for peace, she offered an extraordinary example of the gospel in action.
Now the publication of her diaries, previously sealed for twenty-five years after her death, offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her daily struggles and concerns.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 700 pages
• Publisher: Marquette Univ Pr; 1st edition (April 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874620236
• ISBN-13: 978-0874620238
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49,533 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #3 in	Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( D ) > Day, Dorothy
  #79 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Catholicism > Roman Catholicism

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day. I am turned around..." *, May 3, 2008

By	Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.
____________
* Entry from Easter Sunday, 1968 (p. 418) that could easily serve as the epigram for Dorothy's diaries.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Penny a Copy, June 24, 2008

By	James E. O'Leary (Corpus Christi, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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."

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Duty Of Delight/ The Diaries of Dorothy Day, January 19, 2009

By	Gramma Jeanne "weaver of the web" (Prescott Wi) - See all my reviews

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.