Wonderful DVD, I may have mentioned it: Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story. I also am reading Robert Ellsberg’s edited selections of her writings.
She hung out with Communists, anarchists, women’s movement activists prior to women’s having the vote. Not a likely candidate for sainthood. Had an abortion. But later, when she gave birth to her daughter Tamara, she was brought into the Catholic Church.
Never lost her love of the poor. Not until she met a French peasant-philosopher Peter Maurin did she know how to make the difference she sought in the world.
She found God in the poor. The incarnation continues, most specially (not exclusively) among the poor.
How does someone like me put her insights into action, I wonder. Both she and Gandhi used the written word effectively to build a movement.
Think what a blog could do, if God got hold of it, with the energy behind it of someone like her. I’m a shriveled up crippled never was has been. But surely God can use what little I have somehow to help Christianity in America heed God’s option for the poor.
The wrongs of capitalism are rampant in this country. Just think of the contortions Congress is going through simply to pass health care reform. If we can’t do something so clearly just as that, how can we expect to do anything?
Photo by Mary Fran