Words from Dorothy Day

Inventory

This last year at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality we gave out, roughly speaking and underestimating it at that, 460,000 meals. Also 18,250 night's lodgings. This is what the world sees and if we wished to impress the world we would multiply this by eighteen years, and the figures would be truly impressive.

But suppose a mother should say, in a plea for sympathy, "I've put one thousand and ninety-five meals on the table this last year. I've washed fifty thousand plates."

It is easy to see how foolish it is to look at things in this light, in this big way. I am sure that God is not counting the meals. He is looking at Tony Aratari, Joe Monroe, Ray Taylor, turning off their alarm clocks at five every morning to go downstairs to start the coffee and cut the bread. They get no credit for being noble. They have no realization of dying to themselves, of giving up their lives. They are more often than not abused by friends and relatives for not getting jobs, using their education, "supporting themselves," instead of living on charity. "This then is perfect joy," St. Francis would say...

We all wish for recognition of one kind or another. But it is mass action people think of these days. They lose sight of the sacrament of the present moment-- of the little way.

Like Lord Jim in Conrad's story, we are all waiting for great opportunities to show heroism, letting countless opportunities go by to enlarge our hearts, increase our faith, and show our love for our fellows, and so for Him. As St. Paul says, it is by little and by little that we are saved-- or that we fall. We are living in this world and must make choices now, choices which may mean the sacrifice of our lives, in the future, but for now our goods, our reputations even. Our work is called futile, our stand of little worth or significance, having no influence, winning no converts, ineffective if not a form of treason. Or it is termed defeatism, appeasement, escapism.

What a paradox it is, this natural life and this supernatural life. We must give up our lives to gain them; we must die to live; we must be pruned to bear fruit. Ah yes, when we are being called appeasers, defeatists, we are being deprived of our dearest goods -- our reputation, honor, the esteem of men -- and we are truly on the way to becoming the despised of the earth. We are beginning perhaps to be truly poor.

We are trying to spread the gospel of peace, to persuade others to extend the peace movement, to build up a mighty army of conscientious objectors. And in doing this we are accounted fools, and it is the folly of the Cross in the eyes of an unbelieving world.

Martyrdom is not gallantly standing before a firing squad. Usually it is the losing of a job because of not taking a loyalty oath, or buying a war bond, or paying atax. Martyrdom is small, hidden, misunderstood. Or if it is a bloody martyrdom, it is the cry in the dark, the terror, the shame, the loneliness, nobody to hear, nobody to suffer with, let alone to save. Oh, the loneliness of all of us in these days, in all the great moments of our lives, this dying which we do, by little and by little, over a short space of time or over the years. One day is as a thousand in these crises. A week in jail is as a year.

But we repeat that we do see results from our personal experiences, and we proclaim our faith. Christ has died for us. Adam and Eve fell, and as Julian of Norwich wrote, the worst has already happened and been repaired. Christ continues to die in His martyrs all over the world, in His Mystical body, and it is this dying, not the killing in wars, which will save the world.

Do we see results, do these methods succeed? Can we trust in them? Just as surely as we believe in "the little way" of St. Therese, we believe and know that this is the only success.

-Dorothy Day, January 1951
[from Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, ed. Ellsberg]